Strzok testimony confirms partisan channel for accusations against Trump was through Ohr at DOJ, whose Russia expert wife worked for Fusion GPS, Democrat bankrollers of the dossier

From the story here:

The first-time disclosure is significant because it confirms an unusual and continuing channel for collusion accusations that started outside the government with anti-Trump people and reached Mr. Ohr at the Justice Department and then the FBI. Around that time, Mr. Ohr was communicating with dossier writer Christopher Steele. Mr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, a Russia researcher, worked for Mr. Steele’s paymaster, investigative firm Fusion GPS, which was trying to damage Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Mr. Ohr met with Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson after the November 2016 election. ...

Republicans now know that the dossier trail started with Mr. Steele, Mr. Ohr, Fusion GPS and Mr. Simpson and a journalist. Mr. Corn has denied he worked with the FBI. ...

“Bruce Ohr, the fourth-ranking official at the Department of Justice, his wife works for Fusion GPS in the summer. He gets information and passed it to the FBI. That becomes the basis to spy on the Trump campaign, plain and simple,” Mr. Jordan said. “This is the first time to my knowledge the FBI has admitted that . . .."

It's been almost one year since McCain was diagnosed with a cancer which typically kills in 12-15 months

Noted at the time here.

He remains active on Twitter, if that's really him.

Today he's blasting President Trump again, this time over the Helsinki presser, calling it "disgraceful".

The guy's dying and has nothing better to do than vent his spleen.

Sad.

Trump is magnificent in presser: Where is the DNC server? What happened to Hillary's emails?

Here.

Hacked DNC servers, never examined by FBI, have now conveniently disappeared, so Mueller's charges against the ham sandwiches are doubly meaningless

From the story here:

The one thing [the indicted Russians] are alleged to have done that is serious is hacking the servers of the Democratic National Committee. That’s a serious charge. It’s also completely unprovable, which makes it a brilliant political move by Mueller.

It’s a serious charge. But if any of the people charged with doing it were to show up in court, which is highly unlikely, their lawyers would demand to see the DNC’s servers so they could have their experts examine them. Mueller says Russians hacked them, but the servers have magically disappeared. So how can anyone be certain who hacked them, or if they were even really hacked at all?

Since none of those charged are going to show up in court, there will be no challenge to the allegation, no demand to see the evidence, and no legal embarrassment for Mueller when the charges are dropped because the key piece of evidence not only can’t be provided to the defense, it wasn’t even examined by the prosecutor. He appears to have simply taken the word of the Democratic Party about what happened.

Babe, 1995's piggy prophet to the alt-right

Baa-ram-ewe!

Baa-ram-ewe!

To your breed,

your fleece,

your clan be true!

Sheep be true!

Baa-ram-ewe!

Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicts thirteen Russkies

Mark Fuhrman's use of the n-word damaged the prosecution's credibility in the OJ case, but Democrats expect us to believe in Strzok's credibility even though he hates Trump's guts

A point made by a black caller to The Chris Plante Show in the last half hour.

"Democratic lawmaker says Peter Strzok deserves Purple Heart for enduring hearing"

Ann Coulter: The point isn't being made enough that the Russia investigation began because of Peter Strzok

Here.

It was the hubris and political animus of a single high-level FBI functionary, Peter Strzok, which sought to stymie the political will of the American people who elected Trump by presenting a phony dossier as credible evidence to a FISA court in order to surveil a presidential candidate.

The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as the Lois Lerner affair, when one person in The Swamp used her position to curtail the free-speech rights of The Tea Party during the 2010 revolt against Obamacare and government bailouts of all and sundry except the taxpayers.

"If a nuclear device leveled DC I don't know if I would shed a tear, unless I heard this pile was out of town at the time."

   

For 80% of workers, inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings are down 0.22% from a year ago in June 2018

If it were a real jobs boom, we'd see rising real earnings pressure. We don't. The measure has been comparatively flat for two and a half years.

Political reality in Michigan summer 2018

The left is still here, waiting to be roused.

Barack Obama 2008:  2,872,579

Barack Obama 2012:  2,564,569

Donald Trump 2016:  2,279,543

Hillary Clinton 2016: 2,268,839

While Hillary's deficit to Trump was just 10,704 votes, to Obama it was between 295,730 and 603,740 votes.

Somebody here in Michigan really disliked Hillary.

Who could it be?

Bernie Sanders 2016 Democrat primary: 598,943

Hillary Clinton 2016 Democrat primary: 581,775

Donald Trump 2016 Republican primary: 483,753

all other Republicans 2016 primary: 842,836

Trump admitted in December 2016 in remarks in Grand Rapids that "a bunch of people didn't show up" in November, which is the real reason he won here. Obviously a mix of Bernie supporters/black people couldn't bring themselves to vote for Hillary in the general.

But they didn't just go away.

Trump approval in Michigan in June 2018 is at 44%, disapproval at 52%. He was at 48/40 in January 2017. That growth of disapproval combined with erosion of approval looks problematic for Michigan Republicans in November.

Michigan's employment level, though much improved, still hasn't recovered to pre-Great Recession levels, and is flat to slightly declining in early 2018. GDP on the other hand is better than the pre-Great Recession period, but is flat in the mid-threes. These things argue for continued Republican governance, but cheerleaders for a Trump boom will encounter a disconnect with the actual experience of people. They are advised to cool it.

Looks like NeverTrumpers went fishing with multiple dossiers at the FBI until NeverTrumper Peter Strzok bit

Hey, we got a live one here!

John Solomon reports in "Did FBI get bamboozled by multiple versions of Trump dossier?":

Now, memos the FBI is turning over to Congress show the bureau possessed at least three versions of the dossier and its mostly unverified allegations of collusion.

Each arrived from a different messenger: McCain, Mother Jones reporter David Corn, Fusion GPS founder (and Steele boss) Glenn Simpson. ...

[T]he generally same information kept walking through the FBI’s door for months — recycled each time by a new character with ties to Hillary Clinton or hatred for Trump — until someone decided they had to act.

That someone was Strzok, whose own anti-Trump bias was laid bare by his personal text messages. 

Child separations are a feature, not a bug: Illegals are abandoning their children to the US so they get green cards and become anchors

From the story here quoting Matthew Albence of ICE:

"I will say that for the vast majority of the individuals [who leave their children]… it is because they completed the smuggling act. Their goal when they paid their smuggler, the criminal organizations, these cartels, $5,000 or $6,000 to smuggle themselves into the country, their goal was to get their child here. They’ve accomplished that goal. So if they return on their own [to their home country], they are willing to do so and leave the child here because that was the intended goal of their illegal entry in the first place." ...

DHS officials also cannot force parents who are released from detention in the United States to pick up their claimed children from the shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, said Albence. “If individuals choose not to do that, there is nothing we can do to force them to claim their child,” he said during a telephone interview arranged by DHS.

Foreign children and youths who are left in the United States by their parents are allowed to file for green cards on the grounds that their parents abandoned them. The migrant children are also eligible for various welfare and aid programs, and are allowed to attend taxpayer-funded schools and universities. Once adopted by the United States, then legalized and naturalized, the new Americans will be allowed to bring in their foreign parents and siblings via unreformed chain-migration laws.

Full employment in 2018 would mean 6.5 million more working than are

Laura Ingraham lies, says the voters knew Kavanaugh was on Trump's list when they elected him

Just now on the radio show.

Kavanaugh was added to the list in late 2017, according to rumor at the behest of Justice Kennedy himself, who had been angling to retire:

Two others — Brett Kavanaugh, another former Kennedy clerk now on the powerful D.C. Circuit, and Amy Coney Barrett, a University of Notre Dame law professor nominated by Trump last year to the Chicago-based 7th Circuit — were added to the list last November.

Rick "Tin Ear" Santorum: Trump's base will be "turned off" by Brett Kavanaugh

Quoted here.

No one in the base who watched Kavanaugh's remarks was turned off in the least.

In fact, Kavanaugh impressed as a person with a common, ordinary touch, who is deeply committed to his family and to the law. And he endeared himself to his listeners because the emotion welling-up underneath his remarks went far to prove his sincerity. 

Methinks Santorum, exasperated that he didn't get more support from Catholics in 2012, is a little jealous of his fellow Catholic, whose credentials and experience already stand out from those currently serving on the Supreme Court, not to mention from Santorum's.

The spectacle was when seven men decided women should kill the beneficiaries of court-ordered child support

The spectacle was when seven men decided women should kill their inconvenient children

Chinese Communist hypocrite Xi Jinping has jailed political opponents Sun Zhengcai and 1.3 million others

Gordon Chang, here:

At the 19th Communist Party National Congress held last October, however, Xi broke convention by preventing the designation of a successor. No one who might follow him was named to the Politburo Standing Committee, the apex of Chinese power. Also, ahead of the 19th Congress Xi targeted an up-and-coming figure, Sun Zhengcai from Chongqing, by having him investigated for “serious discipline violations,” party code for corruption. Sun has been given a life sentence in circumstances indicating his crime was political—in other words, being in a faction not controlled by Xi Jinping. ...

Xi is upping the consequences for those coming out on the short end of political struggles. In what he has styled a new “anti-corruption” campaign but which looks more like an old-fashioned political purge, Xi has jailed more than 1.3 million officials. He has removed the venal, but it’s noteworthy that almost none of them were his supporters. They were, for the most part, either political opponents or potential rivals, like Sun from Chongqing. Moreover, Xi has betrayed the real nature of the campaign by jailing anti-corruption campaigners and leaving alone his own family members, some of whom, under the most suspicious of circumstances, have become extraordinarily wealthy since he was identified as Hu’s successor.

The headline writer at The Hill gets it wrong, but the article author gets it right

People returning to labor force in droves — a key step for the economy, says the headline, but the article says no such thing.

The story author makes many astute points, which the headline writer obviously doesn't understand.

The labor force is growing, but gradually, as is the percentage of the population actually working. We ought to have north of 62% working as was true before the Great Recession instead of 60% now, but the direction is up, if gradual.

This means we are NOT at full employment. People who dropped out are dropping back in, looking for work, and finding it, gradually.

This is dispelling the myth that the decline in the labor force was structural, and permanent. It isn't.

This also explains why wages aren't rising dramatically. Employers still have bodies to choose from as people who formerly sat on the sidelines get back in the game. Employers still do not have to pay dramatically higher wages to keep the employees they have. They still have employees to choose from.

In a nutshell, it's not a boom, but it is overall a return to the right direction.

Fewer than 600 acres of opium production in Afghanistan keep the Taliban insurgency alive

There should be a relatively simple solution to that, but Politico has a story here about what we've been doing instead.

The United States is not a serious country.