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Several things will soon happen that could prove interesting.
First, Gorsuch should be approved one way or the other but Schumer might urge his Demwits to filibuster just out of spite.
Second, Trump has made overtures to Democrats that he would like their help in making improvements in Obamacare. This means Obamacare would survive in name allowing changes that would theoretically correct its flaws.
If Democrats decide not to join Trump in making changes in Obamacare then he will let it die of its own accord on the assumption they will come running at a future date as premiums begin to skyrocket. (See 1 below.)
Third, Democrats will continue to make an effort to link Trump and his team to Russia so they can prove his entire administration is in bed with Putin.
By tainting Rep. Nunes, Democrats believe they have emasculated his ability to investigate Russia's influence.
Fourth, now that Trump has eliminated many of Obama's regulations pertaining to the EPA's over reach, which were passed on the premise most of the world's population will die from pollution and flooding, Al Gore will begin his 2020 campaign seeking the Presidency. His V.P will be one of the last remaining polar bears.
Fifth, sanctuary cities, states and their mayors and governors will soon go to court to enforce their right to house/protect illegal immigrants who have committed further crimes. In other words, these public officials are using the law to enforce their ability to protect those who have been engaged in breaking the law because the government, they claim, is violating the rights of states and cities to break the law. A very novel approach.
At the same time, these politicians also want the government to continue funding their police forces so their citizens will be protected from the criminals they want to sanctuary. Capiche?
Finally, Democrats want to block Republicans from passing a budget so they can blame them for shutting down the government and at the same time prevent Trump from building his wall.
I, for one, would be delighted to see the government shut down so that our overworked bureaucrats can have a paid vacation at taxpayer expense.
Now it is time for bar humor.
1. Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn't much but the reception was excellent.
2. A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, "I'll serve you but don't start anything."
3. Two peanuts walk into a bar and one was a salted.
4. A dyslexic man walked into a bra.
5. A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm and says: "A beer please, and one for the road."
6. Two cannibals are eating a clown.
One says to the other: "Does this taste funny to you?"
7. Two cows are standing next to each other.
Daisy says to Dolly, "I was artificially inseminated this morning." "I don't believe you," says Dolly."It's true; no bull!" exclaims Daisy.
8. I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day but I couldn't find any.
9. A man woke up in a hospital after a serious accident. He shouted, "Doctor, doctor, I can't feel my legs!" The doctor replied,"I know, I amputated your arms!"
10. I went to a seafood disco last week... and pulled a mussel.
11. What do you call a fish with no eyes? A fsh.
12. Two fish swim into a concrete wall.The one turns to the other and says, "Dam!"
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Comey should have been fired long ago. Now he is more in charge than Trump.
Comey could have taught Hoover a thing or two. (See 2 below.)
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Several years ago, I arranged for James Van de Velde, a cyber warfare expert, to come and speak about cyber-warfare.
The article below is very important because it highlights how effective Russia and Putin have been in de-legitimizing the recent election and how ill prepared we are to cope. Furthermore, the bickering and partisanship that is engulfing the nation and wrecking any potential investigation simply highlights how detrimental Congress is to protecting the interests of our nation.
Rep.Schiff is as big a worm as Sen. Schumer.(See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
STUNNING! Single Brave GOP Congressman Just Made Move On His Own To Repeal Obamacare
On the same day that the House of Representatives canceled its vote on Ryancare, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks filed a simple one-line bill to repeal Obama’s signature health care law.
The Huntsville Republican titled the bill ‘Obamacare Repeal Act.” It is short and to the point, AI.com reported.
From Breitbart
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++“Effective as of Dec. 31, 2017, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is repealed, and the provisions of law amended or repealed by such Act are restored or revived as if such Act had not been enacted,” the bill reads.Brooks, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, told constituents last week that he was a “no” vote on the Obamacare repeal/replace bill offered by Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.Also last week, in an interview with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow, Brooks called the Speaker’s bill “a horrible replacement bill.”Rep. Brooks went on to call the bill “the largest Republican welfare program in the history of the Republican Party.”“If the American people want to repeal Obamacare, this is their last, best chance during the 115th Congress,” Brooks said.“At a minimum, the discharge petition will, like the sun burning away the fog, show American voters who really want to repeal Obamacare and who merely act that way during election time,” the 5th District Congressman concluded.
2)The G-Man Takes On Donald Trump
FBI Director James Comey isn’t supposed to be America’s political referee.
By
In one headline, the Chicago Tribune sums up everything wrong with today’s Washington: “James Comey will determine the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
The headline appeared last Wednesday above a commentary by Eli Lake of Bloomberg View, which was pegged to the FBI director’s earlier appearance before the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Lake argues, correctly, that Mr. Comey has been elevated to an “outsize role” in our politics.
Somewhere J. Edgar Hoover is smiling.
When Mr. Comey testified last Monday, the context was a committee riven by three competing narratives. The Democratic narrative, as pushed by ranking member Adam Schiff, is that there is “more than circumstantial evidence” that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians to influence last November’s election.
The Trump narrative, expressed in a now-infamous Saturday-morning tweet, is that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had Mr. Trump’s “wires tapped” in Trump Tower.
An alternate Republican narrative, which House Intel Chairman Devin Nunes sketched out more fully toward the end of last week, is that while Mr. Trump is wrong about Mr. Obama having ordered wiretaps, there’s evidence some Americans were “incidentally” caught up in foreign surveillance. Additionally, their names were identified (“unmasked”) and unlawfully leaked, at least in the case of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, who resigned after news of his conversations became public.
Into these fires Mr. Comey rode. And before the day was out, he had given the Democratic narrative a significant boost. He did so, first, by announcing a continuing FBI investigation into the Trump-Russia connections; second, by rejecting Mr. Trump’s claims of an Obama-ordered wiretap; and third, by saying almost nothing about the one felony we know of: the public disclosure of Mr. Flynn’s name.
Republicans are right to squeal here. Yet not all do so from atop Mount Principle. Last summer, perhaps fearing their candidate could not beat Hillary Clinton in the election, too many Republicans placed their hopes on Mr. Comey to take down the Democratic presidential nominee for them.
In the end, Mr. Comey bumbled both his investigation and the politics, not least with a hot-dogging press conference that even he admitted was unusual. There the FBI director pre-empted the attorney general, declaring that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring an indictment against Mrs. Clinton. Never mind that this was a gift to then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, because it spared her of having to pay any political price for not indicting.
Mr. Lake points out that Mr. Comey was able to do this only because Ms. Lynch had been fatally compromised by a secret meeting she’d held with Bill Clinton at a moment when the Justice Department was considering charges against his wife. Fast forward to today, when a similar recusal on the Russian issue by Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions (because he too had met with the Russian ambassador), has again elevated Mr. Comey to a political role he should not have.
Certainly politicians ought to be investigated and prosecuted if they’ve broken the law. Even so, these days both parties too often forget the primary source of accountability in our government is not the criminal justice system. It’s the American people acting through their elected representatives. The Constitution gives Congress many tools to enforce accountability, from hearings and contempt findings to impeachment.
True, these are messy, imperfect processes, fraught with posturing. For example, when the Republican House held Lois Lerner in contempt for refusing to testify about the IRS targeting of conservative organizations, Speaker John Boehner could have jailed her until she testified. Instead he referred her name to the U.S. attorney for a prosecution he knew would never happen, perhaps because he feared making her into a martyr. All along the way Congress was lectured it should back off, lest it do anything to jeopardize the FBI’s investigations.
This gets it precisely backward. Plainly the FBI should pursue its criminal investigations. But the FBI director is not America’s political referee.
Critics now claim Chairman Nunes is too compromised by association with Mr. Trump to oversee an honest inquiry. But what of Mr. Comey? Many Democrats believe he cost Mrs. Clinton the election. Is it not at least possible he might see taking on Mr. Trump as an opportunity to redeem himself? It augurs ill when we forget political legitimacy is ultimately decided at the ballot box and look to the unelected for a political shortcut—whether this be a special prosecutor, an independent commission or an FBI director.
So let Mr. Comey investigate. But it should not stop the intelligence committees from doing whatever they need to do to get to bottom of what really happened with Russia. Because in our system it’s the elected people we send to Washington who are meant to keep an eye on the permanent government—not the other way ’round.
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3)
America Is Ill-Prepared to Counter Russia’s Information Warfare
Propaganda is nothing new. But Moscow is frighteningly effective—and worse is on the way.
By Mike Rogers
Propaganda is perhaps the second- or third-oldest profession. Using information as a tool to affect outcomes is as old as politics. Propaganda was familiar to the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Byzantines, and the Han Dynasty. Each generation applies the technology of the day in trying to influence an adversary’s people.
What’s new today is the reach of social media, the anonymity of the internet, and the speed with which falsehoods and fabrications can propagate. Twitter averaged 319 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2016. Instagram had 600 million accounts at the end of last year. Facebook’s monthly active users total 1.86 billion—a quarter of the global population. Yet even these staggering figures don’t fully capture the internet’s reach.
In February, Russia’s minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu, announced a realignment in its cyber and digital assets. “We have information troops who are much more effective and stronger than the former ‘counter-propaganda’ section,” Mr. Shoigu said, according to the BBC. Russia, more than any other country, recognizes the value of information as a weapon. Moscow deployed it with deadly effect in Estonia, in Georgia and most recently in Ukraine, introducing doubt into the minds of locals, spreading lies about their politicians, and obfuscating Russia’s true intentions.
A report last year by RAND Corp., “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model ,” noted that cyberpropaganda is practically a career path in Russia. A former paid troll told Radio Free Europe that teams were on duty around the clock in 12-hour shifts and he was required to post at least 135 comments of not fewer than 200 characters each.
In effect, Moscow has developed a high-volume, multichannel propaganda machine aimed at advancing its foreign and security policy. Along with the traditional propaganda tools—favoring friendly outlets and sponsoring ideological journals—this represents an incredibly powerful tool.
Now extrapolate one step further: Apply botnets, artificial intelligence and other next-generation technology. The result will be automated propaganda, rapid spamming and more. We shouldn’t be surprised to see any of this in the future.
Imagine an American senator who vocally advocates a new strategic-forces treaty with European allies. Moscow, feeling threatened, launches a directed information campaign to undermine the senator. His emails are breached and published, disclosing personal details and family disputes, alongside draft policy papers without context. Social media is spammed with seemingly legitimate comments opposing the senator’s position. The senator’s phone lines are flooded with robocalls. Fake news articles are pushed out on Russian-controlled media suggesting that the senator has broken campaign-finance laws.
Can you imagine the disruption to American society? The confusion in the legislative process? The erosion of trust in democracy? Unfortunately, this is the reality the U.S. faces, and without a concerted effort it will get worse.
Congress is too focused on the trees to see the frightening forest. Rather than engaging in sharp-edged partisanship, lawmakers should be investigating Russian propaganda operations and information warfare. They should be figuring out how to reduce the influence of foreign trolls, and teaching Americans about Moscow’s capabilities. That would go a long way to save the republic.
Mr. Rogers was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, 2011-15.
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