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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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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“…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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Glenn Reynolds strung this together:

This was an effort to overturn a legitimate election by undemocratic means, for selfish reasons. People should be fired, and quite possibly prosecuted, for this.

Anyone who lied to the President as part of this is subject to prosecution under the False Statements Act.

JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…I am so old, I can remember when liberals invented the term “fake news” to refer to pro-Trump commentary on Facebook. Those days are long gone, of course, and President Trump has made the phrase his own. “Fake news” now refers to the partisan falsehoods that dominate the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and many other news outlets.

Which you can tell by the fact that when the phrase appears, reporters understand that they are being called out. In the proud tradition of free speech totalitarianism, which they so often represent, they are trying to stamp out use of the phrase that they invented. Bloomingdale’s inadvertently transgressed by selling a t-shirt that included the legend “Fake News”

Like Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, that couldn’t be allowed to stand. Reporters swung into action, as detailed here. Of course, Bloomingdale’s hadn’t intended to transgress against liberalism, so it groveled as you would expect:

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention and we apologize for any offense we may have caused,” the company said in a statement posted to Twitter. “We take this feedback very seriously and are working quickly to remove this t-shirt. Again, thank you for taking the time to alert us.”

That apology was deemed inadequate and insincere by reporters–sort of like Ilhan Omar’s–and reporters continued their assault on the company. Which was only trying to sell t-shirts, not delegitimize and destroy a foreign country. But I digress.

It isn’t surprising that the totalitarian impulse is strong in lots of Americans who consider themselves superior to their deplorable neighbors. But it might be considered newsworthy that the totalitarian impulse is strong among American journalists…”

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“…Seven of 10 new students in a Baltimore-Washington area school district are immigrants, their legal status unknown and their second language English, according to a series of new media reports about the impact of surging immigration on local communities.

A recent Baltimore Sun report said that of the 5,000 new students jamming Baltimore County schools in the past five years, 3,500 are “recent immigrants or children whose family speak another language.”

That has helped to double the percentage of students who speak English as a second language, part of a national trend…”

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If nothing else, Newsome appears to be pragmatic.

“…California Governor Gavin Newsom said on Tuesday the state will dramatically scale back a planned $77.3 billion high-speed rail project that has faced cost hikes, delays and management concerns, but will finish a smaller section of the line.

“Let’s be real. The current project, as planned, would cost too much and respectfully take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency,” Newsom said in his first State of the State Address to lawmakers on Tuesday.

“Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. (Los Angeles). I wish there were,” he said.

Newsom said the state will complete a 119-mile (191 km) high-speed rail link between Merced and Bakersfield in the state’s Central Valley. In March 2018, the state forecast the costs had jumped by $13 billion to $77 billion and warned that the costs could be as much as $98.1 billion…”

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https://youtu.be/QrLkMR7nUUI

Former KKK Grand Wizard Defends Omar Tweets

ILANA REDSTONE AKRESH:

“…Our universities are failing students by teaching them that there’s only one right way to understand our most vexing inequalities and social problems. This undoubtedly disproportionately affects students focusing their studies in the social sciences, but the near universality of cross-disciplinary general-education requirements (such that many students, regardless of their area of study, are required to take courses in the social sciences) suggests that almost no student is immune.

In sociology, for instance, we teach students about a wide range of social disparities. This entails conversations about the causes of those differences. Yet we do students an enormous disservice teaching them only about the possible structural causes of those disparities — aspects we can blame on the “system” or on “institutions.” Students learn, for example, that the gender pay gap is due to systemic labor-market discrimination against women and a devaluation of women’s work. These are likely contributing factors. But when pressed on the topic, most students can’t name a single additional factor that might contribute to the wage difference (such as variation between the sexes in job preferences or priorities).

I have had a chance to see this firsthand in an undergraduate course I am currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Aptly, the course is called Social Problems. It is an intro-level course in the sociology department and serves as a gateway to the major. On the first day of class, I told students that I would be teaching from multiple political angles — i.e., from a “heterodox” perspective — an approach that would necessarily include conservative viewpoints that are likely heard less often in their other classes.

We’re now almost four weeks into the semester and it’s clear that these bright, engaged students are not being exposed to the range of perspectives that they will need in their lives after college. I expect that, in this regard, they resemble students at many other institutions across the country. They are led to believe that our most difficult problems have simple causes and that those causes are rooted in structural bias that the right policies will fix. In addition, they are taught that this is the only right way to view these challenges…”

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Ilhan Omar Apologizes for Jew Hatred, Promises to Make it Less Obvious

Robert A Heinlein:

“Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

JOHN HINDERAKER:

“…If you dispute the inflated and inconsistent claims of global warming alarmists, you are denounced as anti-science. You may even find yourself under investigation. But is catastrophic anthropogenic global warming actually a scientific theory at all?

A fundamental principle of science is that a theory, to have any significance, must be falsifiable. Science proceeds by proposing a hypothesis, and figuring out what the hypothesis implies. Scientists then make real-world observations to determine whether the theory’s implications do, in fact, obtain. They look for implications that are specific to the theory, so that, for example, it doesn’t work to say: If this theory is valid, the sky will be blue. Voila! Any theory can be consistent with countless facts, but if it implies a prediction that is falsified by observation, the theory is wrong. Period.

Also: a model is not evidence. A model is a theory. Whether the model is correct or not depends on its consistency with observation.

This is so elementary that it shouldn’t need to be explained. But apparently, America’s public schools are not teaching the scientific method. Otherwise, how to explain the Green New Deal?

The alarmists’ predictions of rapidly rising global temperatures have repeatedly failed to come true, which is why the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dramatically scaled back its predictions of future temperature increases a few years ago. Thus, the alarmists shifted to “climate change,” a hopelessly flexible concept that can be assigned to any untoward weather event.

When the polar vortex brought temperatures of 20 below zero to the Twin Cities last week, some alarmists–those who didn’t politely remain silent–assured us that bitter cold temperatures were caused by global warming, via the Arctic. This was only days after a climate “expert” testified before a Minnesota legislative committee that “scientists” no longer expect Duluth, Minnesota, to see temperatures colder than 10 degrees. At that moment, temperatures of -25 to -30 degrees were just outside the 10-day forecast for Duluth.

But being a global warming alarmist means never having to say you’re sorry. Why recant, when billions of government dollars continue to flow, no matter how many wrong predictions you make? So far, the leftist alarmists have had the last laugh: consistently wrong, but never in doubt. And still lavishly funded…”

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Dem. Rep. Al Green Blames Trump for Ralph Northam Scandal, Urges Impeachment. “Va. Gov.’s refusal to resign is a symptom of Trump’s bigotry, Congressman says.”

“…Public optimism in their personal economy has hit a 16-year high under President Trump, according to a new survey.

Some 69 percent told Gallup that they expect their personal finances to be even better next year, just shy of the record 71 percent when the internet boom was raging under former President Bill Clinton.

What’s more, the survey company said that 50 percent believe they are “better off” than just a year ago when the current economic surge was kicking in and when the White House coined the phrase “MAGAnomics.”

Gallup said that is the first time the level has reach 50 percent since 2007.

“Americans’ optimism about their personal finances has climbed to levels not seen in more than 16 years, with 69 percent now saying they expect to be financially better off ‘at this time next year,’” said Gallup.

The highlights:

69 percent expect their financial situation to improve over the next year.
Optimism about finances over the next year is almost at a record-high level.
50 percent say they are in better shape financially than a year ago.

The president has been touting the economy and stock market recently, and Republicans are urging him to continue with policies like deregulation that can continue to feed growth…”

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