Saturday, December 16, 2017

op ed review 12/17



Economy is now forecast to grow 4%
The Trump administration will reverse course from previous Obama administration policy, eliminating climate change from a list of national security threats.

The Federal Communications Commission has jettisoned the heavy-handed regulatory burden placed on a free and open Internet during the Obama administration. The FCC voted 3-2 on December 14th, along party lines, to repeal the so-called “net neutrality” rules adopted by the regulatory agency in 2015.
The Left goes nuts over deregulation: “Bomb threat temporarily disrupts FCC vote to kill net neutrality rules.”
The administration’s decision to reverse President Obama’s expansion of the H-1B program has been met with criticism by advocates for cheap foreign white-collar labor, but the decision will open up roughly 80,000 jobs to Americans graduates over the next two years.
Melania Trump's approval rating climbs 17 points: now the majority of Americans like her.
Roy Moore loses Jeff Sessions’ senate seat in Alabama.  Who’s to blame? McConnell? Bannon? Weak campaigning? 11th hour Washington Post hit piece?
Democrats smell blood?  Not so fast…..

Just before last year’s election, a “prominent woman’s rights lawyer”, offered a reward of $750,000 to a woman if she would publicly accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.  The woman declined.

A senior Justice Department official demoted last week for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump “dossier” had even closer ties to Fusion GPS:  The official’s wife worked there during the 2016 election.

Now a Democrat woman is accused of sexual harassment.

Illegal border crossings are back to Obama levels.  Tell Congress we need a wall.

Santa and Christmas trees 'not appropriate' for holidays, students are told at the University of Minnesota.
Princeton University has become the latest Ivy League institution to host a club for students who seek to explore sexual desires that delve into bondage, domination, sadism and masochism, underscoring a larger trend found at many top-tier universities.
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COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Roger Simon:  The FBI's Ship of Fools

Of the many astonishing revelations now emerging from the Russia investigation, not enough has been made of the fact that Peter Strzok -- that Zelig of the FBI who mysteriously appeared at every controversial moment -- was second in command for counterintelligence. That's right, counterintelligence -- that activity "designed to prevent or thwart spying, intelligence gathering, and sabotage by an enemy or other foreign entity."

And yet that same Mr. Strzok was conducting a clandestine extra-marital affair with an FBI colleague over thousands of text messages that could be and likely were (more of that in a moment) intercepted by those same foreign intelligence agencies -- or were, at the very least, recklessly exposed to them.

Now you don't have to be James Jesus Angleton or even have read a novel by John le Carré to know one of the most important vulnerabilities in the intel world is just such dangerous liaisons, frequently used for blackmail of all sorts. Yet, our second in command in counterintelligence conducted his in full digital view of anyone and did so replete with idiotically extreme comments about the president of the United States that would make our Peter a prime candidate for blackmail.

How exactly do you spell D-O-O-F-U-S?

Or, come to think of it, didn't someone else do something just that dumb?  Oh, yes, the very Mrs. Clinton who moved the entire email correspondence of the secretary of State onto a homebrew server stashed in a bathroom. No wonder Strzok went easy on her and on her buddies Cheryl and Huma. It wasn't just the extreme bias they all shared, it was the extreme cyber-stupidity they also shared. How could he call them "grossly negligent" when he was so "grossly negligent" himself?  (He was also "grossly negligent" with his wife, but that's another matter.  Someone should get a good interview with her.  She might have an interesting story to tell at this point.)

Which leads me back to the seemingly banal adverb likely or, more precisely, "reasonably likely." Newly released documents obtained by Fox News reveal that then-FBI Director James Comey’s draft statement on the Hillary Clinton email probe was edited numerous times before his public announcement, in ways that seemed to water down the bureau’s findings considerably.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, sent a letter to the FBI on Thursday that shows the multiple edits to Comey’s highly scrutinized statement. In an early draft, Comey said it was “reasonably likely” that “hostile actors” gained access to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email account. That was changed later to say the scenario was merely “possible.”

Do we detect the hand of Zelig-like Strzok here?  I would say it's "reasonably likely."  But if I were, like Michael Ledeen, to channel the great Angleton, I would say it's "extremely likely" to "almost certain."

What are witnessing as these embarrassing documents, emails and texts continue to be extracted from a reluctant -- and therefore self-incriminating -- Justice Department is the emergence of a veritable FBI Ship of Fools with Captain Mueller at the helm, a man we repeatedly have to be told is above reproach, a Raleigh for our times, but is seeming more of a cross between Ahab and Queeg.

Well, that's perhaps too harsh.  But the investigation has already crashed against rocky shoals  and is about to sink.   I should be joyfully clapping my hands with schadenfreude but I am decidedly not.

If it is true -- as seems increasingly likely (maybe even reasonably likely) -- that a cabal inside the Justice Department conspired to prevent Donald Trump from being president and then, once he became president, did their best to make sure he did not succeed in office, then we are all in a horrifying pass until we sort this out.


Another good read on the subject:  “All of Hillary’s men…..The only picture of collusion emerging from the Russian probes is one that implicates Hillary. Across the U.S. government, political appointees and deep state hacks were helping Hillary and gunning for Trump. One of her partisans over at the FBI, Peter Strzok, performed a virtual hat trick of political espionage: he went from inoculating Hillary against criminal prosecution (by convincing Comey to soften his description of her mishandling of classified information) to joining the quest to nail Trump, all while writing to his mistress, also at the FBI, that they had a mutual duty to prevent Trump from winning the White House.
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OTHER COLUMNS
“If we are to accept the special pleadings of journalists, we have to believe these were all honest mistakes. They may be. But a person might then ask: Why is it that every one of the dozens of honest mistakes is prejudiced in the very same way? Why hasn’t there been a single major honest mistake that diminishes the Trump-Russia collusion story? Why is there never an honest mistake that indicts Democrats? Maybe the problem is that too many people are working backward from a preconception.”
       -David Harsany

“The Pentagon is about to deploy 23,000 troops — but not for the mission you’d expect. According to the Defense Department, that’s how many service members it’ll have to train to deal with the first wave of transgender recruits. Although the Trump administration is actively fighting the court’s order, military officials are bracing themselves for the monumental distraction set in motion by Barack Obama. … If liberals were as focused on the world’s threats as they are on LGBT activism, America would be the safest, most powerful country in the world. Instead, they’re desperately trying to preserve Obama’s radical legacy and jeopardizing the whole of national security in the process. And for what? So that a group of people with legitimate health concerns can self-actualize? The military’s purpose is to fight and win wars. Does the integration of men and women confused about their gender make us better prepared to defend our nation? If the answer is no (and research suggests it is), why are we even considering it?”
       -Tony Perkins
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ARTICLES
Toxic Hatred of Trump a Sign of Non Compos Mentis

The Case of the Missing Catastrophe
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HUMOR
“Karl Marx to Resign, Ditch Legacy Due to Sexual Misconduct”
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PHOTOS, VIDEO
Pushy children's hilarious letters to Santa are enough to get them put straight on the naughty list. 

WISE WORDS
“Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.”
                    -Benjamin Franklin

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