PrairiePundit

Legal Insurrection:
Gallup: Satisfaction With Direction of U.S. Hits 12-Year High
...

The number isn’t all that shocking considering our economy is doing very well. The May jobs report showed unemployment at 3.8%, the lowest it’s been in 18 years. College graduate unemployment is at 2% while “workers 25 years and older with less than a high-school diploma” have an unemployment rate of 5.4%, which is “down from 6.2% a year earlier.”

Hourly earnings went up 8 cents in May to $26.96, which is an indication that the “strong pace of hiring is encouraging employers to raise pay to secure workers.”

The United States added 223,000 jobs in May. That number means the country “has added 207,000 new jobs per month on average, a brisk pace of hiring.”

Trump signed the tax bill into law at the end of December, which meant more money in the pockets of Americans and businesses, which allowed the businesses to invest more money into capital spending.

The Iran nuclear deal may also have an effect on the Gal…

The taint will be hard for Muller to overcome.

Power Line:
... Jason Jones and John Zmirak argue that the Mexican government created the problem: These migrants from Central America claim that the chaos in their home countries amounts to “persecution.” If so, then by international law they must seek refuge in the “first safe country.” That was Mexico, which didn’t offer them asylum, but shipped them north to us. They also note the recklessness of adults who bring their children from Central America through Mexico: The Huffington Post reported that 80% of women and girls from Central America who enter the U.S. illegally suffer rape. If the percentage even remotely approaches that number, then almost anything we can do to discourage immigrants from bringing children through Mexico is worthwhile. Jones and Zmirak also place the issue of separation at the border in the context of sex trafficking: Every year thousands of children get raped, abused, and sold. Right here in America. Many of these kids are immigrants, and a key tactic traffickers…

Sara Carter:
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At the hearing Grassley laid out the extraordinary differences in the investigations and questioned Horowitz, asking him if “granting immunity is the only way to gain truthful testimony from witnesses;” a reference to the highly unusual decision by the FBI to grant immunity to Clinton and her aides before they were interviewed. Both Wray and Horowitz noted that it was not the only way to extract information from witnesses, but he did not expand on why it was handled in such a manner. Horowitz also revealed that his office is handling an investigation into Comey’s leaking of personal memos to his friend and the New York Times, which initiated the opening of a Special Counsel to investigate Trump.

Horowitz sent a strong message to the FBI during his opening statement, telling lawmakers, “as detailed in our report, we found that the inappropriate political messages cast a cloud over the Midyear investigation sowed doubt about the credibility of the FBI’s handling of it, …

Washington Examiner:
While the FBI was investigating Hillary Clinton's secret server where she kept official emails out of the view of the authorities until her lawyers could scrub them, for some reason, agents never searched the Blackberries or other email devices belonging to her inner circle at the State Department.

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and his team received a crazy response when they asked FBI agents on the Hillary Clinton email investigation why not.

The agents' primary excuse was to point to "the culture of mishandling classified information at the State Department which made the quantity of potential sources of evidence particularly vast" (see page 153).

Put another way, the agents thought that they might find so much classified information on unauthorized servers and systems that they would become lost in the maze. Horowitz, in what can only be described as a generous admonition, counters by noting "that [this excuse] …

Daily Mail:
Osama Bin Laden’s driver who was linked to 2012 Benghazi attack that killed a US diplomat ‘is captured in Libya’, 11 years after he was released from Guantanamo
Abu Sufian bin Qumu has reportedly been captured in Libya. The 'high-ranking' al-Qaeda operative had ties to Osama Bin Laden and was linked to the 2012 Benghazi attacks that killed US mabassador and others. Releasing people from Gitmo has been a mistake for the most part.  Too many of them are recidivist terrorists.

Fox News:


Investigators should probe whether former FBI Director James Comey discussed classified information using a personal email account, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said Monday at a hearing on the Justice Department watchdog's bombshell report on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe.

FBI Director Christopher Wray and Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz were testifying before the panel.

During the hearing, Horowitz revealed that the DOJ watchdog is already investigating Comey concerning his leaked memos documenting his interactions with President Trump, which critics charged may have contained classified information....
In a letter to Wray, Grassley on Monday drew parallels between Hillary Clinton's email practices and Comey's.

"It is disturbing that FBI employees tasked with investigating Secretary Clinton, including the former Director, appear to have engaged in strikingly similar conduct," he wrote.
...Se…

Marine Corps Times:
Russia just can’t let it go that Norway recently decided to invite several hundred more Marines to the region for cold-weather training.

Last week, the Russian Embassy in Norway warned of consequences and on Friday, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed the Corps’ presence in the Arctic country may, in fact, be an attack.

Norway recently agreed to boost the number of Marines in the country from 330 to 700 and opened a second training area closer to the Russian border in the Troms region.

Russia’s argues Oslo’s decision is in violation of agreements the Scandinavian country made when it joined NATO in 1949. Norway agreed not to base permanent foreign forces in the country unless threatened or attacked.

“But what attack is it possible to talk about today? As is known, top-level Norwegian officials have repeatedly noted that Russia presents no threat,” Zakharova said. “Considering the fact that US Marines are deployed in Norway, perhaps it is the United…

Washington Post:
At least six people close to Trump almost certainly knew about offers from Russians of dirt on Clinton

The president’s argument has long been that there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russian government. That claim increasingly depends on how one defines “collusion.” The Post is still whipping the dead horse of Trump campaign collusion with the Russians despite a 17 plus million investigation by Mueller that has charged no one with collusion.  It is preposterous to focus on contacts with Russians that did not lead to seeking Russian help in rigging the election as was first pushed by Clinton and her dirty dossier. 

The meeting in Trump Tower and the recent revelation about Roger Stone's meeting with what could be an FBI entrapment effort demonstrate that the Trump campaign was not buying what the Russians were selling. 

It is beyond question that Hillary Clinton campaign was buying what Russians were selling through Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.…

NY Times:
Erdogan Is Targeting Education in His Bid to Remake Turkey
Seeking re-election, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes to leave a lasting imprint by opening thousands of religious schools, even as standards slip in public ones. Erdogan has been the worst modern leader in Turkey's history.  He is an Islamist know-nothing who has ridiculous ideas such as Muslims discovered the Americas and built mosques here before the European discovery of America.  In fact, the only contribution of Islam to the discovery of America was their blocking of the normal trade routes from Europe to India.  That is what led Columbus on his journey to discovery of the new world.  Putting him in charge of education is a mistake.

Military.com:
Pentagon Policy Bars Marines from Using New Infantry Quadcopters

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Released May 23 and signed by Under Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, the memo cites a May 14 Defense Department Inspector General report that found the Pentagon did not have adequate procedures to assess cybersecurity risks associated with using commercial drone systems.

Many of the most popular commercial UAS are Chinese-made, prompting concerns that they could come with embedded malware enabling the user to be surveilled or otherwise hacked.
... These drone mechanisms appear to be widely used in commercial operations by pilots in the US.  If the Marins can't use them I suspect they will find willing buyers of the drones. The quadcopters come in various sizes many of which would be too big for combat Marins to use in operations.

Thomas Lifson:
Laura Bush is publicly supporting the Democrats' BS propaganda effort, hand-wringing over the poor "immigrants" (make that illegal immigrant law-breakers) who are arrested and therefore separated from the children. She wrote a column for the Trump-hating Washington Bezos Post that is getting major attention from all the other Trump-haters....
The reason for the separations is that their parents have been arrested for violating our law. Just like American citizens who are arrested. As Bre Payton of The Federalist reminds us....
... What the Democrats want to do is allow illegal entry into the US so that they can try to grow their ranks with a later amnesty for the unskilled illegal immigrants.  They are trying to make empathy the basis for immigration policy rather than sound policies to encourage skilled immigrants.

Fox News:
Nearly 60,000 immigrants with arrest records -- including 10 accused of murder -- have been allowed to stay in the United States under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) revealed Monday.

According to DHS, 59,786 DACA recipients have been arrested while in the U.S. -- approximately 7.8 percent of all who have been approved to remain in this country under the program since it was created in 2012. Of those, 53,792 were arrested before their most recent request for a so-called "grant of deferred action" was approved. Another 7,814 were arrested after their request was approved.
... It is not clear why they could not cull the criminals out of the program, but the number looks significant.  If Congress is going to approve this program it should make those with criminal backgrounds ineligible for it.

Michael Graham:
The new Justice Department inspector general's report on the FBI's handling of the Clinton email scandal is 568 pages long, but for Trump supporters it can be reduced to a single phrase:

"Told ya so."
...
Opponents of the president and many in the mainstream media have largely dismissed this notion of an FBI corrupted by partisanship. Much of the media coverage has focused, not on the bad behavior by James Comey, but instead on Trump's (often over-the-top) criticisms of the FBI, the Justice Department and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

And that in itself is additional proof of the Trump-supporters' primary premise that the institutions they are told they should trust—government, media, academia—are no longer trustworthy. Otherwise, how could they ignore such a juicy tale of corruption and scandal?

Start at the beginning: Hillary Clinton, with her history of problematic ethics, becomes secretary of state and, during her tenure, her family simu…

Washington Post:
Democrats intensify fight for immigrant children — and bash Trump, GOP ahead of midterms

Against a notable silence on the part of many Republicans who usually defend President Trump, Democrats visited detention centers across the country to compel a change of policy and gain political advantage. Ever since Trump was elected Democrats have gone from one hysterical response to his policies to the next.  This one is full of misleading stories and Democrats and the media have produced no alternative policy for controlling the invasion of illegal immigrants.  In fact, I get the impression they are pleased by the hysteria because it gives them a chance to change the subject from a booming economy and successful negotiations with North Korea that are removing the threat of nuclear war.

This is just the latest excuse by Democrats and their cohorts in the media to try to change the US demographics and create dependency on government programs by importing future Democrats.  Thei…

NY Times:
In Texas Governor’s Race, Lupe Valdez Faces Resistance From Fellow Democrats Ms. Valdez is a Latina, a lesbian and the Democratic nominee for governor. But some activists on the left say she’s not worthy of their support, particularly because of her record on immigration. She is running way behind Governor Abbott regardless of her stand on immigration.  An open borders policy is not politically popular in Texas.  The Democrat running against Ted Cruz has come out in favor of an open borders policy and has fallen further behind Cruz already.

Valdez has run a lackluster campaign since securing the nomination and is woefully underfunded.  She has also been embarrassed by reports that she has passed due property taxes.  Texas is likely to continue its run of having no Democrat candidate win a statewide race.

Hot Air:
Mayor Bucks Feds On Illegal Immigrant Children’s Detention Center

A Texas non-profit confirmed Friday that it has signed a lease on a large warehouse near downtown Houston to house the children of illegal immigrants. At one time the facility housed homeless women and families displaced by Hurricane Harvey. Southwest Key Programs applied for a general residence operating license for holding up to 240 children between the ages of 0-17....
This is the catch – the law has been on the books for some time (children can’t go to jail with illegal immigrant parents to serve the time sentenced on their misdemeanor before the parents go to a detention center.) Usually, the children go to other family or legal guardians to wait for their parents to be processed. Very young children and pregnant teens were typically turned over to foster families. Illegal border crossings have increased in recent months, though, and Homeland Security is being overwhelmed. New facilities are opening to han…

Steven Hayward:
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1. We may have abolished monarchy in America way back in 1776, but it seems we haven’t quite rid ourselves of royal prerogative. Then-FBI director James Comey took it upon himself to decide not to apply consistent procedure in conducting the investigation for reasons that he’ll never candidly explain, but it seems reasonable to surmise that he took politics into consideration. Consider this: if Comey had charged Hillary with violating the law in a fashion consistent with other such offenders, we might well have Joe Biden as president today. Suck on that, Democrats. 2. Deep State or Derp State? It is apparent that many in the FBI wanted to stop Trump from winning the election. But by giving Hillary a pass, they assured Trump’s election. (David French makes this case very well here.) How’s that for political competence? ... Hayward also believes Trump should have fired Comey as soon as he took office.  In benefit of hindsight that would have been a smart move that would…

Washington Examiner:
House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said that House Speaker Paul Ryan led a meeting with senior Justice Department and FBI officials Friday, and claimed he “made it very clear” the House will use “its full arsenal of constitutional weapons to gain compliance” on outstanding subpoenas.

Gowdy, R-S.C., said on “Fox News Sunday” that Republican lawmakers’ actions could involve "the full panoply of constitutional weapons available to the people’s house."

However, it was not immediately clear which subpoenas or requests Gowdy was referencing.

In March, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte subpoenaed the Justice Department to obtain documents related to the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server, potential surveillance abuses, and the decision to fire former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

The request totals roughly 1.2 million documents.

However, that subpoena is already being handled: FBI Director Christopher Wray annou…

Washington Times:
FBI agent Peter Strzok put the Trump-Russia investigation on a fast track during the 2016 election season at the same time he was sending text messages to his lover condemning the Republican presidential candidate as an “idiot” and vowing to “stop” him.

Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in a voluminous report, singled out as troubling Mr. Strzok’s decision to move quickly from working on Hillary Clinton’s email case to investigating Mr. Trump.

“In assessing Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation … these text messages led us to conclude that we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision was free from bias,” Mr. Horowitz wrote.

Mr. Horowitz’s 500-plus-page report focused on the Clinton email saga, not Russia. A separate inquiry into how the FBI started and conducted the investigation into Russia election interference is continuing.

But because Mr. Strzok’s texts to former FBI counsel Lisa Page dealt with both, Mr. Horowitz exa…

Byron York:
The struggle to uncover the FBI's conduct in the Trump-Russia probe has made some congressional investigators deeply suspicious of the bureau. But what do those investigators think the FBI actually did in its investigation of the Trump campaign, Russia, and the 2016 election?

First, they're convinced the FBI has something to hide. In the last 12 months, the bureau has, at various times, ignored, slow-walked, resisted, and downright stonewalled congressional requests, not to mention subpoenas, for information on the Trump-Russia investigation.

Each time the bureau hunkered down, suspicion grew on Capitol Hill. The FBI seemed particularly reluctant to reveal to Congress not what Russians did, or what people in the Trump circle did, but what the bureau itself did.

When did the investigation start? How did it start? What measures did the FBI, and its lawyers, and its informants employ? Getting facts out of the FBI has been a long and arduous task.

First to cause seriou…

Fuel Fix:
If you have turned on the news or picked up a paper lately, you have probably seen reports that foreign enemies are increasingly launching cyber-attacks on America's critical infrastructure, including energy facilities. To address these threats, electric grid operators must comply with mandatory standards overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) that protect against cyber and other attacks that threaten the reliability of our electric service.

Natural gas pipelines are not subject to similar standards. But given the increasing threats we face, the time has come to establish them for natural gas pipelines.

Abundant and affordable natural gas has facilitated a major shift in the United States' electric generation mix. The emergence of natural gas as a significant part of the fuel mix has greatly raised the stakes for pipeline cyber security.

Although FERC has the authority to issue certificates for new interstate gas pipelines and set their rates, th…

Guardian:
US woman fights off rabid bobcat, strangling it with bare hands

‘I thought, not today ... there was no way I was going to die’ says Georgia grandmother who strangled animal to death

...
“My neighbor’s dog was barking and it drew my attention,” she said. “I saw the cat and I took a picture. The cat took two steps and was on top of me … It came for my face.”

Phillips said she grew up in the country, where her father-in-law was once a trapper of bobcats. As a result, she knew something about the animal’s behavior and how to fight back.

“I thought, ‘not today,’” she told the newspaper. “There was no way I was going to die.”

She grabbed the cat by its throat and didn’t let go. She was afraid of calling for help, she said, because her five-year-old granddaughter was in the house.

“Once I got him where he wasn’t moving,” she said, “I started screaming for my daughter-in-law to call 911.”

Her son arrived with a gun, she said, but she didn’t want him to fire because she was so close. …

Washington Examiner:
This week the world learned of yet another technology bungle by former FBI Director James Comey in what is becoming a substantial catalog of faux paus and struggles when a highly anticipated report from the Department of Justice’s inspector general revealed he sometimes used a private email account to conduct official business while leading the bureau.

According to the watchdog’s report on the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation unveiled Thursday, Comey used his personal Gmail account on “numerous” occasions to conduct his work as head of the FBI, despite the Justice Department implementing a policy in 2016 that forbade such a practice. The report listed five examples between 2016 and 2017 of Comey using the Gmail account for FBI business, including to draft documents and public statements. One of the emails had an attachment with a list of titles, contact information, and duty hours for FBI employees.

Comey defended his use of the personal a…

Washington Post:
The media needs to radically change the way Trump is covered

A cognitive scientist and linguist who has long studied how propaganda works believes it’s long past time for the reality-based news media to stop kowtowing to the emperor. One has to search long and hard to find an article about Trump in the Washington Post that is not already hypercritical.  If that is their definition of Kowtowing it is a strange one.  I get the impression that all but a couple of Post writers fire each other up with their hatred for the President and his policies and find ways to ramp up their criticism on a daily basis.  The hatred of the President spills from its pages.

NY Times:
Trumpism Finds a Safe Space at a Conservative Women’s Leadership Conference
An estimated 1,000 young women took part in sessions like “How Political Correctness is Making Everyone Stupid” and displayed enthusiasm for Republicans in the midterm elections. These are certainly conservative women who I can support.  Political correctness is speech imposed by liberal language Nazis to keep "protected groups" from being offended while they offend unprotected groups like conservatives.   George Carlin describes it as fascism pretending to be manners.

Salena Zito:
These Harvard kids got the lesson of their life in the Heartland

...
“So,” I said, “who do you think most of the people you just got to know voted for president?”

None of the students had an answer. It hadn’t come up in their conversations and they didn’t know I had privately asked each person who they’d voted for.

So, I let a minute pass and told them.

“Nearly every one of them voted for Trump.”

My students looked stunned, at first. But then a recognition crossed their faces.

We were only a few days into a new course I had developed with Harvard’s Institute of Politics, called the Main Street Project, where students are immersed in small-town America. Even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, our journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course, as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time. And this was their opening lesson.
... It is worth reading the whole piece.  She took the students on road trips and had some b…

Michael Goodwin:
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... Wray is the consummate company man as he sings the agency’s praises while suggesting the dirty doings are no big deal.

“The report did not find any evidence of political bias or improper consideration actually impacting the investigation under review,” he boasted, then diminished the improper behavior as mere “errors of judgment, violations of or disregard for policy, and decisions that, at the very least, in hindsight, were not the best choices.”

Arrrrgh!

His bias bar is so low it would never pass muster in an ordinary criminal trial. Imagine a case where the defendant is black and all the jurors have identified themselves as white racists. Would it be considered a fair trial if they found the defendant guilty just because they didn’t make racist comments during deliberations?
... He does not sound like the person to fix the problem of bias at the FBI. It is going to take more than just bias seminars, the probable results would be to tell biased agents not to…

Washington Post:
Roger Stone, longtime Trump confidant, met with Russian who offered dirt on Clinton

Stone, who spoke about the previously unreported incident in exclusive interviews with The Washington Post, says the man, who called himself Henry Greenberg, offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton in exchange for $2 million during a brief sit-down in Florida in late May 2016. The meeting has resurfaced as part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s sprawling investigation of Russian interference. If Mueller is chasing this "lead" it is more evidence of his bias and his failure to go after the obvious collusion by the Clinton campaign with Russians.

The meeting could have been an attempt by the FBI to entrap Stone.  Sone told the guy, Trump would not pay.  It makes me wonder if this was a prelude to the meeting at Trump Tower where a Russian lawyer said she had dirt on Clinton that turned out to be a pitch for removing sanctions against Russia, a project she wor…

NY Times:

Corey Stewart, Virginia Senate Nominee, Evokes Trump on Racial Issues

Mr. Stewart, a Minnesota transplant who has defended the Confederacy and praised white nationalists, has seized opportunities to gain media attention, especially with harsh remarks about immigrants. Trump is not into identity politics and political correctness.  One of the things the left has tried to do is suggest that if you reject their identity politics or political correctness they will tag you as a racist.

I share Trump's disdain for identity politics.  I think politics should be issue oriented and focused on the well being of all.  That has been the effect of Trump's economic policies.  He is freeing people from dependency by providing them with something more valuable--a job.  His current trade disputes are also aimed at helping American workers find more markets for their goods and services.  Black and Hispanic unemployment are at a record low as a result.

The Confederacy is history.  Both …

NY Times Op-ed:
The Trump Doctrine Is Winning and the World Is Losing By KORI SCHAKE The planet is a safer place because of the liberal world order. The president wants to destroy it. This seems like another misinterpretation of the Trump trade policies which at their heart are intended to result in actual free trade.  If you examine the end game in the current disputes it is doing away with protectionist tariffs that target US farmers and manufacturers.  Why in the world would the NY Times defend a 270 percent tariff on US dairy products by Canada?  Why defend a 10 percent tariff on US automobiles by Germany or a 25 percent tariff on US autos in China?

If that is what countries call world order, it sucks especially for US workers and businesses who are harmed by it.  No wonder former Democrats in those trades now support President Trump.

When I think of the planet being a safer place I think of a denuclearized North Korea and Iran.

Laura Ingram takes on the latest political and media attacks on those who support the President as a "cult," and then shows clips of the adoration of Obama.

Mark Levin has no trouble sorting out the bias shown in the IG report.  He also highlights the collusion between the biased FBI employees and the biased media.

Lee Smith:
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Horowitz’s report is referring to a draft of Comey’s speech dated June 30, 2016, at 9:50 a.m., which states:

[Clinton] also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal email.
In the draft circulated at 4:24 p.m. the same day, the reference to the president, as the IG report remarks, “was changed to ‘another senior government official,’ and ultimately was omitted.”

Perhaps as significant as the FBI’s efforts to insulate Obama is its decision to conceal the identity of the foreign adversary. Documents that American Greatness has assembled working with an independent researcher, the pseudonymous Twitter user “Undercover Huber,” strongly suggest th…

New York Magazine:
Report: Obama Administration Handed Child Migrants Over to Human Traffickers

The United States government placed an unknown number of Central American migrant children into the custody of human traffickers after neglecting to run the most basic checks on these so-called “caregivers,” according to a Senate report released on Thursday.

In the fall of 2013, tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors traveled to the U.S. southern border, in flight from poverty and gang violence in Central America. At least six of those children were eventually resettled on an egg farm in Marion, Ohio, where their sponsors forced them to work 12 hours a day under threats of death. Local law enforcement uncovered the operation last year, prompting the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to open an inquiry into the federal government’s handling of migrants.

“It is intolerable that human trafficking — modern-day slavery — could occur in our own backyard,” Senator Rob Portman, Re…

Wesley Pruden:
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Some core. Some values. You don’t have to read between the lines to see that, try as the inspector general does, to give as much help as he can to Mr. Comey and the Justice Department, he concludes that Donald Trump, mean, crude, vulgarian as the swamp may think he is, is nevertheless right about how the prevailing political establishment was out to cook the election result.

This is scandal and outrage beyond bias. The FBI, which only yesterday was one of the most respected and highly regarded agencies of the government, has become regarded as perhaps one of the most corrupt because it can destroy anyone — even a presidential candidate — once it commits the resources of the federal government to the cause.

The KGB never persecuted better. Robert Mueller, friend and protector of James Comey, has been chasing the wrong rabbit. This is a scandal that is not going to be cured with "bias training."  All that will likely do is teach biased agents to not record t…

John Kass:
...
Obama told his silky lie when his chosen successor was Hillary Clinton.

Clinton had endangered top secret information by using an unsecured, home-brew email server when she was U.S. secretary of state. Any other American who dared risk top government secrets on a basement server would have faced federal prosecution and prison.

Obama’s lie was told in 2015, when Obama was asked by CBS’ Bill Plante when he learned Mrs. Clinton had used an unsecured email server.

“The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports,” Obama said. He was so silky that you couldn’t even hear his tongue rustling along his teeth.

He waxed on about how his administration was all about “transparency.”

But Obama did not learn about Clinton’s home-brew server like “everybody else.”

According to the inspector general’s report, Obama was in fact one of 13 top government officials communicating with Clinton on her private email server, even as Clinton’s server was targeted by foreign intelli…

Washington Post:
As Mueller moves to finalize probe findings, Trump’s allies ready for political battle

The confrontation between special counsel Robert Mueller III and President Trump is coming to a head as Washington awaits the Mueller write-up, which could spur impeachment hearings. Administration allies are ratcheting up their attacks, seizing on a report released Thursday by the Justice Department that castigated FBI officials for their conduct during the Clinton email investigation. Muller hired Democrats who hate the President and want to use their investigation as an excuse for a coup attempt.  While there have been a few firings for being too open about this objectives, there is little doubt that the people working for Mueller are not going to allow the lack of factual evidence dissuade them from trying to extort testimony by using unrelated charges against those caught in their web. 

The Manafort charges are a case in point as are the more recent charges of "tampering wit…

NY Times:
Why Hackers Aren’t Afraid of Us
The United States has the most fearsome cyberweaponry on the planet, but we won’t use it for fear of what will come next. If the weapons are not a deterrent they are of little value.  The US should develop counter strikes that are instantaneous and cripple the computers used in the attack.   To be effective the response needs to be more than defensive. The kind of weapon I am suggesting would not have to be concerned about what comes next because any such attempt would also be thwarted.

Washington Post:
Praise for Kim Jong Un reflects Trump’s growing regard for totalitarian leaders

No U.S. president has been as free in his admiration of authoritarians and absolute power as the 45th, historians say. And President Trump’s interest in them seems to be increasing as he becomes better acquainted with leaders such as Kim, Xi Jinping and Vladi­mir Putin This is a ridiculous analysis. 

It was just a few weeks ago the media was saying Trump's insults of Kim would prevent him from getting a deal. 

Now they have flipped and say his flattery of a negotiating partner is because he likes dictators.  They are wrong on both points.   In both instances, Trump is working on getting to yes in a negotiation.  Once you are in a serious negotiation you don't continue to insult the other side,  Instead, you flatter them when possible.  Trump is actually joking when he talks about how North Koreans react to Kim.

What I have noticed is that with many in the media they deliberately mis…

NY Times:
U.S. and China Expand Trade War as Beijing Matches Trump’s Tariffs The tariffs on China by the Trump administration shift what has primarily been a war of words between Washington and Beijing into a full-blown trade war. Because the US buys significantly more from China than China buys from the US, it has more to lose in a trade war with the US.  Trump's goals are also more realistic.  He is looking to break down barriers to trade and reduce tariffs on US businesses.  While the media tends to focus on the tariffs Trump is imposing, the end goal is to eliminate tariffs on both sides and have genuine free trade to should benefit both countries.

Trevor Thomas:
It seems the Republican National Committee (RNC)'s cash advantage over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is even more pronounced than the numbers – $43.8 million to $3.4 million – indicate.  As long as Democrats like Nancy Pelosi vainly ignore, downplay, or even badmouth good to excellent to record-breaking (in more ways than one) economic numbers – and in the process beclown themselves – the RNC will have to spend next to nothing when it comes to creating ads for the midterm elections.

Pelosi, in particular, is the gift that keeps on giving to the GOP.  Cementing herself as one of our nation's most morally and economically ignorant citizens, just prior to the GOP passing – and President Trump signing – sweeping tax reform legislation in December of last year, Mrs. Pelosi went on a historically foolish rant.

Awash in hyperbole and hypocrisy – remember, she leads the party that stands for, among other immoral outrageousness, the "right" to kill the m…

Carolyn Glick:
...
... Trump’s playbook involves doing essentially the opposite of what American and Israeli negotiators have been doing for the past 30 years.

Five lessons stand out.

1. Don’t make light of your counterpart’s failings, play them up.

For decades, Israeli negotiators praised Arafat as a man of courage and Abbas as a moderate. Obama and his team praised Iranian President Hassan Rouhani as a moderate. By praising their opponents, the Israelis and Americans justified making concessions to their counterparts, without requiring them to reciprocate. In other words, Israeli and US negotiators put the burden to prove good intentions on themselves, rather than their opponents, who actually had no credibility at all.

Trump took the opposite approach. After North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile last July, Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and a “madman.”

By polarizing Kim and blaming him for the growing danger to US national security, Trump made the case that …