FBI soft-pedaled first Hillary e-mail probe, Loretta Lynch, James Comey and Peter Strzok out-and-out suppressed the second probe of Weiner laptop e-mails

So says a special investigation by Paul Sperry for Real Clear, here, which suggests the 30,000 missing e-mails which Hillary originally deleted are still on it:

Although the FBI’s New York office first pointed headquarters to the large new volume of evidence on Sept. 28, 2016, supervising agent Peter Strzok, who was fired on Aug. 10 for sending anti-Trump texts and other misconduct, did not try to obtain a warrant to search the huge cache of emails until Oct. 30, 2016. Violating department policy, he edited the warrant affidavit on his home email account, bypassing the FBI system for recording such government business. He also began drafting a second exoneration statement before conducting the search.

The search warrant was so limited in scope that it excluded more than half the emails New York agents considered relevant to the case. The cache of Clinton-Abedin communications dated back to 2007. But the warrant to search the laptop excluded any messages exchanged before or after Clinton’s 2009-2013 tenure as secretary of state, key early periods when Clinton initially set up her unauthorized private server and later periods when she deleted thousands of emails sought by investigators.

Far from investigating and clearing Abedin and Weiner, the FBI did not interview them, according to other FBI sources who say Comey closed the case prematurely. The machine was not authorized for classified material, and Weiner did not have classified security clearance to receive such information, which he did on at least two occasions through his Yahoo! email account – which he also used to email snapshots of his penis.

Many Clinton supporters believe Comey’s 11th hour reopening of a case that had shadowed her campaign was a form of sabotage that cost her the election. But the evidence shows Comey and his inner circle acted only after worried agents and prosecutors in New York forced their hand. At the prodding of Attorney General Lynch, they then worked to reduce and rush through, rather than carefully examine, potentially damaging new evidence. ...

[C]onducting a broader and more thorough search of the Weiner laptop may still have prosecutorial justification. Other questions linger, including whether subpoenaed evidence was destroyed or false statements were made to congressional and FBI investigators from 2014 to 2016, a time frame that is within the statute of limitations. The laptop was not searched for evidence pertaining to such crimes. Investigators instead focused their search, limited as it was, on classified information.

Stock market return in the last 18 years has been better than during the Great Depression and WWII, but not by much

Flashback: Obama campaign fined $375,000 for keeping illegal donations, hiding donors in 2008

Obama Campaign Fined Big for Hiding Donors, Keeping Illegal Donations

Obama 2008 campaign fined $375,000

Another beautiful American girl murdered by an illegal alien, this time in Iowa

Mollie Tibbetts case: Undocumented immigrant charged with murder:

Cristhian Bahena Rivera, 24, has been in the area for four to seven years, officials said. Charges were filed in Poweshiek County court. He is being held on a $1 million cash bond. 

Unlike most violent crimes, this kind is entirely preventable by not letting illegal aliens stay here in the first place.

Ann Coulter agrees Cohen's "crimes" aren't crimes

If you haven't been listening to Mark Levin tonight, you are probably panicking about the Michael Cohen plea for no reason

Mark Levin says the myriad talking heads out there, especially Jonathan Turley, have the Cohen plea all wrong. In fact, he says Cohen stupidly pleaded guilty to things which aren't crimes. The special prosecutor wants it to appear that there are campaign crimes involving Trump, but there are not. And because this is a plea, this isn't a finding of a court. So there is no effect, setting a new precedent. Cohen's plea comes to avoid more serious charges.

Levin even had the former head of the Federal Election Commission on to explain how there was no violation involved.

Good stuff.

Watch for the synopsis later, here.

Hooah Rand Paul: Edward Snowden is no traitor, he didn't sell secrets to anybody, he proved Clapper a liar

Quoted here in July:

"He didn't sell secrets to the Russians, he wasn't a traitor. He revealed something that revealed the highest ranking member of our intelligence community lied. I think he did it as a whistle-blower, he was reporting malfeasance," Paul said.

Paul, who previously joked about Snowden sharing a prison cell with former intelligence director James Clapper, whose inaccurate testimony Snowden exposed, doubled down after polling students, finding a similar number viewed Snowden as a traitor and a whistleblower.

"I don't see him as a traitor at all," Paul added about Snowden, saying later, "People have to decide on Snowden. My preference has become stronger and stronger that he was revealing the government was lying to us in a big way." Paul said he'd like to see a deal struck where Snowden can return from Russia without a long prison sentence.

The five-year statutes of limitations for prosecuting Clapper expired in March 2018.

Our feckless Congress let him off.

One rule for Clapper, another for Snowden, who marks his fifth year in Russian exile this summer.

Should have executed more of them when we had the chance

"Prisoners nationwide go on strike to protest 'modern-day slavery'":

Inmates plan to abstain from reporting to their assigned jobs, halt commissary spending, hold peaceful sit-in protests and refuse to eat during the strike.

Al Sharpton dresses down Donald Trump, tells him to show Omarosa a little R.E.S.P.I.C.T.

Here in "Sharpton misspells 'respect' while quoting Aretha Franklin to Trump".

Who knew Omarosa was Hispanic?

The Tobin Q ratios for Germany and America tell us Elizabeth Warren and David Dayen are wrong

Louis Woodhill, here:

Put simply, a Tobin Q ratio higher than 100% means that a company is creating economic value, and a Tobin Q below 100% means that a company is destroying value.  The most fundamental social responsibility of a company is to add value to the capital it employs, so the most fundamental job responsibility of a corporate CEO is to keep the Tobin Q ratio of the company he or she leads above 100%. 

Writing for The New Republic, progressive David Dayen argues:

“There’s proven evidence that this model of corporate governance [Warren's] can work. “Co- determination,” the term for worker representation on corporate boards, has created a form of capitalism in Germany where workers are far more equitably compensated and decisions are made with an eye toward long-term goals.”

The problem with this argument is that Piketty’s data shows that, since 1995, America’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged more than 100%, while Germany’s Tobin Q ratio has averaged about 55%.  In other words, America’s evil, rapacious corporations are creating economic value, while Germany’s enlightened companies are doing the equivalent of burning 45% of the euros entrusted to them.

The superstitious George Packer of The New Yorker imagines that the 2009 stimulus which PASSED failed because Republicans put a hex on it

Proving that it isn't just George Will who suffers from the disease. As Paul Krugman pointed out at the time, the stimulus simply wasn't big enough.

It never is.

Here is Packer:

In February, 2009, with the economy losing seven hundred thousand jobs a month, Congress passed a stimulus bill—a nearly trillion-dollar package of tax cuts, aid to states, and infrastructure spending, considered essential by economists of every persuasion—with the support of just three Republican senators and not a single Republican member of the House. Rather than help save the economy that their party had done so much to wreck, Republicans, led by Senator Mitch McConnell, chose to oppose every Democratic measure, including Wall Street reform. In doing so, they would impede the recovery and let the other party take the fall. It was a brilliantly immoral strategy, and it pretty much worked.

Atheist George Will conflates economy and stock market, remains oddly superstitious about deficits

George Will forgets we've had trillion dollar deficits quite recently but without a stock market crash. 

The trillion dollar deficits recently were in:

2009 $1.41 trillion

2010 $1.29 trillion

2011 $1.29 trillion

2012 $1.08 trillion.

These deficits triggered nothing in particular except fevers among Republicans, but are associated with the misallocation of capital which produces L-shaped instead of V-shaped economic recoveries. Meanwhile that it's an L-shaped recovery is a concept which eludes George Will, eyes fixed as they are on his towering S&P 500 idol. But we do agree the economy isn't the best it's ever been as the president insists. The gap is now about $5 trillion and rising.

Here:

When He, or something, decides that today’s expansion, currently in its 111th month (approaching twice the 58-month average length of post-1945 expansions), has gone on long enough, the contraction probably will begin with the annual budget deficit exceeding $1 trillion.

China eating America's lunch for 25 years by following exactly the protectionist strategy free traders say will destroy US

Jeff Ferry here in USA Today says free traders can't explain China's success because their free trade ideology blinds them to how protectionism has made China great:

China has been eating America’s lunch for a quarter-century. And they’ve done it by following exactly the strategy that pundits and free traders now suggest will be destructive to the US economy. ... Unless Washington stands up to China now, the trajectory of the past 25 years points to a troubling, continued decline for America’s working families. And so, for those who suggest that tariffs are a mistake, they need merely look at China’s rise for an instructive rethink.

Since the 1980s the share of job seekers relocating has fallen from more than a third to ten percent now

The Wall Street Journal reports via Mish, here:

The share of job seekers relocating for new employment has fallen dramatically since the late 1980s, when more than a third moved to take new opportunities elsewhere, according to surveys from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. In the 1990s, job-related moves ebbed and flowed between 20% and 35%, then fell below 20% after 2000. Roughly 10% of job seekers relocated for new opportunities in the first half of this year, Challenger said.

John Brennan and his liberal sycophants make Glenn Greenwald want to puke

Your next opportunity to pick a parasite is little more than two months away

In a truly representative republic which reflected the intent of the Founders, America would have 100 senators picked by the state legislatures, not by popular vote, and at least 6,561 members of the US House (using the ratio of 1 representative per 50,000 of population intended by Article the First, not ratified; the father of our country wanted a ratio of 1:30,000 for 10,934 members of the US House in 2018). Instead we have 100 senators and 435 representatives, and 10,840 lobbyists in 2018. The corporate takeover of the Congress was a fait accompli by 1929, thanks to Republicans.

The English today are better represented than Americans with one member of parliament to about 101,000 of population, for all the good it does them. In the US the current ratio is 1:754,092. When Republicans stopped the growth of representation once and for all in 1929, the ratio stood at about 1:280,460. Using the 1929 ratio in 2018 would mean 1,170 members in the US House instead of 435.

Surely what was good enough for 1929 is good enough for 2018, no? But good luck even with that.

Author finds cost of housing and daycare to be the main drivers of the middle class "squeeze"

From the transcript of the podcast here:

Middle-class life is 30% more expensive than it was 20 years ago. ... The main problem is the cost of housing. ... The second problem was the cost of daycare. A lot of it had to do with wages that were just not keeping up with other kinds of expenses. ...  [R]eal estate is no longer a place to live, but it’s an investment vehicle. That has driven up the cost of housing for ordinary people or the precarious middle class, as I call them. 

Unstated here is the new necessity of two incomes once women entered the labor force in quantity after the 1960s under the influence of feminist ideology. For the first twenty years of the post-war this was not so. When you dramatically increase the size of the labor force, the cost of the labor naturally comes down. The result was that women entering the workforce increased their average real income, but only just enough over time to pay for the cost of daycare, a wash. Meanwhile real male incomes stagnated.

Women working in large numbers naturally put pressure on the future growth of the labor force as well. Because they were not having the children who would become the country's next workers, a future labor shortage was inevitable as the post-war 4-child families transformed into 2-child families.

Enter the pressure to increase immigration, wink at low-labor-cost illegal immigration, and export jobs, a new era of which was inaugurated under George H. W. Bush in 1989, who doubled the level of legal immigration overnight, and under his son George W. Bush in 2001, who presided over the export of 3 million manufacturing jobs, a trend continued under Barack Obama who exported 3 million more. Manufacturing jobs had been the most important anchors and hubs for middle class jobs in American communities, the absence of which turned college from an option into a necessity in order to maintain what was formerly possible with only a high school diploma. Increase the demand for college, and you increase its price, and with it the pressure on stagnating pocketbooks.

Housing prices rose dramatically from the late 1990s in consequence of the fateful decision under Bill Clinton to unleash the savings hidden in the nation's housing stock for sixty years. Clinton signed in 1997 the libertarian Republican legislation rewriting the tax laws which had forced homeowners to stay in their homes or move up to avoid large capital gains tax hits. Large economic forces were behind this, not the least of which was the growing sense of the unsustainability of the middle class consumption culture without a new source of savings. 

The birth of the housing ATM under Reagan in the 1980s had no doubt prepared the way for these developments, who infamously did away with the tax deductibility of credit card interest while increasing the same for home equity lines of credit. The effect was to get the children of the Baby Boom to think of their homes as mere commodities which could be exploited to extract value. The liquidity unleashed by the Clinton legislation ten years later hit the economy like a tidal wave, driving prices higher and higher into the now infamous housing bubble as homes were churned by flippers and families alike. It took just ten years of that to drive the economy into the worst panic it had experienced since the Great Depression.

Reversing these horrible developments would require a civilizational transformation of values which in the past only Protestant Christianity seems to have been able to provide. Feminist ideology, like all ideology, has done nothing but take away. The revaluation of values necessary in our situation would have to begin with women insisting on fidelity and marriage once again. Women are biologically predisposed to the self-sacrifice needed. To get the men to go along they will need a Lysistrata, but she's probably not Camille Paglia.

Communism works in only one place.  

Priceless: Yale historian Timothy Snyder blames Democrats for Hillary's loss

Here, on May 1, 2017, in Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy:

 '"On Tyranny" is a suggestion of things that everyone can do. ... [T]he other lessons — such as supporting existing political and social institutions, supporting the truth and so on — those things will then come relatively easily if you can follow the first one, which is to get out of the drift, to recognize that this is the moment where you have to not behave as you did in October 2016.' 

Funny how he lets that little slap slip at the end of an interview about his fears. It is the great, unacknowledged truth of Election 2016.

The rest of it reminded me of myself in 2009.

When I saw how leftists started trashing Obama one year in to his presidency it dawned on me that the tyranny I had feared from an Obama presidency had been a misplaced fear. Then the stories of Obama's laziness started to surface, and the personal details about his penchant for watching sports on TV, traveling, fine dining and playing golf. The guy got captured by the trappings of the office. Only then was it clear that there was nothing existential to fear. And then the guy punted on Obamacare, letting the House and Senate duke it out, creating a grotesque. And after reelection, he actually made the Bush tax cuts permanent and fixed the AMT.

Wow. What a revolutionary!

If Snyder breathed into a paper bag for a minute or two, he might realize that Trump's first midterms are upon us and only now is Trump starting to realize what presidential power is all about. The thing is, it's way too late. He has already squandered his political capital in year one, failing at job one, which is to get the order of the agenda correct. This was partly the result of making lousy appointments across the board in the first place, many of whom have gone on to blow up like so many Clinton bimbo eruptions but without the sex. By generally being incompetent like any true outsider would be in Washington Trump was at a huge disadvantage from the start anyway. But the people who could have helped him didn't because Trump got elected in part by insulting them.

This presidency is already much like Obama's, a creation of the House and Senate, not of the president. Recourse to executive orders to get what you want but can't get the ordinary way is a sign of weakness, not strength. It shows that the master is the slave. 

Few presidents get three important things done. Trump has one major accomplishment but it wasn't the one people remember the fearless leader championing at every venue of 2015 and 2016. So far the corporate tax cut is not translating into unequivocal results for the people. As a percentage of civilian population, employment remains over 6 million behind the pre-Great Recession average.

"Hillary isn't president" is something to be truly grateful for, but sooner or later it will dawn on the Trumpists that Trump isn't either.

Black privilege in Michigan

Remember all those stupid ads on conservative talk radio a few months ago about a breakout for silver?

There was even this story about it in April, "Silver On The Verge Of A Breakout".

Silver's down about 15% since April 19th when the story was published.

What they didn't tell you was the expected breakout was to the downside, and "it would be really nice of you to buy all this silver I need to unload".

Silver soared to 48.70 in April 2011, but it's been all downhill from there.

Average US House seats lost by Republican and Democrat presidents in midterm elections

Average including all midterms:

9 Republican: 21

12 Democrat: 32

Average for midterms after initial election to office:

6 Republicans: 17

7 Democrats: 31

Data here. 

Matthew Continetti is delusional, imagines Republicans after 2010 "overreached", thinks Democrats might after 2018

Here, when in reality the so-called Tea Party Congress utterly capitulated.

It continued to ratify the new level of Obama's spending from fiscal 2009 onward, increased 25% overnight and kept there through the end of his presidency.

The Congress wasn't supine just in respect of the spending, either. John Boehner explicitly ceded the agenda to Obama after his reelection in 2012. Congress did nothing to hamstring an imperial president bent on ruling by decree. It was the Supreme Court which had to repeatedly rebuke the Obama administration, which simply ignored the court and kept on doing it.  

One can only wonder what Continetti would call it if Congress had actually exercised its constitutional power of the purse instead of lining up at the hog trough to lap it up with the rest of the pigs. Probably something about the tyranny of the legislative, or some such rot.

Why did the liberal cross the road, mommy?

Same as the squirrel, honey. He wanted to die.

The liberal death wish fulfilled by Islam

Puncturing Matt Yglesias: Kids today may be growing less tolerant of those they actually disagree with

Noted here at Heterodox Academy:

Contemporary young adults are significantly less likely to endorse “racist” views than any other U.S. age cohort. Well, are they more likely to give the racists a platform? Actually, they are far less willing today than they ever have been to grant racists a platform. And this is actually far more significant than it may initially seem in light of the fact that the sphere of what counts as “racist” has radically expanded – from David Duke in the 70’s to things like “microaggressions” today. In other words, not only are contemporary youth more willing to censor those they deem racist than previous cohorts, but they are likely to brand a much wider range of speech as “racist” (and therefore, worthy of censorship). ... Coverage on campus speech by Vox writers seems to regularly suffer from bias.

Public school indoctrination about race clearly has succeeded.

Hey Boston Business Journal, tell it to the gun industry and the NRA, you jerks

Obama spied on Americans FOR YEARS, crickets from his SLAVES in the media

'The normally supportive [FISA] court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

'The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.' 

Story here.

The enemies of the people circle the wagons

Former communist head of the CIA loses his security clearance

Sad.

"Wayne Isaac" provides a sage estimation of Richard Spencer, and much else besides

Here at American Greatness:

Spencer’s aims are rooted instead in a romantic vision of defending the volksgeist. ... Spencer is, at heart, a contrarian social critic. ... Instead of bourgeois and proletariat, we now have whites versus the marginalized. Spencer is the poster-boy archvillain of that construct. The entirety of Spencer’s argument is simply to posit the opposite of the Left: whites aren’t bad. In fact, they’re wonderful. ... [I]n the end, he is a provocateur and critic of liberalism, nothing more. Spencer’s politics are reactionary not “Progressive.” His erudition and urbanity allowed him to become the perfect representation of all the Left’s nightmares: a defender of whiteness sensible enough to be a threat but fringe enough to be safely skewered by the elite everywhere and anywhere. Spencer is a convenient Leftist boogeyman. But in the end, there is no “there” there. Spencer is wide, not deep.

Julie Kelly unpacks in August 2018 what Pat Buchanan had already assembled in October 2017

"Thus we have Free Beacon neocons, never-Trump Republicans, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DNC, a British spy and comrades in Russian intelligence, and perhaps the FBI, all working with secret money and seedy individuals to destroy a candidate they could not defeat in a free election."

Here:

The Washington Free Beacon admitted last year that they retained Fusion from late 2015 until April 2016 to gather opposition research on Republican primary candidates. The website is run by Kristol’s son-in-law, Matthew Continetti. The Beacon posted numerous negative stories about the Trump campaign in 2016, including hit pieces on Carter Page in March and July.

The Beacon’s story keeps changing, however. At first, Continetti admitted that the Beacon “retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary.” Days later, Continetti explained why his website failed to mention its relationship with Fusion in several related articles prior to October 2017. After some blather about aggregated articles, Continetti vowed that future articles “will mention its history” with Fusion.

And they did. A few days after that, the Beacon posted an article with this disclaimer: “The Washington Free Beacon was once a client of Fusion GPS. That relationship ended in January 2017.”

Say what? Something is not adding up here; in fact, it stinks.

We are expected to believe that Bill Kristol’s son-in-law paid Fusion throughout the 2016 presidential campaign cycle but Simpson doesn’t pitch one dossier-related story to either one? Kristol just comes up with the very same flimsy talking points that Simpson and Steele are peddling—at the exact same time—and it’s pure coincidence? Kristol just happens to call for an investigation one week before the FBI takes the outrageous and unprecedented step of probing private citizens working on an opposing presidential campaign? Kristol and Robby Mook just strangely regurgitate the identical Trump-Russia plotline—on the same morning?

Chief economist at Merrill Lynch when it went bankrupt ignores the first 130 years of US history, aptly proffers a figure of mere myth

Those Cuomos sure are kwazy

Chris Cuomo says Antifa is on the side of right.

Andrew Cuomo says America was never great.

Since Antifa wants to overthrow America, they're reading from the same page.

So that's the meaning of Mario Cuomo's liberalism. Or its legacy anyway.

There is no contradiction between liberalism and socialism.

Republicans apparently have had enough of the man who first brought the Muslims to Minnesota

Omarosa's not a dog, she's a chameleon: She worked in the Clinton administration in her 20s

Trump's not the only one who's switched parties.

Reported here last December:

In her 20s, she was a political appointee in the Clinton administration where, according to People, she held four jobs in two years. ... In the last, she was reportedly “asked to leave as quickly as possible, she was so disruptive.”

Trump expands infrastructure of the coming police state, body scanners coming to LA subway system

This will be in mass transit countrywide before you know it, and then in every public building and on every roadway. And then on your street, and on your house. There will be no escape from the surveillance of Big Sis.

If you object to the surveillance, you won't be able to ride or eventually do other things you take for granted now under the free republic. In effect this will be no different than the Chinese social credit system, which denies travel, and other "privileges", to people who receive low scores for not cooperating with the state's demands in matters of politics or religion.

From the story here:

Los Angeles' subway will become the first mass transit system in the U.S. to install body scanners that screen passengers for weapons and explosives, officials said Tuesday.

The deployment of the portable scanners, which project waves to do full-body screenings of passengers walking through a station without slowing them down, will happen in the coming months, said Alex Wiggins, who runs the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority's law enforcement division.

The machines scan for metallic and non-metallic objects on a person's body, can detect suspicious items from 30 feet (9 meters) away and have the capability of scanning more than 2,000 passengers per hour. ...

Signs will be posted at stations warning passengers they are subject to body scanner screening. The screening process is voluntary, Wiggins said, but customers who choose not to be screened won't be able to ride on the subway.

The IRS fraudsters are at it again, calling from 615-258-9721

Supposedly from Nashville, TN.

The call was already into its spiel before I could even say hello.

I hung up on the robot.

Poverty guidelines for 2018

When Antifa thinks even the media are the fascists, you know we are still at Orwell's "meaningless" fascism from 1944

George Orwell, here:

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.

But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.

Antifa trying to incite violence with a banner stating it takes a bullet to bash fascism, media/Democrats in their silence remain complicit

Video here.

"White" is really beside the point to Antifa, when what it really wants is the overthrow of the American nation

Antifa's radicalism boils down to communist anarchism: No borders, no walls, no USA at all

To Antifa, anyone who believes in the American nation is a fascist and is therefore the enemy. The police are the enemy because the police defend the nation, the citizens and their property, all of which Antifa believes must be destroyed. That's why the police arrest people with hammers at these "protests".

Antifa hates the cops by definition because Antifa are radicals, not simply because cops stop them from beating up their other enemies

Ann Coulter: Antifa is 90% white (in addition to being violent, angry, self-loathing liberal projectionists)

Peter Strzok, who led the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, was fired on Friday

From the story here:

Strzok has been a target of withering criticism since text messages he exchanged with FBI lawyer Lisa Page became public. In thousands of messages, Strzok and Page disparage the president and other political figures.

In one exchange, Page asked Strzok: "Trump's not ever going to be president, right? Right?!"

In response, Strzok wrote, "No. No he won't. We'll stop it."

That text exchange was one of 40,000 reviewed by the Justice Department's inspector general in the course of its review of the investigation into former Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton's private email server. Strzok played a senior role on the Clinton email investigation.

The inspector general's report, made public in June, found that there was no evidence that Strzok took any action in that inquiry as a result of political bias. The text messages, however, "cast a cloud over the entire FBI investigation," the inspector general concluded.

The pastor who stood by Bill Clinton during his impeachment, Bill Hybels, crashes and burns in his own sex scandal

He’s a Superstar Pastor. She Worked for Him and Says He Groped Her Repeatedly

How the Willow Creek Church Scandal Has Stunned the Evangelical World

Afraid of being replaced in 2017 200+ million vacation days were left on the table, worth $62 billion

Quits may be high above the 3 million level, but that's a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of millions feeling job insecure.

CNBC reports here:

52% don't use all their vacation time

24% have gone a year without a vacation

12% haven't taken a vacation in three years

61% say they fear looking replaceable

56% say they have too much work to do to take time off

The many tweets of Sarah Jeong, now of The New York Times, add up to just one thing

A multitude of vulgar turds she tweets,

poured forth through soiled lips not sweet;

On men of just one tribe and race she heaps,

a steaming pile of excremental heat.

-- Johnny

Yakima Washington Herald lets the cat out of the bag: American fruit grower rich enough to buy hotel to house foreign labor complains they make too much

Growers want more, cheaper guest workers:

Rob Valicoff is relying on 270 guest workers this year to pick his 1,700 acres of apples and pears in Wapato, nearly triple the 96 guest workers he used last year.

Under the federal H-2A guest worker program, growers are required to provide workers with housing, transportation, affordable meals and pay them higher wages.

“I’m excited now, to be honest,” he said. “Even if it costs more money, I’m excited for us not to be short of labor this year.” ...

One recent afternoon, more than 300 laborers filed into the dining hall at the former FairBridge Inn and Suites on North First Street in Yakima for dinner after a day in the fields.

Valicoff bought the 800-bed hotel and in June began housing H-2A workers from Mexico there. Some of the workers are employed by other growers, with Valicoff providing housing under an agreement with them.

Housing is free for workers, and they each pay $12.26 a day for three meals. They eat breakfast and dinner at the hotel and are provided sack lunches.

Valicoff would like to see changes that would require workers to pay a little more for meals and help with the cost of utilities.

“I think they need to pay a portion of that,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a lot, maybe $6, $7 a day.”

He’d also like to see wages lowered for H-2A workers. The minimum wage is $14.12 an hour, above the state minimum wage of $11.50 an hour.

Turkey won't let Rev. Andrew Brunson go, Trump retaliates with tariffs as promised, Turkish lira plunges

Hooah President Trump!

The story is here.

Brunson had been imprisoned for a year and a half and is reportedly now under house arrest. The tyrannical government of Erdogan allegedly pressured his own parishioners to testify against him falsely under threats.

More here.

A country headed by the likes of Erdogan is not fit to be a NATO member country.

Rick Gates testimony the complete opposite of MSNBC buffoon Chris Hayes: Manafort working to ally Ukraine with EU not with Kremlin

From the story here:

Gates said that their shell companies in Cyprus had transferred money between themselves in payments disguised as loans.

Manafort crafted a policy for Yanukovych aimed at bringing Ukraine into the European Union called “Engage Ukraine”.

Manafort recruited top former European politicians to help out with that effort.

Manafort’s income fell precipitously after Yanukovych stepped down in 2014.

Manafort then had trouble paying his bills.

Manafort then worked briefly advising Ukraine’s current president, Petro Poroshenko. ...

“Engage Ukraine became the strategy for helping Ukraine enter the European Union,” he told prosecutors Tuesday.

The meaning of "high" in "high crimes and misdemeanors" refers not to the nature of the offenses, but to their sphere

Gary L. McDowell, "High Crimes and Misdemeanors": Recovering the Intentions of the Founders (1999) here:

[I]t was essential to their way of thinking to make clear that impeachment was a political process dealing with political wrongdoing and not a part of the criminal justice process. Thus, they made clear that punishment for impeachment could not "extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States." But they emphasized that impeachment was not a bar to prosecuting criminal acts that the person impeached may have committed by noting that "the Party convicted [of impeachment] shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law." Thus, although an indictable crime may be deemed an impeachable offense, impeachable offenses are not simply limited to indictable crimes. ...

In all of the English cases the political nature of the offenses charged in impeachments was revealed by the use of the word "high" to modify both "crimes" and "misdemeanors." The use of "high" in "high crimes and misdemeanors" did not refer to the substantive nature of the offense, that it was a particularly serious offense, but that it was a "crime or misdemeanor" carried out against the commonwealth itself. This use of "high" to distinguish crimes and misdemeanors against the society as a whole derived from its use in distinguishing "high" treason from "petit" treason. Alexander Hamilton summarized this understanding of "high Crimes and Misdemeanors" as adopted by the Federal Convention in his explanation of the impeachment process created by the Constitution. The objects of impeachment, he noted, "are those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."

Nearly 1 million Americans, many of whom are rich urban elites, received over $13 billion in farm subsidies in 2017

From the story here about the findings of the organization headed by Tom Coburn:

'Today, our organization, American Transparency, released its OpenTheBooks oversight report, “Harvesting U.S. Farm Subsidies.”  The report catalogues $13.2 billion in these subsidies flowing to nearly 958,000 recipients in fiscal year 2017. Using our interactive mapping platform at OpenTheBooks.com, taxpayers can search all recipients receiving $100,000 or more in FY2017 farm subsidies by ZIP Code.'  

FBI now admits they improperly continued to solicit and receive info from Steele through Bruce Ohr

As reported here by John Solomon:

Ohr’s own notes, emails and text messages show he communicated extensively with Steele and with Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. Those documents have been turned over in recent weeks to investigative bodies in Congress and the DOJ, but not reviewed outside the investigative ranks until now.

They show Ohr had contact with Steele in the days just before the FBI opened its Trump-Russia probe in summer 2016, and then engaged Steele as a “confidential human source” (CHS) assisting in that probe.

They also confirm that Ohr later became a critical conduit of continuing information from Steele after the FBI ended the Brit's role as an informant. ...

Steele's FBI relationship had been terminated about three months earlier. The bureau concluded on Nov. 1, 2016, that he leaked information to the news media and was “not suitable for use” as a confidential source, memos show.

The FBI specifically instructed Steele that he could no longer “operate to obtain any intelligence whatsoever on behalf of the FBI,” those memos show.

Yet, Steele asked Ohr in the Jan. 31 text exchange if he could continue to help feed information to the FBI: “Just want to check you are OK, still in the situ and able to help locally as discussed, along with your Bureau colleagues.” ...

FBI officials now admit they continued to receive information from Steele through Ohr, identifying more than a half-dozen times its agents interviewed Ohr in late 2016 and 2017, to learn what Steele was saying.

That continued reliance on Steele after his termination is certain to raise interest in Congress about whether the FBI broke its own rules.

But the memos also raise questions about Ohr’s and the Justice Department’s roles in the origins of building a counterintelligence case against the Republican presidential nominee, based heavily on opposition research funded by his rival's campaign, the DNC, and the DNC’s main law firm, Perkins Coie.

Despite personal support from Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, lefty candidate Welder in Kansas defeated

Trump beat Hillary in Ohio's 12th District 53% to 42% in 2016, Republicans barely held on to it yesterday

Last October yesterday's result was hardly thinkable:

Map makes Republicans strong favorites to retain Pat Tiberi's 12th Ohio congressional district

Total nonfarm employment has come a long way in Ohio, especially overperforming quite recently in vaulting well past the 5.6 million mark.

You'd think the voters had been more grateful yesterday, but like Hillary energizing Trump supporters by calling them deplorables, Republican Troy Balderson managed to get out the Democrat vote for his opponent by insulting part of his own district, in Franklin County.

All politics is local.

Liz Peek's talk radio echo chamber: Trump's already solved the jobs crisis

This morning on the Steve Gruber show.

This is the sort of hubris which precedes debacles, especially when the hubris isn't justified by the facts.

The difference between an employment population ratio at 60.5% today vs. 63% pre-Great Recession is in excess of 6 million jobs, or 120,000 votes in each and every one of the fifty states in the union. Trump won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by fewer than 80,000 votes total. Failure to expand employment decisively beyond current levels is courting disaster.

Hardly a time for gloating.

Egyptian American Abdul El-Sayed came within 3 points of beating Gretchen Whitmer in Kent County MI in the Democrat primary for governor

Whitmer overall captured the nomination for governor among Democrats in Michigan with nearly 52% of the vote, but Democrats in the county around Grand Rapids, Michigan, are clearly very divided. El-Sayed crushed Whitmer in the city itself, 49% to 36%, and beat her also in the city of Wyoming.

El-Sayed is an accomplished individual, who however has the support of very far left people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Linda Sarsour, and of the far left The Nation magazine.

Public Enemy #1 of democracy is Connecticut's Democrat Senator Chris Murphy

Dan Bongino for Mark Levin opens the show on fire tonight

He's saying the rules which say Republicans have to lose ground in November because that's what usually happens two years after a new president is elected . . . aren't the rules.

Good for him.

Fight! Trump broke the rules, so can we.

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for July 2018

Grand Rapids, Michigan, Climate Update for July 2018

Max temp 94, Mean Max temp 94

Min temp 54, Mean Min temp 49

Av temp 74.4, Mean Av temp 72.2

Av temp to date 48.3, Mean Av temp to date 46.6 (actual is elevated 3.6%)

Precip 2.30, Mean precip 3.12

Total precip to date 21.5, Mean total precip to date 19.7 (actual ahead 1.8 despite dry conditions)

Cooling Degree Days 301, Mean CDD 241, Season to date 577, Mean Season to date 425

The cooling season to date as measured by CDD has moderated to 35.76% warmer than the mean after a hot early start to the summer season.

I notice Mean Max temp for June 2018 has been altered/changed/corrected down to 91 from the 94 I reported. It's also possible I misread it.

Check, check, double check, but still discrepancies arise due to human error . . . just not sure whose. 

Sarah Jeong of The New York Times is guilty of far worse than racism

Frank Rich slams Gary Cohn in NY Mag, Cohn fires back in Bloomberg

Frank Rich on the 5th, here:

The Wall Street bandits escaped punishment, as did most of the banking houses where they thrived. Everyone else was stuck with the bill. ... But it’s a measure of how much the country is broken that we just shrug with resignation when the wealthy Democratic Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn joins this administration to secure an obscene tax cut, then exits without apology to enjoy his further enrichment at the expense of the safety net for the country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Gary Cohn here on the 6th:

In ’08 Facebook was one of those companies that was a big platform to criticize banks, they were very out front of criticizing banks for not being responsible citizens. I think banks were more responsible citizens in ’08 than some of the social media companies are today. And it affects everyone in the world. The banks have never had that much pull. ... In Washington nothing’s perfect, so I’m not thinking it’s perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. But the fact that we got something really important done, which is corporate tax reform, which made us competitive with the rest of the world, is good.

Laugh of the Day 2.0: Boris Johnson objects to "The New English Letter Box"

Quoted here:

"If you say that it is weird and bullying to expect women to cover their faces, then I totally agree," he said.

"I would go further and say that it is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes."

And he added that "a female student turned up at school or at a university lecture looking like a bank robber" he would ask her to remove it to speak to her.

Frank Rich: The sole upside of the 2008 crash is that it exposed the kleptocratic Establishment of both parties

The chief kleptocrat, of course, was Bill Clinton, but Franky doesn't mention that, nor that his hero Barack Obama, who in the worst of economic times managed to come in third for increasing income inequality, is hard at work in retirement trying to catch up with him. Former President Carter, meanwhile, is building and restoring over 30 homes in Indiana for his 2018 work project. 

Still, it's a worthwhile read, if your indignation has been flagging of late.

In 2008, America Stopped Believing in the American Dream

Variety review of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie can't get even recent history right

Here:

At one point, amid all the fringe academics he interviews, D’Souza sits down with Richard Spencer, the white supremacist and alt-right crusader who came to mainstream prominence when he led the May 13, 2017, riots in Charlottesville.

There were no riots in May. Those were in August. And about the only thing Spencer led then was the retreat when the local Democrat authorities gave police a stand down order, effectively giving Antifa the green light to attack.

There is no variety at Variety, just the homogeneity of political correctness, aka fake news.