Laugh of the Day: Putin mocks Comey, offers him asylum as a persecuted leaker like Snowden

Reported here:

How then is the director of the FBI any different from Snowden?

Looks like we need to build two walls: Canada has an illegal entry problem from the US, turning away refugees

Which means bad actors can easily penetrate unmanned border areas and get into the US.

From the story here:

Since late summer, 27 men from Ghana walked to Manitoba from the United States, Yeboah said. Two lost all their fingers to frostbite in December and nearly froze to death.

More than 7,000 refugee applicants entered Canada in 2016 through land ports of entry from the United States, up 63 percent from the previous year, according to Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA).

Over 2,000 more entered "irregularly" during a similar time period, without official authorization, such as across unmonitored fields.

Four hundred and thirty asylum seekers crossed Manitoba's border irregularly in the first nine months of 2016-17, up from 340 the entire previous year, CBSA said. ...

In Quebec, 1,280 refugee claimants irregularly entered between April 2016 and January 2017, triple the previous year's total.

In British Columbia and Yukon, 652 people entered Canada irregularly in 2016, more than double the previous year.

More of these people would enter at border crossings, advocates say, if Canada didn't have a policy of turning many of them away when they do.

Boston mayor claims he doesn't know Boston bombers' immigration history

The Boston mayor pleads ignorance of the inconvenient facts.

But the Atlantic reported at the time of the bombing here:

At some point within their first year of being here, the family would have had to apply for asylum. (If they'd already outstayed their six-month visa, they could have applied defensively if the government was trying to deport them.) Asylum-seekers, like those seeking refugee status, must demonstrate that they have a "well-founded fear" of persecution in their home countries. This is a necessarily subjective determination for the government to make, one that has been subject to various legal decisions over the years. (For those curious: Asylum seekers apply for refugee status from within the U.S.; refugees seek it from their home countries.) ... After a year of holding status as asylum seekers, the family would be eligible to apply for green cards. Again, a security check, which by now would include reviews of the entire immigration application history to ensure that there was no apparent fraud. In 2007, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — the younger brother, suspect 2 — received this status. Despite early reports, his brother Tamerlan apparently never did. At some point, he returned to Russia to renew his passport, according to his father.

1993 World Trade Center bomber got illegal immigrant amnesty from Ronald Reagan in 1986

Germany denied [Mahmud Abouhalima] political asylum and he quickly married Renate Soika, a troubled German woman, which guaranteed he could remain in the country. He divorced Soika three years later, but shortly after he married another woman named Marianne Weber in a Muslim ceremony. He flew to Brooklyn with his new wife and after his American tourist visa expired, applied for amnesty claiming to be an agricultural worker and was accepted as a permanent resident under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

Ulterior Motives In Writing: Why Does Mark Judge Hate Monica Crowley?

Did you ever get the feeling that an entire column was merely a pretext to slam someone the writer didn't like . . . with a sucker punch saved for the very end?

That's the overwhelming feeling I got from reading Mark Judge's "HL Mencken Against The Journalists" here, which ends with this:

"So let's just put an end to it. Call them analysts. Call them pundits. But to coo over people like Frank Rich and Monica Crowley as brilliant intellectuals is to denude the term of meaning."

After ridiculing liberal after liberal in the column the lazy writer realizes at the end he needs to be an equal opportunity critic and throws poor old Monica under the bus just to make himself look objective.

If Mark Judge hangs around people who coo over anyone, let alone journalists, he's clearly in special company already. They used to call them asylums.

You know, the sort of place which makes you write like this: "but as a man with whom we could speak with about any topic".

The Banker Inmates Are Running The Central Bank Asylum

"[W]hat we see unfolding is the latest chapter in the tug of war between inflationary and deflationary forces. During the “goldilocks” economy of the last decade, investors levered themselves up. Homeowners treated their homes as if they were ATMs; banks set up off-balance sheet Special Investment Vehicles (SIVs); governments engaging in arrangements to get cheap loans that may cost future generations dearly. Cumulatively, it was an amazing money generation process; yet, central banks remained on the sidelines, as inflation – according to the metrics focused on - appeared contained. Indeed, we have argued in the past that central banks lost control of the money creation process, as they could not keep up with the plethora of “financial innovation” that justified greater leverage. It was only a matter of time before the world no longer appeared quite so risk-free. Rational investors thus reduced their exposure: de-levered. When de-leveraging spreads, however, massive deflationary forces may be put in motion. The financial system itself was at risk, as institutions did not hold sufficiently liquid assets to de-lever in an orderly way. Without intervention, deflationary forces might have thrown the global economy into a depression.

"The trouble occurs when the money creation process takes on a life of its own, because the money destruction process is rather difficult to stop. However, it hasn’t stopped policy makers from trying: in an effort to fight what may have been a disorderly collapse of the financial system, unprecedented monetary and fiscal initiatives were undertaken to stem against market forces. Trillion dollar deficits, trillions in securities purchased by the Fed with money created out of thin air (when the Fed buys securities, it merely credits the account of the bank with an accounting entry – while no physical dollar bills are printed, many – including us – refer to this process as the printing of money)."

-- Axel Merk (for the rest, go here)

Sarah Palin's Republican Hotel Reserves a Room For Insane Libertarians

Yeah, and it's right across the hall from one marked "GOProud" and another marked "Log Cabin Republicans."

The Libertarians' room is easy to spot. Its sign says "Insane Asylum."

Video here:

"the GOP had better not marginalize Ron Paul and his supporters after tonight"