More on FBI/DOJ malfeasance during the 2016 election. They did everything they could to stop Trump.

“…The FBI omitted from its application to spy on Carter Page the fact that Russian spies had dismissed the former Trump campaign adviser as unreliable – or as one put it, an “idiot” – and therefore unworthy of recruiting, according to congressional sources who have seen the unredacted document.

The potentially exculpatory detail was also withheld from three renewals of the wiretap warrant before a special government surveillance court. The warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court allowed the FBI to spy on Page and others he was in contact with for almost a year, the sources also confirmed.

The FBI was aware of Russians’ skepticism that Page knew anything of value or was a significant player because the bureau had recorded them voicing such doubts in a wiretap, from an earlier espionage case involving three Russian spies working undercover for the Kremlin in New York.

The FBI cited that 2013 case, minus the disparagement of Page, in its applications to the FISA court. They have been made public only in redacted form, professing evidence that Page was “recruited” by Russian intelligence and had “coordinated” with the Russian government. But “that’s a mischaracterization of the facts in the case,” a congressional source said…”

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/09/05/fbi_kept_from_fisa_court_russian_view_of_page_as_idiot.html

“…In a blow to decades of myth-based policy, Team Trump last week cut all US funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency — a special body that does as much to distort the peace process as to help Palestinian refugees.

Since its founding in 1949 to take care of, as The Post’s Benny Avni put it, the roughly “750,000 Arab refugees from the war Israel’s neighbors launched to erase it off the map,” UNRWA has worked not to end that refugee crisis but to prolong it.

Key to that perverse mission has been the decision to grant refugee status to the descendants of the original ones — a rule applied for no other refugees in all the decades since World War II and the founding of the United Nations.

Where a normal accounting would have the population down to a few tens of thousands, UNRWA recognizes some 5 million Palestinian “refugees,” including even great-great-grandchildren whose families have been citizens of Jordan and other nations for decades…”

https://nypost.com/2018/09/03/trump-is-pushing-the-middle-east-to-face-reality-in-palestine/

“…In the memo, Papadopoulos’s lawyers detailed the FBI’s January 27, 2017, questioning of their client, explaining that for two hours, Papadopoulos answered questions about professor Joseph Mifsud, Carter Page, Sergei Millian, the “Trump Dossier,” and others on the campaign. According to Papadopoulos, “[t]he agents asked George if he would be willing to actively cooperate and contact various people they had discussed.” Papadopoulos said he would be willing to try.

Yet when Mifsud—the Maltese professor who in late April 2016 told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt on Hillary” in the form of “thousands of emails”—visited the United States just two weeks later to speak at a State Department-sponsored conference, the FBI didn’t even bother to have Papadopoulos reach out to his former colleague.

Instead, the FBI questioned Mifsud, then in the special counsel’s sentencing memorandum blamed Papadopoulos for the government’s inability “to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States.” According to Mueller’s office, Papadopoulos’ “lies also hindered the government’s ability to discover who else may have known or been told about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on Clinton,” and prevented the FBI from determining “how and where the Professor obtained the information [and] why the Professor provided information to the defendant.”

I previously explained why the special counsel’s claim that Papadopoulos’s lies impeded the FBI’s investigation doesn’t fly. Papadopoulos’s attorneys similarly argued in their memo that their client’s lies did not actually harm the FBI’s probe, adding significantly that “George was still a cooperating source in their investigation” at the time investigators questioned Mifsud.

That final point and the revelation in Papadopoulos’ sentencing memo that the FBI had asked the former Trump advisor if he would be willing to contact Mifsud—and Papadopoulos’ agreement to do so—exposes the FBI’s purported investigation into Russia as a sham…”

http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/04/papadopouloss-court-docs-provide-evidence-russiagate-setup-get-trump/

Now, if they could just reduce spending, we’d be in good shape.

“…President Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker Paul Ryan have teamed up this summer to do something that hasn’t happened in two decades — write and pass department spending bills instead of lumping everything into a massive package.

The House and Senate are moving at a brisk pace to pass the appropriations bills, with the Senate leading, approving nine of 12.

What’s more, the Trump administration has pushed through key priorities on wall and Pentagon spending, as well as curbing wasteful programs, though still ending up with a more expensive budget than they wanted by over $50 billion.

And while Congress has taken the votes, many on Capitol Hill are giving Trump and his team the credit for breaking the 20-year log jam. They cite his refusal to sign another massive “omnibus” spending bill that ignored his priorities, even if it means shutting down the government.

“This is all driven by the president,” said a key congressional insider. “It’s a win for the president. For 20 years this system has been busted.”

Nobody is as pleased as McConnell. Last week he said that the passage of department spending packages was a huge achievement, “given how completely fouled up the government funding process has been for 20 years, 20 years.”…”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trump-breaks-20-year-fouled-up-budget-gridlock-scores-big-wins

New Resistance Theory: A Trump Staffer Was Giving White Supremacist Hand Signals Behind Kavanaugh Today

“…Look me in the (virtual) eyes and tell me we shouldn’t scrap this garbage spectacle altogether. There’s no reason we couldn’t have senators submit written questions to a SCOTUS nominee, give him two weeks to answer, then hold an up-or-down vote. There hasn’t been a meaningful Supreme Court confirmation hearing since Clarence Thomas’s, and those were extraordinary circumstances because of the sexual harassment allegations against him. Unless there’s scandal to explore, there’s simply no point to quizzing nominees in real time. Particularly in an age of the Ginsburg Rule, extensive pre-hearing meetings between the nominee and various senators, and extraordinarily close White House vetting of candidates to avoid any confirmation-process surprises. . . .

The accused “white power” signaler is of Mexican ancestry and a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Jewish Mexicans — the most dangerous white nationalists of all.

Maybe she’s under deep, deep cover. If so, it must be really deep: By more than one account, she’s a very nice person. . . .

What’s the hand signal for “The Resistance is filled with bad-faith morons”?

Bash is fortunate that her background disproves the accusation against her so obviously. If it didn’t, this charge would follow her around for God only knows how long no matter how innocent her hand gestures today were. As it is, the only semi-redeeming virtue of this pitiful episode is that the QAnon people are destined to notice and conclude that Bash was actually sending a coded signal to them about Trump’s and Mueller’s secret plan to liberate the kids from the pedophile camps or whatever…”

Original Here

Gail Heriot:

“…THE LEFT HAS GONE BARKING MAD: A former Kavanaugh clerk sitting behind Kavanaugh at the hearing is accused of being a White Supremacist by a bizarre Twitter mob  that imagines she is sending some sort of “White Supremacist” hand signal.

The woman—Zina Bash—is also a former Alito clerk. Just in case it matters to you, her mother is Mexican and on her father’s side she is the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

Stop the world. It’s time for me to get off…”

JIM GERAGHTY:

“…You almost have to admire the audacity of Nike; for decades they’ve cemented their position as The Man by marketing an image of fighting The Man. Don’t let anyone tell you that they’re a group of daring, iconoclast rebels. They’re a massive publicly traded corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of athletic shoes, sporting equipment, and apparel, and their chairman is worth about $22 billion. They’re getting sued for “pay discrimination and limited opportunities for women to win promotions” and failing to address sexual-harassment complaints. They’ve settled class-action racial-discrimination lawsuits for millions of dollars. They operate a political-action committeethat gives to both parties (although more to Democrats) and are quite active in Oregon state politics.

They are the kind of big, powerful corporation with a long history of documented exploitation of overseas labor that is usually the villain in leftist narratives. Staunch progressives who proudly wear the Nike swoosh are like impassioned environmentalists wearing Exxon Valdez t-shirts.

And now, for the cost of a few million — remember Nike had nearly $10 billion in revenue last quarter — the company bought the loyalty of the woke Social Justice Warrior crowd. Sure, some folks on the right will announce they’re boycotting, but nobody collects and analyzes marketing research data like Nike. They’ve no doubt run the numbers on this and concluded that the controversy was worth it. In fact, the controversy is the whole point of the marketing campaign. (It sure as heck isn’t Kaepernick’s performance on the field!) The aim is to get every Kaepernick-hater in the country publicly raging about it — the president, conservative-talk radio, sports-talk radio — so that everyone who agrees with Kaepernick feels almost obligated to go out and buy the Kaepernick sneakers, shirt, hat, etcetera…”

Original Here

“…Funeral services are not for the benefit of the defunct, who is beyond our praise or condemnation, but for the living, who know before long that they will follow the honored dead into a cold grave.

Senator John McCain’s funeral was the most ostentatious that Washington has accorded except for a president, and much grander than the 2006 funeral of Gerald Ford, for example. The American Establishment took the opportunity to mourn a world that it imagined but never inhabited.

The eulogies for the Arizona senator, to be sure, were a convenient occasion for the Establishment to show its dudgeon at “the pointedly un-invited President Trump,” as the New Yorker noted, calling the event “the biggest resistance meeting yet.”

McCain’s daughter Meghan contrasted what she called her father’s “real greatness” with the “cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice,” a reference to Trump. Politics, though, were less important than the American elite’s collective exercise in self-consolation after the catastrophic failure of its policies and its repudiation by the voters in the 2016 election.

Senator McCain served his country and suffered on its behalf as a prisoner of war, and deserves respect on the occasion of his passing. But the unctuous sea of self-congratulatory declarations of virtue embedded in his obsequies were enough to make the portraits in the Capitol rotunda puke. . . .

In its narcissism and self-adulation, the Establishment will not die of pricking of the thumb, but the other way around.

By civility and bipartisanship, the Establishment refers to the policy consensus that squandered America’s dominant position in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. America had no military competitors of importance when George W. Bush took office in 2001, and an edge in high technology that made the American economy seem insuperable. Since then:

China has taken America’s place as the leading exporter of high-tech equipment;
America faces credible military competition from China;
Real median household income hasn’t grown since 2000;
The civilian labor force participation rate has fallen from 67% in 2000 to 63% today;
Productivity growth has languished at 1% a year since the global financial crisis;
US federal debt has between 2000 and 2018 has doubled as a share of GDP;
The American economy became “cartelized, corrupt and anti-competitive,” dominated by a handful of tech monopolies who combined to crush competition…”

https://www.atimes.com/article/a-funeral-for-a-world-that-never-was//

Weird how this never ending stream of mistakes always affects conservatives?

“…PragerU’s recent Facebook shadowbanning was reportedly due to a single “employee error” — this employee has been sent for guideline re-education but is still employed by the company.

Breitbart News spoke with PragerU recently following their issues with Facebook, the conservative non-profit found that many recent posts from their page were suffering from a 99.9999 percent drop in engagement based on Facebook’s own dashboard. The Social Media Masters of the Universe also pulled down two PragerU videos, which it labeled “hate speech.”…”

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/08/31/facebook-employee-error-responsible-for-prageru-99-9999-drop-in-reach/

Spends 3,000 words trying to cover for her, but facts revealed destroy her claim to be Native American

In a word, Journalism!

“…The story, which had the cooperation of the Warren campaign, comes just days before the first debate in Massachusetts’ Senate race. Clearly, the Warren campaign is worried after even Native Americans who are Democrats criticized Warren at the DNC in Charlotte, and is attempting to put its story out there through a friendly source.

The article is a masterpiece of distraction, weaving stories from people completely unrelated to Warren as to their own experiences with Native America family lore or growing up as Native American in the 1950’s and 1960’s with bits and pieces of Warren’s story. The end result is an attempt to paint Warren as a victim of circumstance and the times she grew up in, as a means of explaining away the many inconsistencies in her story…”

https://legalinsurrection.com/2012/09/boston-globe-unintentionally-proves-elizabeth-warrens-ethnic-fraud/

Michael Walsh:

“…Thus is lunacy now abroad in the land. The approaching congressional elections have much to do with it. Having failed first to prevent Trump’s candidacy, then betting the house on Hillary Clinton’s inevitable victory in 2016, then cashing in the DOJ/FBI’s “insurance policy” (the “Russian collusion” fantasy), then unleashing, via Rod Rosenstein, the Straight Arrow’s endless investigation into not Russian collusion but the president’s past life and business arrangements, then mounting via their journalist allies the “Resistance” to the duly elected president and our entire Constitutional system of governance, and harrying him every step of the way since, the sore-loser Left has been driven mad by the manifest failure of the Arc of History to bend their way…”

https://pjmedia.com/michaelwalsh/a-tale-of-two-funerals-and-two-waves/

We have the worst political class and media of my adult life, maybe of all time.

Charles Hurt:

“…It sure was nice to turn on the “Sunday shows” and finally get away from all the politics of this weekend’s funerals.

Listening to failed politicians hijack the funerals of two such respected American heroes as John McCain and Aretha Franklin so they could smear the sitting president really tells you all you need to know about those washed-up has-beens.

It was particularly strange to listen to all these rabid enemies of McCain in life heaping praise on him in death.

McCain was a rare genuine battle hero in American politics; but American politics treated him badly. During his presidential campaign against then-Sen. Barack Obama, McCain was slimed as a racist. During his campaign against then-Gov. George W. Bush, he endured sneaky robocalls accusing him of having an illegitimate black child.

Hard to see how both could be possible. But when it comes to low-down, dirty, dishonest gutter politics in America, nothing is out of bounds.

Somehow these people are shocked — SHOCKED! — by the harsh rhetoric of President Trump.

Give me a break.

And now these people are lining up to smear yet another good person dragged into the sewer of American politics.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, went on one of the Sunday shows to shred the good name of Mr. Trump’s latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh. (I will not say the name of the program because, honestly, I am embarrassed to have wasted precious moments of the Sabbath on such sleepy-eyed nonsense.)

Anyway, she claims to have read 148,000 documents that reveal Judge Kavanaugh to be so heinous as to be unfit for the high court.

OK, let’s say Ms. Klobuchar spent two minutes reading each document. That would be 296,000 minutes — or 205 days — reading these documents. Which is pretty remarkable considering Judge Kavanaugh was nominated 55 days ago.

There is another word for this. It is called a “lie.” And the person who utters it is known as a “liar,” even if the person she tells this “lie” to is so sleepy-eyed as to appear to be fully asleep…”

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/2/from-funerals-to-talk-shows-the-washington-gutter-/

This graph from the recent issue of Science Magazine shows 1.6 million years of alternating warm and cold periods in the recent geologic past. For me the importance of this data, which was generated from ocean sediment cores, is the time frames involved, and the number of glacial and interglacial periods. Also the fact that, though man was on earth during this interval, the Earth manged to get cold and warm in alternating cycles all by itself. Some scientists and many media personalities now think we can fully understand the global processes involved in these cycles of climate sufficient to predict, and reverse engineer the next warm period. This highlights for me the conceit and folly of man.

Michael Walsh:

At this point, it’s hard to tell:

Pope Francis wants concrete action to combat the “emergency” of plastics littering seas and oceans. Francis made the appeal in a message Saturday to galvanize Christians and others to work to save what he hails as the “marvelous,” God-given gift of the “great waters and all they contain.” He said efforts to fight plastics litter must be waged “as if everything depended on us.”

The pope also denounced as “unacceptable” the privatization of water resources at the expense of the “human right to have access to this good.” Environmental protection is a priority of his papacy.

Francis urged politicians to apply “farsighted responsibility” and generosity in dealing with climate change, as well migration policies including about those who “risk their lives at sea in search of a better future.”

“…Nice job of working in “refugees” and “migrants” into the remarks as well. Seriously, given the enormous crisis of faith the Catholic laity is currently experiencing, is this really what’s on the Pope’s mind?

Come back, Benedict, your Church needs you…”

Original Here