op ed review 4/9
Trump hits Assad in Syria, dominating the weekend news and
deflating the mainstream media Russia collusion story.
Gorsuch confirmed.
Why the Left is unhinged: “Bit by bit, Trump methodically undoing Obama
policies”
And they’re afraid of news like this: The number of employed
Americans increased 472,000 to 153,000,000 in March, setting a second straight
monthly record; and the number of unemployed persons dropped by 326,000 to 7.2
million.
The diplomat who is in line to be America´s next NATO
ambassador said that former National Security Advisor Susan Rice has been
suspected ´for weeks´ of involvement in an effort to publicly unmask Donald
Trump associates whose names appeared in foreign intelligence reports. And he
claimed ten days ago that if Rice and her deputy Ben Rhodes were behind
politically motivated leaks of classified intelligence, former president Barack
Obama was also in the know.
CNN
has raced to shoot down the story on Susan Rice. CNN Don Lemon went so far as
to announce he
would ignore the news at all costs. CNN's Chris Cuomo claimed it was "demonstrably
untrue" Rice sought
surveillance of the Trump team, even as that's exactly what yesterday's reports
prove.
The New York Times and Bloomberg knew about Susan Rice’s unmasking
of Trump officials but sat on the story.
Lawmakers probing the surveillance of key Trump officials say
the intelligence agencies now nominally under the president’s control are
stonewalling efforts to get to the bottom of who revealed names and leaked
protected information to the press.
Ben Carson Finds $500 Billion in Errors in Obama HUD
Audit. Mainstream media silence.
Illegal immigration down 67 percent under Trump
Arrests of people caught trying to sneak into the United
States across the Mexican border plummeted in March to the lowest monthly
figure in more than 17 years,
How corrupt is the Mexican government? Mexican state
attorney general arrested at U.S. border in San Diego “on charges that he
conspired to smuggle heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine into the U.S.”
Fresh evidence the Russia ‘scandal’ is a Team Obama operation
Vice President Pence cast a tie-breaking Senate vote
Thursday to advance legislation that would allow states to withhold federal
funds from Planned Parenthood and other health care providers that perform
abortions.
New documents obtained by government watchdog group Judicial
Watch show the IRS targeting scandal was more expansive than previously known
and show IRS officials admitting the tactics used to hinder conservative groups
were inappropriate
The gun industry may be headed for a slump after eight years
of explosive growth under former President Barack Obama.
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Scott Uehlinger 4/5
The U.S. intelligence community is in the midst of a severe
crisis. It has been used, or perhaps allowed itself to be used, as a tool of
political destruction, against some of the same U.S. citizens it was created to
protect.
What I am talking about is the continuing “Wiretapgate”
debacle. We are seeing the widespread abuse of intelligence by an incumbent
administration to target political opposition. Long a technique in the
developing world — a tactic I often witnessed as a CIA station chief working
abroad — the Third World has come to roost in the United States. It is a
tragedy of the first order.
The danger of politicization is widely accepted throughout
the intelligence community as the greatest hazard, in theory, to the
intelligence profession. If an intel service cannot be accepted as an unbiased
arbiter, it loses the trust of its people, and risks becoming irrelevant and
unheeded. History is littered with intel failures; one need only look to the
invasion of Iraq to see how politicization can lead to costly failure and a
“trust gap” that can take years to bridge and resolve.
Truth, despite the naysayers, is objective and absolute. The
intelligence community has a responsibility to provide the most informed truth
to the president. The truth, warts and all, will always be the soundest basis
for any foreign policy. This is what our multibillion-dollar intel leviathan
owes the American people and its government.
It has become clear to the American public, however, that
intelligence leadership learned long ago to stop listening to its own
philosophy. The twin serpents of politicization and political correctness — a
Soviet term, by the way — walk hand in hand throughout the intelligence
community, as well as every other government agency. The PC mindset that now
dominates every college campus is also positioned firmly throughout our
government — particularly within the intelligence community, which saw its
greatest personnel influx ever in the post-9/11 environment. Today’s
intelligence community, the average age of which I would estimate at 32, was
raised under the beleaguered Bush administration and reached professional
maturity primarily under the Obama administration, immersed in a PC
environment.
In this PC world, all diversity is embraced — except
diversity of thought. Federal workers have been partisan for years, but
combined with the rigid Obama PC mindset, it has created a Frankenstein of
politicization that has never been seen before.
Watching Evelyn Farkas admit on TV that the Obama
administration wanted the intelligence community to “get as much information as
you can” before Donald Trump took office resembles some sort of social science
experiment gone bad — and it frames the problems wrought by PC/political
brainwashing. Here a mid-level official, permanently dwelling in a bubble of
progressive liberalism, acknowledged being complicit in the breaking of U.S.
ethics rules and perhaps law — because, as she explained, that’s what they
needed to do!
Farkus has all the right credentials: a Ph.D. and a career
shuttling between academia, the government and the press that is the hallmark
of the anointed “Washington insider” class. What is lacking, however, is any
level of self-awareness, common sense or judgment. She is emblematic of the
denizens of the Deep State that everyone in Washington likes to tell us doesn’t
exist.
I am here to tell you, having served in the CIA and the
Naval Reserve, that the Deep State does indeed exist. And it’s not a bunch of
centrally controlled drones in black robes meeting at midnight. The Deep State
is made up of thousands of similarly credentialed, remarkably “un-diverse”
civil servants and political appointees who saw themselves promoted rapidly
during the eight years of the Obama administration. The appointees have left,
but make no mistake — the progressive civil servants remain.
There is little doubt that intel leadership saw Obama’s relaxation
of rules regulating the sharing of NSA raw intelligence — for which there is NO
operational justification — and did nothing. They also saw the Obama
administration’s demand for “incidental”
collection on the Trump campaign at an unprecedented level — and
still they did nothing.
Like some binary poisonous reagent, these dynamics combined
to foster an environment ripe for political abuse and leakage — a fairly
transparent attempt, from the point of view of any discerning intelligence
officer. This weaponization of intelligence for the sake of discrediting the
political opposition I have seen in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, Moldova and elsewhere —
sadly, it is now on our shores.
The present culture of the intelligence community and the
shameless political shenanigans of the Obama administration combined to create
this disaster. In earlier times, such a gambit would have failed; CIA
leadership famously stood up to the Nixon administration when asked to
domestically spy on Justice during Watergate, for example. It seems that today
we lack the character and the competence to ensure that the intelligence
community honors the trust of the American people.
____________________________________________________________________
OTHER COLUMNS
“What does the Left’s newfound enthusiasm for the Bible tell
us? It tells us that the Left doesn’t actually believe in the Bible — the Left
believes in government. Every time the Left cites the Bible, it does so as an
excuse to let government take from some and redistribute to others, or compel
work from some on behalf of others.”
-Ben Shapiro
“Obviously, there are going to be a lot of stars from the
Obama years in need of lawyers. One question does bother me: How could so many
Obama aides be so stupid as to eavesdrop on team Trump after
Trump won the election?”
-R.
Emmett Tyrrell
_____________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
The LA Times disgraces itself with this editorial: “Our Dishonest President”. Some are calling it “The most astonishing
editorial ever written.”
Associate professor at Drexel University ignites a Twitter
firestorm when he tweets that he was trying not to "vomit" when he
witnessed a fellow passenger aboard his flight give up a first class seat to a
uniformed soldier.
Hillary urges democrats to "resist, insist, persist,
enlist."
For everything there is a season, and for many the Time of
Trump is the season for perpetual outrage. The latest horror is over President
Trump’s supposed “erasing” of the LGBT community, because the 2020 Census isn’t
asking any questions about sexual orientation or gender identification.
The University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada, is hosting
a “masculinity confession booth” this week, in which male students are asked to
confess sins that may have been inspired by the Western world’s emphasis on
“hypermasculinity.”
Harvard University has decided to edit its anthem lyrics to
remove the term "Puritan," which a school 'task force' found
insufficiently inclusive.
Leftie professor writing in Time Magazine: “America should
never be "great again"….its a bad thing for the world.
PETA says milk is a 'Symbol of White Supremacy'...
___________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Here, courtesy of Palestinian Media Watch, is the moderate
liberal Islamic position on beating your wife: Don't do it too hard. “….the
goal of the beatings is rebuke in a way that does not cause injury.”
___________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Global Warming: Listen to the critics, and you´d think
President Trump´s executive order on federal climate change regulations spells
doom for the planet. But an Obama administration report shows why such fears
are wildly exaggerated.
Fewer than 1 percent of papers published in scientific
journals follow the scientific method, according to research by Wharton School
professor and forecasting expert J. Scott Armstrong. Professor Armstrong, who
co-founded the peer-reviewed Journal of Forecasting in 1982 and the
International Journal of Forecasting in 1985, made the claim in a presentation
about what he considers to be “alarmism” from forecasters over man-made climate
change.
_____________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Donald Trump may not look like a conservative, act like a
conservative or sound like a conservative, but he has been governing like one.
Many Republican activists are satisfied with the first 70 days of his
administration. In conversations with such figures this week, issues such as
Trump’s controversial travel bans or the resignation of national security
adviser Michael Flynn did not come up. Instead, optimism centered around
efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations and the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to
fill the vacant supreme court seat.
Hard times have arrived at the Environmental Protection
Agency. It’s not just the budget and staff cuts which have the long time
staffers down in the dumps. It seems that they feel the new boss, Scott Pruitt,
as well as his boss, aren’t exactly onboard with the old agenda which
they’ve grown used to over eight years under Barack Obama. This has some of
them feeling so glum and hopeless that they are thinking of leaving their
plush, virtually fire-proof jobs and heading out in search of greener pastures. 😊
After years in the political wilderness, Republicans have
honed their skills as an opposition party to a fine edge, but their electoral
success requires that they govern. With control of both houses of Congress and
the White House, Republicans need to close the gap between theory and practice
quickly. “GOP Leaders, Remember Trump Ran
Against Your Pieties … and Won”
VDH:
The
entire Trump-collusion-with-Russia narrative has now descended into
incoherence.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446148/russian-farce-trump-collusion-hysteria-diverts-attention-surveillance-scandal
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446148/russian-farce-trump-collusion-hysteria-diverts-attention-surveillance-scandal
“Nuke ‘em till they
glow” The Democrats must learn through
pain, specifically the agony of watching Neil Gorsuch take the seat that they
stompy-feet insist belongs to Merrick Garland. For too long, they’ve packed the
bench with liberal partisans committed to exercising raw power as an end-run
around democracy and the Constitution. Well, if raw power is the rule, then
they need to choke on it. And we should laugh at their pain even as we amplify
it via the Nuclear Option. Thank you, Harry Reid!
___________________________________________________________________
LISTS, CHARTS, GUIDES, ETC.
A
Beginner’s Guide to the Trump/Russia Controversy
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/446339/donald-trump-russia-2016-election-controversy-explained
____________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended
with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience.”
-Alexander Hamilton
“Wherever is found what is called a paternal government,
there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to
insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.”
-Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)
posted by gary at
6:14 PM
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