“…The Supreme Court reversed the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals again Tuesday in an immigration case that turned on a clear-cut question of statutory interpretation. While the 5-4 conservative majority read the law as it was written, the Court’s liberals would have overruled Congress.

Federal immigration law generally authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to detain “deportable” immigrants with the discretion to release them on bond or parole if they don’t endanger the public. Congress in 1996 limited executive discretion and required the government to detain immigrants who have committed certain crimes or have links to terrorism “when [they are] released” from prison or jail.

In Nielsen v. Preap, plaintiffs argued that if the government does not detain the criminal immigrants immediately upon their release—that is, the day they leave jail—they are entitled to a bond or parole hearing. Immigration officials didn’t detain the lead plaintiff until 2013, seven years after being released from criminal custody. The case is especially ripe since sanctuary cities often don’t inform federal authorities when they release criminal immigrants.

Siding with the plaintiffs, the Ninth Circuit twisted itself into knots to rule against the Trump Administration. But as Justice Samuel Alito observed in the majority decision, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling “misreads the structure” of the law and would result in all kinds of legal absurdities.

“It would be ridiculous to read paragraph (1) as saying: ‘The Secretary must arrest, upon their release from jail, a particular subset of criminal aliens. Which ones? Only those who are arrested upon their release from jail,’” Justice Alito noted, adding that “The mandatory-detention scheme [favored by the Ninth Circuit] would be gentler on terrorists than it is on garden-variety offenders.”

Or as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explained in his pithy concurrence: “It would be odd, in my view, if the Act (1) mandated detention of particular noncitizens because the noncitizens posed such a serious risk of danger or flight that they must be detained during their removal proceedings, but (2) nonetheless allowed the noncitizens to remain free during their removal proceedings if the Executive Branch failed to immediately detain them upon their release from criminal custody.”

Although the case involved a narrow statutory question, the Court’s four liberals quibbled about the law’s policy implications on the nation’s “values.” For instance, what if immigrants were detained years after being released from police custody and have “established families and put down roots in a community”? The Court’s job isn’t to substitute its policy judgments for those of Congress…”

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The Only Option They Had as Pseudo-Conservatives

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Something in this country went radically wrong in the 1980s and 1990s. We created an entire subversive ideology according to which loud allegiance to “progressivism” — decrying class, race, and gender “inequality” —  excused an institution or industry from bias, exempted it from following the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution, and made competency in its mission of educating youth irrelevant. And worse still, so-called progressive egalitarians transformed the idea of an elite college degree from a reflection of wide reading, inductive thinking, and scientific and mathematical literacy into a mere cattle brand, a showy trademark that advertised social-justice virtue and provided entrée into the well-paying capitalist rat race.

Yet once politics serves as such a blanket exemption for institutions, then it’s no surprise that the institutions ignore or even normalize fraud, racial and class discrimination, and consumer misinformation.

The rationale of contemporary higher education is that such progressive angels surely cannot be self-interested devils…”

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Socks the cat peers over the podium in the White House briefing room Saturday, March 19, 1994. A White House groundskeeper was walking Socks when he stopped and lifted Socks to the podium.

Don’t believe the White Supremacy nonsense coming from the media and the left. They never stop attacking Trump and actual facts mean nothing.

Worth clicking over to read the whole thing. The media loved McCain, now we see why.

Julie Kelly:

“…After receiving a subpoena to appear before the House Intelligence Committee last year,  David Kramer, a close associate of the late Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The committee had additional questions to ask Kramer about his handling of the infamous Steele dossier, which he helped circulate on Capitol Hill and in the news media after the 2016 presidential election.

Now, we may know why.

Kramer’s recently unsealed court deposition in a lawsuit related to the dossier contains bombshell revelations that not only directly contradict media reporting about how McCain came into possession of the dossier, but Kramer’s December 2017 testimony also undercut claims made by McCain himself in his 2018 book. This might explain why Kramer refused to appear before the committee for a second time.

It’s important to revisit the history of the dossier. While the term is meant to confer seriousness (it sounds more official than “file”), the dossier is nothing more than unverified political opposition research produced by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who now runs a consulting firm in London. Steele was hired in mid-2016 by Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, also a political consulting firm, to dig up Russia-related dirt on then-candidate Trump. Simpson, in turn, was being paid by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

(Steele and Simpson have collaborated since 2009 on behalf of “oligarchs litigating against other oligarchs,” according to a 2017 article in The Guardian.)

Steele confessed that he never traveled to Russia, and instead relied on distant sources and hearsay for the dossier, which is a poorly formatted and in some places, ridiculous, collection of allegations about Trump and some associates. It’s nothing close to hard evidence—but that did not stop former FBI Director James Comey from presenting the dossier to a secret court in order to obtain a warrant to spy on a Trump campaign volunteer.

The dossier was used before the election for a number of nefarious purposes by political schemers at the highest levels of government. But McCain’s engagement occurred after the election. This is even more troubling because the shady dossier was legitimized arguably by Trump’s most powerful enemy on Capitol Hill in a campaign to sabotage the duly elected president of the United States.

Shortly after the election, McCain and Kramer attended a conference in Nova Scotia. Kramer, who worked for the McCain Institute at the time, hosted a panel with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia. At the November 19, 2016 event, McCain, Kramer, and a staffer for the Senate armed services committee briefly met with Wood.

According to Kramer, Wood mentioned “the possibility of a video that might have shown the president-elect in a compromising situation. He mentioned that it was, if it existed, from a hotel in Moscow before he was president-elect, and . . . [it] was of a sexual nature.” (Wood was referring to the infamous “pee pee” tape that has yet to surface.)

In his final book, The Restless Wave, McCain described the somber climate of the meeting despite its farcical topic.

“Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity,” McCain wrote. “We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, and the atmosphere was eerie.” Both Kramer and McCain admit that Wood did not present to them any material, including the dossier. At that point, it was gossip. But McCain “was taken aback. They were shocking allegations.” (Wood, it turns out, is an advisor to Steele’s consulting firm.)

What happened afterwards appears to be in dispute. McCain wrote, “Kramer offered to go to London to meet with Steele, confirm his credibility, and report back to me. I agreed to the idea.”

But Kramer had a different, and far more consequential, version of the story. In his deposition, Kramer testified that McCain directed him to meet with Steele. “[Wood] said that the person who gathered this was in London and would be willing to meet. And so the Senator turned to me and asked me if I would go to London to meet with what turned out to be Steele.”

This is a distinction with a major difference; if Kramer indeed offered to go of his own accord, that’s far different than a sitting U.S. senator directing an associate to travel overseas to track down information from an unknown British consultant that would humiliate the incoming U.S. president. In his own June 2018 court deposition, Steele testified that “McCain nominated [Kramer] as the intermediary” between the hired gun and the senator.

There is another significant fact Kramer revealed that contradicts news reports as well as McCain’s suggestion in his book about who furnished the dossier to him. The public has been led to believe that Steele gave Kramer a top-secret copy of the dossier during their November 28, 2016 meeting in London; Kramer, in turn, gave it to McCain upon his arrival home. “Kramer flew back to Washington that same night, guarding his hard-won prize with his life,” wrote Howard Blum in a 2017 puff piece about Steele for Vanity Fair.

McCain also intimated that Steele was his source for the dossier. “When David returned and shared his impression that the former spy was . . . a respected professional . . . I agreed to receive a copy of what is now referred to as ‘the dossier.’ I reviewed its contents. The allegations were disturbing.”

In fact, Steele refused to give Kramer the dossier in London; instead he arranged for Kramer to meet Glenn Simpson in Washington the very next day. It was Simpson, a DNC-Hillary Clinton hired gun, who was responsible for furnishing two versions of the dossier to Kramer and ultimately to McCain.

“Both [Simpson] and Steele knew that I was going to give this to Senator McCain,” Kramer testified. “[Simpson] indicated to me that it was a very sensitive document and needed to be handled very carefully. That it covered material that was politically sensitive and in terms of the allegations in here, so it was not something to be bandied about.” Kramer also acknowledged he became aware that Fusion had a “relationship” with Steele at that point.

Even more troubling, Kramer claimed McCain did not carefully vet the 35-page dossier…”

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The net effect of all this is that men will not mentor female staff as before. It will have an overall negative effect on females in the workplace.

Paul Bedard:

“…The new numbers show that even among women the issue has plateaued.

Overall, 62 percent of adults believe sexual harassment is a “major problem.” That is down from 69 percent in 2017.

Among men, 53 percent see it as a major problem, down from 66 percent in October 2017.

For women, 70 percent call it a major problem, down from 73 percent in 2017.

While still in the minority, more also see that “people in the workplace are too sensitive” to the issue, said Gallup.

For men, 45 percent said people are “too sensitive,” while 46 percent said they aren’t “sensitive enough.” At the height of the movement, 54 percent said people were “not sensitive enough,” versus 33 percent who felt people were “too sensitive.”…”

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However good its intention, recycling was always a poorly thought-out scheme. The benefit was to liberal nany-staters who gained additional control over the lives of Americans, and additional cause for moral preening.

Michael Corkery:

Racism in America today comes from the progressive left’s attempts to feel good about themselves. Nothing ever works.

Eric Kaufmann:

“…We find this pattern across numerous issues. And taken as a whole, it reveals something about the United States in the Trump era: The country is not divided by racial conflict, but by conflict over racial ideology. This is a crucial difference — and it is also grounds for optimism.

Race pertains to communities defined by ancestry and physical appearance. Racial ideology turns instead on race as a political idea. Questions like “Should Northam resign?” or “Is the wall racist?” divide voters today by ideology far more than race. “White” is a description of a person’s race, whereas feelings about whether whites are privileged or whether diversity makes the country stronger are part of a person’s racial ideology.

Liberal whites — not minorities — are setting the tone on these issues.

Since 2012, white liberals have moved considerably left on questions related to race, reflecting both a campus- and online-driven cultural awakening that has accelerated in response to Mr. Trump. On the American National Election Study’s scale measuring how respondents feel about a group — white liberals are warmer toward minorities than their own racial group. . . . For example, support for immigration among Democrats has broadly risen, but that rise is much more pronounced for white Democrats than for black Democrats. . . .

Yet Trump voters rate minorities relatively warmly. Racial ideology rather than race accounts for their differences with white Democrats: White Republicans reject affirmative action, the notion of white privilege and the idea that racial discrimination continues to hold minorities back.

Minorities again rank in between on many of these measures. When it comes to “microaggression” statements such as “America is a colorblind society” or “You are so articulate,” few blacks and Hispanics find these offensive while more liberal whites do…”

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The media are really Democratic party activists masquerading as “journalists.” Their journalism takes a backseat to, and enables, their activism.

“…Members of the group, which calls itself Cult of the Dead Cow, protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise the former Texas Congressman’s political career. After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the record. In an interview in late 2017, O’Rourke acknowledged that he was a member of the group, on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.”…”

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Just Imagine the response to this if the parties, Democrat and Republican, were reversed.

Steele admits he used posts from ‘random individuals’ on CNN website for Trump dossier

Rick Moran:

“…The dossier that launched several investigations into Donald Trump and his presidential campaign was based, in part, on posts from “random individuals” from a CNN website that allows the public to publish unverified information.

Christopher Steele made the admission in a deposition given in connection with a lawsuit against the dossier.  The judge released portions of the deposition this week.

Washington Examiner:

According to deposition transcripts released this week, Steele said last year he used a 2009 report he found on CNN’s iReport website and said he wasn’t aware that submissions to that site are posted by members of the public and are not checked for accuracy.

A web archive from July 29, 2009 shows that CNN described the site in this manner: “iReport.com is a user-generated site.  That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post.”

The FBI was able to obtain several FISA warrants based on the dossier.  Was the FISA judge told that some of the information was from an internet crank?

He was pressed on this further: “Do you understand that CNN iReports are or were nothing more than any random individuals’ assertions on the Internet?”  Steele replied: “No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it may has [sic] some kind of CNN status.  Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site.”

When asked about his methodology for searching for this information, Steele described it as “what we could call an open source search,” which he defined as “where you go into the Internet and you access material that is available on the Internet that is of relevance or reference to the issue at hand or the person under consideration.”

Steele said his dossier contained “raw intelligence” that he admitted could contain untrue or even “deliberately false information.”

When in doubt, Google it.

The FBI was aware of Steele’s “sources” but still used the dossier to convince a FISA judge to issue a warrant against Trump campaign aide Carter Page.  That the FBI has, to this day, refused to verify the authenticity of the information in the dossier is not surprising.  A document as flawed as this should never have been presented to a FISA court as justification for granting a warrant to spy on Carter Page.  It makes the FBI look ridiculous.

Many on the left still take the dossier as gospel and refer to it as if it were relevant.  It isn’t.  It was a political smear job, paid for by Democrats, that Steele passed on to a former aide to GOP presidential candidate John McCain, who gave it to BuzzFeed, who then posted it.

The FBI has no interest in declaring most of the information in the dossier untrue.  Look at the anti-Trump mileage they’re getting out of it.  Someday, in some dusty history of our times, a small footnote will tell the story of how a political hit job was used to try to blow up a presidency…”

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AP: Job openings rise, outnumber the unemployed by 1 million