It’s Friday, July 27th, 2018…but prior to beginning, we offer a few random thoughts from the passing scene. First, Stilton Jarlsberg honors us with his recognition of our recent incidents of atrial fibrillation:
Which makes Barack Hussein Obama a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize in Cardiology!
Second, one cartoon which is worth far more than a thousand words, as it explains the unwavering support The Donald continues to enjoy from his base:
Last, but not least, why we won’t be sending Larry Hogan a dime for his re-election campaign:
“On a sleepy summer Saturday, after months of stonewalling, the FBI dumped 412 pages of documents related to the Carter Page FISA surveillance warrants — the applications, the certifications, and the warrants themselves. Now that we can see it all in black and white — mostly black, as they are heavily redacted — it is crystal clear that the Steele dossier, an unverified Clinton-campaign product, was the driving force behind the Trump–Russia investigation.
Based on the dossier, the FBI told the FISA court it believed that Carter Page, who had been identified by the Trump campaign as an adviser, was coordinating with the Russian government in an espionage conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
This sensational allegation came from Christopher Steele, the former British spy. The FISA court was not told that the Clinton campaign was behind Steele’s work. Nor did the FBI and Justice Department inform the court that Steele’s allegations had never been verified.To the contrary, each FISA application — the original one in October 2016, and the three renewals at 90-day intervals — is labeled “VERIFIED APPLICATION” (bold caps in original). And each one makes this breathtaking representation:
The FBI has reviewed this verified application for accuracy in accordance with its April 5, 2001 procedures, which include sending a copy of the draft to the appropriate field office(s).
In reality, the applications were never verified for accuracy.
…I freely acknowledge that we do not know what the redactions say. But we have been very well informed about what they do not say. They do not verify the allegations in the Steele dossier. I have no doubt that they have a great deal to say about Russia and its nefarious anti-American operations. But the FBI has been taking incoming fire for months about failing to corroborate Steele. No institution in America guards its reputation more zealously than does the FBI. If Steele had been corroborated, rest assured that the bureau would not be suffering in silence.
Plus, do you really think the FBI and Justice Department wanted to use the Steele dossier? Of course they didn’t. They undoubtedly believed Steele’s allegations (the applications say as much). That is no surprise given how much their top echelons loathed Donald Trump. But they were alsowell aware of the dossier’s significant legal problems — the suspect sourcing, the multiple hearsay. If they had solid evidence that verified Steele’s allegations, they would have used that evidence as their probable cause showing against Page.Instead, they used the dossierbecause, as McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee, without it they would have had no chance of persuading a judge that Page was a clandestine agent.
Whatever is in the redactions cannot change that.
…It turns out…the crazies were right and I was wrong.The FBI (and, I’m even more sad to say, my Justice Department) brought the FISA court the Steele-dossier allegations, relying on Steele’s credibility without verifying his information.
I am embarrassed by this not just because I assured people it could not have happened, and not just because it is so beneath the bureau — especially in a politically fraught case in which the brass green-lighted the investigation of a presidential campaign. I am embarrassed because what happened here flouts rudimentary investigative standards.Any trained FBI agent would know that even the best FBI agent in the country could not get a warrant based on his own stellar reputation.A fortiori, you would never seek a warrant based solely on the reputation of Christopher Steele — a non-American former intelligence agent who had political and financial incentives to undermine Donald Trump.It is always, always necessary to persuade the court that the actual sources of information allegedly amounting to probable cause are believable.
Well, guess what? No one knows that better than experienced federal judges, who deal with a steady diet of warrant applications. It is basic. Much of my bewilderment, in fact, stems from the certainty that if I had been so daft as to try to get a warrant based on the good reputation of one of my FBI case agents, with no corroboration of his or her sources, just about any federal judge in the Southern District of New York would have knocked my block off — and rightly so.
That’s why I said it.“
It’s rare for Andy McCarthy to apologize for being wrong primarily because he’s so often right. Still, we report, you decide; but for our money, McCarthy’s factual conclusions carry infinitely more weight than all the biased opinions of the Progressive propaganda machine put together.
In a related item forwarded by Balls Cotton, one Charles Faddis, retired CIA operations and case officer, pens…
I understand that you are a political opponent of the current President of the United States. I understand that you are an American citizen, and you have the right to freedom of speech. I encourage you to utilize that right. I encourage you to speak your mind. I encourage you, as I do all Americans, to be heard.
I implore you, however to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.
None of this is true.
…There is no impartiality in your comments.Your assessments are not based on some sober judgment of what is best for this nation.They are based exclusively on what you believe to be in the best interests of the politicians with whom you long since allied yourself.
It should be noted that not only are you most decidedly not apolitical but that you have been associated during your career with some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent American history.
…Ever since this president was elected there has been a concerted effort to delegitimize him and destabilize him. This has been an unprecedented attempt to undermine the stability of the republic in order to achieve partisan political advantage. You and your patrons have been complicit in this effort and at its very heart.
Now as the Mueller investigation collapses of its own weight and the extent of this conspiracy is beginning to become clear you are in evident panic.You should be.
You are free to do as you wish politically. Stoprepresenting to the American people that there is anything else at play. You abandoned any hope of being a true intelligence professional decades ago and became a political hack.Say so.
Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul’s assessment of you stands:
“John Brennan started out his adulthood by voting for the Communist Party presidential candidate. He’s now ending his career by showing himself to be the most biased, bigoted, over-the-top, hyperbolic sort of unhinged director of the CIA we’ve ever had.”
With all due respect to Rand Paul…which is frankly very little…Brennan demonstrated his abject bias long before Trump took office.
Since we’re on the subject of Trump’s critics and their extra-legal efforts to overturn the results of a lawful election, writing at NRO, Victor Davis Hanson coins and defines the term…
“Russianism is a psychological malady in which furor at Donald Trump’s election victory and presidency — and the ensuing depression resulting from the inability to abort it — finds release through fixation on Russia.
The recent orthodox progressive and Democratic view of Russia — until the appearance of Donald Trump — was largely what it had been throughout the Cold War: one of empathy for Russia and understanding of its dilemmas, and shame over supposed right-wing American paranoia over a bogus “Russian bear.”
Obama’s 2009 reset was birthed as a correction to George W. Bush’s modest sanctions against the Putin government for going into Ossetia. What then followed during the Obama administration was the embarrassing red reset-button rhetoric that was usually couched in anti-Bush-administration snark.
Or, as Hillary Clinton put it:
We believe that there are a lot of challenges and threats that we have inherited that we have to address. But there are also opportunities, and we are being extremely vigorous in our outreach. Because we’re testing waters, we’re determining what is possible. We’re turning new pages and resetting buttons.
Then we witnessed a “turning new pages” effort by the Obama administration to downplay Russian aggression and emphasize its own new creative outreach to Putin.They thought the Russian strongman would be charmed by humanitarian sanctimoniousness and the hope-and-change charisma of Barack Obama. Instead, Putin, true to character, saw weakness accompanied by pious sermonizing. That is always a fatal combination when dealing with a brute. And so, Putin proceeded to gather up his easy pickings.
What variously ensued was the inadvertent hot-mic offer of quid pro quo collusion with Putin by President Obama when he was up for reelection. Obama more than fulfilledthis promise(No evidence of Russian collusion here!) when, in early 2013 — after Putin’s 2012 hiatus in aggression — he cancelled the final phase of missile defense based in Eastern Europe.There was the iconic but cheap attack on candidate Mitt Romney for supposedly being obsessed with Russia as a geopolitical enemy. The Obama administration showed indifference to the absorption of Crimea and eastern Ukraine. There was also not much anger over prior Russian cyberattacks on the United States. In October 2016, Obama offered a haughty, flat-out dismissal of the notion that Russia could change the way people vote in any election:
There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, there’s no evidence that that has happened in the past or that it will happen this time.
His optimism was apparently predicated on his certainty that Hillary Clinton would win and that a defeated and humiliated Donald Trump should not post facto “whine” about losing.
Hillary Clinton was instrumental in persuading the U.S. government to green-light sales of American uranium to Putin-connected companies. It is surely not a coincidence that Russian interestspaid Bill Clinton a $500,000 honorariumfor a single speaking gig in Moscow, shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, and that pro-Putin Russians gave multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation.Such largesse was never repeated after 2016, when the market value of the Clinton brand crashed after 16 years of more-than-market returns. We forget that Democratic arch-fund-raiser and lobbyist Tony Podesta also received generous fees from Russians, who presumed that his brother (top Clinton aide John Podesta) would soon be part of the new Clinton administration.
Obama refused to arm the Ukrainians and his green-energy, anti-fracking policies played right into Russian oil interests. His defense cuts contributed to NATO laxity. Secretary of State John Kerry invited Putin into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus. It proved a pathetic effort to get the Obama administration off the hook of enforcing the very ultimatum — the now infamous red line — that it had issued to the genocidal Assad government, and it might well have convinced Putin that annexing former Soviet territory would likewise have few consequences.In sum, according to the protocols of contemporary progressive hysteria and an unhinged media, all of the above, if done by the Trump administration, would have been redefined as impeachment-worthy collusion — or far worse…”
Just as back in the days of Fletch…
…as the great Stilton Jarlsberg observed…
…these days it’s all Russia, 24/7, ad infinitum/ad nauseam; to the point it’s like the previous 24 years of Russo-American relations…
…never happened!
Here’s the juice: while those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, those who seek to rewrite the past in the interest of purely political gain should just be condemned…both in this world and the next.
Speaking of those who should simply be condemned, writing at Best of the Web, Jim Freeman details the financial windfall benefitting a Missouri Senator and her husband:
Yeah,…and Hillary’s profits in cattle futures were only the result of her innate…
…investment expertise!
That and the fact she’s fat as a cow.
Which brings us to our latest installment of the Environmental Moment, as, writing at Commentary Magazine, Noah Rothmann identifies…
The Last Straw
The new prohibitionists.
Few things are as illustrative of the liberal predicament as the extremely recent moral panic over the threat posed by plastic drinking straws. Not only has this contrivance demonstrated the left’s confused priorities, it has also crystalized the extent to which this movement has a deluded perception of its own appeal.
The alacrity with which a variety of liberal urban enclaves passed ordinances banning single-use plastic straws, stirrers, and toothpicks was staggering. In 2008, the city of Seattle imposed plastic restrictions on its residents, but it has been implementing that measure as slowly as possible. This month, without much in the way of public input, the city withdrew statutory exemptions for plastic straws and utensils. Violators of the ban are now technically subject to a $250 fine.
San Francisco moved faster.In mid-May, a lawmaker from a town in which city-provided heroin syringes litter the streets insisted that disposable straws can be found in two-thirds of the refuse that makes its way into the Bay. She proposed an outright ban on all single-use plastics as a calibrated response to her dubious statistic and, by July, the city’s board of supervisors unanimously approved the measure. The zealous legislators in the city of Santa Barbara passed legislation that imposes up to a $1,000 fine and six months of jail time for illicit straw users. Several other municipalities and major cities are considering or have implemented similar bans on plastic straws and utensils.
“All of a sudden, everyone around the world is focused on this problem and taking action, and that’s what we’re doing with this ordinance,” San Francisco’s chief environmentalist insisted. And yet, as NPR noted, “at the center of conversations about plastic” is the presumption that Americans use approximately 500 million straws every day—a dramatic figure for a nation of just about 325 million people. Nevertheless, that figure has been cited by lawmakers, published authoritatively by the New York Times and CNN, and even reproduced by the National Park Service.There was just one problem: the source of that statistic was 9-year-old Milo Cress.
Cress, a fourth grader at the time when he determined that every man, woman, and child in America uses approximately 1.5 straws per day, arrived at that figure based on an extrapolation of the number of straws that manufacturers produce. How could this obviously unscientific metrichave escaped the scrutiny of experts and skeptics amid our productive national “conversation” around single-use plastics?Because there was no “conversation” at all.
By “everyone around the world,” San Francisco’s chief environmentalist meant his allies in urban centers and on the coasts, and the occasional European bureaucrat. It’s a revealing comment.Everyone in the world—everyone who matters, at least—believes that single-use plastics are killing the oceans and that the industrialized West is a primary source of that pollution. He probably believes that there has been sufficient time and public debate on the measure, too. After all, Strawless Ocean, the Lonely Whale Foundation, and former “Entourage” star and UN Goodwill Ambassador Adrian Grenier have been demanding a phase-out of disposable plastics for, presumably, weeks. There’s even a viral video of a sea turtle struggling to dislodge a plastic straw from its nostril. Everyone has seen that. If you’ve somehow missed this lively debate, maybe you’re just not worth convincing.
If there had been a genuine give and take between adversarial factions, as was once customary in American politics before one-party municipalities summarily banned minor conveniences, the cities and towns behind this new prohibition might have been told that it would have almost no effect on the amount of plastic pollution in the ocean. Like carbon pollution, the vast majority of the estimated 10 million tons of plastic waste that is dumped into the ocean annually comes from the developing world. In March, the Economist reported that “scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, in Germany, found that ten rivers—two in Africa and the rest in Asia—discharge 90 percent of all plastic marine debris.” The Yangtze River in China alone is responsible for carrying 1.5 million tons of plastic into the Pacific each year.
The combination of technocratic arrogance, insularity, and condescension displayed by the left’s straw banners would be irksome enough, but our social engineers are not done inconveniencing you. Instead of disposable plastic straws, Americans are being asked to switch to biodegradable paper straws, which function precisely as advertised: They biodegrade upon contact with fluid. Slow drinkers will be treated to a mouthful of pulp if they’re not careful. But a little foul-tasting vegetable matter in your teeth is a small price to pay for a sense of moral superiority.
And that, dear friends, is what contemporary Progressivism is all about!
Turning now to The Lighter Side:
Though as regards that last meme, not…
…always.
Then there’s yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, thought we’re frankly flummoxed why, in this day and age, THIS headline…
“…The Lincoln County Nebraska Sheriff’s Office reports that Chaunt’l Wilson of Council Bluffs was spotted speeding down I-80 in her yellow 2018 Ford Mustang at 1:00 am on Saturday morning (doing 92 mph in a 75 mph zone), pulled over, given a citation and let go.
And boy did she go.Deputies reported that she “accelerated very rapidly” and then clocked her on a radar gun going 142 mph. They began a pursuit, and after initially refusing, Wilson eventually pulled over (15 miles later) and was arrested for willful reckless driving.
A subsequent search of her car turned up a small amount of marijuana that police said could lead to further charges against her.”
Had Harry Callahan been the arresting officer, we’ve no doubt he’d have observed of the daring Ms. Wilson…
Then again, as our friend Anthony “Super T” Walton noted, perhaps Chaunt’l was under the impression she could only be served one ticket per day.
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