The populist sledgehammer kills Amazon jobs that Middle America would love to have

Salena Zito:

“…Tito Brown can’t imagine driving a perfectly good thing out of a town that hasn’t had a perfectly good thing come its way in a very long time.

At least, a perfectly good thing the size and scope of the Amazon headquarters that ideological politics drove out of Long Island City on Thursday, when Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., danced on the grave of the deal as Amazon walked away from the New York project.

Brown doesn’t really get that. He governs a city with a declining population, a 40 percent poverty rate, and would welcome the opportunity for a project such as Amazon to have considered locating here.

“Oh, any time I can get regional and/or economic growth in my community, I would absolutely want that here,” he said. “It’s budget time.”

Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the leader of the left-wing insurgency within the Democratic Party, slammed the plan in a tweet the moment it was announced in mid-November last year.

She initially said the response to the Amazon announcement from her constituents was outrage, arguing that the tax breaks Amazon would receive should be spent by city and state officials on the subway system and communities instead of billion-dollar corporations.

Which isn’t how tax breaks work. It’s not like there is a pile of money they would hand to Amazon that could have been spent on the subway system, but that is a story for a different day.

What this moment signifies in the Democratic Party is one that has been in existence for several years, but the party establishment and ruling class have been unwilling to face: the leftist populism punching up to take the reins of the party…”

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Quote of the Day

Good article. Worth clicking over.

DOV FISCHER:

“…When Ocasio-Cortez speaks, she reflects not only an element of Personal Stupid, but she also reflects a generation of college graduates who literally do not know what World War II was, what Hitler and Stalin were, what mass genocide and Golodomor and Holocaust are. That was part of the bounty of White Male Privilege…”

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Bearing False Witness: The Case of Jussie Smollett

ROBERT STACY MCCAIN:

“…Four below zero — that’s how cold it was at 2 a.m. in Chicago on Jan. 29, when actor Jussie Smollett claims he was the victim of a racist, homophobic hate crime perpetrated by two white Trump supporters. There were many reasons to be skeptical of Smollett’s story, but the fact that Chicago was experiencing a “polar vortex” of arctic cold was high on the list of doubts. Even if you could believe that two right-wingers would be stalking a not-very-famous actor in downtown Chicago, waiting for a chance to attack him on his way back from a wee-hours trip to a sandwich shop, why would they be doing this in -4°F weather?

Smollett’s story never made sense, and it came completely unraveled last week after Chicago police apprehended two of the Empire actor’s friends when they flew into O’Hare Airport, returning from a trip to Nigeria. According to reports by Chicago’s WBBM-TV and other outlets, brothers Abimbola “Abel” Osundairo and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo were paid $3,500 by Smollett to stage the fake hate crime. Police have not yet filed any charges or given an official explanation of exactly what happened, and Smollett’s attorneys issued a statement Saturday asserting his innocence, but there is now every reason to believe that the whole thing was a complete hoax. If this proves to be the case, will any of the liberals who rushed to exploit Smollett’s tale face any consequences for smearing Trump supporters?

Consider, for example, what Stephen Colbert did on The Late Show. Two days after Smollett claimed he was attacked, Colbert invited lesbian actress Ellen Page onto the CBS program to blame the Trump administration, and particularly Vice President Mike Pence, for “what happened the other day to Jussie.” After describing Pence’s conservative policies as having “hurt LGBTQ people so badly,” Page said: “Connect the dots. This is what happens if you are in a position of power and you hate people and you want to cause suffering to them — you go through the trouble, you spend your career trying to cause suffering, what do you think is going to happen?” This was either deliberate slander, or evidence of insuperable stupidity, but neither Colbert nor Page have acknowledged any error, because they don’t have to. Presumably, the advertisers and executives at CBS have no problem paying Colbert to falsely blame Republicans for a “hate crime” that turns out to be a hoax, and Page knows that every liberal in Hollywood will applaud her “courage” for insulting the vice president…”

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Great News Summary From Legal Insurrection

Two years were wasted on this investigation to find out what most people already knew.

And look who else was cleared.

Now let’s look at some real collusion.

Here we go.

No jobs for you!

It didn’t work.

Lovely.

The truth comes out.

Surprise!

World news.

Branco cartoons!

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Smollett Case a New Low for Media

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Shot: Police sources: New evidence suggests Jussie Smollett orchestrated attack.

—CNN, tonight.

Chaser: Don Lemon Says He Texts Jussie Smollett Every Day Following Attack.

Entertainment Tonight, Tuesday.

Hangover: Cameron Gray collects a ton of tweets on the alleged Jussie Smollett attack that might not age well.

Twitchy, Thursday.

UPDATE: “As the Smollett tale unravels, MSM hasn’t been this blindly wrong about a story that smears Trump supporters in *checks watch* 3 weeks. #Covington”

Ed Driscoll strung this together

Andrew McCabe is a national disgrace – and we owe him a big, fat thank you

Michael Goodwin:

“…Andrew McCabe is a national disgrace. He was part of the most corrupt and most partisan leadership team in FBI history and was fired for being dishonest under oath.

And yet, America owes him a big thank-you.

McCabe, you see, has reminded us once again that there really is a powerful deep state, and that there has not been a full accounting of rampant FBI misconduct during the presidential campaign of 2016.

There is also still too much we don’t know about the role top aides to then-President Barack Obama and higher-ups in the Justice Department played in spying on the Trump campaign and leaks of classified information for partisan purposes.

In short, what is arguably the greatest scandal in the history of America remains mostly hidden from the public. That shroud of secrecy piles one scandal on top of another.

Fortunately, the McCabe reminder is a timely one, coming on the same day that William Barr was confirmed as the new attorney general. Barr is just the man to get to the bottom of the unprecedented plot to swing an election and later to remove a duly-elected president…”

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The deep blob

Roger Kimball:

“…There follows a few hundred words of brow-wrinkled prose about their ‘so alarmed,’ ‘dire concerns’ that the President had just fired their guy, FBI director James ‘higher loyalty’ Comey, that they got together and wondered how they could entice the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to collude (ooo, there’s that word!) to invoke the 25th Amendment and jettison a guy they didn’t approve of.

The Times story is cast in their best anodyne prose, carefully tilted to make it seem as if this was perfectly reasonable, business-as-usual stuff.

But it wasn’t reasonable, and it is business-as-usual only in a banana republic or a polity that is essentially ruled by hyper-bureaucratized administrative apparatus.

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Even for the Times that must have been a twisted cue.

‘Justice Department Officials Had Discussions About Pushing Trump Out.’ Think about it. On May 9. the President fires his employee, James Comey. Panic in Bureau. Scarcely a week later, the Big Boy Scout, Robert Mueller is appointed by Rod Rosenstein to be Special Counsel in charge of the Get Trump battalion. It’s a real flood the zone operation. Pre-dawn raids, full-press intimidation, careers ruined.

It’s been going on so long, and has involved so many nefarious characters in such high positions in the Obama administration and our intelligence and law enforcement services, that it is hard to keep the main fact, the overwhelming point of the episode in mind.

It is this: people in the FBI (aided an abetted by elements in the CIA and the Obama administration) decided that they didn’t like the person who had been elected President of the United States. Their anger and frustration boiled over when the President had the temerity to fire their man, James Comey. So they plotted to get rid of him.

The FBI didn’t like the President. so they plotted to remove him from office. That is the irreducible minimum, class, that you should take away from this whole sordid lesson. Top figures in the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not approve of the President. Therefore, they took steps to destroy him. Rod Rosenstein, Deputy Attorney General, several times offered to wear a wire to entrap the President.

The fact that this all took place in May 2017 has led many observers to compare the FBI’s actions to the movie Seven Days in May, which described a plot by the military to take over the government.

What ever have here is nothing so melodramatic. There’s no Burt Lancaster or Kirk Douglas. And there is certainly no Ava Gardner. No, it’s all gray on gray. The oozing, engulfing, suffocating metastasis of the administrative state, a bureaucracy drunk on its own prerogatives, fired by a misplaced sense of election (‘higher loyalty,’ remember) conveniently indistinguishable from its own entitlement and quest for power…”

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Presidential plotters must face punishment

“…That Justice Department officials were having discussions about ousting a sitting president should concern every American. It is simply astonishing that these actors allegedly held conversations around the notion of seizing power from the elected head of the executive branch.

Obviously, heads should roll, but really such a plot should result in criminal prosecutions with all the high-profile force that was used to arrest Roger Stone.

The new revelations come to us care of former FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe, who has written a book and is shilling it on “60 Minutes.” The interview will air in full on Sunday, but the tidbits that have been released in advance are already damning.

According to CBS’ Scott Pelley, the reporter who interviewed McCabe, after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, McCabe jumped into action with other members of the Justice Department. McCabe was alarmed that Trump “might have won the White House with the aid of the government of Russia.” The next day, he brought the investigators together for a meeting.

“There were meetings at the Justice Department at which it was discussed whether the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet could be brought together to remove the president of the United States under the 25th Amendment,” Pelley said.

“I was speaking to the man who had just run for the presidency and just won the election for the presidency,” McCabe told CBS. “And who might have done so with the aid of the government of Russia, our most formidable adversary on the world stage, and that was something that troubled me greatly.”

The arrogance is astounding.

According to Pelley, McCabe noted that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein offered to wear a wire in order to record conversations with President Trump and the idea was discussed on several occasions. It was “so serious that he took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss it,” Pelley explained on “CBS This Morning.”

It was at this time that Rosenstein appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate whether Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russians interfering in the 2016 election.

This is one tight circle of Washington, D.C., Justice Department brass and G-men. And they’ve succeeded in hampering a sitting president using their power because they were “troubled” by him.

These men must face consequences for their actions.

Thankfully a purge has begun.

As we know, Director Comey was fired, as was Deputy Director McCabe, and Peter Strzok, an FBI senior counterintelligence agent, a onetime member of Mueller’s team. Add to that Lisa Page, who was also on the Mueller team, and Bruce Ohr, who was stripped of his title as associate deputy attorney general.

Page had been texting anti-Trump messages back and forth with Strzok, and Ohr had been in contact with the authors of the Steele dossier shortly after the election. In fact, Ohr is married to Nellie Ohr, who worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that hired ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to compile the infamous dossier.

And this is just a partial list.

Americans need to know the entire story.  If, as it appears, there was an effort to sabotage a presidency and create elaborate distractions and cover-ups using the powers entrusted to them, members of the U.S. government have involved themselves in a criminal conspiracy that dwarfs Watergate…”

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Doug Santo