Wow, I missed this one: Michael Morell, former CIA director under Obama, in March 2017 said Chris Steele PAID Russkies for dossier info

Clinton Ally Says Smoke, But No Fire: No Russia-Trump Collusion:

About the dossier, Morell said, "Unless you know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just can’t." The dossier "doesn’t take you anywhere, I don’t think," he said. He continued: "I had two questions when I first read it. One was, How did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries. "And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, ‘hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,’ because they want to get paid some more. "I think you’ve got to take all that into consideration when you consider the dossier." Another former CIA officer in the room pointed out that the CIA also pays its sources. "But we know who the source [i]s and we know how they got the information," Morell responded.

 

Sad to see Glenn Greenwald retweeting the spitting-on-Vietnam-vets-is-a-myth crap

The left-wing standard for doubting the veracity of the claims continues to be the inability to find corroborating news accounts at the time of the alleged spitting incidents, as if Vietnam vets were such whiny weenies that they ran like babies to the papers to complain "that hippie spit on me!" See the 1998 book by Jerry Lembcke which depends on this line of reasoning to argue the spitting incidents are a myth.

In our own time there has been a virtual news blackout on assaults against Trump supporters, especially during 2015 and 2016, which partisans point to as evidence those also are myths.

"If we don't report it, it's not news."

The problem with this analysis, now standard, is that libertarianism co-opted conservatism

The three-legged stool of "conservatism" in the age of Reagan consisted of a libertarian leg, a social conservative leg, and a foreign policy hawk leg. The libertarian leg came to dominate (the money interest), as is typical, which discarded the conservative leg except when it needed it, at election time (traditional values agenda), and put the foreign policy leg to work in its interests (global free trade).

This has happened before. The proponents of the professional, managerial state in the early 20th century similarly co-opted the rural Christian farming population to pass the "progressive" agenda, in the name of Christian fairness, of women's suffrage, popular election of senators, the corporate and income taxes to make business and the rich pay their fair share, and Prohibition, in exchange for political power.

The gulls in this game have always been the core Christian population. They are being replaced now, however, by a new class, the Latinos.

The 3-D chess masters will have to run the future scenarios. Yo no hablo espanol. But I expect them to be less charitable when jilted.

Current illegal immigration surge totally predictable but Trump botched the response

Spring Brings Surge of Migrants, Stretching Border Facilities Far Beyond Capacity:

The Border Patrol has been facing a record influx of migrant families since fall, but in recent weeks the numbers have begun to escalate substantially, thanks to the annual surge before the arrival of the deadly summer heat.

For months, the federal authorities knew that this spring was likely to set records, but only now is it becoming apparent how big the numbers will be. Apprehensions already dwarf the numbers of five years ago and echo those of the spring of 2014, when the arrival of the first migrant families from Central America transformed the nature of immigration along the southern border.

“The current surge was totally predictable and the Trump administration chose not to prepare for it. Instead it launched a raft of harsh deterrence measures that were totally ineffective,” said Wayne Cornelius, a migration scholar at the University of California, San Diego. ...

In the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, nearly 400,000 migrants were apprehended at the border, a low figure compared with the peak of 1.6 million in 2000. But experts predict that arrivals this fiscal year could hit one million, a level not seen since the record numbers in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Trump's incompetence combines with Congress' inaction on immigration resulting in human traffickers confidently overwhelming the asylum system with hordes of illegals

'We’ve never seen anything like this': As Trump threatens to close border, migrants overwhelm Texas cities:

Border Patrol officials were on pace in March for more than 100,000 apprehensions and encounters with migrants – the highest monthly tally in over a decade, he said. Around 90 percent of those – or 90,000 – crossed the border between legal ports of entry. ... Increasingly, smugglers are bringing larger numbers of families together and delivering them across the Rio Grande, knowing they’ll overrun facilities and be released until their immigration court date, she said. Under U.S. law, Border Patrol is not supposed to hold any migrant for longer than 72 hours. Usually, Border Patrol hands them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which can detain families for up to 20 days. But all of those facilities are overcrowded, [Theresa] Brown [of the Bipartisan Policy Center] said, leading Border Patrol to skip the transfer to ICE and release migrants to shelters en masse. “This is a system-wide collapse,” she said.

No, not The Onion: New political party forms in the realm which gave us rum, sodomy and the lash, calls itself CUK

Short for Change UK, formed on the day when Brexit was finally supposed to occur.

Apparently their idea of change is no change, as in no Brexit.

Looks like the woman in the center realizes their mistake, but that's probably just wishful thinking.

Any seat in Parliament kept by one of these in the next election one wag says will constitute a CUK-hold, but they all already have made cucks of the people of the UK they represent. It is an odd fetish, thankfully, enjoyed by but few, less than 2% of the UK's constituencies. 

 

Education is so bad that even common idioms like "turned out" and "ended up" are lost to us

Or is it the toxoplasmosis?

67% of Democrats think Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Trump elected in latest Economist/YouGov poll

Democrats also believe in reincarnation, yoga, astrology, spiritual energy and the evil eye by 2 to 1 over Republicans in a Pew Research study from 2009.

The same goes for being in touch with the dead, ghosts and fortune tellers.

Independents are almost as bad at 1.8 to 1 on average.

Ding dong.

Leader of New Zealand mosque says the Joos did it!

Must be why Democrats run interference for Muslims so much.

There's been no manufacturing jobs boom here in Michigan under Donald Trump, just more of the same

This has never been an economic boom, just more meh

Gee what a shock, millions of older Americans get fired in the Great Recession, and their homelessness soars

Welcome to libertarian hell.

WHY AMERICANS ARE RETIRING INTO HOMELESSNESS:

UCSF researchers estimate that half of the single homeless adults are age 50 or older, compared to 11 percent in the early 1990s — a 354 percent uptick. This data is emblematic of a graying homeless population across the nation: America’s homeless elderly population is projected to nearly triple by 2030, according to new research encompassing New York City, Boston and Los Angeles County. And this problem spans the globe: A 2017 report on the U.K.’s homeless population found that the population of homeless people over 60 had increased 111 percent since 2009, and for those over 75 it had increased by 155 percent — compared to an increase of 48 percent in the general population.

Remember those 5 guys Obama let go to get back Bowe Bergdahl?

Maybe they could cast Rachel as Kayla Arnold in a tranny remake of The Wonder Years

Letting Jussie Smollett go is the kind of criminal justice reform you can expect from the woman who inspired it, Kamala Harris

Here in Grand Rapids, Ann, they're called Dutch Yetis: Their feet as so big you can actually hear them comin' up behind you

Jussie Smollett pretty tight with Moochelle

If Joe Biden gets his way white jurisprudential culture in America will be replaced with Smollett-style justice

Alexandra Chalupa's timeline of her activities and of her fears about Paul Manafort's influence in Ukraine in his capacity as part of the Trump campaign isn't convincing

Alexandra Chalupa: The Ukrainian-American who exposed Manafort:

In late 2015, a small group of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian civic leaders visiting Washington, D.C. told Chalupa they had heard Manafort’s former clients in Ukraine were remobilizing again, and that Manafort had made a fortune working in Kyiv. ...

It was around this time that Chalupa started to develop a gut feeling that Manafort was poised to help Trump’s bid for the White House. ...

By early 2016, Chalupa notified a senior DNC executive that a political spin doctor who had worked against America’s interests for the pro-Kremlin Yanukovych and was linked to some of the most powerful Russian oligarchs serving Putin was to play an important role in the effort to get Trump elected. ...

On March 28, The New York Times broke the story that Manafort had joined the Trump campaign.

The problem with this timeline and Chalupa's obsession with Manafort's Ukraine connection is that Manafort's overture to Trump to come on to the campaign didn't come until February 29, 2016, according to The New York Times. And the overture came at the urging of Trump's close friend Tom Barrack, who wanted Manafort to help a flailing and inexperienced Trump by managing successfully the potentially explosive upcoming Republican convention in Cleveland. Manafort's Republican political experience dating from 1976 onwards is well known.

Chalupa would have had no reason to believe Manafort would suddenly become active in the Trump campaign in late 2015 and early 2016, as she claims, when it wasn't until sometime in mid-February 2016 that Tom Barrack made his pitch to Manafort.

It is more likely that Manafort became the convenient focus for Chalupa after the fact when all along it was opposition to Trump's proposed opening to Russia which motivated her activism and overtures to the DNC long before Manafort came on the scene.

There is absolutely nothing in this puff piece in The Kyiv Post about Chalupa's longstanding loyalty to and work for the Clintons.

Alexandra Chalupa is at the nexus of what has become the criminalization of a foreign policy difference between Trump Republicans on the one hand and Democrats and NeverTrumpers on the other, like John McCain who was notably famous for his deep involvement in the political dispute in Ukraine.

George Washington tried to warn us about the consequences of entangling foreign alliances, and those have been Exhibit A for the last two years.

If 29% of 2016 population 55 and older have absolutely nothing coming in retirement except Social Security, we're talking about 26 million Americans

[Almost] Half of Older Americans Have Nothing in Retirement Savings:

Of those 55 and older, 48 percent had nothing put away in a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan or an individual retirement account, according to a GAO estimate for 2016 that was released Tuesday. That’s an improvement from the 52 percent without retirement money in 2013.

Two in five of such households did have access to a traditional pension, also known as a defined benefit plan. However, 29 percent of older Americans had neither a pension nor any assets in a 401(k) or IRA account.