Impeach Trump

 For his incitement to violence that led to the storming of the Nation's capitol, while lawmakers were debating the electoral college results, leading to the deaths of four citizens.

Period. That's it. That's the post.

Why They Hate Us

I can't take credit for this insight, it really comes via Andrew Klavan (New York Times bestselling author, creator of the "Another Kingdom" trilogy and podcast host).

Klavan spends a lot of time commenting on the culture, and Klavan has noted that in the culture today, conservatives live amongst what has become a culture dominated by Progressives and cultural Liberals (as opposed to classical political liberals). 

Because of this, conservatives understand progressive culture.  We're subjected to it daily. Our news (if you watch anything other than Fox or OANN) is dominated by it. Our movies are dominated by left-wing filmmakers, and TV is full of it.

Our public education systems are run and populated by teachers steeped in the teachings of The Left.  The universities are dominated by far left professors. Only in STEM education can you escape a massive split of liberal to conservative numbers, and even in some sciences, the Left is taking over.

All this is to say that we, conservatives, understand you, progressives.  Mark Dice hits on this in a tweet today:

Massive hit piece on YouTubers in today's New York Times.    The latest wave of censorship is just getting started.  They smell blood.    https://t.co/a88tLqRfMm

— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) June 8, 2019

Dice quotes the Times article referring to You Tuber Caleb Cain:

"He began referring to himself as a “tradcon” — a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends." These are signs one is becoming "radicalized" according to the New York Times."

And people in this person's orbit were shocked at how radical this was:

“It was kind of sad,” said Zelda Wait, a friend of Mr. Cain’s from high school. “I was just, like: ‘Wow, what happened? How did you get this way?’” hahaha. How dare a guy date a Christian woman, and support traditional family values!

We used to have a name for  what Caleb Cain is describing himself as, and it was "normal."

To The Left, however, someone with Christian values, who describes themselves with pretty traditional conservative beliefs, is a "radical."

Of course we would be radical to these people, they don't know us. They never meet us, they don't hang out with us. They don't see us in movies or on TV, and when they do, it's a caricatured version that paints us as evil troglodytes who deny climate science and want women locked in cages making babies.

The real problem is because these people own the culture, they're worldview is amplified, and they think everyone holds their opinions and beliefs.  They don't look at surveys that show that most people fall into the mostly conservative category in their personal beliefs.  They think 75% of the public believes that abortion should be legal for the full term. They think 100% of democrats think Donald Trump should be impeached. They think socialism works.

They think we're out of touch.  And with the culture, we may be, but with reality, they are the ones out of touch.  But that won't help you very much, because until we take the culture back, they will dominate, and things will only get worse.

When did it become cool to disrespect the national anthem?

Short answer: It's not.

I used to live in a nation where it was verboten to disrespect the national anthem and the flag. Long ago, the Left made desecration of the flag an acceptable form of political "speech" and the Supreme Court agreed.  We acceded to this, because it was rare and flag burners were obviously radicals who we knew hated the country.  When Smith and Carlos raised the Black Power salute at the '68 Olympics, they were roundly criticized, but it was understandable in the context of the times.  It was wrong then, and remains wrong today.

Colin Kaepernick thought he'd give himself some relevance by latching on to the morally bankrupt and dubious BLM agenda by taking a knee during the national anthem last year.  He's really the symptom, though, of something that has been happening really since the '60s, the inability, or unwillingness of people to appreciate, that by the miracle of the place of their birth, they get to live in the greatest, freest, most tolerant and diverse country on the planet, where people, even today, can rise from poverty to be a Supreme Court jurist, or run a huge fast food chain, coach a Super Bowl winning team, or even be President.

We need fewer Colin Kaepernicks and more Alejandro Villanuevas.

Now, here are some things I don't need.

I have no need of people disrespecting the country that is a beacon of freedom to the world, that has enshrined individual rights in its Constitution, and that has only asked in fighting foreign wars for a place to bury its dead.

I have no need of people dishonoring the men who fought to secure that freedom and the men who wrote those documents, who did so at great peril.  If we had lost, every one of those men who signed the Declaration of Independence would have been tried as a traitor to Britain (they were) and likely executed.

I have no need of people who won't acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of men died in a bloody civil war to free slaves and reunite the union and ensure the promise of the Declaration.

I have no need of those who ignore that these men's sons and grandson's fought in two world wars, in one final act saving the world from the scourge of the Nazis.

I have no need of those who find it acceptable to disgrace the men and women who served under the flag when the government wasn't allowing them to win in Vietnam, and conversely, when the government did provide the resources to face down the Soviets and stick the failed ideology of communism into the ash heap of History where it belongs.

I'm not a fan of compulsory military service, but, I think there's merit to the argument.

Why?

As the percentage of the populace who serves in the military continues to decrease, we find ourselves as a society increasingly disconnected from the personal sacrifices faced every day by men and women who serve, willingly, in dangerous places like Kabul, Mosul, Syria; at bases in far removed from their families like Djibouti, Guam, Diego Garcia, Incirlik, and on ships at sea for months at a time.

For parts of the country (I'm looking at YOU, Northeast and California), you're half as likely to run into someone who served as in the Sunbelt.  It's easy for rich, entitled brats to enjoy the blessings of liberty when they're largely being secured by young men and women from the places they detest.

Because we no longer enjoy the shared experience that every family could sit down for Thanksgiving Dinner and pray for at least one family member who was serving, or had served, we have fewer and fewer collective connections to our men and women who protect us, at great personal sacrifice, every day.

When BLM,  millionaire pro athletes, Hollywood Liberals, or NYC-DC axis "journalists" preen about anthem protests being about racism, or police brutality, or about the plight of minorities in this country, forgive me if I barf and say "Screw you."  The anthem is about these men and women who served. It's about the men who gave us this Republic.  It's about freedom.

It is one of the last of those shared experiences that ties us ALL to those who nobly made this country the last, best hope of earth.  It is why removing our hats, facing the flag, and placing our hand over our heart for 3 minutes at some sporting event is so important. When you abstain, you dishonor these men and women. Period.

Steyn on Comey

Mark Steyn, on Comedy and Trumprussia:

'Rubio's right: Trump is not "under investigation". That's a significant fact, and the only unleaked fact. Everything else leaks non-stop: Someone who met with someone who once worked for Trump in some hotel near Trump Tower two months before he launched his campaign once had business dealings with someone who knows a Kazakh oligarch who used to be close to someone close to Putin...

'This is thin gruel. It only thickens and congeals and sticks if in the general atmosphere Trump himself is believed to be "under investigation".

 'He isn't, and never has been. Comey confirmed that to Trump three times. '

Boeing Going Strong - Why Trump Matters

Because even if Donald J Trump gets very little accomplished legislatively, he has significantly changed the Executive's approach to dealing with issues like trade and regulations.

Boeing's CEO, in an interview with Aviation Week, noted:

"What we have with President Trump is an administration that is welcoming business input. We’re glad to have a seat at the table as we think through things like trade policy, tax reform, regulatory reform and a strong and stable defense budget. The president is very good at inviting dialog and is open to ideas and inputs."

Pressed about Boeing's business in China:

"I think that conversation has led to a very productive engagement between the U.S. and China. President Xi [Jinping’s] visit [to the U.S.] and the dialog he had with President Trump set a very cooperative tone. The world needs more than 39,000 new commercial airplanes over the next 20 years, and almost 6,800 of those will be in China. We’ve been able to make the case to the president and his administration that a productive trade relationship with China can create this kind of mutual growth."

Of course, Boeing wants to leverage the administration's "fair" trade stance to stop what it considers dumping by our Canadian neighbors:

"The fact that this airplane is being sold to customers in Canada at a much higher price than it’s being sold to [Delta Air Lines] should also provide pause. It’s clearly a classic dumping case. We stand on the principle of a fair and level playing field for trade."

Trump's trade and immigration rhetoric will turn out to have been mostly bluster.  He's turning out to be much more a mainline conservative republican, in the mold of, oh, Marco Rubio.

He just needs to ignore the ongoing attempts by Democrats and the Media to smear and slow him down, and get to work on doing the work the American people sent him there to do (and keep saying that, like Bill Clinton, over and over and over).

Trump v. Comey - Trump Wins (alternatively, Comey Loses)

It's been since March since I posted here.

What's happened?

Whether you post hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or rarely, the news in the Era of Trump changes so quickly you just can't keep up.

This week, of course, we had all the Comey news.

Andrew McCarthy does have a good take on this entire thing this weekend, and I commend it to you.  McCarthy, as you may know, wrote an incredibly important book, "The Grand Jihad" about how Islamism and the Left have teamed to shred America's Constitutional Democracy.  McCarthy was the federal prosecutor who convicted the Blind Sheikh who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing, and he makes all the ties to CAIR, ISNA, and other Muslim front groups who are engaged in terrorist activities here and abroad.

It's a must read if you want to know what's the lay of the land with these groups.

With that said, McCarthy's take on Trump/Russia and Comey (who McCarthy counts as a friend) is important.

You can read the essay for his take.

This is about mine.

Mine is that Comey is not the Boy Scout that people want to make him out to be.  He's a smart man who came up in the ranks at the FBI to get to be Director, and that takes no small amount of political acumen.

It also takes competence and hard work, and accomplishments, and all those things speak well of Comey.

But just as the Peter Principle is in play in every large organization, so the FBI is not immune from it, and with Comey, I think we may just have a bit of it, coupled with a desire to cover his ass and make up for his obvious shortcomings as the Cowardly Lion of the FBI.

I listened to Comey's testimony (alright, I admit, some of the dumber Democrat senators earned a mute button - don't blame me, I did need to get some work done, but seriously, who wants to hear Kamala Harris - the dumbest senator since Patty Murray and Claire McCaskill, or Ron Wyden?).  My initial impression was of a guy who admitted under oath that he at times acted cowardly, admitted hs was often confused and befuddled, and was, with respect to Trump, acting like a disgruntled employee.

Other than the fact that he did tell Trump three times he personally was not under investigation (this is at the crux of McCarthy's argument, so go read him if you want to understand why this was so important to Trump), a key take-away was Obama's AG, Loretta Lynch, asking, no ordering him to use the term "matter" to describe a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton, which gave him a "queasy feeling."  But not queasy enough to act [pro[perl

He went on:

"And, again, you look back in hindsight, you think should I have resisted harder? I just said, all right, it isn't worth -- this isn't a hill worth dying on and so I just said, OK, the press is going to completely ignore it. And that's what happened. 

"When I said, we have opened a matter, they all reported the FBI has an investigation open. And so that concerned me because that language tracked the way the campaign was talking about FBI's work and that's concerning.

"It gave the impression that the attorney general was looking to align the way we talked about our work with the way a political campaign was describing the same activity, which was inaccurate. 

"We had a criminal investigation open with -- as I said before, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We had an investigation open at the time, and so that gave me a queasy feeling."

What we have here in this case is a guy willing to look the other way on the FBI's own rules and policies, and when he knows he is being manipulated by a political operative (Lynch) disguised as his boss, he says nothing of her actions, but uses it as an excuse for his horribly ill-advised non-indictment of Hillary Clinton.

Then there is the leaking.

This guy is the former Director of the FBI and he deigns it as acceptable to leak memos which are the property of the United States taxpayers, and that are subject to Executive Privilege, to the media, involving a "friend" of his in his duplicity, all in the effort to cause a Special Prosecutor to be named.  This wasn't your ordinary, "let's get the truth out there" leak.  This was designed with a political purpose, an arrow aimed right at the administration, who had so clumsily, and I am sure in Comey's mind, wrongly, let him go.

These are not the actions, boys and girls, of a Boy Scout. These are the actions of a man who has some kind of axe to grind, as I can't see how they fit into the CYA category.  These only make him look bad, and the President was right to tweet about this.

IMHO, this makes him not much different from Reality Winner, who leaked for much the same reasons as Comey (a devotion to a rotten causes).

Let's hear Comey's words:

"And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn't do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it."

This guy had plenty of opportunities to do something different.  Just as in the Clinton affair, he looked askance at an AG openly obstructing justice, and decided to take matters in his own hands, this time, he decided that he'd not discuss this with the current AG (or the Deputy AG), but he'd leak these memos, which belong to us, to the NYT through a third party.

Finally, of interest to me is the stake Comey drives through the Russian collusion angle the Democrats have been trying to gin up for weeks (is anyone STILL talking about Jared Kushner and back channels?).

On direct questioning, here is what Comey testifies, under oath:

BURR: Do you have any doubt that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 elections? 

COMEY: None. 

BURR: Do you have any doubt that the Russian government was behind the intrusions in the DNC and the DCCC systems, and the subsequent leaks of that information? 

COMEY: No, no doubt 

BURR: Do you have any doubt that the Russian government was behind the cyber intrusion in the state voter files? 

COMEY: No. 

BURR: Do you have any doubt that officials of the Russian government were fully aware of these activities? 

COMEY: No doubt. 

BURR: Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered? 

COMEY: I'm confident. By the time -- when I left as director, I had seen no indication of that whatsoever. 

BURR: Director Comey, did the president at any time ask you to stop the FBI investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. elections? 

COMEY: Not to my understanding, no. 

BURR: Did any individual working for this administration, including the Justice Department, ask you to stop the Russian investigation? 

COMEY: No.

Later, Comey testifies under questioning from future president Marco Rubio (who, I might point out, none other than Alan Dershowitz has praised for his handling of this):

RUBIO: Director Comey, the meeting in the Oval Office where he made the request about Mike Flynn -- was that the only time he asked you to hopefully let it go? 

COMEY: Yes. 

RUBIO: And in that meeting, as you understood it, that was -- he was asking not about the general Russia investigation, he was asking very specifically about the jeopardy that Flynn was in himself?

COMEY: That's how I understood it, yes, sir. 

RUBIO: And as you perceived it, while it was a request that -- he hoped you did away with it, you perceived it as an order, given his position, the setting and the like, and some of the circumstances? 

COMEY: Yes. 

RUBIO: At the time, did you say anything to the president about -- that is not an appropriate request, or did you tell the White House counsel, that is not an appropriate request, someone needs to go tell the president that he can't do these things?

COMEY: I didn't, no. 

RUBIO: OK. Why? 

COMEY: I don't know. I think the -- as I said earlier, I think the circumstances were such that it was -- I was a bit stunned, and didn't have the presence of mind.
And I don't know -- you know, I don't want to make you -- sound like I'm Captain Courageous. I don't know whether, even if I had the presence of mind, I would have said to the president, "Sir, that's wrong." I don't know whether I would have. 

RUBIO: OK. 

COMEY: But in the moment, it -- it didn't -- it didn't come to my mind. What came to my mind is, be careful what you say. And so I said, "I agree Flynn is a good guy.” 

RUBIO: So, on the cloud -- we keep talking about this cloud -- you perceived the cloud to be the Russian investigation in general, correct? 

COMEY: Yes, sir. 

RUBIO: But the specific ask was that you would tell the American people what you had already told him, what you had already told the leaders of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans: that he was not personally under investigation. 

COMEY: Yes, sir, that's how I... 

RUBIO: In fact , he was asking you to do what you have done here today. 

COMEY: ... correct. Yes, sir. 

RUBIO: OK. And again, at that setting, did you say to the president that it would be inappropriate for you to do so, and then talk to the White House counsel or anybody so hopefully they would talk to him and tell him that he couldn't do this?

COMEY: First time, I said, "I'll see what we can do." Second time, I explained how it should work, that the White House counsel should contact the deputy attorney general. 

RUBIO: You told him that? 

COMEY: The president said, OK, then I think that's what I'll do. 

RUBIO: And just to be clear, for you to make a public statement that he was not under investigation would not have been illegal, but you felt it made no sense because it could potentially create a duty to correct, if circumstances changed?

COMEY: Yes, sir. We wrestled with it before my testimony where I confirmed that there was an investigation. And there were two primary concerns. One was it creates a duty to correct, which I've lived before, and you want to be very careful about doing that.
And second, it's a slippery slope, because if we say the president and the vice president aren't under investigation, what's the principled basis for -- for stopping?

So, again, we see what a coward Comey is.  It's almost as though he's consciously trying to trip Trump up, but, we have his former experience with Lynch to inform us that he's probably a coward, and unwilling to rock the boat with his political superiors.

But there's more good stuff from Rubio, where he forces Comey to admit that the President had actually asked him to ensure the investigation continues, and if there are any "satellites" involved, that would be "good to know."

RUBIO: Now, on a number of occasions here, you bring up -- let's talk now about the general Russia investigation, OK? In page 6 of your testimony, you say -- the first thing you say is, he asked what we could do to, quote/unquote, "lift the cloud," the general Russia investigation. 

And you responded that we were investigating the matter as quickly as we could and that there would be great benefit, if we didn't find anything, to having done the work well. And he agreed. He reemphasized the problems it was causing him, but he agreed.
So, in essence, the president agreed with your statement that it would be great if we could have an investigation, all the facts came out and we found nothing. So he agreed that that would be ideal, but this cloud is still messing up my ability to do the rest of my agenda. Is that an accurate assessment of... 

COMEY: Yes, sir. He actually went farther than that. He -- he said, "And if some of my satellites did something wrong, it'd be good to find that out." 

RUBIO: Well, that's the second part, and that is the satellites. He said, "If one of my satellites" -- I imagine, by that, he meant some of the other people surrounding his campaign -- "did something wrong, it would be great to know that, as well"? 

COMEY: Yes, sir. That's what he said. 

RUBIO: So are those the other -- are those the only two instances in which that sort of back-and-forth happened, where the president was basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, it's OK, do the Russia investigation. I hope it all comes out. I have nothing to do with anything Russia. It'd be great if it all came out, if people around me were doing things that were wrong. 

COMEY: Yes. As I -- I recorded it accurately there. That was the sentiment he was expressing. Yes, sir.

We have a president who at one time requested leniency for his friend, Michael Flynn, and at another, requested that the investigation continue and that any of his people involved be outed.

As most on the right, and even some left-leaning legal minds (Dershowitz) have suggested, there is juts no obstruction case, and the "collusion" case is certainly on the ropes.  That is the why the Dems have moved on from collusion, from Trump outing Israeli operations, from Jared Kushner, to now "obstruction."

They hate that they lost to Trump, and they will not stop.

Ever.

This is why I am in the Dennis Prager, Colonel Kurt Schlicter, and Ace of Spades camp on this.  Trump is the general we have now, and we're fighting a second civil war for the return of Constitutional government to this country, and ultimately for Western civilization, of which, we are the bulwark.

The Left, because they thirst for power, have been fighting this battle a lot longer.  They're better at it.  They've co-opted the Media and Academia and they have more outlets and mouthpieces, but they're wrong.  And I won't stop calling our these Fascists everywhere I can.

Neither should you.

Note: I don't consider Comey one of them, he's a tool, being used by them at the moment.  The fact that 12 months ago he was persona-non-grata to them is evidence that they'll use any tool available to them at the moment.  And right now, he's available.

VDH on the New Media in the Age of Trump

Victor Davis Hanson has some thoughts in an NR corner post about the media in this day and age.

It bears a read.

The larger point is that the average person, getting his 'news' from Sean Hannity, is getting a much fairer recount of what is happening, coupled as it is, with the up front knowledge that Hannity has a particular point of view.

That The NY Times and WaPo try to conceal their biases while shading the news has hurt them by diminishing their credibility.

These media outlets have done this to themselves.

The Democrat Party of Racism

I hope that blacks and Hispanic people will soon become "woke" as our Prog friends like to say, to the fact that the Progressives, operating under the banner of the Democrat Party, have finally been able to do what Jim Crow and the militant wing of the Dem Party (i.e. the KKK) could not.

That is, get a segregated society that marginalized people of color. And get those people to think that's what they want, and need, to succeed in America.

Something called 'students4justice' at the University of Michigan is asking for

“a permanent designated space on central campus for Black students and students of color to organize and do social justice work.”

Over in Northampton, NH, we have a school board who cancelled a police outreach program because:

“Concerns were shared that some kids might respond negatively to a group of uniformed officers at their school,” the police department said in a post on its Facebook page last week. "People were specifically concerned about kids of color, undocumented children, or any children who may have had negative experiences with the police."

So, our little Prog SJWs celebrate and push for diversity by self-segregating, and we can't encourage better relations between the police and minority communities because we don't have better relations between the police and minority communities.

Welcome to Progland, folks.

Trump hates the media. Obama attempted to silence them

Remember when a president merely used the apparatus of the executive to silence the press?

Nothing compared to the jawboning being done by President Trump.

Good times.

"Reporters’ phone logs and e-mails were secretly subpoenaed and seized by the Justice Department in two of the investigations, and a Fox News reporter was accused in an affidavit for one of those subpoenas of being “an aider, abettor and/or conspirator” of an indicted leak defendant, exposing him to possible prosecution for doing his job as a journalist. In another leak case, a New York Times reporter has been ordered to testify against a defendant or go to jail."

Said New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote earlier this year, “it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and unprecedented attacks on a free press.” 

“President Obama had said that default should be disclosure,” Times reporter Shane told me. “The culture they’ve created is not one that favors disclosure.”ration spokesmen are often unresponsive or hostile to press inquiries, even when reporters have been sent to them by officials who won’t talk on their own. Despite President Barack Obama’s repeated promise that his administration would be the most open and transparent in American history, reporters and government transparency advocates said they are disappointed by its performance in improving access to the information they need." 

“This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” said David E. Sanger, veteran chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times

Trump is Going Four Dimensional on Immigration Foes

Remember when President Trump gave a speech at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and proposed a bunch of radical stuff?


You know, totally crazy shit, like, "I’m asking all of you to enforce the laws.”


At the same time, he signed two executive orders that day, one to begin/continue construction of a border wall, and the second to restore the "Secure Communities Program" and strip money from so-called "sanctuary" cities and states. It includes the end of the "catch and release" program and money for more detention centers.  These EOs are a dead giveaway that the Trump administration fully intends to spend more effort on finding, detaining, and eventually removing these folks from society (whether it's by a long time in an American detention center, aka "jail", or by sending the scofflaws back to whence they came).  Absent anything else to distract attention, cue the sad stories about innocent mothers and their children separated by the evil Trump admin.  Ignoring that mom entered the country (illegally), then stole someone's identity to get papers to make her look like a legal citizen, something YOU or I would find ourselves serving some significant time for...


As I said, "absent anything else..."


Hence, in the next few days, we saw the wider travel ban on immigrants from seven previously identified failed states and Iran, and that's all we've been talking about since.


Many have pointed to the botched rollout of the travel ban, and its subsequent troubles in court, leading to the Ninth Circuit's ridiculous and willful disregard of the law and precedent this week, as signs of the incompetence or, at best, chaos, of the Trump White House.


But, what if this is not chaos, but orchestrated?


Trump and his advisors know that the travel ban, especially as short as it was going to be, would end up having little impact on the immediate national security prospects, and likely knew they could "figure out what the hell is going on" even without a ban.  And I have every confidence they will come up with much better vetting procedures, especially for those from the failed states in this order, but for all immigrants from countries who export terrorism (yes, I'm looking at YOU, Saudi Arabia).


They knew this would send the Left and their media squirrel chasers into paroxysms of outrage.  This would divert attention from the truly radical thing that happened here, and that's the actual enforcement of the law. 


Eventually, the media will bore of the travel ban.  The admin will lessen it's severity, they'll put something more modest together and the media will move on to those grieving mother stories.  But it'll be too late, with the die cast.


That this has the side benefit of exposing the Ninth Circuit for what it is, the Supreme Court of Californistan, well, that's icing.

Killing the Filibuster

This week was an eventful one for the President.

You have to give him some credit, the guy has a tireless work ethic.

He semi-carelessly implemented his promised "ban" on travel from 7 mostly failed-state, majority-Muslim countries, prompting the kind of theatrics one would have expected from The Left.  Cue the protests, the descriptions of it as "anti-Muslim," the faux crying by Chuck Schumer, the judge-shopping by Left-leaning State Attorney Generals, etc.

Then, he nominated Neil Gorsuch to be the next SCOTUS justice, which was a universally-applauded pick, even by those on The Left ^TM.  Which is the subject of this post.

Starting with Gorsuch.  He's an imminently qualified, well-liked and thought of jurist, in the mold of Scalia, with perhaps a bit more concern about the encroachment to Liberty we face from the administrative state.  He'll be a strong 4th Amendment advocate, which should please the libertarian-minded, and he has argued forcefully for religious liberty, and is a clear textualist, as was Scalia.

For conservatives, the pick is a home run.

Which is why he must be confirmed, and quickly.

What are the Democrats to do here?

Almost out of the box, their attack dogs, led by Oregon's Senator Ron Wyden, were painting Gorsuch as an ideologue determined to undo every civil liberty ever contemplated, and a danger to the American republic.  This despite Wyden's own vote to confirm him to the 10thDistrict Court of Appeals in 2006.

This was followed by calls that this seat should not be filled because it was "stolen" by the GOP when they refused to even give Merrick Garland a hearing.  Although that was a strategy that had been advocated by Joe Biden (remember him) in 2008, hypocrisy knows no boundaries in Democrat politics.

The fact on that argument is that the Supreme Court was a central theme, at least in conservative circles, and a key reason many reluctant Trump voters cast a ballot for him.  If The Left couldnt' get out the vote for this for Hillary Clinton, well, isn't that on their hands?  They held it within their own power to prevent a Trump nominee.  They lost.

Now, we will have to deal with the filibuster.

The GOP needs to peel off 8 Dems to prevent a filibuster, and given 2018's electoral map, that may be entirely possible.  I wonder how many of these 2018 Dems know they're dead senators walking and will just accept that and give in to their donor base and join a filibuster.  My guess is a vote against Gorsuch for a senator such as Manchin, Heitkamp, Tester, Donnelly, etc, is more dangerous to their chances than losing money from rich, progressive donors.

I advocate 2 options here for the GOP, if the Dems threaten a filibuster and can sustain it with numbers:

1. Force them to actually carry it out.  Enjoy the spectacle of Democrat senators actually bringing the senate to a halt and cover it full time on C-SPAN.  Change the rules so the Senate is in session 24/7 during it so they have to stay up all night.  Make these old geezers pay for their recalcitrance.
2. Nuke it.

For the Dems, what is the best political move here?

Given that the seat does not change the existing court balance, do they hold their fire for the next one, which will either be Kennedy or Ginsburg (my guessses).  They'd certainly want to go hard after a choice for Ginsburg.  If they retain the filibuster and give Gorsuch this seat, you might see Trump, in a Ginsburg situation, go for someone like Garland.  In fact, were it me, and I knew that one would be filibustered, I would nominate Garland for Ginsburg.  he's older, and wont' likely serve more than 20 years, and he's already been nominated by a Democrat. How would they filibuster that?

If they give up the filibuster and let the GOP nuke it, all future SCOTUS picks will be far right textualists.  Trump has a list, and he'd use it.  And he'd be mad enough to nominate the judges who piss the Dems off the most.

Also, nuking the filibuster will make Chuck Schumer and the Dems in Congress completely powerless for 2 years, most likely 4.  Do the Dems really want to take that chance.  I think they have to keep their powder dry.

We'll see.

Dem's Crack Up and Media Stupidity

A couple of articles caught my attention today

First....

The Washington Free Beacon's Matthew Continetti is joining Charlie Cooke and Kevin Williamson as my favorite NR contributors. Today, he writes about the Dem's crack-up.

The Dems are following the path the GOP was on pre-2016, without the benefit of a thriving base to their party, which the GOP had in the post Tea Party era. That base, and a generally unifying vision (opposition to Dems, but generally limited government and fiscal conservatism) led to the landslide that is GOP control of everything today.

The Dems have no such base, and much of that is because at the local level, what they are selling has no market. We see the results of long-term progressivism in places like Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and only Silicon Valley permits the morons in California from destroying their state, and even that may not save it in the end.

At the national level, it's all ancient leaders beholden to their own donor class. It's generally retreads and losers, who are all too happy to tell these ancient politicians what they want to hear, and take their money from them.

It's nice to see the Dems have their own little Mike Murphy's.

Next, is Jonah Goldberg's weekly newsletter, the G-File, which occupies the primary space over at National Review Online today.

This is a cautionary tale from a former #nevertrumper that we need a conservative media to be wary and honest about Trump. His position, which I share, is that Trump isn't a conservative, and while he has those tendencies, he is first and foremost a showman, and the show is Trump.

He is going to do things antithetical to the conservative movement and its principles (trade chief among them) and we need a conservative polity that calls that out and makes fair and honest distinctions. I want to protect him from his worst instincts, because those have the capability to betray all the good things I think he can do. And he is doing a ton of good things. For example:

• He will nominate a real constructionist replacement to SCOTUS to replace Scalia
• He has put in place a serious, and professional national security team, particularly at DoD
• He is going to emasculate the EPA, the DOE and the Education by sending in heads who find what these agencies have been doing deplorable.
• Obamacare is going to get replaced by something that is more market-oriented and won't destroy the lives of the middle class people who are tasked with propping it up today
• He's serious about border security and fighting Islamic Fascism
• We will see a reduction in the corporate tax rate and real reform in the tax code, as well as loosening of regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley, the Dodd-Frank reforms, and generally reducing the burden of regulation.

All those are tremendously positive things that I believe will happen, and quickly. Make what you will of Trump, there is no "Apology Tour" to be held in the first 100 days. He's hitting the ground running, and once the Dems figure that out, they'll either get on board, or get run over. Sound familiar, Trumpistas?

Anyway, back to Jonah, while he is primarily talking to the conservative media in this week's G-File, he has some scathing things to say about the left-wing (i.e 96% of the) media:

On "Fake" news, Jonah reminds it's always been around:

No, it wasn’t all “fake news” (man, am I exhausted by the ridiculous misuse of that term), at least not most of the time [insert outrage over Duranty’s Pulitzer, Janet Cooke’s and Steve Glass’s fabulations, and of course that time Dan Rather climbed the jackass tree only to hurl himself down, hitting every branch].

On Liberal Journalists, Jonah falls where many are, that they mean well, but they truly live in a bubble.  This doesn't impact us on the right so much, because we live in much the same cultural bubble as the Left.  We read their newspapers, we hear their "news," we watch their TV and movies.  We're ensconsed in that bubble.  On the contrary, they have never set foot in our churches, or attend the same sporting events as us, or know who Sean Hannity is (I am not saying that last thing is a good thing). Jonah:

Still, the more you get to know elite “objective” journalists, the more you can appreciate that they are trying to do it right. But it also becomes all the more obvious that they live in a social milieu where the borders between the Democratic party, liberal activism, and liberal experts are very, very fuzzy.

He adds, talking about reporters seeking verification of "facts" and opinions they agree with:

Reporters routinely call experts they already agree with knowing that their “takes” will line up with what the reporter believes. Sometimes this is lazy or deadline-driven hackery. But more often, it’s not. And that shouldn’t surprise us. Smart liberal reporters are probably inclined to think that smart liberal experts are right when they say things the smart liberal reporters already agree with.

On the right, we know Vox to be an excuse for the Left to have an echo chamber.  But I love how Jonah puts this:

Think of editors like security guards at a military base. They tend to wave through the people they know and the folks with right ID badges. But when a stranger shows up, or if someone lacks the right credential, then the guards feel like they have to do their job. This is the basic modus operandi for places like Vox, which seek to explain not the facts or the news, but why liberals are right about the facts and the news. [emphasis mine]

I linked on Facebook to The Atlantic's ridiculous "sciency" article on the Right-to-Life's use of ultrasound technology and abortion.  This ridiculous article deserved the ridicule it received.  Like Jonah, I am happy that this extremely  long piece has now been equalled by the length of the retractions and corrections The Atlantic has had to issue.

From here Jonah pivots to his discussion of how the right wing journos should approach Trump, and I think fair and balanced is the best way to describe what he wants.  In other words, not what the aforementioned Hannity is doing.

My observation is that Jonah's observation here is correct:

But if you actually watch the news side of Fox News, or read National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary (not to mention the more responsible conservative websites: The Federalist, Hot Air, etc.), you’ll find that we tend not to be swept up in the hysteria of the Left or the Right. There’s a diversity of writers and opinions to be sure, but on the whole we have praised some of what Trump has done and criticized other things. Fox reports inconvenient facts for the Democrats and inconvenient facts for the Trump administration. It’s not always easy to draw the lines — again, mixed bags and all — but so far I’m proud of the way most of my colleagues and peers have handled all of this weirdness.

YOU, on the other hand, should read the entire piece.

A-Listers not needed here

Salena Zito is the one reporter who most accurately understands the Trump voter.  She has written about them tirelessly this cycle, and she correctly predicted Trump.  Today, she explains why having no A-list celebrities at the inauguration is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump Administration.

Most telling is this section from a 19 year old Trump supporter who will be attending the inauguration:

Jesse Crammer, 19, can’t wait for Friday, and all he wants to see during the inauguration is President Trump’s remarks about the moment. “He is all of the celebrity I need,” said the high-school sophomore from the Keystone State. 

“This night is about him; it is about us. It would be really cool if he opened up his remarks and asked people attending one of the balls, in particular the ball that will have our military, police and first responders in attendance, and ask them to talk about their lives. 

“[Trump’s] message about ‘making America great’ was aspirational; it was about something bigger than ourselves, and perhaps that is what Hollywood does not get. They cannot imagine something bigger than themselves.”

Cory Booker & John Lewis Explained

Cory Booker broke a longstanding precedent and engaged in a bit of moral preening over the nomination of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General.

John Lewis has decided that Trump is not a "legitimate" president.

What is going on with these people?

It dawned on me today that they feel it is necessary to protect an important Democrat constituency, that is, black voters.

I believe, under Trump, the 90/10 numbers that Dems have built with black voters is the softest part of their coalition, and the race hucksters and black politicians who rely on this as the source for their jobs, let alone their power, recognize this and must do whatever they can to keep it going for the next 4 (8?) years.

Like accusations that Trump will somehow be less friendly to the LGBT community (come on, he waved their flag at an event and he thanked the GOP convention to cheering his line about equality for them), there is the likelihood that his policies will actually help the black community and inner cities and I think he actually means he is going to work on improving conditions in the cities.

So, buckle up, because these people are not going to let go peacefully.  The Democrats had made it clear that they have one playbook in opposition, and it's the same one they've had for 40 years.

It's old, it's worn, it's tattered, and it's basically been published for everyone to see.

The GOP has gotten much smarter at this game, and the public has grown weary of it.

I predict doom and gloom for Liberals for the next few years, if they don't truly revisit their worldview and how they oppose Trump.

In Case of Climate Change, Break Glass

If you care about "Climate change" please  ensure you follow these simple instructions

If everyone who thinks CO2 is a pollutant would hold their breath for twenty minutes the problem would solve itself.

— CSM (@usacsmret) December 21, 2016

Dear liberals:

Why Trump Won

Selena Zito gets it, and has for a while.

Her article in the Washington Examiner lays it out there for the media and the Left

Russians, Meddling

The latest whine from the Left is a rehash of one they peddled during the campaign, that the Russians had a preferred candidate in 2016, and that Trump was that candidate.

Now they are using the report, referenced in the Washington Post, and attributed to anonymous sources, that the Intelligence Community has determined that the Russians put a finger on the election to elect Trump. 

Reality check: The only effort we're talking about here is the hacking of the DNC emails and John  Podesta's emails, most likely by Russian hackers.  Despite John Bolton's protestations, it is likely that some Russian hackers were involved in these hacks. What is unlikely is what the Post and their anonymous sources want you to believe, that the Russians somehow favored Trump and their lack of releasing RNC emails proves that.

Let's be clear here.  That's it.  There is no attempted hacking of voting machines, of tabulation counters, or of any outright manipulation of voting.  The question comes down to: Do you believe that the WikiLeaks revelations were enough to tip the balance from Hillary to Trump, across the 4 swing states (NC, FL, OH, IA) and the 3 "Blue Wall" states (PA, WI, MI)? 

I said repeatedly during this cycle that this boiled down to how mad were people, and how many of them were there.  Trump did that same calculus, and guess what, it turns out, pretty mad.  And a lot of them

The typical Liberal forces are rallying around this nonsense, from the WaPo, to the New York Times, to the Economist, to the usual players in Congress, to their media lackeys at CNN, MSNBC, and the big three networks.

Their fantasies take two forms:

1. Trump is diminished and his electoral victory questioned and his legitimacy reduced
2. Electors hear the siren call and somehow decide that Trump is truly a puppet of Putin and decide to deny him 270 EVs and send this election into the House.

Like they were with the Jill Stein recount (for which she paid ~$28k per additional Trump vote margin), they will not be satisfied with the results.

The people who even care about these machinations are Washington insiders and political cognoscenti.  The rest of the country, and that means 95% of the people, were neither influenced by these revelations initially, and do not give a rat's patootie about them now.

These people, who elected Trump (except for you, California) are going to be very upset should these attempts lead to any change in the electoral process in which they participated.

Trump knows that the country doesn't care, and he is the ONE person in Washington who matters who does.  He is right to brush these off as the partisan attacks that they are.

As usual in the Season of Trump, he is running circles around our dishonest and partisan media.

John Glenn & the Future of NASA

 John Glenn is dead, and Mark Steyn has a few things to say about it. You should always heed Steyn.

I grew up in the '70s and loved everything about the space race.  For those generations who weren't alive when we were walking on the moon, they have missed what was the pinnacle of human achievement.  

Today, NASA is more concerned with Muslim outreach and helping screw the poorest people in the world by playing politics with "climate change."  Some of us remember when NASA was about challenging us to dream big and explore the universe, when space exploration was actually their mission.

I hope the Trump administration will return NASA to that goal, restore its former glory, and our sense of national pride and technological achievement.  An entire generation of engineers could be dissuaded from developing smart phone apps and losing money on inane internet adventures, and could instead reach for the stars.

I hope Mark Steyn is wrong when he laments:

'Today, when we talk about Americans boldly going where no man has gone before, we mean the ladies' bathroom. Progress."

Biden, the Class Idiot

Seriously, there are people who actually believe we can "stop" the climate from changing.

This is what is wrong with you idiots.

The Abortion Death Cult

From this week's National Review:

The French State Council recently ruled that a video featuring children with Down syndrome will not be permitted to air on French television because the children’s smiles would “disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices”—in other words, seeing these children happy would upset women who had aborted children suspected of having the syndrome. The award-winning “Dear Future Mom” video shows young people with Down syndrome from around the world speaking in a variety of languages about being able to learn to write and to ride a bike, hug their mothers and go to school, earn money and live on their own. In France, 86 percent of babies who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome are aborted. Why should anyone’s conscience be at risk of being disturbed over this?

Why, indeed, in a culture of death, should we disturb anyone for their "choices."

Steve Bannon Speaks

Buzzfeed provides a transcript of a discussion where Steve Bannon laid out his global nationalist vision in unusually in-depth remarks delivered by Skype to a conference held inside the Vatican in the summer of 2014.

Some highlights I pulled out, but you who are concerned over Bannon should read the whole thing to get some insight into his thinking.

on Capitalism:

But there’s a strand of capitalism today — two strands of it, that are very disturbing.

One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia. I believe it’s what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people. And it doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.

The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative movement — whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.

However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of “personal freedom.”

On Breitbart:

The central thing that binds that all together is a center-right populist movement of really the middle class, the working men and women in the world who are just tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos. A group of kind of — we’re not conspiracy-theory guys, but there’s certainly — and I could see this when I worked at Goldman Sachs — there are people in New York that feel closer to people in London and in Berlin than they do to people in Kansas and in Colorado, and they have more of this elite mentality that they’re going to dictate to everybody how the world’s going to be run.

I will tell you that the working men and women of Europe and Asia and the United States and Latin America don’t believe that. They believe they know what’s best for how they will comport their lives. They think they know best about how to raise their families and how to educate their families. So I think you’re seeing a global reaction to centralized government, whether that government is in Beijing or that government is in Washington, DC, or that government is in Brussels. So we are the platform for the voice of that.

On Bankers and the 2008 collapse:

The 2008 crisis, I think the financial crisis — which, by the way, I don’t think we’ve come through — is really driven I believe by the greed, much of it driven by the greed of the investment banks. My old firm, Goldman Sachs — traditionally the best banks are leveraged 8:1. When we had the financial crisis in 2008, the investment banks were leveraged 35:1. Those rules had specifically been changed by a guy named Hank Paulson. He was secretary of Treasury. As chairman of Goldman Sachs, he had gone to Washington years before and asked for those changes. That made the banks not really investment banks, but made them hedge funds — and highly susceptible to changes in liquidity.

In addition, I think you really need to go back and make banks do what they do: Commercial banks lend money, and investment banks invest in entrepreneurs and to get away from this trading — you know, the hedge fund securitization, which they’ve all become basically trading operations and securitizations and not put capital back and really grow businesses and to grow the economy.

When you have this kind of crony capitalism, you have a different set of rules for the people that make the rules. It’s this partnership of big government and corporatists. I think it starts to fuel, particularly as you start to see negative job creation. If you go back, in fact, and look at the United States’ GDP, you look at a bunch of Europe. If you take out government spending, you know, we’ve had negative growth on a real basis for over a decade.

And that all trickles down to the man in the street. If you look at people’s lives, and particularly millennials, look at people under 30 — people under 30, there’s 50% really under employment of people in the United States, which is probably the most advanced economy in the West, and it gets worse in Europe.

On Islamism

But I strongly believe that whatever the causes of the current drive to the caliphate was — and we can debate them, and people can try to deconstruct them — we have to face a very unpleasant fact: And that unpleasant fact is that there is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today.

On Putin

I’m not justifying Vladimir Putin and the kleptocracy that he represents, because he eventually is the state capitalist of kleptocracy. However, we the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what he’s talking about as far as traditionalism goes — particularly the sense of where it supports the underpinnings of nationalism — and I happen to think that the individual sovereignty of a country is a good thing and a strong thing. I think strong countries and strong nationalist movements in countries make strong neighbors, and that is really the building blocks that built Western Europe and the United States, and I think it’s what can see us forward.

You know, Putin’s been quite an interesting character. He’s also very, very, very intelligent. I can see this in the United States where he’s playing very strongly to social conservatives about his message about more traditional values, so I think it’s something that we have to be very much on guard of. Because at the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand. However, I really believe that in this current environment, where you’re facing a potential new caliphate that is very aggressive that is really a situation — I’m not saying we can put it on a back burner — but I think we have to deal with first things first.

The Real Problem with White America - Smug Liberals

There is a class of white people, they're in the top 5%. They've really no conception of what it's like to make a living with your hands. To farm, or to learn a trade, or to toil as a welder or a plumber.

For them, they've been comfortable their entire life. They've attended college, the nation's finest in many cases. That's fine, that's the American dream, and the value of the work they do with their brains is fantastic. It's important and it's valuable.

This isn't quite the top 1%, but it's the top 5%.

95% of Americans live in a quite different world. They strive to be in the top 5%, or to get their kids in it. They work hard, with their hands, or with multiple jobs, and they've been left behind by this awesome economy that has favored the 5%. This is not an 8 year phenomena, it's been going on for 25 years. There's plenty of people who have forgotten them, across both parties.

These people are not racists, sexists, homophobes. They voted for Obama - twice, and they have received few of the bounties of the last 8 years.

They're angry, and they vote, too, and they voted for Trump this time.

I am sick and tired of rich, white, suburbanites who have never known the indignity of an unemployment check whining about their racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia.

Get out of your safe spaces and learn something about America.

My Agenda For Trump

Some things I am looking forward to with Trump and a GOP Congress:

Immediately:

1. A return to regular order in the House and Senate
2. Cancelling all of Obama's executive overreaches
3. Supreme Court Judge Ted Cruz
4. More Ships! Especially submarines
5. Fracking expanded in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York.
6. Tearing up the Iran "deal"
7. Release of drilling on government owned land
8. Opting out of the Climate "Deals" with China, and the Paris agreement
9. Shifting $500M of PPfA money to real womens health organizations or eliminating it altogether

Longer Term:

1. Ending Obamacare and actually getting affordable health care (like Trump, the 26 year olds on parents plans can stay, or maybe lower it to 24, and the pre-existing conditions clause needs to be worked out so that it's fair to people without driving costs through the roof - another debate, perhaps)
2. Securing the border (with a physical wall, where appropriate), ending Visa Overstays, reforming the H1B scam program; then reforming the LEGAL immigration system, and return to a quota system, vice chain migration
3. A defense build up that signals the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians that we're serious about ending their attempts at global/regional hegemony. Reaffirming our support for the one true western democracy in the Middle East and supporting reform efforts in egypt and Iraq and any other ME country that wants to secularize
4. Mark Cuban going away
5. Chelsea Clinton in the House (seriously, don't we always need a Clinton around to remind us of what real corruption looks like)

Dems to Their Angry Voters - Take This Establishment Hack and Like It

It's election day.

Voters are angry, and how angry they are will determine what happens today.

I would like my liberal friends (and enemies) to consider how each party treated their angry element.

The GOP listened (of a fashion) and allowed the angry partisans to coalesce behind the candidate who best diagnosed their problem, Donald Trump.

He's imperfect, but he has voiced the concerns of many in the GOP's orbit.  The beast within the GOP is being fed.

In contrast, the Dems had Bernie Sanders with a very energized based, voicing many of the same concerns as the GOP's disaffected voters.

What did the Dems do?

As we've seen from Wikileaks, the Clinton machine put their finger on the scales and rigged (yes, rigged) the Dem primaries to ensure a Bernie loss.  This time, Hillary would not be denied the nomination.

Then, they told those Bernie voters to get in line, and take this Establishment Hag and like it.

Basically, they gave them the finger.

The angry GOP voters are going to go for Trump.

Will they be enough.

Today's Anti-Hillary Roundup

Here are a few interesting anti-Hillary posts from this week:

First, from InfoWars:

Hillary Clinton is clearly trying to get her pal George Soros to rig this election.  Via InfoWars:

The U.K.-based company Smartmatic has sent voting machines to important battleground states across the US including Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

“Other jurisdictions affected are California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin,” noted the Daily Caller.

“Smartmatic Chairman Mark Malloch-Brown is a former U.N. official and sits on the board of Soros’ Open Society Foundations.”

The discovery has caused concern among the US voting populace given Soros’ deep ties with Clinton.

=============

Next Up:

This week, Trump's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was defaced by members of the Party of Tolerance™, then replaced.  Then, the replacement was being "guarded" by a homeless black woman and Trump supporter, who was promptly attacked by more members of the Party of Tolerance™.  All caught on You Tube.

I wonder what tolerant "moderates" and Hillary activists like Ralf Gomez think of this kind of activism?  Pretty effective, eh?  And I am sure so totally not coordinated by Bob Creamer or anyone like him...

================

Speaking of Bob Creamer, 

While us bitter, partisan hacks are busy convincing Jim Comey to come join us and bring down the Hillary campaign by getting her emails onto a computer shared by serial sexter and overall creep Anthony Weiner and Hillary girl Friday Huma Abedin, Wikileaks has confirmed the ties shown in the Project Veritas videos between Clinton fixer, agitator, and convicted felon Bob Creamer and Clinton CAMPAIGN MANAGER Robby Mook ("Bob Creamer...is close to Robby Mook").

It is demonstrated that the Clinton campaign coordinated with the PAC being run by Creamer to stir up trouble at Trump rallies, and if you don't believe that, then YOU are a bitter, partisan hack, and not the disinterested moderate you purport to be.

Looks like Lux got his desire to get the netroots more involved.

===================

While the Clintonistas were attacking Jim Comey for partisanship and attacking anyone who pointed out that there may be something actually here as Bitter Partisans™, the Washington Examiner dug up the Clinton's reaction to the 1992 revelation that Cap Weinberger would be indicted in the Iran-Contra scandal. Nothing like a little good old Liberal Hypocrisy™

================
Via Twitter, I found this Guardian (not typically a right-wing British newspaper) article on the rape allegations against Trump.  Again, the Party of Morality™ sometimes throws these allegations out to counter the real allegations that Bill Clinton is a serial rapist.

Doing the work American reporters won't do, The Guardian  provides some insight and actual investigating into the people behind the trump rape allegations.  This reads like a parody, but it is really what is going on.

As I suspected, these are completely fabricated.

Anyone who pushes this nonsense to you, just say, "yeah, right."

The Trouble With Huma

The FBI Director dropped a bombshell yesterday that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails based on new information from an "unrelated" investigation.

Later on Friday, we learned that "unrelated" investigation was the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, in which Mr. Weiner was sexting an underage girl.

During the course of that investigation, the FBI took possession of several computers used in the Weiner household, among them one shared by Mr Weiner and his (now estranged) wife, Huma Abedin.

Herein the relation.

Huma happens to be Hillary's long term Girl Friday and potential Chief of Staff in a Hillary administration, so, it's kind of a big fvcking deal, as Joe Biden might say.

So, what happened here and what is the likely outcome?

We know the Clintonistas spent a lot of time traveling. That's Hillary's number one accomplishment as Secretary of State, so they were on mobile devices alot.  So much so, that we know Hillary ran through 17 of these things (all of which have been destroyed, sadly), and we also know that Hillary was prone to ask her minions to "pls prt" when she wanted to read a particularly interesting email.

Huma testified that she would frequently send these to her personal email accounts for later printing, ostensibly when she was somewhere with a convenient printer hooked up.  This is where she may find herself in some personal legal hot water with the investigators.  I don't know the details of her "pls prt" testimony, but, we may find out that she misled the FBI over the depth and breadth of her emailing to private accounts.  She may have even lied about the accounts.

Personally, I think Huma is in big trouble.

But, is Hillary in trouble, too?

That really depends on the nature of the emails and the trail back to Hillary.  If it turns out that in this trove of emails there are emails that were work related and not turned over to the FBI, she can make the case that she turned over all known recoverable emails and that she had no knowledge of this Huma cache.  I think both those are lies, but they probably couldn't lead to perjury charges against Hillary.

If it turns out there are classified emails, and that they passed through Hillary's hands, then she may not be in legal trouble due to Comey's previously established "intent" standard, but she would certainly be in deep political trouble.

If the emails contain evidence that the private server that Hillary maintained was clearly established to prevent future disclosure and harbored clearly classified email at some point, then she is guilty on the "intent" standard and on several other laws, including perjury.

What will the Hillary gang do about Huma?

She's problem number one, and she has a long history of, err, service, to Hillary.  Will she fall on her sword for Hillary, or will they throw her overboard?  And will all this happen before November 8th?

I feel sorry for Huma.  She has had to work for an odious woman for many years, and maybe she and Hillary have the kind of special relationship that only they can share.  She was forced into a sham marriage with an equally (ok, more) odious man, in Anthony Weiner.

If anyone has suffered for this, it is Huma.

I think her suffering may be in prison for a while.

Trump loves him some Russians!

The Left is trying to push it as Gospel Truth that Donald Trump is in the pockets of the Russians, and that he's really just a Russian proxy.

He has admittedly issued some friendly statements about Vlad Putin and the Russians, so it's worth considering.

Many of them cite Donald J Trump Jr's 2008 comments as quoted in this Washington Post article as some sort of proof:

"Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Personally, if that were backed up by some actual reporting that would shed light on it, I would find it much more damning. As it is, it sounds like so much of Trumpland, bluster, probably for the specific audience.

Instead of following up on the potentially most damaging piece, the Post delves into some pretty insignificant areas:

1. The Miss Universe Pageant being held in Moscow in 2013, where the Post alleges he "made millions." This would seem something they could actually prove, with an actual number
2. Trump's team also attempted to sell condos in a Panama project to Russians. The horror! An international project looking for international investors!
3. Trump sold a Palm Beach mansion he bought at auction for $41M for a tidy $54M profit to a Russian investor.  Trump bought the home at auction 4 years earlier and he sold it before the 2008 crash, so it probably had achieved maximum value. I don't know what this is evidence of.  But, whatever, the Post provides no additional info or context.
4. While Trump has never built a hotel in Russia, the Post is quick to inform us it's "not for lack of trying."  

So, this is it.  

Like so many attacks on Trump, it's flimsy and held together by very thin threads.  

It's just so much, nothingness.

I Voted Today

On the whole, the election comes down to two pretty despicable people. I know that Hillary Clinton, by her deeds is not qualified to be president.  Do I really need to list them?

Her demeanor, as has been revealed in numerous books and articles over the years, and confirmed in the Wikileaks emails, confirms that she is entirely unsuited to be YOUR president, let alone mine.

She is ruled out.

The choice becomes Trump, or a protest of some kind, and while I have toyed with the protest, ultimately, this is a binary system, and you hold your nose and take the lesser of two evils, from a "person" perspective.

I am helped along in this decision by a couple of things:

1. I know that The Left, after settling on a candidate, through thick and thin, would do whatever is necessary to win the election.  If they couldn't outright replace the candidate, they would obfuscate, lie, use the media, go on the attack against their opponent, make up stories out of whole cloth, just to win.  They do not play fair.  The people who could turn Mitt Romney into a man who literally gives people cancer, just don't give a crap about "the rules."
   
   It's time we did the same thing, and a vote for Trump serves to tell The Left - "Go Screw Yourselves, we're done being your patsies."
   
2. The GOP and particularly, the #nevertrump crowd needs to hear a message that some on the right are sick and tired of The Left playing by their set of rules, while we try to play by rules of fairness.  We're talking about the future of the country, which albeit will survive either one, but actual progress for our causes (at the national level, I agree) will be set back a generation by a Hillary victory.
   
3. Enough of Trumpism intersects with my conservative/libertarian leanings to recognize that he is much closer to me than Hillary.  My agenda has a far better chance of moving forward under President Trump, than President Hillary.
   
4. With Trump, I am not assured of conservative judges, but I am assured of Liberal ones with Hillary.  Another 4 years packing the federal bench with ideologue leftists will seriously set us back years.  I won't live to see the correction.

I respect #nevertrumpers and their desire to retain some sense of moral clarity, but, let's not kid ourselves, politics is a dirty business, and that means it attracts people we might not consider pure of heart, or pure of ideology.

You may choose, and in choosing, consider the stakes and I think Victor Davis Hanson sums this up in his article for NR. I have listened to both sides, and ultimately, logic requires that I side with VDH and Peter Robinson and Larry Kudlow, not with Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson, and Bill Kristol, though I respect their choices to remain above Trumpism.

For me, the choice is really between Trump and Hillary, and that makes the choice for Trump the only logical one.

Hillary's Magic Court - F The Constitution

If you watched Debate #2, the most important question occurred near the end.

In response to what kind of justices would you appoint to the Supreme Court, Hillary Clinton had these wonderful insights for us:

"I want to appoint Supreme Court justices who understand the way the world really works, who have real-life experience, who have not just been in a big law firm and maybe clerked for a judge and then gotten on the bench, but, you know, maybe they tried some more cases, they actually understand what people are up against."

In other words, the judges will use as their basis for examining law "the way the world works."  Or, more accurately the way Hillary Clinton and her friends on the Progressive Left think the world works.

"Because I think the current court has gone in the wrong direction. And so I would want to see the Supreme Court reverse Citizens United and get dark, unaccountable money out of our politics. Donald doesn’t agree with that."

She wants to remove the right of people to freely assemble and gut the First Amendment.  Citizens United was correctly decided and some may recall it was a case about a film that was about HILLARY CLINTON.  Basically, this bitch wants to throw out the First Amendment due to spite.

"I would like the Supreme Court to understand that voting rights are still a big problem in many parts of our country, that we don’t always do everything we can to make it possible for people of color and older people and young people to be able to exercise their franchise."

Voting Rights are NOT a big problem.  States that have tough ID laws for voting have little fraud, and they all provide state-issued IDs for free, and in many cases, allow provisional ballots to be cast even to those without IDs.  Fair elections without fraud are fundamental to the integrity of our system.  Requiring voters to produce an ID that proves who they are is not too much to ask.  But, it prevents voter fraud that Democrats like to practice, so it must be cast as racist and enshrined into law by Jurists in Robes, since no state legislature will allow such shenanigans.

"I want a Supreme Court that will stick with Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose, and I want a Supreme Court that will stick with marriage equality."

It's ok for a Liberal to have an abortion litmus test, but God forbid a conservative have one.  If you get Hillary Clinton, you get abortion on demand.  Forever.  You'll also get further erosion in religious liberty.  Liberals dream of the only day you get the chance to practice your religion as being Sunday between 9:30-11.  They'll further gut the First Amendment to get it.  

We also know she'd love to get the 2nd Amendment reinterpreted to remove the individual right enshrined by Heller.  Getting that 5th Liberal Justice and a case suitable enough, will get that done.

Trump is a crap shoot on the Court, and he's a horrible person.  I get that.

Choose wisely.