"less than zero chance that could have happened without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House...This appears to be extraordinary, politically motivated abuse of presidential power."

This Andrew McCarthy piece has been quoted all over the internet, and I am just now getting around to reading it.

President Trump’s early Saturday morning tweeting has exploded to the forefront an uncovered scandal I’ve been talking about since early January (including in this weekend’s column): The fact that the Obama Justice Department and the FBI investigated associates of Donald Trump, and likely Trump himself, in the heat of the presidential campaign.

To summarize, reporting indicates that, prior to June 2016, the Obama Justice Department and FBI considered a criminal investigation of Trump associates, and perhaps Trump himself, based on concerns about connections to Russian financial institutions. Preliminary poking around indicated that there was nothing criminal involved. Rather than shut the case down, though, the Obama Justice Department converted it into a national-security investigation under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA allows the government, if it gets court permission, to conduct electronic surveillance (which could include wiretapping, monitoring of e-mail, and the like) against those it alleges are “agents of a foreign power.” FISA applications and the evidence garnered from them are classified – i.e., we would not know about any of this unless someone had leaked classified information to the media, a felony.

Trump’s tweets on Saturday prompted some interesting “denials” from the Obama camp. These can be summarized in the statement put out by Obama spokesman Kevin Lewis: A cardinal rule of the Obama Administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false. This seems disingenuous on several levels.

First, as Obama officials well know, under the FISA process, it is technically the FISA court that “orders” surveillance. And by statute, it is the Justice Department, not the White House, that represents the government in proceedings before the FISA court. So, the issue is not whether Obama or some member of his White House staff “ordered” surveillance of Trump and his associates. The issues are (a) whether the Obama Justice Department sought such surveillance authorization from the FISA court, and (b) whether, if the Justice Department did that, the White House was aware of or complicit in the decision to do so. Personally, given the explosive and controversial nature of the surveillance request we are talking about – an application to wiretap the presidential candidate of the opposition party, and some of his associates, during the heat of the presidential campaign, based on the allegation that the candidate and his associates were acting as Russian agents – it seems to me that there is less than zero chance that could have happened without consultation between the Justice Department and the White House.

Second, the business about never ordering surveillance against American citizens is nonsense. Obama had American citizens killed in drone operations. Obviously, that was not done in the U.S. or through the FISA process; it was done overseas, under the president’s commander-in-chief and statutory authority during wartime. But the notion that Obama would never have an American subject to surveillance is absurd.

...Nevertheless, whether done inside or outside the FISA process, it would be a scandal of Watergate dimension if a presidential administration sought to conduct, or did conduct, national-security surveillance against the presidential candidate of the opposition party. Unless there was some powerful evidence that the candidate was actually acting as an agent of a foreign power, such activity would amount to a pretextual use of national-security power for political purposes. That is the kind of abuse that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in lieu of impeachment.

Moreover, it cannot be glossed over that, at the very time it appears the Obama Justice Department was seeking to surveil Trump and/or his associates on the pretext that they were Russian agents, the Obama Justice Department was also actively undermining and ultimately closing without charges the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton despite significant evidence of felony misconduct that threatened national security.

This appears to be extraordinary, politically motivated abuse of presidential power.

Read more here.

"The left and its media’s problem, however, is that the new information reality means that they can start a controversy, but they can’t control it."

About the left, Kurt Schlichter explains,

Lying is what they do because that’s all they have left on the left. They have no foundational principles except power. Their entire ideology is transactional – it’s not based on ideas but on payoffs to Democrat sub-sets. Here’s some dough for the baby crunching industry! We’ll hassle some Christian bakers for the SJWs! Let’s put a bunch of cis-het males of pallor who don’t even listen to NPR out of work in West Tennetucky, or wherever they grow coal, to delight our global warming cultist pals!

But today the Democrats hold no levers of power, and they can’t dispense goodies anymore. All they can do now is howl, whine, and lie, and try to mobilize the parasites burrowed into the federal bureaucracy to undercut the will of normal Americans. They do this by falsely accusing us and those who represent us of doing exactly what they are doing and what they intend to do once Trump is ousted. Their goal is to seize power again and permanently disenfranchise us – and they are happy to take the risk of literally ripping the country apart.

The media is, of course, a willing and eager accomplice in this coordinated campaign of deception and slander. Notice how no one in the mainstream media pointed out how the Sessions perjury lie conveniently appeared simultaneously across the entire media just when the Democrats desperately needed to shift the narrative from their utter humiliation by Trump’s terrific joint address? The media hacks never mentioned it because they were part of it, the beat-boy skeletons to the David S. Pumpkins of progressivism. The left and its media’s problem, however, is that the new information reality means that they can start a controversy, but they can’t control it.

Here’s the utterly predictable pattern. Spazzy Dems freak out about some imagined atrocity by a conservative then, within a few hours, it becomes clear that the alleged offender did nothing wrong while conservatives scour the web and start showing how Democrat hacks are on record doing exactly the same thing times a zillion. That’s the key – the media can no longer guide the lie to destroy the target. The internet lets us have a say – and to grab the wheel.

Oh no, Jeff Sessions talked to a Russian then didn’t bring it up when not asked about it! Oh, we Democrats would never do that … except, thanks to us conservatives (and a President who’s willing to punch back twice as hard), here come the photos of Schumer and Ivan sharing a cup of Joe Stalin and here’s Pelosi’s partying with some Russkies after denying it and then the State Department turns out to have arranged it and FOR THE LOVE OF GAIA SOMEBODY SHUT DOWN THAT INTERNET MACHINE BECAUSE IT NEVER FORGETS!

...Then Jewish Community Centers started getting threats and, of course, it had to be Trump supporters because fanatically pro-Israel people always threaten Jews or something. Facts, shmacts – the bogus narrative must be preserved! So Trump condemns this scummery, but also notes, “Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad.” Of course, the fake news media went nuts, because no hate crime has ever been a hoax except for almost all of them, so we conservatives settled down with our tea and waited for the ending we totally saw coming. And, of course – of course – as every non-Fredoriffic conservative predicted, the FBI busted the slug responsible for a bunch of the threats and it turned out to be …. wait for it!

Let’s see. Was it the conservative Trump supporter? Did he have a MAGA hat? Just like the media and the liberals would have you believe? Oh come on, we all knew it. Say it with me: “Leftist member of the media.”

...And, of course, there is the Trump the Authoritarian/Trump the New Hitler meme. Except Trump’s apparently not very good at authoritarianism, since no one seems to be being oppressed. He has a lot of policy ideas, which he openly explained to the American people in his speech, and which he will submit to Congress to be debated and voted upon before being enacted. That seems to correspond pretty closely to how I learned a bill becomes a law on Schoolhouse Rock.

Well, maybe his enforcing the duly enacted laws passed by Congress to deport illegal aliens counts as authoritarian Hitler stuff, except it seems odd that a leader who is doing what the people’s representatives passed into law instead of unilaterally deciding on his own not to do what the people’s representatives voted to do, and thereby effectively ruling by decree, is a hitlery authoritarian.

Obama unilaterally changed the immigration law by simply not enforcing it. That seems pretty undemocratic. He also seems to have tapped the communications of his political opponents and left some sleepers in the government dedicated to bringing down the new administration. Maybe I’m being fussy, but those seem super-undemocratic. Naturally, the mainstream media finds this all less disturbing than Kellyanne Conway’s Oval Office footwear.

Watch the liberals. Listen to what they say, because their lies and their slanders are a road map to their plans for the future. Straightforward from here, given the chance, they absolutely intend to impose the kind of quasi-fascist rule they falsely accuse Trump of contemplating. But their problem is that we now recognize their lies, and we see their endgame, and the collapse of the media gatekeepers means they can no longer keep us blind and isolated. So when they lie, we are going to throw their hypocrisy right back in their withered, pruny faces and there’s nothing they can do to shut us up. Sorry, you lying sacks of socialism, we’re not about to let you rip our country apart.

Read more here.

"How does the President use the investigative agencies to root out totalitarian-style corruption and illegalities when the agencies themselves are at the heart of the investigation?"

JJ Sefton asks a good question at Ace of Spades:

...how does the President use the investigative agencies to root
out totalitarian-style corruption and illegalities when the agencies themselves are at the heart of the investigation?

He then links to a Front Page piece by Matthew Vadum:

President Donald Trump caused a media firestorm by claiming over the weekend that then-President Obama wire-tapped telephones at Trump Tower in Manhattan during the final leg of last year's election campaign.

Seeing the writing on the wall, tainted FBI Director James Comey promptly and publicly urged the Department of Justice to reject Trump’s claims. Although it is an attempt at a cover-up, it is an admirably transparent one.

Now the outlines of a Watergate-like conspiracy are emerging in which a sitting Democrat president apparently used the apparatus of the state to spy on a Republican presidential candidate. Watergate differed in that President Nixon didn’t get involved in the plot against the Democratic National Committee until later as an accomplice after the fact. Here Obama likely masterminded, or oversaw someone like the diabolical Benghazi cover-up artist Ben Rhodes, masterminding the whole thing.

...Most mainstream journalists were loath over the past eight years to call the exhaustively documented and at times bald-faced lies and misdeeds of President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and HHS Secretary Sebelius. It would seem uncovering government corruption is only a journalist’s duty when a Republican resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

...We already knew that days before Trump’s inauguration, it was reported that Obama green-lighted a disturbing relaxation of the rules regulating the National Security Agency’s ability to circulate globally intercepted personal communications among the other 16 intelligence agencies, some of which are more politicized than the NSA, before applying important longstanding privacy-protection protocols. Before the policy was altered, the NSA screened out the identities of innocent people and irrelevant personal information before passing intercepted communications along to other agencies like the CIA or the FBI’s intelligence units.

Put another way, 17 days before President Trump was sworn in, NSA was unleashed against his embryonic administration, newly empowered to share raw intelligence gathered from telephone calls and emails that go through network switches outside the country, as well as messages between people outside the U.S. that go through domestic network switches.

WikiLeaks offered a refresher course in Obama’s treachery on Twitter Sunday, noting that “Obama has a history of tapping & hacking his friends and rivals[,]” and providing plenty of examples.

Read more here.

Obama, Trump, Russia, and journalism

Lee Smith writes at Tablet,

...Obama didn’t kill journalism, but he took advantage of it in its weakness, because he knew the press would do anything to feel relevant again. All those 27-year-olds at the Times, the Washington Post and others hired as bloggers—“who literally know nothing,” as Rhodes told the Times Magazine—when the foreign and national bureaus were closed, they didn’t know it wasn’t OK to be a journalist and a political operative at the same time. They thought it made them more valuable, even patriotic, to put themselves in the service of a historic presidency. And they’d replaced for pennies on the dollar all the adults who could have taught them otherwise.

That’s the raw material out of which the Obama administration built its echo chamber, the purpose of which was to drown out the few remaining vestiges of journalism in order to sell the president’s policies.

...What everyone saw at the time was that the press had put itself in the service of executive power. This was no longer simply tilting left, rather, it was turning an American political institution against the American public.

...The public is astonished and appalled that the media has now returned after an eight-year absence to arrogate to itself the role of conscience of the nation.

It’s not working out very well.

...The Russia story is evidence that top reporters are still feeding from the same trough—political operatives, intelligence agencies, etc.—because they don’t know how to do anything else, and their editors don’t dare let the competition get out ahead. Why would the Post, for instance, let the Times carve out a bigger market share of the anti-Trump resistance? And what’s the alternative? Report the story honestly? Don’t publish questionably sourced innuendo as news?

And still, you ask, how could the Russia story be nonsense? All the major media outlets are on it. Better to cover yourself—maybe it’s true, because the press can’t really be this inept and corrupt, so there’s got to be something to it.

I say this not only out of respect for a late colleague, but in the hope that journalism may once again merit the trust of the American public. Wayne Barrett had this file for 40 years, and if neither he nor the reporters he trained got this story, it’s not a story.

Read more here.

Slush fund settlements

"Is it possible? Oh, yeah, it's possible!"

"They did not "order" it. Did they know about it? Did they approve it?"

What should happen next?

J. Christian Adams weighs in on the seriousness of the revelations of wiretapping by the Obama team against the Trump team during the election.

Sean Hannity asks some questions

Lee Stranahan reports at Breitbart,

FOX News host Sean Hannity went on the warpath against President Obama and Obama administration officials Valerie Jarrett, Ben Rhodes, and former senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer on Saturday.
Hannity grilled the three on the shocking revelations recently outlined by radio host Mark Levin and expanded on by Breitbart News that show that starting in June, 2016 the Obama administration filed requests with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to monitor communications involving Donald Trump and several advisers.

On the eve of Inauguration Day, the New York Times reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Treasury Department were monitoring several associates of the Trump campaign on suspicion of “Russian ties.”

Hannity was having none of it on Saturday, blasting top Obama friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett, whom The Daily Mail recently reported is now living with the Obamas in their Washington D.C. mansion. Hannity made a reference to this in one his Tweets to Jarrett, saying:

Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Valerie, who asked for the FISA warrant and Y? What did OBAMA know and when did he know it? Maybe you can knock on his door and ask. https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
11:42 AM - 4 Mar 2017
4,740 4,740 Retweets 8,676 8,676 likes
Hannity followed that shot across the bow with a series of questions that the public has a right to know, peppering Jarrett like a skilled prosecutor:

Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Valerie did OBAMA have knowledge of the FISA warrant requests? Did you have knowledge of this? Ben Rhodes? Did the WH coordinate with anyone https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
11:45 AM - 4 Mar 2017
4,520 4,520 Retweets 7,895 7,895 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
June 2016: FISA request. The Obama administration files a request with the FISA court to monitor communications involving Donald Trump-- Y? https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
11:50 AM - 4 Mar 2017
3,124 3,124 Retweets 5,317 5,317 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
That July request was denied. Then another FISA request was filed in October, no evidence was found but the wiretaps continued. Why Valerie? https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
11:55 AM - 4 Mar 2017
4,891 4,891 Retweets 7,620 7,620 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
After a FISA request is first denied, then a second one is filed and no evidence is found, why did the Government of BHO keep surveillance? https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
11:59 AM - 4 Mar 2017
4,670 4,670 Retweets 7,326 7,326 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
It looks like BHO, Ben Rhodes, Valerie and some in the intelligence community have a lot of explaining to do. Surveillance of Opposition? https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
12:03 PM - 4 Mar 2017
4,801 4,801 Retweets 8,119 8,119 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Did you, Obama, or anyone associated with the administration have a role in leaking the Buzzfeed/CNN dossier that we know had false info? https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
12:07 PM - 4 Mar 2017
3,408 3,408 Retweets 6,501 6,501 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Why with only 14 days left did OBAMA expand the power of the NSA to share intercepted personal communications with 16 other agencies? https://twitter.com/valeriejarrett/status/838083755168382976 …
12:14 PM - 4 Mar 2017
7,428 7,428 Retweets 12,005 12,005 likes
After going after Jarrett, Hannity set his sights on Ben Rhodes, former Obama speechwriter and foreign policy advisor.

Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
You mean the 27 year olds that "know nothing" that you lied to? What did u, BHO, and Valerie know about FISA requests and when do you know? https://twitter.com/brhodes/status/838033241068175360 …
5:03 PM - 4 Mar 2017
2,841 2,841 Retweets 6,671 6,671 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
It's you Ben who needs to explain. You may need a good lawyer. https://twitter.com/brhodes/status/838088101457190912 …
5:06 PM - 4 Mar 2017
4,379 4,379 Retweets 9,968 9,968 likes
Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Have you tried "bleach bit" like @HillaryClinton? https://twitter.com/brhodes/status/838088101457190912 …
5:10 PM - 4 Mar 2017
2,545 2,545 Retweets 6,229 6,229 likes
Then Hannity set this sights on Dan Pfeiffer, a senior advisor to President Obama and a current contributor to CNN.

Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Dan what did you know about FISA requests to spy on an opposition candidate, and when did you know it? https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/status/838106138130300928 …
5:17 PM - 4 Mar 2017
3,796 3,796 Retweets 8,329 8,329 likes
Finally, Hannity asked “the Watergate question” of the former President:

Follow
Sean Hannity ✔ @seanhannity
Mr President. What did you know about the FISA requests vs @POTUS @realDonaldTrump and when did you know it? https://twitter.com/obamafoundation/status/837320370281644032 …
5:31 PM - 4 Mar 2017
3,942 3,942 Retweets 8,692 8,692 likes
Stranahan concludes, Democrats and the media have used accusations of Trump’s supposed connection to Russia to assail Trump for months, and since the President was sworn in, have continued to target administration officials such as Attorney General Jeff Sessions and General Michael Flynn, who was forced to resign after giving incorrect information, possibly inadvertently, to Vice President Pence. Meanwhile, the media has joined the attack, throwing out endless questions about Russia and Trump and his team, as well as allowing disgraced Democrat officials like Donna Brazile to use “Russian hacking” as an excuse and deflection from their own misdeeds.

Covering up the real scandal

Joel Pollock writes at Breitbart,

...the DOJ approached the FISA court for permission to spy on Trump aides; that surveillance, once granted, continued after no evidence was found of wrongdoing; that the Obama administration relaxed National Security Agency rules to facilitate the dissemination of evidence through the government; and that Obama staffers allegedly did so, the better to leak damaging (and partial) information to the media.

In addition, there is reason to doubt the claim that the White House never “interfered”: the New York Times reported in January that “intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House.”

...It would have been possible for the DOJ to approach the FISA court with a request to monitor foreign entities allegedly communicating with the Trump campaign, using those intercepts as a way to monitor the Trump campaign itself. According to news reports cited by Andrew McCarthy, that could have been precisely what happened.

...Even without Trump’s more sensational accusations of wiretapping, it is, so far, undisputed that there have been many leaks of classified information to damage Trump, and that the Obama administration took steps that could have made such leaks more likely.

...But if the Obama administration did order surveillance of the Trump campaign during the election; and if Obama or any other White House officials knew about it (or created a “plausible deniability” scheme to allow such surveillance while preventing themselves from knowing about it directly); then there is an even bigger problem.

It would then seem that the “Russia hacking” story was concocted not just to explain away an embarrassing election defeat, but to cover up the real scandal.

Read more here.

New York Times deletes, covers up newsworthy story

Patterico reports,

...It’s actually quite newsworthy that a politician who criticizes Jeff Sessions for saying he didn’t meet with the Russian ambassador when he had . . . herself said she didn’t meet with the Russian ambassador when she had. If the New York Times were interested in simply reporting newsworthy material, they would have left in McCaskill’s claim, and reported that she was wrong.

I’m going to say that again, because it’s important. If the New York Times were interested in simply reporting newsworthy material, they would have left in McCaskill’s claim, and reported that she was wrong.

But, you see, they’re not interested in simply reporting newsworthy material. They have an agenda. This didn’t fit their agenda. So they disappeared it. Without a trace. Without a hint that it had ever been there.

Except, that is, at NewsDiffs.org (and on the Twitter timeline of the Federalist’s Sean Davis, who first caught this).

If you want to understand why Americans are furious at the news media, this is Exhibit A. The newspaper of record deliberately covered up a newsworthy story that we can prove they knew about, just because it was inconvenient for the leftist, anti-Trump agenda they are pushing.

You want to know why we don’t trust you, media? This is why. Right here. This is why.

Read more here.

"If you’re going to drain the swamp, you need to act hard and fast. Otherwise the swamp with suck you dry and throw your body into the muck to rot."

Bookworm writes about

Obama and flunkies used the instruments of government to spy on an American political adversary:

...Obama, of course, has always been good at plausible deniability. After all, how many administration scandals did Obama claim to have known nothing about until they broke in the media? Obama was either a liar (which we know he was) or an incompetent man with no control whatsoever over the administrative offices he was elected to govern (a possibility, but a lesser one).

Conservatives need to play this wiretapping hard, with constant allusions to Watergate. If they let go of the narrative for even a second, the Democrat party’s media outlet — aka the MSM — will bury it. Once buried, there’s nothing to stop the continued Deep State/Media/Obama effort to destroy the current administration. And no, even though that sounds paranoid, the way the media is getting leaks every single day from within the government forces the conclusion that there are people within the American government colluding with the media to take down the Trump presidency. You don’t need a tinfoil hat to tune you in to what’s happening.

If you’re going to drain the swamp, you need to act hard and fast. Otherwise the swamp with suck you dry and throw your body into the muck to rot.

Read more here.

Obama team's eavesdropping on the Trump team

At Breitbart, Joel Pollock summarized two days ago what was then known (before Trump tweeted about being spied upon by the Obama administration). Pollock also gives credit to Mark Levin, who is calling for an investigation concerning the Obama team's wiretapping of the Trump team.

In summary: the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media.

Levin called the effort a “silent coup” by the Obama administration and demanded that it be investigated.

In addition, Levin castigated Republicans in Congress for focusing their attention on Trump and Attorney General Sessions rather than Obama.

Read more here.

This is getting good, folks!

Slowly, but surely

hat tip CDR M

Who will be indicted?

Robert Barnes writes at Law Newz,

...Watergate would have never happened if Nixon felt like he could just ask the FBI or NSA to tape the calls. This is Hoover-esque abuses of the kind Bob Woodward pal, former FBI Assistant Director Mark Felt (otherwise known as Deep Throat), routinely engaged in at the FBI until convicted and removed from office. (You didn’t know that Deep Throat was really a corrupt part of Deep State, did you? Guess who ran the famous COINTELPRO? That’s right — Deep Throat. How would the public have reacted if they knew the media had been in bed with the deep state all the way back then? Maybe that was the reason Woodward, Bernstein and Bradley kept Deep Throat’s identity secret all those years?)

Democrats may regret Sessions’ recusal, as his replacement is a mini-Sessions: a long-respected, a-political, highly ethical prosecutor, Dana Boente, whose reputation is well-warranted from his service at the Tax Division, and who won’t be limited by any perceived ties to Trump, given his prior appointment by Obama. Obama himself appeared scared of Boente, as he removed Boente from the successor-to-Sessions position during the lame-duck part of Obama’s presidency, but Trump restored Boente to that role earlier this month. Democrats may get the investigation they wanted, but it may be their own that end up named in the indictment.

Barnes goes into great detail explaining how there could be serious legal problems if the Obama administration was involved in illegal surveillance of the Trump team. Read the whole thing here.
hat tip CDR M

First blooms of 2017!

"These last protestors were masked. If they, and those like them, prevail, they will, one day, be wearing uniforms."

Andrew Stattaford writes at The Corner,

Paul Crookston has already discussed yesterday’s attack on free speech at Middlebury College, but it’s worth adding how it concluded. After Charles Murray had been forced to abandon his speech, he was escorted to a separate room where he was interviewed by Allison Stanger, a Middlebury professor of international politics and economics. The interview was livestreamed. And then, The New York Times reports:

Once the interview began in the second room, protesters swarmed into the hallway, chanting and pulling fire alarms. Still, the interview was completed and officials, including Ms. Stanger, escorted Mr. Murray out the back of the building.

There, several masked protesters, who were believed to be outside agitators, began pushing and shoving Mr. Murray and Ms. Stanger, Mr. Burger [a spokesman for the college] said. “Someone grabbed Allison’s hair and twisted her neck…”

After the two got into a car, Mr. Burger said, protesters pounded on it, rocked it back and forth, and jumped onto the hood. Ms. Stanger later went to a hospital, where she was put in a neck brace.

Appalling, but revealing too. Murray was leaving the campus, and yet the fracas not only continued but also degenerated into outright violence. The ‘justification’ for disrupting his speech was that opinions such as Murray’s should not be given a hearing on campus, but this was something else. Murray was not about to speak, he was about to depart, and yet he and Ms. Stanger were attacked. It was not, apparently, enough to stop Murray from expounding on his views. He had, in addition, to be punished for them, and so (if Stanger’s assailants were doing more than lashing out at anyone in Murray’s vicinity) did an academic who evidently understood the importance of free expression.

These last protestors were masked. If they, and those like them, prevail, they will, one day, be wearing uniforms.

"Trump is the media’s Nemesis—payback for its own hubris."

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

...Sadly, the contemporary mainstream media—the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN), the traditional blue-chip newspapers (Washington Post, New York Times), and the public affiliates (NPR, PBS)—have lost credibility. They are no more reliable critics of President Trump’s excesses than they were believable cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s policies.

Trump may have a habit of exaggeration and gratuitous feuding that could cause problems with his presidency. But we would never quite know that from the media. In just his first month in office, reporters have already peddled dozens of fake news stories designed to discredit the President—to such a degree that little they now write or say can be taken at face value.

No, Trump did not have any plans to invade Mexico, as Buzzfeed and the Associated Press alleged.

No, Trump’s father did not run for Mayor of New York by peddling racist television ads, as reported by Sidney Blumenthal.

No, there were not mass resignations at the State Department in protest of its new leaders, as was reported by the Washington Post.

No, Trump’s attorney did not cut a deal with the Russians in Prague. Nor did Trump indulge in sexual escapades in Moscow. Buzzfeed again peddled those fake news stories.

No, a supposedly racist Trump did not remove the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the White House, as a Time Magazine reporter claimed.

No, election results in three states were not altered by hackers or computer criminals to give Trump the election, as implied by New York Magazine.

No, Michael Flynn did not tweet that he was a scapegoat. That was a media fantasy endorsed by Nancy Pelosi.

In fact, Daniel Payne of the Federalist has compiled a lengthy list of sensational stories about Trump’s supposed buffooneries, mistakes, and crudities that all proved either outright lies or were gross exaggerations and distortions.

We would like to believe writers for the New York Times or Washington Post when they warn us about the new president’s overreach. But how can we do so when they have lost all credibility—either by colluding with the Obama presidency and the Hillary Clinton campaign, or by creating false narratives to ensure that Trump fails?

Ezra Klein at Vox just wrote a warning about the autocratic tendencies of Donald Trump. Should we believe him? Perhaps not. Klein was the originator of Journolist, a “left-leaning” private online chat room of journalists that was designed to coordinate media narratives that would enhance Democratic politicians and in particular Barack Obama. Such past collusion begs the question of whether Klein is really disinterested now in the fashion that he certainly was not during the Obama administration.

Recently, New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush coauthored a report about initial chaos among the Trump White House staff, replete with unidentified sources. Should we believe Thrush’s largely negative story?

Perhaps. But then again, Thrush not so long ago turned up in the Wikileaks troves as sending a story to Hillary Clinton aide John Podesta for prepublication audit. Thrush was his own honest critic, admitting to Podesta: “Because I have become a hack I will send u the whole section that pertains to u. Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.”

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has become a fierce critic of President Trump. Are his writs accurate? Milbank also appeared in Wikileaks, asking the Democratic National Committee to provide him with free opposition research for a negative column he was writing about candidate Trump. Are Milbank’s latest attacks his own—or once again coordinated with Democratic researchers?

The Washington Post censor Glenn Kessler posted the yarn about Trump’s father’s racist campaign for New York mayor—until he finally fact-checked his own fake news and deleted his tweet.

...former UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor in the Obama administration, Susan Rice (married to Ian Cameron, a former producer at ABC news), likewise went on Twitter to blast the Trump administration’s decision to include presidential advisor Steven Bannon in meetings of the National Security Council: “This is stone cold crazy,” Rice asserted, “After a week of crazy.”

Is Rice (who has no military experience) correct that the former naval officer Bannon has no business participating in such high strategy meetings?

In September 2012, Rice went on television on five separate occasions to insist falsely to the nation that the attacks on the Benghazi consulate were the work of spontaneous rioters and not a preplanned hit by an al Qaeda franchise. Her own quite crazy stories proved a convenient administration reelection narrative of Al Qaeda on the run, but there were already sufficient sources available to Rice to contradict her false news talking points.

There are various explanations for the loss of media credibility.

...Trump now communicates, often raucously and unfiltered, directly with the American people, to ensure his message is not distorted and massaged by reporters who have a history of doing just that. Unfortunately, it is up to the American people now to audit their own president’s assertions. The problem is not just that the media is often not reliable, but that it is predictably unreliable. It has ceased to exist as an auditor of government. Ironically the media that sacrificed its reputation to glorify Obama and demonize Trump has empowered the new President in a way never quite seen before. At least for now, Trump can say or do almost anything he wishes without media scrutiny—given that reporters have far less credibility than does Trump.

Trump is the media’s Nemesis—payback for its own hubris.

"Deep State" sounds way too cool for what these people are doing. They're basically just jerks!"

Also, how about a "Sanctuary Judge" who enables a DUI criminal escape and evade ICE agents through her private exit in the courthouse!

Buddies

hat tip CDR M

Tucker Carlson's full show on March 3

Here is Tucker Carlson's full March 3 show. First up is a congressman from New York, who thinks there is a big, bad conspiracy involving Jeff Sessions. Second is an Arizona doctor who wants to stop Obamacare abuses. Third, is a professor who agrees that Charles Murray's ideas should be ignored. Fourth, is Issac Morehouse, who wants to help young people find good jobs. Fifth is Noah Rothman from Commentary Magazine, who accuses the Obama administration of trying to rehab their own reputation by using the intelligence agencies against the new Trump administration.

Hypocrite

hat tip Bookworm

"While the man in the street can learn from his mistakes, the elite, immured in their ivory bubbles (yes, I’m mixing ivory towers and Progressive bubbles) were not up to the tasks they had so arrogant assigned themselves."

Bookworm writes,

...When Barack Obama, with his abiding dislike for America, decided that the Pax America was a bad thing, not a good one, and withdrew America’s military and moral leadership from the world, all of these petty little bureaucratic potentates proved to be just as stupid as, if not more stupid than, the ordinary man in the street. While the man in the street can learn from his mistakes, the elite, immured in their ivory bubbles (yes, I’m mixing ivory towers and Progressive bubbles) were not up to the tasks they had so arrogant assigned themselves.

Read more here.

"Hawk or traitor: you can only pick one."

Walter Russell Mead writes,

ith his latest effusive remarks to Reuters on the importance of expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal, President Donald Trump has sent the press into a panic once again.

What the press has largely ignored about Trump’s latest pronouncement is an obvious truth that undermines its own narrative: someone who was safely in Vladimir Putin’s pocket wouldn’t run around saying things like this. While liberal America may have forgotten recent history, Russia certainly hasn’t: provoking a nuclear arms race with an outclassed, economically weak Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan’s winning strategy in the 1980s. Tech and wealth are two key American advantages over Russia now as they were over the Soviet Union then; Trump’s message here is that he intends to follow in Reagan’s footsteps to use these strengths to advance American power, with the inevitable result of marginalizing one of Russia’s primary sources of power and prestige. Putin’s ramshackle Russia is no more capable of matching an American nuclear buildup than Brezhnev’s sclerotic Soviet Union could keep up with the United States—and Putin knows it.

Whether it will work is an entirely different question, but there can be little doubt that Trump’s core global strategy will destroy any illusions in Moscow, or anywhere else, that Russia is a peer competitor of the United States. A Trump administration is going to be four years of hell for Russia: a massive American doubling down on shale production along with a major military buildup. Trump is, in other words, a nightmare for Putin and a much, much bigger threat to Putin’s goals than President Obama ever was or wanted to be.

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran
That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice.
Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, they preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia’s position in the world, and the media, suddenly flushing eight years of Russia dovishness down the memory hole, now sounds the warning that Trump’s Russia policy is treasonously soft.

This foolishness is best understood as an unreasoning panic attack. The liberal media hate Trump more than they have hated any American politician in a generation, and they do not understand his supporters or the sources of his appeal. They are frantically picking up every available stick to beat him, in the hopes that something, somehow, will Miloize him.

So blind does hatred make them that they cannot understand how their own behavior is driving American public opinion in directions that bode ill for liberals in the future. In the first place, suppose Donald Trump does not in fact turn out to be the second coming of Benedict Arnold. Suppose instead, as is much more likely, that he turns out to be a very hawkish president, one who quite possibly will make George W. Bush look like Jimmy Carter. The media and Democratic Party leaders will have staked huge amounts of credibility on a position that turns out to be laughably untrue. Six months or a year from now, they will have to flip from calling Trump an anti-American traitor and Russian plant to calling him a dangerous, fascistic ultranationalist whose relentless hawkishness is bringing us closer to World War Three. Already there are some days when they mount both attacks at the same time: the hawkish traitor whose Nazi style America First ideology leads him to lick Putin’s boots. The media wants to cast Trump as both Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler; but you can’t give the Sudetenland to yourself.

The talking heads and the top pundits won’t admit it, and may not even see it—as our media is extremely good at hiding from facts that make it feel uncomfortable—but not many people will be convinced by this line of attack. Hawk or traitor: you can only pick one.

Meanwhile, the current media and Democratic drumbeat of fierce, hyper-patriotic anti-Russian fervor is legitimating exactly the kind of nationalist assertiveness and chauvinism that, in normal times, liberals try to tamp down. The liberal media, in the desperate hope of landing some blows on President Trump, is helping to create a national climate of alarmed and defensive patriotism that leads to exactly the kind of public opinion climate that is catnip to Republicans and poison to liberal Democrats.

Of course it’s possible that all the rumors and gossip about Trump and Putin are true, and that Putin holds powerful blackmail material on Trump, or alternatively that they share a dark and anti-democratic dream that they will jointly try to impose on the world. But if those things are true, we won’t find out because some nameless source has whispered something incriminating to one of Ben Rhodes’ 27 year-old journalistic naifs; it will be because Trump begins to shift American foreign policy in ways that benefit Russia.

What would those telltale signs of treason look like?

Trump might for example acquiesce in a greater Russian presence and say in the Middle East. He might limit U.S. fracking, helping to prop up Putin’s oil price. He might seek to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles in ways that give Russia badly needed economic relief from an arms burden that daily pressures the country more, and that accepts a permanent parity between the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, leaving America perpetually hostage to a nuclear balance of terror with a much weaker Russia. He might slash military spending and procurement; rather than steadily building the gap between Russian and American military capabilities, he might slow down and allow the Russians and others to dream of catching up.

In other words, if President Trump really is a Putin pawn, his foreign policy will start looking much more like Barack Obama’s. Will the New York Times and the Washington Post really have the brass to call Trump a traitor for pursuing a mix of policies which came right out of Obama’s playbook?

This would be a foolish enough positioning to cause even the press, or at least some of it, to blush. The Gray Lady has her limits. What is happening instead is the identification of the largely ineffective and symbolic sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and illegal annexation of Crimea as the gold standard of anti-Russia policy. If Trump so much as hints at bargaining away these largely decorative sanctions, we are likely to see a media firestorm of historic scale. It will not be grounded in reality; Obama’s chosen anti-Russia policy mix was as weak and hesitating as such policy can be. The sanctions were a way of pretending to ourselves that we had a Ukraine policy more than offering an actual path to forcing Russia to disgorge its gains. Trump’s policies of fracking and big military build up are more anti-Russian without sanctions than Obama ever thought was practical or wise.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t some honest and important questions about Trump and Russia. Looking into President Trump’s business ties and possible conflicts of interest is legitimate journalism. And there is little doubt that some of the Russian and other ex-Soviet figures which whom President Trump did business in the past are not the kind of people one would want a future president associating with.

But Trump’s actual foreign policy hardly suggests a president in thrall to the Kremlin, and excessive dovishness is unlikely to be the besetting sin of the Trump administration. The more the media locks itself into the narrative of Trump the appeaser, the harder its job will become when the real difficulties of the Trump presidency begin to take shape.

America needs an intellectually solvent and emotionally stable press to give this president the skeptical and searching scrutiny that he needs. What we are getting instead is something much worse for the health of the republic: a blind instinctive rage that lashes out without wounding, that injures its own credibility more than its target, that discredits the press at just the moment where its contributions are most needed.

Unless, perhaps, there is a God

David Goldman writes,

For friends who are confronted by Black Lives Matter activists with the question: "Do Black lives matter?," I suggest this answer:
"Why does anyone's life matter? We're alone in an unfeeling universe, an insignificant speck of carbon in an enormous galaxy among 200 billion galaxies, while our synapses flash and flicker out in a minuscule cut of time, chasing our petty illusions and trying to distract our gaze from the fact that our lives don't matter....Unless, perhaps, there is a God who cares about us. Assume that there is such a God: if you addressed your question to Him, what would He say?"

Last night's sunset

As usual, I waited too long to look up!

You go, Ryan!

Trump's Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke rode a horse to work today on his first day of work. Also jeans and a black hat.

Iran documents are secret-but-unclassified

Michael Ledeen writes at PJ Media,

...We are entitled to ask for the release of the secret arrangements with Iran. If the citizens don’t know what Obama/Kerry/Rhodes/Jarrett agreed to, then the whole “debate” over what Trump should do with regard to Iran is essentially meaningless.

The Iranians don’t want us to know what’s in the secret-but-unclassified documents, and the Obama crowd’s apparent agreement -- as usual -- with Iran on this issue underlines the importance of making them public.

I keep hearing that Trump’s National Security Council wants to release many important documents about which we have an urgent right to know, like the captured bin Laden stash. I hope my sources are right. We also need to know a lot more about Obama’s secret diplomacy with the ayatollahs -- particularly the role played by Valerie Jarrett, the ex-president’s new housemate.

While we’re on the subject of Iranian nukes, have a look at a terrific article published in Israel about the joint Iranian-North Korean nuclear weapons project. You’ll get a very valuable timeline and a careful analysis, which the authors summarize this way:

"Iran is steadily making progress towards a nuclear weapon and is doing so via North Korea. Iran is unwilling to submit to a years-long freeze of its military nuclear program as stipulated by the July 2015 Vienna Nuclear Deal. North Korea is ready and able to provide a clandestine means of circumventing the deal, which would allow the Iranians to covertly advance that nuclear program. At the same time, Iran is likely assisting in the upgrading of certain North Korean strategic capacities."

I wonder if there are clues to the Iranian covert program, with or without the North Koreans, in those documents stashed away in the Capitol Building. By now, the excellent people that Mike Flynn put in charge of Middle Eastern and intelligence issues probably know a lot about that stash, and my guess is they’d be very happy to make it all public.

With all the excitement about Russian secrets, it’s time to look carefully at Iranian schemes.

Read more here.

What we need: alternative sources of dopamine!

Scott Adams writes,

Politics serves up lots of outrage opportunities. That’s why we are drawn to it – for the high.

We rationalize that we are fighting the good fight and making the world better. But mostly it just feels good to get worked up about issues and share the experience with like-minded dopamine addicts.

The Dopamine Puppet idea is compatible with what I call the Persuasion Filter. This view on life says we do things for chemical rewards and we rationalize those choices after the fact as being totally reasonable. Our sense of reason is an illusion when it comes to most of our actions.

We do use reason to narrow our options. For example, you don’t try to marry a dead person, and you don’t try to get a job with a company that no longer exists. But our final decisions are generally based on some sort of feeling, not logic.

If what I describe is an accurate view of the world, one way to reduce all the protests and outrage is to provide alternative sources of dopamine. I have in the past referred to this as my Pleasure Unit concept. The idea is that humans need a minimum level of pleasure in life, and we will do almost anything to get it. If we don’t have socially-acceptable sources of pleasure, we can easily turn to crime, risky behavior, drugs, or anything else that can give us a buzz. We might even go so far as to hallucinate that Hitler became President of the United States just so we can be outraged about it.

This filter on life suggests that the best way to bring the country together is to provide alternative sources of dopamine. Honest debate never changes anything. Facts never change anything. Reason has left the building. If we want unity, it will require new sources of dopamine to replace the outrage-induced kind.

When I was younger and dumber I thought I could transform unhappy people into happy people by giving them whatever they wanted, or fixing whatever they thought was broken. This approach worked approximately zero times. Once a dopamine addict’s alleged problem is fixed, the addict still needs the next high. So they magnify small problems into big ones just to feel something. Or they create a problem where there was none.

If you want unity in the country, don’t think in terms of facts and policies and honest debate on the topics. That stuff never got anyone high. What you need is new sources of dopamine so people are less attracted to outrage.

If my hypothesis is correct, I predict that you will see less passion in the protests over the summer because the dopamine addicts will be enjoying the warm weather pleasures of sunlight, greater activity, tanned bodies, and probably more sex. Those pleasures will partially replace their winter outrage.

If my dopamine-replacement idea has merit, the people who exercise several times a week would have less political outrage than those who do not. The fitness addicts are getting their dopamine high from another source. They don’t need outrage.

Do you remember all of those muscular anti-Trump protesters who came straight from the gym?

Neither do I.

Read more here.

Two Obama gun control orders repealed this week!

Trump administration has repealed two last minute Obama gun control orders this week. One was repealed by Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke today on his first day on the job! Awr Hawkins reports at Breitbart,

The ban was contained in Director’s Order 219–from National Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe–and it required regional directors to work with state-level agencies to begin phasing out the use of lead ammunition on Federal land.

On February 28 President Trump signed the repeal of Obama’s Social Security gun ban. The White House explained that the Social Security gun ban was repealed on grounds that it “would prevent some Americans with disabilities from purchasing or possessing firearms” and “could endanger the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens.”

Failures of multiculturalism and feminism in Sweden

Katie Hopkins of MailOnline traveled to Sweden and reported,

...no one dares address the sharp rise in violent crime — stabbings, grenade attacks, automatic-weapon fire, violent rapes, the sorts of crime which terrorise communities.
Except one, Peter Springare, a police officer with 42 years of policing Sweden under his belt.
I went to meet him at his police station in Örebro to ask why he spoke out, in a place where silent acceptance seems mandatory.
He posted on Facebook, 'here we go; this is what I've handled from Monday to Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape....violence against the police, threats to police, drug crime, felony, attempted murder, rape again.
'Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, Muhammad, again, again, again. Countries representing all the crimes this week; Iraq, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia...


Peter Springare, a police officer with 42 years of policing Sweden under his belt, wants politicians to acknowledge there is a problem with immigrant criminals

I spoke to residents who know burglaries will not be attended, rapes not prosecuted, car fires accepted with a shrug, pepper spray banned in case your rapist is hurt.
Gangs here have rewritten the relationship between crime and punishment. They have gained the upper hand. And they know it. For them, justice is delivered with guns or knives, dominance asserted by unbuttoning their fly.

He will not be silenced. Nor will the stranger in the coffee shop who urged me to keep speaking out. Or the Swedish Democrats determined to force this debate into the centre ground. Or the victims of violent rape who don't care if you think the sexual assault graph is going up or down.
They share a single message; Sweden cannot begin to solve its problems until it starts talking about them.

I'd ask the politicians to step away from the pretty bits which look like the Sweden I imagined. And spend time with the men and women in the dirty places in between.
Places I spent time in pretending to be brave; where a white woman is a whore, first responders are under attack, and the streets are run by gangs who do not fear the law but laugh in its face.

Read more here.

Obama now a self-declared enemy of the State?

Bookworm writes,

...no, Obama is not just taking advantage of fortuitously leaked data that the Deep State is coincidentally leaking. Obama set this one up:

Bookworm links to Ace, who writes,

Obama, on his way out the door, radically changed NSA rules to allow them to share unredacted surveillance information while preserving the names of people (US citizens) it’s illegal for the US to spy on without a warrant. This is a change of practice– the NSA used to have to scrub out the names of US personnel it’s not permitted to eavesdrop on.

Bookworm asks,

Here’s a question for you: Looking back at the tapestry of American political history, has any outgoing president ever set himself up as the leader of an opposition — a government in exile, if you will — that is being fed illegally created and leaked immigration by Fifth Columnist administrative flunkies and that is using the media as its mouthpiece, with a stated goal of driving his duly and democratically elected successor out of office? It may not have happened before, but it’s happening now:

Back to Ace:

Barack Obama is turning his new home in the posh Kalorama section of the nation’s capital – just two miles away from the White House – into the nerve center of the mounting insurgency against his successor, President Donald J. Trump.

Obama’s goal, according to a close family friend, is to oust Trump from the presidency either by forcing his resignation or through his impeachment.

And Obama is being aided in his political crusade by his longtime consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who has moved into the 8,200-square-foot, $5.3-million Kaloroma mansion with the former president and Michelle Obama, long time best friends.

Bookworm again:

It is time to destroy Obama. He’s not president anymore. He is now, I think, a self-declared enemy of the State and there should be nothing stopping us. And when I say “destroy,” no, I am not threatening his life. Perish the thought. Given that my concern is Obama’s destruction of our peaceful, democratic American political system, I could never, ever countenance using violence to bring about political change. I am simply talking about destroying Obama’s reputation.

...The other thing we need to do is get people, ordinary Americans, really, really angry that the outgoing president of the United States of America is trying to destroy America’s 242 year constitutional history of smooth transitions of power from one government to the next without coups or bloodshed. Frankly, I’m not sure how one goes about inflaming the masses — masses who have been pacified by computer games and social media and rendered ignorant by decades of Progressive control over education — but it needs to be done. What’s happening now is outrageous and un-American, and it cannot end well.

Read more here.

Our false notion of elitism

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson notices that

Trump is in a virtual war with the mainstream global media, the entrenched so-called deep state, the Democratic-party establishment, progressive activists, and many in the Republican party as well.

Sophisticated Washington, D.C., economists produced budgets for the last eight years that saw U.S. debt explode from $10 trillion to nearly $19 trillion, as economic growth sank to its lowest level since the Hoover administration. For a year, most expert pundits and pollsters smugly assured the public of a certain Hillary Clinton victory — until the hour before she was overwhelmed in the Electoral College. Rhodes Scholar and former U.N. ambassador Susan Rice lied repeatedly on national television about the Benghazi debacle. 21st-century repute is accrued from the false gods of the right zip code, high income, proper social circles. From the fabulist former NBC anchorman Brian Williams to the disreputable reporters who turned up in WikiLeaks, there are lots of well-educated, influential, and self-assured elites who apparently cannot tell the truth or in dishonest fashion mix journalism and politics.

University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony. Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities?

The public no longer believes that privilege and influence should be predicated on titles, brands, and buzz, rather than on demonstrable knowledge and proven character. The idea that brilliance can be manifested in trade skills or retail sales, or courage expressed by dealing with the hardship of factory work, or character found on an Indiana farm, is foreign to the Washington Beltway, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.

Instead, 21st-century repute is accrued from the false gods of the right zip code, high income, proper social circles, and media exposure, rather than from a demonstrable record of moral or intellectual excellence.

The hollow, tiny coastal establishment of the 1820s perpetuated the ancestry and background of the great but all-but-disappeared Founding Fathers such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Yet otherwise, the Founders’ lesser successors had not earned the status they had assumed from their betters. The outsider Jackson won by exposing their pretenses.

What got the brash Trump elected was a similar popular outrage that the self-described best and brightest of our time are has-beens, having enjoyed influence without real merit or visible achievement. If Donald Trump did not exist, something like him would have had to be invented.

Read more here.

"A Big Brouhaha"

The drama continues. Many Democrats are demanding Jeff Sessions resign.

Feminist Sweden

Katie Hopkins, a real journalist from the Daily Mail, decided to go to Sweden to see how women are faring in Sweden.

"Let them come as guests!"

Now for some humor. Robert Davi is an actor you will recognize. Prior to the recent Oscars ceremonies, he had some suggestions. I just now saw his interview with Tucker Carlson, and wanted to share it with you.

When will the focus be on Obama?

JJ Sefton reports at Ace of Spades that Mark Levin has laid down the gauntlet. Sefton summarizes Levin's position:

the Obama administration sought, and eventually obtained, authorization to eavesdrop on the Trump campaign; continued monitoring the Trump team even when no evidence of wrongdoing was found; then relaxed the NSA rules to allow evidence to be shared widely within the government, virtually ensuring that the information, including the conversations of private citizens, would be leaked to the media. Levin called the effort a “silent coup” by the Obama administration and demanded that it be investigated. In addition, Levin castigated Republicans in Congress for focusing their attention on Trump and Attorney General Sessions rather than Obama.

White Suffragette Dresses

2017-03-03
Guest post by Suzann Darnall

First off, let’s define “suffrage”. It is the right to vote in political elections. Well, pardon me, but don’t American women already have that right? Didn’t we get that right on August 18, 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and finally granted American women the right to vote. A right that had been denied them for far too long. A right that was further delayed while the Democrats kept voting it down. For more than 40 years the Democrat controlled Congress defeated the 19th Amendment each time the Republicans introduced the bill. Yes, that’s right! It was the Democrats who truly waged the war on women.

A tweet by one of these Women in White indicated they were wearing the color as a pledge to fight for various rights, including #reprorights (which they already have, except that they seem to want the abortion right of killing unborn babies without limit), #equal pay (also in place, but some Democrat divas like Hillary Clinton, don’t even pay their female staffers as much as they pay males on their payrolls, so what difference does it make?), and #paidleave (an issue addressed in President Trump’s speech, which the majority of the Women in White did not stand for anyway).

Wearing white was supposed to show their unity, yet they were not in the least bit unified in what they did and did not stand for at the speech. So far as I could see while watching there were some standing, some clapping, and some sitting, without solidarity, throughout the evening. As for supposedly being all about supporting women . . . ummm . . . apparently not so much. In various ways they were disrespectful of President Trumps wife, daughter, and female guests. Many of them could not even offer support to a grieving widow of an American hero who was killed in action. And, they were not in the least consistent in their reactions to pro-women hopes that President Trump has for the future.

Most of them did not even stand or clap when it was announced that H.R. 255 and H.R. 321 were signed earlier in the day by President Trump. Bills specifically aimed at helping women’s advancement in careers of science, technology, engineering, and math, with an emphasis on aerospace and entrepreneurship.

Once again, it seems to me, that “women’s rights”, for these hateful females comes down to one thing and one thing only: abortion. It is not sufficient that abortion is a medical option in America. They apparently want the totally unlimited right to kill unborn children and have it paid for by the government . . . which means by the American citizenry. Heck, they even want us paying for unlimited abortions around the world. I suppose their bloodlust cannot be sufficiently slacked by the appalling number of abortions that happen right here within our borders. So much for wearing white suffragette dresses as a sign of purity. Perhaps blood red would have been more apropos.

But, then again, white has long been a color the Democrats have worn when demonstrating unmitigated hatred. Maybe the women in white should have used sheets. Perhaps as togas, since robes are not exactly fashionable right now. Then they would look like a herd of sorority bunnies at an out of control frat house party. ‘Cause they are certainly are the party out of control. All hyped up on vitriol and living in a state of altered reality.

What it comes down to, time and time again, these women, whether in white or not, do not represent me. In fact, they do not represent the majority of the women I know. I find these women to be an embarrassment to my gender. However, on the plus side, at least they didn’t opt to wear the pink pussyhats!

Sayonara,
Suzann
http://www.suziezoo.com
http://www.woolymammoth.org

The immigration debate we need to have.

George Borjas writes an op-ed in the New York Times on the immigration debate we need.

Leftist fake news journalist arrested for phoning bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers

Ben Shapiro at The Daily Wire and Ace at Ace of Spades both have stories about the leftist fake news reporter who phoned in bomb threats to Jewish Community Centers. Here he is.

"It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes."

Satirical blogger Manhattan Infidel brings to our attention a very real story of New York Mayor DeBlasio's attempt to make a socialistic land grab.

Successful relationships

Mark Manson writes one of the best posts on relationships I have ever read. See if you agree here.

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

Alcohol and coffee

Chelsea Follett writes at Foundation for Economic education that civilization was built around alcohol and coffee.

Nature created both to kill creatures much smaller than us — plants evolved caffeine to poison insect predators, and yeasts produce ethanol to destroy competing microbes.

True to its toxic origins, alcohol kills 3.3 million people each year, bringing about 5.9% of all deaths and 25% of deaths among people aged 20 to 39. Alcohol causes liver disease, many cancers, and other devastating health and social issues.

...Alcohol consumption could have given early homo sapiens a survival edge. Before we could properly purify water or prepare food, the risk of ingesting hazardous ... was so great that the antiseptic qualities of alcohol made it safer to consume than non-alcoholic alternatives — despite alcohol’s own risks.

...At first, humans obtained alcohol from wild plants. Palm wine, still popular in parts of Africa and Asia today, may have originated in 16,000 BC. A Chilean alcoholic drink made from wild potatoes may date to 13,000 BC. Researchers now believe the desire for a stable supply of alcohol could have motivated the beginnings of agriculture and non-nomadic civilization.

...Alcohol has been with us since the beginning, but caffeine use is more recent. Chinese consumption of caffeinated tea dates back to at least 3,000 BC. But the discovery of coffee, with its generally far stronger caffeine content, seems to have occurred in 15th century Yemen.

Before the Enlightenment, Europeans drank alcohol throughout the day. Then, through trade with the Arab world, a transformation occurred: coffee, rich with caffeine, a stimulant, swept across the continent and replaced alcohol, a depressant.

...Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive drug worldwide. Alcohol gave civilization its start, and it certainly helped the species drown its sorrows during the grinding poverty of much of human history. But it was caffeine that gave us the Enlightenment and helped us achieve prosperity.

Read more here.

"The attacks on Sessions started when some of his own employees decided to leak intelligence information -- just like happened to General Flynn. It will continue unless the administration realizes the media isn't the only gang in Washington opposed to the interests of the American people."

J. Christian Adams writes at PJ Media,

Today's Justice Department drama is a tactic by Democrats to personalize and polarize a target. It is a strategy to make Jeff Sessions devote time and energy to this instead of protecting America from foreign influences and cleaning up the Justice Department from the lawless rot that Obama caused. The Democrats prefer the lawless rot, so they want Sessions to be diverted from his job.

Of course the leaks are going to continue until the new administration has the guts to clean the place out of all the radicals that were embedded there.

Leaks are pouring out over large and small matters because so far nobody is afraid of crossing the new administration. The attacks on Sessions started when some of his own employees decided to leak intelligence information -- just like happened to General Flynn. It will continue unless the administration realizes the media isn't the only gang in Washington opposed to the interests of the American people.

Read more here.

President Trump speaks to sailors today at Newport News, Virginia aboard the Gerald Ford warship.

We will give you the resources you need to keep us safe.

Four new Cabinet members sworn in by Vice President Pence

Vice President Pence has been busy swearing in new cabinet members. You can watch the swearing in ceremonies below, starting with Governor Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, followed by Ben Carson at HUD. Many Democrats voted against each of these two highly accomplished men.

Perry and Carson confirmed, but the Big Club is fighting for its life.

Sundance reports,

The Senate voted Thursday to confirm Dr. Ben Carson as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Governor Rick Perry as Energy Secretary, adding two more Cabinet leaders to President Donald Trump’s administration.

Secretary Carson passed with a senate approval vote of 58-41; and the vote for Secretary Perry was 62-37.

The Democrats continue using the confirmation process as a slowdown gimmick to stall the Senate from voting on any legislation. The larger Democrat objective is to obstruct any legislative accomplishments as they continue their highly coordinated actions to undermine and attack the Trump agenda.

The Democrats are joined by their UniParty republican colleagues toward that specific endeavor. The aggregate DC swamp is a UniParty of self-interest now openly defending itself -across party lines- from the existential threat that is the Trump ‘swamp draining’ agenda. Additionally, the recent DC narrative against Attorney General Jeff Sessions is simply a variant approach toward the same objective.

Read more here: https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/02/24/to-remove-obamacare-we-must-first-remove-the-uniparty-big-club/

How journalists can make a war out of an accord!

"So much drama over a nothing burger."

Ace of Spades ridicules the Democrats' drummed up controversy over Jeff Sessions here and here.

Scientists discover major source of greenhouse gas in the Pacific!

Ace of Spades links to this article, which tells about scientists who

have discovered a major source of an important greenhouse gas in the Tropical Pacific Ocean for the first time.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, and a major contributor to increasing global temperatures. The largest pool of marine methane on Earth spans from the coast of Central America to Hawaii in the Tropical Pacific Ocean.

Ace writes,

How much more powerful is methane than carbon dioxide in terms of greenhouse impact? Try thirty times more powerful, Jack.

The Warming Mongers have occasionally sort of owned up to this Inconvenient Truth. When they talk about cattle farming as being a Danger to Our Very Earth, they're talking about the methane produced by cows' digestion of grass and feed. Their farts, I mean. More cows, more methane, more greenhouse effect.

But of course their central preoccupation is carbon dioxide, which I have a habit of mocking as The Invisible Killer. In fact, it's not so much a killer as a minor bother.

Now scientists have probed the tropical Pacific floor, and have found a great big swath of microbes pumping out a gas that actually has a greenhouse impact beyond the trivial.

...Hack Scientists Who Didn't Really Major in a Real Science: "The science is settled."

Actual Science: "Yes, lads, you've fathomed all of my mysteries in the thirty years since you've created and then 'pefected' this infant grab-bag science of yours. You've got me all figured out, and there's nothing left to learn. Well done, boys. Very well done. By the way, I'm being very sarcastic. Like Spock with an arched eyebrow. That's how Science rolls."

Read more here.

Something green!

Mama feed her brand new calf in the sunshine!

"Please go away! I don't want to get pregnant again!"

"The only unwelcome guest is reality!"

"Sitting back and letting it happen, as if we've been hypnotized. The latest trend in Sweden is live streaming gang rapes on the internet for everyone's entertainment! Spectators at an approaching tsunami!"

Unvetted "refugees"

Bookworm quotes from Trump's SOTU speech.

It is not compassionate, but reckless, to allow uncontrolled entry from places where proper vetting cannot occur. Those given the high honor of admission to the United States should support this country and love its people and its values.

We cannot allow a beachhead of terrorism to form inside America — we cannot allow our Nation to become a sanctuary for extremists.

She then links to Daniel Greenfield, who compiled several recent examples of what happens when "refugees" are not properly vetted.

"The future is not lost. It is waiting for us."

Daniel Greenfield writes,

After eight years of an administration whose vision of progress was rigidly ideological, President Trump offered optimism grounded in the conviction that we can make the country better by making things happen. “Everything that is broken in our country can be fixed. Every problem can be solved,” he said.

That sense of optimism is uniquely American. It stands in sharp contrast to the dreadful years of Obama malaise that made economic and national progress dependent on social progress. Under Obama, national progress depended on atoning for our social sins through diversity and our environmental sins through alternative energy. We didn’t deserve success or happiness if we didn’t do these things.

...The future is not lost. It is waiting for us.

Read the whole thing here.

"I'm a phobia phobe!"

Sundance brings us news that Mark Steyn is no longer on Mark Levin's Conservative Review t.v. show. Steyn is suing. No further details are yet available. Steyn promises something is coming from his side on Monday.

Here is Steyn's last show. He gives a warm tribute to Alan Colmes, who "understood that politics is persuasion."

It's odd that the left is so unforgiving of him for engaging with the right.

Then he gives a tribute to Nigel Farage, who almost single-handedly persuaded British voters to Brexit.

When all you do is label someone, you make debate impossible. Labels are fine if you are in kindergarten on the playground, but by grade three, you should be learning how to debate!

"It's a shakedown, pure and simple!"

Melissa Jacobs reports at Fox News,

The Obama administration funneled billions of dollars to activist organizations through a Department of Justice slush fund scheme, according to congressional investigators.

“It’s clear partisan politics played a role in the illicit actions that were made,” Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, told Fox News. “The DOJ is the last place this should have occurred.”

Findings spearheaded by the House Judiciary Committee point to a process shrouded in secrecy whereby monies were distributed to a labyrinth of nonprofit organizations involved with grass-roots activism.

“Advocates for big government and progressive power are using the Justice Department to extort money from corporations,” Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton told Fox News. “It’s a shakedown. It’s corrupt, pure and simple.”

When big banks are sued by the government for discrimination or mortgage abuse, they can settle the cases by donating to third-party non-victims. The settlements do not specify how these third-party groups could use the windfall.

So far, investigators have accounted for $3 billion paid to “non-victim entities.”

...Lankford has introduced the Stop Settlement Slush Fund Act of 2017 while House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., submitted similar legislation in the House.

“Congress must permanently end the abuses Obama’s Justice Department exploited to use settlements to funnel money to their liberal friends,” Goodlatte said in a statement.

Read more here.

CNN and Hollywood Reactions to Trump speecn

At Bookworm Room guest blogger John Novick reports on the reaction to last night's Trump speech before Congress by sources you might not have checked: CNN and Hollywood. Read the whole thing here.

Protecting bad-apple teachers in New York

In the New York Post Julia Marsh reports,

Why heroin and classroom sex aren’t enough to get teachers fired anymore!

The city’s bad-apple teachers have a surprising new ally these days — Manhattan judges.

The jurists are increasingly refusing to side with city education bigs to punish rogue educators fired for drug- and sex-related offenses, according to a review of recent cases by The Post.

Read more here.

hat tip Instapundit

Warbots

At Real Clear Defense, Brian M. Michelson writes about The Coming Warbot Revolution.

In May 1940, the Allied and German Armies squared off in what was expected to be an extended campaign for the conquest of France. Six weeks later, the victorious German Army marched down the Champs-Elysees in Paris. How was it that the Germans, with fewer tanks, fewer trucks, fewer troops, less artillery and access to roughly equivalent technologies, managed to accomplish such a remarkable feat? While leadership, luck, and a host of other factors were at play, the decisive factor was the remarkable way in which a few German inter-war military thinkers envisioned and developed a new way of warfare, known to the Allies as the blitzkrieg. German doctrine successfully integrated current technologies in aircraft, radios, and tanks into a coherent and integrated way of fighting and then applied it to great effect.The result was amplified because the Germans fought an enemy that in many cases failed to account for the possibilities enabled by the new combination of these technologies.

We are now on the cusp of a similar revolution in warfare with the opportunity to integrate several current and near term technologies into our concept of how we will conduct military operations in the not-to-distant future. The winner of the next conflict will not likely be determined primarily by the state of their technologies, but by how well a nation’s military thinkers conceptualize future warfare in an integrated manner and then apply robotic systems, or warbots, appropriately to our way of fighting. For purposes of this discussion, warbots can be defined as robotic combat systems that can detect, identify, and apply lethal force to enemy combatants within prescribed parameters and without immediate human intervention. Using the historical lens of the blitzkrieg, we will examine two key trends that can help inform our concept of future warfare and our ability to wage it. They include: the rise of lethal warbots as primary combatants and adapting current leadership methods to a future era of manned-unmanned, or Centaur, teaming.

Read more here.

"America needs a Space Corps!"

M.V. “Coyote” Smith writes at War is Boring,

America Needs a Space Corps
It’s time for the Pentagon to create an independent orbital military service!

[S]pace is an area where we have methodically, almost with genius, allowed bureaucracy to avoid success. The combination of the Air Force’s parochialism and NASA’s bureaucracy, we are now at least 25 years behind where we should be.
— Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, 2016

[The Russian and Chinese] space threat has developed with alarming speed. And yet, during the same time period, the Department of Defense [the Air Force] has significantly reduced research and development dedicated to space systems [by 80 percent].
— Sen. John McCain, Chairman of the SASC, 2017

This article recommends the creation of a U.S. Space Corps in the Department of the Air Force as an initial step to set American space power on a path to reach its full potential.
Ultimately, America’s national security interests in space will best be served when Congress creates an independent Space Corps, just as it created independent services for land, sea and air, uniting them under the Department of Defense.

Read the whole thing here.

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

"Four years is a lot of time for a Master Persuader."

Scott Adams writes,

if Trump maintains a constructive engagement with the black community, and continues to talk about unity, while his critics call him “dark,” who wins the persuasion? Trump’s critics might accidentally turn him into the third black president. (Counting Bill Clinton as first.) That’s obviously a big stretch, but you didn’t think he would get elected president either. Four years is a lot of time for a Master Persuader.

Read more here.

Pro-marijuana groups worried

At the Washington Examiner, Kelly Cohen reports,

Attorney General Jeff Sessions created a wave of worry among pro-marijuana groups this week when he said he doesn't think the United States is a better place with "more people smoking pot."

"I am definitely not a fan of expanded use of marijuana," Sessions said Monday. "But states, they can pass the laws they choose. I would just say, it does remain a violation of federal law to distribute marijuana throughout any place in the United States, whether a state legalizes it or not."

Sessions' comments paralleled those of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who said last week that states with legalized recreational marijuana use will see "greater enforcement" of federal laws.

Read more and watch an interview here.

U.S. oil exports are blowing past expectations

Gerald Herbert reports at AP
"U.S. crude oil exports have exceeded 1.2 million barrels a day, per the Financial Times. That follows the lifting of a 40-year-old ban on crude oil exports in 2015, and far exceeds baseline projections. As the FT points out, the strong exports are a result of:

The oil glut in the world market has made U.S. oil a relative bargain compared with other grades.
A rebound in oil prices last year has encouraged U.S. companies to increase drilling. The EIA estimates domestic production is above 9 million barrels a day for the first time in 10 months.

U.S. refineries, unlike OPEC, haven't done much to "mop up" the glut.

Rates for leasing supertankers have declined, making its cheaper to transfer oil to foreign countries.

Why this matters: The situation poses a threat to Saudi Arabia and other key OPEC members, which have historically had control over the oil industry and the power to gauge pricing. But following the group's November agreement to curtail oil output, concerns about tighter oil supplies have led foreign countries to look elsewhere — such as to the U.S. — for their supply.

hat tip Glenn Reynolds

Nancy Pelosi refuses to clap for new American jobs.

hat tip Stephen Green

None are greater