The Tell: The RNC fundraised me today on the Gorsuch nomination . . .

. . . not on the American Health Care Act.

Always fundraise on the winner.

Year over year additions to full-time jobs in February 2017 were not much better than in 2013

Year-over-year additions to full-time were 1.8 million in February 2017.

In February 2013 1.6 million.

Nothing like 2015's 3 million, 2016's 2.5 million, or even 2014's 2.1 million.

Save your money. You're going to need it.

Mlive: 800,000 lost power in Michigan on Wednesday, two days later more than 615,000 still in the dark

Of those still without power, 515,000 are served by DTE Energy, 100,000 by Consumers Energy.

The story is here.

If the surveillance of Trump was about "financial transactions" (NYT) and "money from the Kremlin" (McClatchy) maybe the Treasury Dept. spearheaded it

I still haven't read anyone saying this.

Instead of obsessing on the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the DNI, and on the process, maybe journalists ought to be focusing their efforts on the last named agency instead, and the substance.

If it's about the money, the Treasury Dept. might very well have led the investigation for the government of Barack Obama, and the spying.

McClatchy, January 19th, 2017:

The FBI and five other law enforcement and intelligence agencies have collaborated for months in an investigation into Russian attempts to influence the November election, including whether money from the Kremlin covertly aided President-elect Donald Trump, two people familiar with the matter said.

The agencies involved in the inquiry are the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and representatives of the director of national intelligence, the sources said.

The New York Times, January 19th, 2017:

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, current and former senior American officials said. ...

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit.

Justin Raimondo is so close and yet so far:

So the FISA issue is, I believe, a false trail . . ..

Jack Lew has been awfully quiet.

Looks like Obama was a natural born citizen of Kenya after all, according to his half brother

Here and here.

Does this mean that the last eight years are invalidated?

Or did Obama just use this to get cheap tuition as a "foreign" student?

Remember, you can keep your doctor, you can keep your healthcare plan, the ocean levels have begun to recede, our planet is beginning to heal and we are the ones we have been waiting for!

And, to quote Howard Dean, "Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Hm . . . CIA hacks the Democrats, leaving Russian fingerprints?

Rush Limbaugh is wrong, as usual, about Obamacare passing the Senate without 60 votes

Obamacare passed the Senate 60-39 on December 24, 2009 with 58 Democrat and 2 Independent votes (one Republican did not vote, Jim Bunning).

The House passed this bill unchanged March 21, 2010, thus avoiding having to go through the House-Senate conference process and another vote again in each chamber. The bill's elements, if changed, were subject to filibuster back in the Senate because Scott Brown's election to the Senate in the interim on January 19, 2010 foreclosed the possibility of Democrats being able to overcome the 59-41 barrier.  60 votes are required to overcome the filibuster.

Reconciliation was used instead to change only budgetary elements in the bill, which were wanted by the Democrats in the House. For reconciliation purposes, simple majorities only are necessary.

Without a filibuster proof Senate majority, Republicans will be unable to repeal Obamacare.

Their only option is to gut the budgetary elements using their majorities in the House and Senate.

Obamacare will not go away in form until the stars align and Republicans capture 60 seats in the Senate.

It can only go away in practice in the interim by defunding it.

Republicans should re-pass the 2015 repeal legislation, which Obama vetoed, and send it to Trump for his signature as a downpayment.

Update:

Here is the Big Boob on the Right, getting it wrong today:

CALLER: Did the Democrats have 60 when they passed all this? I mean, what the hell?
RUSH: No, the Democrats did not. That’s why they used what’s known as budget reconciliation for many aspects of Obamacare, which was trickery. They didn’t have 60 votes. The Republicans, however, did not have the votes to stop anything at the time.  

Now we're talkin': Jim Jordan of Ohio says send Trump the same and only Obamacare repeal bill Obama vetoed in 2016

Here.

Detroit News: Almost 700,000 without power in Michigan according to just two power companies

The story is here.

Here's the Consumers Energy outage map, accounting for only about 194,000 customers who lost power today in the wind storm which gusted as high as 64mph here in Grand Rapids (our power never went out, oddly enough, even though our phone and internet did):

Damn you Congress, repeal Obamacare outright and dare the president to veto it

William Binney says NSA fingerprints are all over release of Trump phone transcripts with Australia and Mexico

Here:

But Binney did say events such as publication of details of private calls between President Trump and the Australian prime minister, as well as with the Mexican president, are evidence the intelligence community is playing hardball with the White House.

"I think that's what happened here," Binney told Fox. "The evidence of the conversation of the president of the U.S., President Trump, and the [prime minister] of Australia and the president of Mexico. Releasing those conversations. Those are conversations that are picked up by the FAIRVIEW program, primarily, by NSA."

Best news so far from CIA Wikileaks: CIA has cracked encryption like Signal used by Deep State

Every cloud has its silver lining.

From The New York Times, here:

Among other disclosures that, if confirmed, would rock the technology world, the WikiLeaks release said that the C.I.A. and allied intelligence services had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”

Assuming Clapper's denial that there was a FISA investigation is true, maybe everyone ought to consider they've been had

James Clapper, who lied to Congress about surveillance in the past and was never prosecuted but should be, has stated over the weekend that there was no FISA investigation at all, contrary to the New York Times and everybody else, as reported here:

For the part of the national security apparatus that he oversaw, "there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president, the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign," Clapper told Chuck Todd in an exclusive interview on Sunday's "Meet The Press."

So . . ..

Either Clapper is lying again, or there's an alternative explanation.

The New York Times etc. have been reporting a narrative based on anonymous sources, a narrative which derives from the Obama Administration and which it wanted everyone to believe.

I say it's an "Oh look! A deer!" narrative. It was designed to get the bloodhounds off the trail and follow to an inconclusive nowhere.

The real story instead might be that Obama was using the Treasury Dept. to investigate Manafort, giving the FBI, CIA and the NSA the plausible deniability they have asserted. So far Comey and Clapper have denied any spying on Trump.

Well, the Treasury Dept. was involved according to news reports, but so far no one's asked Jack Lew to comment as far as I know.

It was Manafort's financial connections in Ukraine which the Times reported in the summer which caused Manafort to have to bail from the Trump campaign, and Bannon and Conway to be tapped by Trump in August 2016.

The spying on Trump by the Treasury Dept. might have then continued, quite lawfully, endeavoring to uncover evidence of Trump financial wrongdoing in connection with Russia, or some one else, in order to finish him off, but it failed.

Jack Lew served Obama at Treasury to the bitter end.

[T]he Inspector General of the Department of the Treasury shall be under the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of the Treasury with respect to audits or investigations, or the issuance of subpenas, which require access to sensitive information concerning— ...
(E) intelligence or counterintelligence matters; or
(F) other matters the disclosure of which would constitute a serious threat to national security or to the protection of any person or property authorized protection by section 3056 of title 18, United States Code, section 3056A of title 18, United States Code, or any provision of the Presidential Protection Assistance Act of 1976 (18 U.S.C. 3056 note ; Public Law 94–524).

Robert Barnes: Obama and his team face jeopardy if they got a FISA warrant by withholding information

From his carefully presented state of the case here at Lawnewz:

and so, third, Obama circumvented both the regular command of the FBI and the regularly appointed federal courts, by placing the entire case as a FISA case (and apparently under Sally Yates at DOJ) as a “foreign” case, and then omitted Trump’s name from a surveillance warrant submitted to the FISA court, which the FISA court unwittingly granted, which Obama then misused to spy on Trump and many connected to Trump. Are these allegations true? We don’t know yet, but if any part of them are then Obama and/or his officials could face serious trouble.

Can a President be charged with a crime? Only once out of office. While in office, impeachment remains the exclusive remedy in order to avoid a single judicial branch trying to overturn an election, such as a grand jury in any part of the country could. Once out of office, a President remains immune from civil liability for his duties while President, under a 1982 decision of the United States Supreme Court. However, as the Nixon pardon attests, nothing forecloses a criminal prosecution of the President after his presidency is complete for crimes against the country. Obama, the Constitutional lawyer, should know that.

The Gateway Pundit has a full list of Obama's proven wiretap victims

Here, with links.

And here at Wikileaks is the NSA subset.

And somehow transcripts of Trump's calls with Australia and Mexico were made and leaked

Wiretaps.

WaPo, here on February 5th, in the "Style" section:

The breadth of the leaks has surprised — and, of course, delighted — journalists, who say it gives the public an unfiltered view of what those in power are thinking and doing. The leaks of Trump’s calls to Turnbull and Peña Nieto may have been the most surprising of all; it’s rare for transcripts of presidential phone calls or details of meetings with foreign leaders, especially potentially embarrassing exchanges, to leak so soon afterward.

And the White House examined a transcript of a wiretapped conversation of Michael Flynn

Someone in the US government was wiretapping all over the place, and the White House read all about it.

It doesn't matter that Comey at FBI denies he's doing it, or that the FISA court refused to allow wiretaps. Someone wiretapped Flynn during the transition, and Manafort during the campaign, which means at Trump Tower.

President Trump is not wrong.

The New York Times, February 13, 2017, here:

The White House had examined a transcript of a wiretapped conversation that Mr. Flynn had with Mr. Kislyak in December, according to administration officials. Mr. Flynn originally told Mr. Pence and others that the call was limited to small talk and holiday pleasantries.

But the conversation, according to officials who saw the transcript of the wiretap, also included a discussion about sanctions imposed on Russia after intelligence agencies determined that President Vladimir V. Putin’s government tried to interfere with the 2016 election on Mr. Trump’s behalf. Still, current and former administration officials familiar with the call said the transcript was ambiguous enough that Mr. Trump could have justified either firing or retaining Mr. Flynn. ...

Officials said classified information did not appear to have been discussed during the conversation between Mr. Flynn and the ambassador, which would have been a crime. The call was captured on a routine wiretap of diplomats’ calls, the officials said.

And when did the wiretapping of Trump Tower begin?

The same NY Times article told us when, here:

The F.B.I. investigation into Mr. Manafort began last spring, and was an outgrowth of a criminal investigation into his work for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine and for the country’s former president, Viktor F. Yanukovych. In August, The Times reported that Mr. Manafort’s name had surfaced in a secret ledger that showed he had been paid millions in undisclosed cash payments. The Associated Press has reported that his work for Ukraine included a secret lobbying effort in Washington aimed at influencing American news organizations and government officials.

New York Times in print version reported American wiretaps provided to Obama White House, now we're supposed to believe there weren't any?

Here, January 19, 2017, in "Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates":

The F.B.I. is leading the investigations, aided by the National Security Agency, the C.I.A. and the Treasury Department’s financial crimes unit. The investigators have accelerated their efforts in recent weeks but have found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, the officials said. One official said intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House. ... It is unclear which Russian officials are under investigation, or what particular conversations caught the attention of American eavesdroppers.

This editorial note appears in fine print at the bottom of the online story indicating that these "intercepted Russian communications" were really American wiretaps:

A version of this article appears in print on January 20, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Wiretapped Data Used in Inquiry of Trump Aides.

Total government spending is well past the point of adding value

Wayne Winegarden, here:

At one-third of the size of the economy, total government spending is well past the point where additional expenditures add value.

Actually, it's higher than one third, as I previously pointed out here. In 2016 total government spending hit 36.1% of GDP.