Glenn Greenwald thinks the FBI is overreaching and abusing its power

The FBI’s Investigation of Trump as a “National Security Threat” is Itself a Serious Danger. But J. Edgar Hoover Pioneered the Tactic:

If Trump’s foreign policy is misguided or “threatening,” that’s a matter for the Congress and/or the American public, not the FBI. However “threatening” one regards Trump’s foreign policy relating to Russia, the FBI’s abuse of its powers to investigate an elected official due to disagreement with his ideology or foreign policy views is at least as dangerous, it not more so, and the fact that those policy disagreements are characterized as “national security threats” does not make those actions any less threatening or abusive – whether for Trump, Henry Wallace or George McGovern.

It’s certainly possible, as the always-smart Harvard Law Professor and former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith wrote at Lawfare, that the FBI had far more grounds that is currently known for opening this investigation. But based on what we do know, Goldsmith adeptly argues, there is a potentially disturbing incident of serious overreach of the FBI’s role and grave abuse of its vast investigative powers. While Goldsmith is clear that he is not yet adopting this view – in part because some facts are unknown and in part because the Constitutional issues are murky – he lays out what the potential dangers are . . ..

Much smaller than first thought to be, the gig economy lies prostrate before the great wall of state capitalism

"The Gig Economy Increasingly Defines Late-Stage Capitalism

Annie Lowrey, Atlantic" is how Real Clear Markets links to:

The Truth About the Gig Economy

Uber and similar companies aren’t driving huge changes in the way that Americans make a living.

Real Clear Markets' libertarian headline writer completely missed the point of the article, which is that the gig economy is as much as 80% smaller than we first thought. A capitalism disintegrating into a chaos of millions of small holders in risky circumstances, careening into the ditch, is a complete myth. The leftists who still long for this resemble no one so much as the Christian millenarians.

Clearly Marxism-light thoroughly infects economic thinking at the popular level in more places than just The Atlantic, blinding us to where we really are, which is in the golden age of fascism. Here tax reform for the individual is an afterthought, a necessary piece of propaganda in the big scheme of things having to do with state capitalism and its myriad forms of corporate welfare. What really matters is the relationship between government and business, protecting their mutual interests.

The West's version is little different from China's. China exercises top down control through the corrupt Communist Party, but we increasingly have the same thing from the bottom up through the unjust hand of Political Correctness, populated through the right schools and the revolving door of Washington where the regulators become the richly rewarded regulated.

The extension and consolidation of control by this globalist fascist system since the Reagan Revolution is responsible for all the failure lately attributed to capitalism by the coddled generations of children of the post-war Baby Boom. It couldn't be otherwise in a world where everything has been organized to feed the corporation through the glorification of the job. You must go to school, you must get good grades, you must get a college degree in order to get hired, you'll need loans to make this happen, and for the car to get to work, and good credit, and . . .. And then they've got you. It's called preying on human nature.

The declarations of independence of our former youth often used to take the form of getting out of Dodge as soon as they turned eighteen. Now those declarations are a mere shadow of their former selves, taking the form of tattoos on that creature that still lives in your basement in his twenties . . . or thirties.

The risk-taking of capitalism has been expunged, and the consequences of rebelling against the new rigidity have been amplified. Stenosis has set in, and if the barbarians finally do overtake us they will find that the bones break easily.     

Rush Limbaugh thanks Mark Meadows today when it was Meadows who helped stop the immigration showdown in October

Neither Meadows nor Limbaugh (Ted Cruz supporter) really want the wall.

And Trump obviously doesn't either, otherwise he wouldn't have treated the issue like he has, in sharp contrast to his campaign for president.

Here's the grifter today taking money from you suckers:

Nancy doesn’t even run the House yet, and she’s out there saying Trump couldn’t get the votes — and he did, and it was because of Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan and the Freedom Caucus. They did their special order earlier this week and they let the president that know they would have his back. It’d be easy for the president to think that he’s isolated, but it was I think a very important thing that they did to make it a point to go to the floor of the House and special orders to make sure that everybody knew — not just the president — that they, significant number of Republicans in the House, would have his back.

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina sinks confirmation of Thomas Farr to US District Court in this congress, but cocaine Mitch may have another plan

Sen. Tim Scott announces opposition to judicial nominee Thomas Farr, effectively dooming confirmation:

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott announced Thursday he will oppose embattled judicial nominee Thomas Farr, in a reversal of his position a day earlier that seemingly ends the nominee's chances for now amid fierce criticism by civil rights groups. ...

Farr was first nominated to the federal court in the Eastern District of North Carolina by former President George W. Bush in 2006, but never received a confirmation vote. ...

Prominent Democrats immediately applauded Scott's decision Thursday to oppose Farr, and attacked President Trump for doubling down on Bush's nomination. ...

Top Republicans had also stood behind Farr this week. It remains unclear whether the Senate's GOP leadership will try to reconsider Farr when the new 53-47 Republican majority -- sans Flake -- is seated in January.

“The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary -- a body that's frequently been held up by my Democratic colleagues as the ‘gold standard’ -- has awarded Mr. Farr its highest possible rating: unanimously well qualified,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Liberal math: In ME-2 the Democrat came in second but wins the seat anyway

This is how the National Popular Vote will work in the case of president if states adopt the kind of legerdemain citizens of Maine adopted in 2016.

I say legerdemain advisedly, because it is not reasoning but simple trickery. In the case of the National Popular Vote, you will think X won your state but because Y got more votes nationally your state agrees to switch its electoral college votes to Y. In Maine because of an equally arbitrary decision to deprive the top vote getter from winning (the winner must get 50% even though Bill Clinton never did), the winner ends up losing because of "ranking". The last place finisher's votes, person D's, get reallocated to A, B, and C using math reflecting the voters' rankings of all the candidates until someone reaches 50%.

The voters collectively decide how your vote will go, not you, based on their ranking of the candidates, not yours.

In other words, if you happened to vote for D, and probably also for C in this case, your vote was changed to B, not the original winner A.

They say every vote must count, and call it democracy.

I seem to recall the Germans voted for Hitler, too. They gave up their freedom willingly, you see, so it must have been OK.

GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin loses in first race decided by Maine's 'ranked-choice' system:

Poliquin narrowly got the most votes on Election Day – with 46.1 percent to Golden's 45.9 – but because he didn't get more than 50 percent of the vote, Maine's new law kicked in. Independent candidates Tiffany Bond and William Hoar combined received about another 8 percent of the vote. 

In the new system, approved by Maine voters in 2016, a person votes for their favorite candidate and ranks the other candidates by their order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the last-place candidate gets knocked out and the ballots cast for them are reallocated based on an algorithm that factors the voters' preferences. That process continues until one candidate has a majority. 

'Camp Fire' incinerates Paradise, the "most destructive wildfire since record-keeping began" in California

Reported here:

Not a single resident of Paradise, California, can be seen anywhere in town after most of them fled the Northern California community that may be lost forever. Most of the town's buildings are in ruin. Entire neighborhoods are leveled. The business district is destroyed.

In a single day, the Sierra Nevada foothill town of 27,000 was largely incinerated by flames that moved so fast there was nothing firefighters could do. Only a day after the "Camp Fire" began, the blaze had grown on Friday to nearly 140 square miles and destroyed more than 6,700 structures, almost all of them homes -- making it California's most destructive wildfire since record-keeping began.

Authorities said at least nine people were killed by the "Camp Fire," which as of early Saturday morning was 5 percent contained.

It is one of three major blazes that firefighters are battling across the state.

In Southern California, the 35,000 acre "Woolsey Fire" was 0 percent contained early Saturday. It has forced over 200,000 evacuations. The "Hill Fire" was holding at 6,000 acres.

Drudge is wrong: The deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history didn't occur in Pittsburgh, not by a longshot

The deadliest anti-Semitic attack occurred in 1939 when FDR refused to let the MS St. Louis of the Hamburg America Line dock with its over 900 Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany.

The ship eventually had to return to Europe and it is estimated that over 200 of its Jews ended up being exterminated in the camps.

So much for the Jewess's sonnet:

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Despite alarmist headlines, Italy knows it can play chicken with the Euro cheaters up north and win because Super Mario will do "whatever it takes"

That's the lesson of Greece and Italy knows it. If there is no way the EU would let Greece go, there is no way Italy or Spain or Portugal are going to be let go, either.

Meanwhile, enjoy these alarmist headlines from a gold fundamentalist.

Italy Bond Yields Surge In Confrontation with ECB President Mario Draghi:

In theory, German, Italian, and Greek 10-year bonds should all have the same yield. In practice, they clearly don't. The difference is perceived default risk. The odds of Italy leaving the Eurozone are rising.

"One Size Fits Germany" Math Impossibility, Get Your Money Out of Italy Now!:

[I]nterest rates are on the verge of spiraling out of control in Italy. ... In theory, German, Italian, and Greek 10-year bonds should all have the same yield. In practice, they clearly don't. The spread between German 10-year and Italian 10-year bonds is 330 basis points (3.3 percentage points). The difference is perceived default risk. The odds of Italy leaving the Eurozone are rising. On September 28, Italy's proposed budget deficit of 2.4% sent bond yields soaring. And they haven't stopped.

The yield on the 10-year has been a lot higher for a long period of time than it is right now.

Everyone should relax and enjoy the show. Who knows, maybe this will force the other rule breakers to clean up their act a little bit, at least for a little while.

Oliver Bullough for The Grauniad blames all the wealth inequality today on an invention of a Jewish banker

Siegmund George Warburg, here, whose invention destroyed the Bretton Woods system.

Except Bullough never mentions he's the descendant of a long line of Jewish bankers who originated in Venice:

One banker in particular was not prepared to tolerate this: Siegmund Warburg. Warburg was an outsider in the cosy world of the City. For one thing, he was German. For another, he hadn’t given up on the idea that a City banker’s job was to hustle for business. In 1962, Warburg learned from a friend at the World Bank that some $3bn was circulating outside the US – sloshing around and ready to be put to use. Warburg had been a banker in Germany in the 1920s and remembered arranging bond deals in foreign currencies. Why couldn’t his bankers do something similar again?

People who advocate shunning Trumpsters are nothing more than latter-day Puritan theocrats, sans the theo

The Right Way to Shun the Trumpsters

Just when you think the religious Right had been expunged from the public square, the irreligious Left swoops in to fill the vacuum, inspired with all the same self-righteous zeal of the hypocritical Pharisee, but for lesser lights, and minus the deity:

"The solution is not to be Pelosi standing down, or Waters screaming in someone’s face, but to quietly shun those like the Golden Couple who could say something or do something but don’t. ... A nod or a stiff arm extended for a handshake to avoid the air kiss. No polite small talk and stay stuck to your chair when the music plays. Make it clear to them, in some quiet dignified way, that the border crisis is a bridge too far."

-- Margaret Carlson, who probably doesn't even know she's a Paulinist

But now I have written unto you not to keep company, if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat. -- I Cor.5:11

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? ... Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you, -- II Cor. 6:14ff.

Trump fired Tillerson, Goldstein and McEntee on Tuesday, now Sessions fires McCabe last night

Just a coincidence, right?

Story here.

The scam known as Informed Electorate PAC is quite the little money maker for its operators

A commenter has provided the website information from the State of Utah where the Informed Electorate PAC discloses its financials:

https://disclosures.utah.gov/Search/PublicSearch/FolderDetails/1414465

If you are one of the many contributors to this so-called PAC, your full name, address and contribution level are listed there.

And wow, there's an awful lot of gulls out there in America. It's a goldmine of a mailing list, free for the taking.

You'll also be fascinated to learn that for the "privilege" of paying these grifters to take your opinion, for that is what they are in my opinion, shameless grifters, they netted about $1.91 million in contributions in 2017 alone, of which about $1.79 million was expended.

On what? you ask.

Never heard of 'em, right? Most people haven't, which kind of gives the lie to their objective of informing anyone. I search in vain for itemized expenditures under "public relations". Instead I see lots of consulting fees and W-2 payrolls, evidently going to the principals.

Nearly $336,000 in 2017 went straight into the pockets of the President, Brett Payne, a board member Rob Andra, and someone named Joseph Demma, who appears to be related to Stacy Demma the Vice President (who is also the only other listed board member), and presumably the CFO Kenneth Kohfel and other unnamed employees. The reports show that the consulting fees in 2017 stopped being paid in July, and that the W-2 payroll line items start appearing once a month beginning in June.

A company named Fiercecom gets large sums regularly for data management, telephone services and fulfillment. Other regulars include Airespring, Heartland Payment Solutions and Skymail International.

One wonders if any of this PAC's principals have any personal business interests in any of the businesses which provide services back to the PAC.

Someone really ought to look into it, like 60 Minutes, or maybe the FBI.

I wonder what they'd find?

At any rate, for the umpteenth time, no legitimate polling organization asks YOU to pay to give your opinion.

The wonder of it all is that these snakes have found the ones that will pay, and that Utah has listed them all for the whole world to laugh at.

This is just one month from the disclosures, October 2017

Reagan era tax "reform" killed the golden dividend goose: Monthly yield hasn't been 4% or better since 1985

How to tax the rich and only the rich as originally intended in 1913, and solve a lot of problems

In 1913 when the average Joe made about $800 a year, the first income tax under the 16th Amendment didn't worry him because he didn't pay it and probably thought he never would. The personal exemption for a married couple in the original tax code was $4,000.

Today that $4,000 personal exemption adjusted for inflation using the Consumer Price Index amounts to about $100,000.

Even in 2016 that kind of income is made by fewer than 10% of individual wage earners. Under the original income tax of 1913, 90% today wouldn't have to worry about paying the dreaded income tax either.

Is there a way to return to this golden age of taxation?

I'm here to tell you that I think so, and I say that as a conservative. We could easily simplify the tax code by returning to the status quo which prevailed before the First World War, pay all the bills, abolish Social Security and Medicare taxes, the corporate income tax and all the other little irritating taxes and reduce income inequality in the process. We'd also save a lot of time and money wasted in complying with the tax code's myriad baroque features.

Here's the math.

In 2016 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis personal income in the United States was $15.9287 trillion.

Social Security's Office of the Chief Actuary tells us that in 2016 there were 163.5 million individual wage earners. If you exempt the first $100,000 of everybody's individual wage income in 2016, including from the rich, you're talking about $6.213 trillion of individual wage income which would be tax-free.

That leaves $9.7157 trillion of personal income left in 2016 to tax, to pay all the bills.

According to The Tax Policy Center, the bills were the total estimated federal outlays of $3.9513 trillion in 2016.

So, the tax is 40.67% (9.7157 X .4067 = 3.9513) on all personal income in excess of $100,000 a year, no itemized deductions, no credits of any kind (this is where they all came from in the first place, because the rich pissed, moaned and complained and bribed the politicians to carve out privileges for them to escape paying).

The rich, all 14.9 million of them, will still have $7.2544 trillion to play with ($1.49 trillion from their first $100K tax-free, just like everybody else, and $5.7644 trillion left over after taxes from the income in excess of $100K).

The rest of us, 148.6 million, won't pay any federal income tax, Social Security or Medicare tax, gasoline tax, or any other kind of federal tax on our $4.723 trillion. The only taxes we'll have to pay will be State and Local Income Taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and the like. Of course rich people will have to pay those too, but that's a problem for all of us and for a different level of politics.

I summarize:

$15.9287 trillion personal income 2016 (BEA)

-  3.9513 trillion federal taxes, all from those making $100,000+ per year @40.67%

-  7.2544 trillion left over for the 14.9 million making $100,000+ per year (top 10%)

-  4.7230 trillion left over for the 148.6 million making less than $100,000 per year (bottom 90%)

___________________________________________________________________

0

And the budget balances.   

Byron York reports Washington Free Beacon confesses to funding opposition research with Fusion GPS

Here, about an hour ago:

Lawyers for the conservative publication Washington Free Beacon informed the House Intelligence Committee Friday that the organization was the original funder for the anti-Trump opposition research project with Fusion GPS. The Free Beacon funded the project from the fall of 2015 through the spring of 2016, whereupon it withdrew funding and the project was picked up by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. ...

The Free Beacon was founded in 2012. Its founders included Michael Goldfarb, who has moved back and forth between conservative journalism, politics, and activism. The Free Beacon was originally part of a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization called the Center for American Freedom, but in 2014 became a for-profit organization. It has never revealed its ownership. Conservative billionaire Paul Singer, a major funder of the Free Beacon, strongly opposed Trump at the time of the opposition research project.

As high school grades inflate, SAT scores deflate

Reported here:

Recent findings show that the proportion of high school seniors graduating with an A average — that includes an A-minus or A-plus — has grown sharply over the past generation, even as average SAT scores have fallen.

In 1998, it was 38.9%. By last year, it had grown to 47%.

That’s right: Nearly half of America’s Class of 2016 are A students. Meanwhile, their average SAT score fell from 1,026 to 1,002 on a 1,600-point scale — suggesting that those A's on report cards might be fool's gold.

Governments often raised funds with lotteries in the past, but how about $7 trillion in FY2017?

I don't think so.

Lotteries started to fall out of favor after 1830, according to the story here, mostly due to corruption. The guys running the things would run off with the dough. So much for the golden age of the past.

Government at all levels in the US will shell out $7.04 trillion in fiscal 2017, 36.5% of GDP.

In 1817 the number was in the neighborhood of $23 million, about 3% of GDP.

The problem with raising revenues today is only a problem because government is too damn big. Spending 3% of GDP today on government at all levels compared with current outlays means they are twelve times the size they should be, $7 trillion instead of $0.6 trillion.

Besides, you couldn't possibly raise enough using lotteries. In fiscal 2014 lottery revenues countrywide barely totaled $70 billion, just 1% of current total outlays.

Every man, woman and child in this country would have to purchase at least $21,757 in lotto tickets this fiscal year in order to fund government at all levels. And that's before any jackpots are paid out, or lottery workers paid.

Or we could just tax everyone that much.

It would be easier and fairer, right?

After all, we're all "equal".

Except 60 million Americans don't make even that much. If government took it all what would they live on?

Hope, no doubt.

The false question remains "Why did Trump win?"

Two examples from today.

Liz Peek of FOX reassured Steve Gruber this morning on his radio program in Michigan that Trump won in 2016 primarily because the voters were most concerned to ensure we had a Supreme Court seat filled by a Scalia clone.

And then Josh Brown assures his readers in the line up at Real Clear Markets that the most important reason was class warfare: a tax cut for the middle class and a big tax increase on rich speculators.

It's been five months since the election and we still can't agree about the political state of the country. Hint: libertarians don't agree about very much.

One could go on. Ann Coulter would tell you it was the promise of The Wall and an end to indiscriminate invasion by illegal aliens. Independent small business owners and self-employed people would tell you it was the promise of repeal of Obamacare. Veterans . . . veterans' affairs. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

These various opinions tell us more about the values of the individual coalitions Trump cobbled together to win, not why he won.

Meanwhile the narrow character of Trump's victory in key states, the result of former Democrat voters boycotting Hillary by the millions, goes underestimated by the winners . . . and the losers.

That's fairly typical, even for otherwise prudent presidents.

George Herbert Walker Bush thought victory in Kuwait made him golden, promptly raised taxes after we read his lips, and was shown the door.

The same will happen to Trump if he doesn't deliver on his program.

And because his program is a Duodetrigintapus, the question is really "How many of my twenty-eight legs can I get away with chopping off and still have enough left to strangle my opponent with in 2020"?

He's already cut off three. Repeal of Obamacare has failed. DACA has not been reversed (what, did they run out of pens in the White House?), and suddenly we have to burn $100 million worth of cruise missiles because someone used a politically incorrect weapon.

What's next, an assault weapon ban?

There's still plenty of time for Trump to prove that he isn't some suicidal sea monster.

But at the rate he's going he'll be a legless jellyfish by Christmas.

Nathan Lewis thinks pretty highly of Judy Shelton's book on the gold standard

Here:

Today, the Federal Reserve, with the blessing of Congress, large banks, and many others, has embarked on an open-ended policy of printing money on a daily basis, basically to fund the Federal government's budget deficit although no one may speak such things in name. These situations tend to end badly, and are soon followed -- as was the case with the United States in 1789, immediately after the Continental Dollar hyperinflation of the 1780s -- by a rigorous gold standard system, more along the lines of the other four proposals that Shelton identifies.

The biggest gold standard advocates are those who lived through a hyperinflation. It is easy to forget that the hard money advocates of 1789 -- Hamilton, Jefferson, et. al -- were actually the same people that were printing money to finance Federal budget deficits in the 1780s, in the guise of the Continental Congress. Oops. More recently, people like Ludwig von Mises, who lived through the Austrian hyperinflation of the 1920s, became the biggest gold standard advocates of the 20th century.

Larry Kudlow likes her a lot, too, and had her on his show yesterday. You can listen to the podcast about an hour and twenty in at wabcradio.com: Go to the Saturday schedule and scroll down for the podcast.

Commerce Secretary in April 2016 can't understand Hillary's flipflop on TPP

Here:

PENNY PRITZKER: I don't understand that conclusion. Because frankly, having looked at this agreement, studied this agreement, it is the Gold Standard. It is the toughest trade agreement out there in the world.