From a dear friend and fellow memo reader:
"Dear You,
Another reason that progressives seem to be always on the attach is the complicit MSM and their skillful use of language (think the Affordable Care Act which was neither affordable nor provided care) and images (children in cages from 2014 Obama actions credited to Trump Administration). The current fabricated issue of separating children from their parents while illegally entering our country is a perfect example. Rather than criticizing it as cruel and inhuman, why doesn't the Administration take the position that ICE is acting as a Child Protective Services Agency given the dangerous and unlawful activities of the parents putting their children in harms way?
Just a thought,
B----"
And:
Requiring kids to do chores could be unhealthy because it does not protect the little tyke's delicate sensibilities and thus, would not be prepared for the rigors of college.
TWO STATES IN THE MIDDLE OF AMERICA! Illinois &Oklahoma:
I thought these two states, made for an interesting contrast. The first part about Illinois and the second part about Oklahoma!
PART 1 – Illinois… "A State with No Republicans"!
Some interesting data on the 'state' of the State of Illinois. There are more people on welfare in Illinois than there are people working. Chicago pays the highest wages to teachers than anywhere else in the U.S. Their average pay is $110,000/year. Their pensions average 80-90% of their income Wow, are Illinois and Chicago great or what? Be sure to read till the end. I've never heard it explained better. Perhaps the U.S. should pull out of Chicago?
Body count:In the last six months, 292 murdered in Chicago.221 killed in Iraq;
AND Chicago has one of the strictest gun laws in the entire US.
This was Chicago´s chain of command:
President: Barack Hussein Obama.
Senator: Dick Durbin.
House Representative: Jesse Jackson Jr. .
Governor: Pat Quinn.
House leader: Mike Madigan.
Atty. Gen.: Lisa Madigan (daughter of Mike).
Mayor: Rahm Emanuel.
The leadership in Illinois - all Democrats.
Thank you for the combat zone in Chicago.Of course, they're all blaming each other.
Can't blame Republicans; there aren't any!
Let us get ALL the facts out while we are at it:
Chicago school system rated one of the worst in the country. Can't blame Republicans; there aren't any!
State pension fund $78 Billion in debt, worst in country.Can't blame Republicans; there aren't any!
Cook County ( Chicago ) sales tax 10.25% highest in country. Can't blame Republicans; there aren't any!
This is the political culture that Obama comes from in Illinois. And he was going to 'fix'Washington politics for us?
George Ryan is no longer Governor, he was in prison.
He was replaced by Rob Blagojevich who is, by the way, also in prison.
And Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. resigned and, that's right, he and his wife are both in prison.
The Land of Lincoln, where our Governors and Representatives make our license plates. What?
As long as they keep providing entitlements to the population of Chicago, nothing is going to change, except the state will go bankrupt before the country does.
"Anybody who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian."
Don't forget Detroit, another great example of a Democratic empire.With all the bad news, there is hope, so let's go to
PART 2- Oklahoma
OKLAHOMA- may soon have plenty of new residents!
THIS IS REALLY INTERESTING, AND TRUE... PLEASE READ IT!
Oklahoma is the only state that Obama did not win even one county in the last election... While everyone is focusing on Arizona's new law, look what Oklahoma has been doing!!!
An update from Oklahoma:
Oklahoma law passed, 37 to 9 an amendment to place the Ten Commandments on the front entrance to the state capitol. The feds in D.C., along with the ACLU, said it would be a mistake. Hey this is a conservative state, based on Christian values... HB 1330… Guess what... Oklahoma did it anyway.
Oklahoma recently passed a law in the state to incarcerate all illegal immigrants and ship them back to where they came from unless they want to get a green card and become an American citizen. They all scattered. HB1804. This was against the advice of the Federal Government, and the ACLU, they said it would be a mistake.
Guess what... Oklahoma did it anyway.
Recently they passed a law to include DNA samples from any and all illegal's to the Oklahoma database, for criminal investigative purposes. Pelosi said it was unconstitutional SB1102.
Guess what... Oklahoma did it anyway.
Several weeks ago, Oklahoma passed a law, declaring Oklahoma as a Sovereign state, not under the Federal Government directives. Joining, Texas, Montana and Utah as the only states to do so.
More states are likely to follow: Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, West Virginia, Mississippi and Florida. Save your confederate money, it appears the South is about to rise up once again. HJR 1003
The federal Government has made bold steps to take away our guns. Oklahoma, a week ago, passed a law confirming people in this state have the right to bear arms and transport them in their vehicles. I'm sure that was a setback for the criminals The Liberals didn't like it-But…Guess what... Oklahoma did it anyway.
Just this month, the state has voted and passed a law that ALL drivers' license exams will be printed in English and only English and no other language.
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Hanson on Hillary. (See 1 below.)
McGurn on Rosenstein. (See 1b below.)
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A solution to that pesky illegal immigration issue? https://townhall.com/tipsheet/
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Harvard fights discrimination with discrimination of another kind. What hypocrisy.
We are ripping our nation apart because we acted one way in the past and now want to change. Why not just change and recognize the past is our history.
An English writer once wrote a satiric essay entitled "The Burning of A Roast Pig." To roast the pig he set fire to the house. (See 3 below.)
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Hanson on Hillary. (See 1 below.)
McGurn on Rosenstein. (See 1b below.)
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A solution to that pesky illegal immigration issue? https://townhall.com/tipsheet/
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Harvard fights discrimination with discrimination of another kind. What hypocrisy.
We are ripping our nation apart because we acted one way in the past and now want to change. Why not just change and recognize the past is our history.
An English writer once wrote a satiric essay entitled "The Burning of A Roast Pig." To roast the pig he set fire to the house. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) ‘Future Pres’ Hillary — the Font of all the Scandals
Review the Clinton email scandal, the Steele dossier, the insertion of at least one FBI informant into the Trump campaign, the misleading of the FISA court by FBI and DOJ officials intent on monitoring U.S. citizens, and, now, the inspector general’s report. There emerges a common denominator: the surety by all involved that Hillary Clinton would be president, and the need to prepare for that fact.
1) ‘Future Pres’ Hillary — the Font of all the Scandals
Review the Clinton email scandal, the Steele dossier, the insertion of at least one FBI informant into the Trump campaign, the misleading of the FISA court by FBI and DOJ officials intent on monitoring U.S. citizens, and, now, the inspector general’s report. There emerges a common denominator: the surety by all involved that Hillary Clinton would be president, and the need to prepare for that fact.
Examine the IG’s transcript of a random, pre-election series of electronic chitchat between high-ranking FBI employees:
15:07:41, Agent 1: “ . . . I’m done interviewing the President — then type the 302. 18 hour day . . . ”
15:13:32, FBI Employee: “you interviewed the president?”
15:17:09, Agent 1: “you know — HRC” [Hillary Rodham Clinton]
15:17:18, Agent 1: “future pres”
15:17:22, Agent 1: “Trump cant win”
“Trump can’t win” explains the salty language also of the Page-Strzok text trove, where the two paramours talk of Trump supporters that they “can smell” and an “insurance” plan to preclude Trump’s nearly nonexistent chances. (“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration . . . that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”)
Perhaps the most iconic example of deep-state bias was the following Page-Strzok exchange:
Page: “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!”
Strzok: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”
When high-career FBI and DOJ officers go on to refer to American voters as smelly, “retarded,” ignorant, and feces (easily trumping Hillary’s own “deplorables” and “irredeemables” and Obama’s “clingers”), they do so because they assume their candor to each other will earn rewards rather than punishments. More generally, they count on their illegal and unethical behavior becoming known and thus résumé points rather than grounds for later firing and jail.
In such an incestuous Washington world, one presidential candidate, an abject outsider and sure loser, was a hopeless “idiot,” ”loathsome,” a ”menace” and a “disaster.” In contrast, as another (unnamed) FBI agent boasted to a female counterpart, “I’m . . . with her.” What he meant was not so much that he was obviously a Clinton partisan and a would-be born-again feminist, but rather that he was a partisan of someone who was going to shortly be president, and that he was an enemy of one who would pay a big price for his eccentric and uncouth bid.
So recalibrate the following questions:
Why would a seasoned careerist like Andrew McCabe allow his spouse to receive nearly $700,000 in campaign donations from Clinton-affiliated organizations, only later to become a chief investigator of the Clinton email scandal, or why would he so clumsily leak to the press and lie about it afterwards? Easy answer: He wisely played the odds and knew that his future FBI ascendency was assured, given that he had helped exonerate the soon-to-be president, Hillary Clinton. His only rub would be competing with other post-election sycophants who would all be vying for President Clinton’s patronage, each claiming that his own particular improper, illegal, or unethical behavior trumped that of the others.
Why would Loretta Lynch endanger her reputation with an adolescent stunt like agreeing to a weird jet-plane meeting on an Arizona tarmac with the old conniving schmoozer Bill Clinton? (What are the odds that two friends accidentally bump into each other in charter jets at the same time at one of the nation’s roughly 5,000 airports?) Answer? Such a concession was not entirely adolescent by Lynch’s savvy calculations. Not only was her improper behavior unlikely to become publicized; far more important, the Clintons, once Hillary was elected, would probably have either retained Lynch as AG or promoted her to the Supreme Court as a careerist reward for noble service rendered. We can imagine that Lynch would have reported to President Hillary that she had forced Comey to drop the word “investigation” and only with a wink and nod had “recused” herself from an investigation that she intended would lead to only one result.
Why would the last boy scout James Comey, in clumsy fashion, reinterpret a federal statute about handling classified communications so that it would suddenly include “intent” as a newly invented criterion for being found in violation of the law? Why, as investigator and prosecuting attorney, would he shut down, open up, and then shut down his investigation of Clinton at the height of the election season? Why would he for so long ignore the Wiener laptop evidence?
Comey later himself answered those questions by his admission that he assumed Clinton would be president. As he stated, he thought his (Potemkin) investigation would give her legitimacy after her exoneration.
A losing Hillary Clinton may now be mad at Comey, but that is only because the deep-state pollsters’ sure 90 percent odds of her winning proved laughable. Had she won, Hillary probably would at least have listened to Comey as he pleaded that his exoneration of her email impropriety and the way in which he had assigned partisans to her case were proof — along with her victory — that he deserved praise and rewards, not firing. Comey’s 2016 calculus was always that Clinton had likely done something wrong but would be president, while Trump probably had not broken the law but certainly would not be elected.
Why would Hillary, John Podesta, and the DNC be so childish as to hire the likes of a reckless egotist Christopher Steele who would leave a paper trial with their fingerprints over his bought fantasies and fabrications? Again, a President Hillary would probably soon have appreciated such slavish service. And more significantly, as a sure winner, she would have thought such dirt would help subject the pathetic loser Trump to a legal morass in his post-election bitter isolation. Who knows, Hillary might have cackled to her gang that their neat oppo-research file reminded her of her own cattle-futures gambit or the mysterious vaporization and reincarnation of the Rose Law Firm files.
Why would professionals such as the omnipresent Rod Rosenstein and the proper Sally Yates sign on to juvenile FISA-court requests for surveillance that were obviously misleading, if not constituting some sort of felonious obstruction of justice by deluding the court about the nature of the Steele dossier? (The application failed to disclose that the dossier was unverified, that the FBI had fired Steele for improper leaking, that the dossier itself was the source of circular “corroborating” news stories, and that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.)
Answer? Again, Yates, Rosenstein, and Comey, along with other signatories of FISA requests, would now be rewarded with tenure and/or promotions for noble service to the cause. Bill might have guffawed that it all reminded him of the Marc Rich pardon caper or the minor inconvenience of being disbarred.
Nothing in the past of either Brennan or Comey, both of whom previously lied with impunity and while under oath to Congress, gave them any reason to fear any legal consequences for either unethical or illegal behavior.
Why would supposed intelligence pros like Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper stoop to traffic in the Steele dossier, and in Comey’s case, even become a party to inserting at least one informant into an ongoing political campaign?
Lots of answers. One, Trump’s was not a political campaign, but rather a sure losing political campaign. Two, Trump himself would not just go down to defeat, but was likely to be ruined after the election as he experienced a Manafort-like fate of endless leaked negative stories in the media, a litany of made-up charges designed to have him plea-bargain to a felony or two, and millions in never-ending legal fees. Three, nothing in the past of either Brennan or Comey, both of whom had previously lied with impunity and while under oath to Congress, gave them any reason to fear any legal consequences for either unethical or illegal behavior. Again, in careerist terms, their behavior was logical; what was abjectly illogical was that Trump won.
Why would supposed progressive humanitarians and civil libertarians such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power request unmasking of hundreds of American citizens and somehow expect such unredacted names to reappear in dark contexts right before the 2016 election? Aside from the fact that neither Rice nor Power is a humanitarian or a civil libertarian, such behavior would springboard a rapprochement with the Clintons. Service beyond the call of duty, indeed, even risking criminal exposure through leaking unmasked but still classified names, could not be ignored even by a vindictive Hillary Clinton, who had prior reason to distrust both.
What then would be stupid in careerist terms? Had James Comey and the Obama DOJ run their investigation of Hillary Clinton the same way that Robert Mueller is currently conducting his hounding of Donald Trump, or had Robert Mueller conducted a post-election, Comey-like faux inquiry into Donald Trump, it would be the epitome of administrative-state stupidity.
It is tiring to hear sermons about the integrity of the FBI and DOJ, as if their elite leadership in Washington has no more influence over an organization than a general does over his army. Of course, the vast majority of employees in the field are both competent and just. But too many of their Washington leaders see themselves in grandiose terms, as subject to no law other than the demands of their own egos.
The problem with all the current scandals is that half the country, including the half that runs the media and the administrative state, thinks that any means are justified to achieve the ethical and noble end of aborting Donald’ Trump’s presidency.
That same mindset of exemption explains why Mueller did not disclose to the public immediately why he removed Page and Strzok from his investigation, and why their staggered and initially clandestine departures were in fact related. And why, too, Andrew Weissmann, Jeannie Rhee, and Aaron Zebley were seen to have no possible conflict of interests even though one of them was not shy about his earlier disdain for Trump and his enthusiasm for Clinton, while the other two had either in the past defended a Clinton aide or the Clinton Foundation. Again, the way the orthodox state works is that the mere suggestion that such progressive attorneys have conflicts of interests is branded heresy and earns outrage — but never alters the fact that they do in fact have real ethical conflicts.
The problem with all the current scandals is that half the country, including the half that runs the media and the administrative state, thinks that any means are justified to achieve the ethical and noble end of aborting Donald’ Trump’s presidency. What one half of the country sees as unethical behavior is assumed by blue America to be noble service beyond the call of duty. When a Page or Strzok or Andrew McCabe broke protocols and likely the law, 50 percent of the population saw something like James Comey’s version of a “higher duty.”
For all the investigations and IG reports, for all the revelations of scandals and wrongdoing, there will probably in the end be little consequence, simply because to those who matter, such illegality is seen as nobility. Many at the highest echelons of the FBI and DOJ broke laws. But Trump broke a far higher and far more important unwritten law — one forbidding any presidential candidate and future president to be and act like Donald J. Trump.
1b) Impeach Rod Rosenstein
1b) Impeach Rod Rosenstein
How Congress can remind the unelected government it answers to the elected part.
The long-awaited showdown between the Justice Department and Congress is finally here.
It started late Friday afternoon. While the rest of the country was parsing the just-released report on the FBI from the Justice Department’s inspector general, senior congressional leaders and selected committee chairmen quietly met with FBI Director Christopher Wray and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a secure location in the basement of the Capitol.
At issue was Justice and FBI’s continuing defiance of congressional subpoenas. At the top of this list is the demand from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for documents about why and whether the FBI had an informant insinuating himself with Trump campaign officials before the Russia investigation officially started.
On Sunday on Fox News, Devin Nunes, the House Intel chairman, made clear his “patience has run out.” The good news is that he and the other House chairmen at the Friday meeting—Judiciary’s Bob Goodlatte and Oversight and Government Reform’s Trey Gowdy —were fully backed up in their demands by Speaker Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan sent Messrs. Rosenstein and Wray an unambiguous message: Comply with Congress’s orders this week.
In a radio interview Monday morning with Milwaukee’s WISN, Mr. Ryan said “the new leadership at Justice and the FBI” has to decide whether it will be “part of the cleanup crew or the coverup team.” If Justice and the FBI don’t comply within the timeline he laid out, he said, “we are going to have to take action.”
Of all the actions Congress could take, a contempt finding or an impeachment is the most substantial. Unfortunately, recent Republican history with regard to the former doesn’t incline to optimism.
Lois Lerner, the former official at the heart of the IRS targeting of conservative groups, and Eric Holder, Barack Obama’s attorney general, were each held in contempt by Congress. But in both cases, Congress blinked when it came to imposing effective consequences.
In June 2012, Mr. Holder was held in contempt for withholding documents Congress wanted from the botched Fast and Furious operation that put firearms in the hands of Mexican drug cartels. It was the first time Congress had taken such a move against a sitting cabinet member. The first contempt resolution referred the attorney general for criminal charges, while a second launched a civil suit seeking a court to order Justice to turn over the documents.
The Obama Justice Department declined to act on the criminal referral—as everyone knew it would. Though a judge would ultimately reject the administration’s claims of executive privilege, the ruling didn’t come until 2016. By that time Mr. Obama was wrapping up his second term, Mr. Holder had retired, and Fast and Furious had long since faded from the headlines.
But Congress has a third option for contempt: It can jail someone until he produces the testimony or documents sought. The advantage here is that Congress can do this all on its own. The last time Congress used contempt to jail was in 1934, when the Senate arrested, tried and then sentenced former Assistant Commerce Secretary William P. MacCracken Jr. to 10 days for allowing the removal and destruction of papers he’d been subpoenaed to produce.
You have to go back even further for the last time Congress impeached an executive-branch official. In 1876, Congress accused Secretary of War William Belknap of using his office for private gain. But if Sally Yates as deputy attorney general could cite the 1799 Logan Act, which no American has ever been convicted of violating, to intervene in the Mike Flynn case, surely Congress needn’t be shy about its Article I constitutional power to impeach.
The obstruction of Justice and the FBI appears rooted in the mistaken idea that they are somehow above the elected representatives of the American people. While Mr. Rosenstein has referred to congressional talk of impeaching him as “extortion,” Mr. Wray, in his statement to a press conference outlining steps to fix the FBI, conspicuously made no mention of better cooperation with Congress.
An impeachment that removed either Mr. Rosenstein or Mr. Wray—or a contempt finding that sent one of them to the congressional pokey for a spell—could send a good message to federal bureaucrats inclined to be dismissive of congressional subpoenas. Then again, if either man thought he was in real and imminent danger of being impeached or held in contempt, Congress would likely find him instantly cooperative. Of course, that’s exactly why Congress has these powers—not so much to punish but to encourage accommodation and respect.
But if Messrs. Rosenstein and Wray don’t accommodate, and if the stonewalling starts again, the House ought to impeach or jail until it gets satisfaction. Because a congressional power Congress is too timid to invoke is worse than a hollow threat: It becomes a sign that Congress need not be taken seriously.
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