Strzok strikes out finally. (See 1 below.)
What is wrong if government officials leave their federal positions and make millions of having been in government. After all, how can they support themselves if they don't take advantage of their contacts? (See 1a below.)
Apparently Keith Ellison has some explaining to do also. (See 1b below.)
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BIBI, time to get tough and stop the nonsense. Set Gaza on fire but then.... (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Mass media disdain for Trump works in his favor. Americans do not cotton to piling on and the mass media twerps know this but can't bring themselves to change. (See 3 below.)
Meanwhile, Trump's loyalty to some of those who campaigned for him was understandable but not wise nor served the nation and his attack on this wretched person neither serves him or the nation well. (See 4 below.)
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Hanson on Mueller. (I am trying to get Professor Hanson to come and be our President's Day SIRC Speaker.)
From my perspective, I believe Mueller's prosecutorial zeal and bias has led him astray and I doubt he will be able to retrieve his investigation from the forest. Rather than turn over alleged law breaking to others in The Justice Department he thought, by pursuing every lead, it would result in Russian Collusion when, in fact, it besmirched his efforts, even though his charge was broad enough to pursue..
Mueller's arrogance and belief he could drink his own bath water has caused him to drown in self-indulgence. There is something about Potomac Water's elixir that leads astray.
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For balance: let's hear it from the anti-Trump crowd. (See 5 and 5a below.)
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Dick
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1) What The Peter Strzok Firing Actually Means
By Ben Shapiro
On Monday, FBI agent Peter Strzok — the agent who presided over both the Hillary Clinton email investigation and the Russian election interference investigation while texting with his mistress about stopping President Trump — finally got the axe. The Department of Justice Inspector General report on the Hillary investigation was highly critical of Strzok, stating that his texts “potentially indicated or created the appearance that investigative decisions were impacted by bias or improper considerations,” and added that Strzok’s behavior “not only indicative of a biased state of mind but, even more seriously, implies a willingness to take official action to impact the presidential candidate’s electoral prospects.” The report found that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over the Hillary investigation could have been biased: “Under these circumstances, we did not have confidence that Strzok’s decision to prioritize the Russia investigation over following up on the Midyear-related investigative lead discovered on the Weiner laptop was free from bias.” The report concluded that Strzok’s activities were “antithetical to the core values of the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
So, it was beyond time for Strzok to go. But what does this mean for the future of the Mueller investigation?
First, we still don’t know the extent to which Strzok’s personal bias impacted the Russia collusion investigation. Were warrants improperly ordered? Was information improperly gathered? Is the entire investigation indeed a sham, as President Trump has suggested? None of that is completely clear, even given Strzok’s pathetic behavior.
But those questions remain open. A bombshell report from The Hill’s John Solomon on Thursday suggests that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, the man behind the Steele dossier, coordinated with then-associate deputy attorney general Bruce Ohr regarding information about Trump. Simpson even gave Ohr a memory stick filled with information. Solomon reported:
Whatever their assessment, Congress has a wide, new mandate to investigate the Simpson-Ohr-Steele contacts with renewed vigor and lots of questions that did not exist just a few short weeks ago: What was on the memory stick? What did Ohr do with the information? Did the FBI rely on it for future court actions? Did the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that approved surveillance warrants know Ohr was getting information from the Simpson-Steele operation after Steele had been dismissed?How much does this impact the future of the Mueller investigation — which, after all, was initiated by the FBI’s investigation into Trump foreign policy aide George Papadopoulos, even according to House Intelligence Committee Republicans? Trump isn’t wrong to be suspicious of the depth of the probe, and its direction. But we’ll have to wait to see whether the probe was initiated improperly, how much Strzok’s bias weighed into the pursuit of information, and whether there is any underlying cause for the collusion investigation in the first place. Strzok’s firing is certainly an indication that the DOJ is aware of a bias problem within the FBI – the first step toward acknowledging that there may be broader problems with the collusion investigation.
1a)
Did Mueller and Comey Net Millions
Through Cronyism?
by: AAN Staff
The Government Accountability Institute's new book, Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption details provocative allegations of how former FBI Director James Comey and special counsel Robert Mueller have "made millions" by selling out their insider expertise to the highest bidder. Steve Hilton explained the gritty details on his Fox News Channel show. (Breitbart)
“[T]hanks to detailed research from the Government Accountability Institute in their new book Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption, we now have evidence of how both Comey and Mueller both made millions off the Surveillance State that they themselves promoted,” said Hilton.
1b) DNC Boss Accused of Domestic Abuse!
He’s the Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and he’s looking to become Minnesota’s first Muslim attorney general during the state’s primary election on Tuesday. But for DNC boss and Rep. Keith Ellison (D – Minn.), his next political move could be over before it even begins… and it’s all thanks to new, disturbing abuse allegations pointing to Ellison.
As first reported by The Daily Caller, a person claiming to be the son of a prominent Minnesota-based environmental activist is accusing Ellison of physically assaulting his mother while the two were in a relationship.
According to a Facebook post from Austin Aslim Monahan, Ellison physically assaulted and psychologically abused his mother and Sierra Club activist Karen Monahan while the two were in a relationship. Austin Monahan also claims his mother convinced him not to make the incidents public because it would not be in her best interests.
“My brother and I watched our mom come out of pure hell after getting out of her relationship with Keith Ellison,” Austin wrote in a Facebook post Saturday before detailing the nature of the abuse.
“I was using my mom’s computer trying to download something and I clicked on a file, I found over 100 text and twitters messages and video almost 2 min long that showed Keith Ellison dragging my mama off the bed by her feet, screaming and calling her a ‘fucking bitch’ and telling her to get the fuck out of his house,” he wrote.
Austin added: “We were ready to go public but our mom begged us not to and she along with others convinced us it wasn’t in our mom’s best interest.”
Up to this point, Karen Monahan has never publicly accusing Ellison of any wrongdoing, but she did retweet a post from one of Ellison’s opponents, Debra Hilstrom, asking the Democratic lawmaker to answer for the allegations brought against him.
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|
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will see his electoral support plummet unless he finds a better solution to the barrage of Hamas rockets and incendiary kites than bombing empty buildings. What we see now is déjà vu – a return to the tit for tat that plagued and disrupted the lives of Israeli residents near the borders, forcing them to spend half their lives in shelters. Netanyahu is to be commended for initially avoiding an open conflict with Hamas in the south while facing the main threat emanating from Iran and Hezbollah in the north. The Egyptians, who have no love for Hamas, have been acting as intermediaries and have been pressing Israel to display restraint. But the principal inhibiting factor has been the legitimate concern that a military operation would result in considerable civilian and military casualties, although there is no doubt that Israel would overwhelmingly crush Hamas. However, in addition to the casualties, the removal of Hamas would create a vacuum, obligating Israel to assume full responsibility for the welfare of the civilians. This is a nightmare that the government is understandably loath to contemplate. But despite these legitimate concerns, red lines have been crossed and unless Israel now gets much tougher, Hamas will become emboldened and the next round will be more extreme. The aftermath of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict was three years of quiet with swift and powerful retaliation when Hamas initiated acts of aggression. But alas, Israel’s deterrent effect has been eroded with the substitution of bombastic empty threats or bombings of buildings and installations that do not appear to unduly concern Hamas. The recent attacks have escalated to as many as 200 missile launches in one day, even landing in Beersheba. In addition, the lobbing of thousands of incendiary kites – the “kite intifada” – have burned thousands of acres of agricultural land, leaving Israel’s south in flames. The violent mass protests at the border continue unabated. The government had announced it would not reopen the crossings without the release of two Israeli civilians and the remains of two soldiers held captive by Hamas. Hamas has adamantly refused and demanded the release of 80 Palestinians, many of whose hands are drenched in blood. The government cannot afford a repeat of the Gilad Schalit deal after many of those then released returned to commit acts of bloody terrorism. In this environment, both Hamas and the government have been proclaiming that they wish to avoid war and restore calm. But every time a truce is announced, Hamas breaks it. Moreover, journalist Nadav Shragai revealed in Israel Hayom that the government provided safe passage to Gaza for Saleh Arouri, deputy leader of Hamas’ political wing. Arouri had served 18 years in prison for terrorism. On his release, he was involved in negotiating the Schalit exchange and was subsequently responsible for some of the most bestial recent acts of terror including the kidnap and murder of the three youths in 2014. It is mind- boggling that Israel is engaged in direct negotiations with Hamas and actively abetting a monstrous murderer like Arouri as an intermediary in negotiations. At this stage, Hamas has only offered a temporary halt in launching missiles. It refuses to discuss the release of the two Israelis and remains of the soldiers. It refuses to stop the incendiary kites and balloons and insists that the violent demonstrations at the border will be maintained until such time as the so-called “Palestinian right of return” is accepted by Israel. The recent media reports from the government suggest that “Hamas suffered a severe blow” and that Israel, after many denials, has now accepted the truce. This is nonsense. The people of Israel deserve better. They are entitled to more than meaningless tweets. Netanyahu should address the nation and explain what is happening. Most Israelis desperately yearn for peace. But creating false illusions undermines any possibility of reaching a genuine peace or even long-term quiet on our borders. Since the launching of the very first primitive rockets that our leaders dismissed as insignificant, our citizens in the southern area have suffered considerably and been transformed into refugees in their own country. After successive wars that temporarily created a deterrent effect, the situation has now eroded to the point where Hamas disregards our empty threats and bombings of empty buildings. We have not learned from the past. We are again acting with restraint as the terrorists gauge our response and resolve. After the events of the past few weeks, we should demand that our government display leadership and strength and adjust its policy of restraint instead of accepting a situation where Hamas tactical considerations determine the quality of life for citizens in the south. Appeasement only emboldens our enemies, who harbor genocidal ambitions against us as their goal. And the absence of deterrence will inevitably, as in the past, lead to war. All Israelis are willing to make great sacrifices to achieve peace. They would dearly love to live side by side with Palestinians. But the road to peace is not paved with illusions. We should inform our allies and warn our adversaries that we will no longer engage in restraint and limit our response. We will act like any other nation and employ the full might at our disposal to bring an immediate end to such assaults against our citizens. We have one of the most powerful armies in the world. If Hamas will not unilaterally cease its terror activities, notwithstanding the difficulties and complications referred to above, we will have no choice but to destroy it. Failure to act now virtually guarantees a full-scale conflict at a later stage when Hamas will probably be in a better position to inflict greater casualties upon us. |
Isi Leibler may be contacted at ileibler@leibler.com
2a) Report: Israel’s Netanyahu Held SecretMeeting in May in Cairo With Egypt’sSisi to Discuss Potential Gaza DealIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Cairo at the end of May for a covert meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Israel’s Channel 10 reported on Monday.
The purpose of the May 22nd meeting, according to Channel 10’s Barak Ravid, was to discuss
Egypt’s effort to promote a long-term diplomatic deal that would include a return of the Palestinian Authority to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, a significant easing of the Israeli and Egyptian blockades of Gaza, and a rehabilitation of critical infrastructure in the Strip.
Netanyahu and Sisi also talked about finding a solution to the issue of the bodies of fallen
IDF soldiers and the live Israeli civilians held by Hamas in Gaza.
An additional agenda item was the Israeli-Palestinian peace plan the Trump administration
hopes to present in the near future.
The prime minister spent only a few hours in Egypt, accompanied by a small team of aides
and bodyguards, and returned to Israel late at night, with the trip being kept secret even from most members of Netanyahu’s security cabinet.
This ongoing behind-the-scenes regional diplomacy could explain the relative restraint shown
by Netanyahu in recent months amid a series of violent flare-ups on the Israel-Gaza border, Ravid theorized on Twitter.
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3) Trump Haters Meet the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Hollywood's Walk of Fame started in the late 1950s to honor accomplished members of the entertainment industry. On average, they add two new stars each month. As Hollywood is a bastion of political correctness and virtue- signaling, it was inevitable that the city would find itself butting heads with President Trump.
Trump has a star on the Walk of Fame, which has been vandalized several times over the past few weeks. The West
Hollywood city council, rather than banning plastic straws, voted unanimously to remove Trump's star from the famous walk. Fortunately, it's an empty gesture, much like when Boulder, Colorado declared itself a nuclear-free zone – as if, during a real war, China or Russia would take great care to steer nuclear missiles to Denver or Fort Collins rather than to Boulder. West Hollywood has no jurisdiction over the Walk of Fame, as it has been run by the Chamber of Commerce since 1962, which has been "[r]esisting public pressure to remove stars for disgraced honorees such as Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Kevin Spacey, saying that a star is part of 'the historic fabric' of the site." It's nice to see that Hollywood has its priorities in order. The president, standing up for America, trying to secure its borders and keep America safe, is somehow evil, but the truly evil #MeToo predators continue to be honored by the Hollywood elites. In response to continued vandalism of Trump's Walk of Fame star, a funny thing happened. A few days ago, multiple Trump stars began appearing on the walk, placed on blank squares. An anonymous street artist and his allies are sending a message to the Hollywood hypocrites: "Rip up the president's Walk of Fame star or try to have it removed – like you're the mayor of West Hollywood or something – and 30 more will pop up." This reminded me of a time long ago, when Hollywood made good and decent movies, designed to entertain, rather than push some sociopolitical agenda. Walt Disney was part of this golden age of Hollywood. One of his early movies was Fantasia, a 1940 film, which set short animated pieces to famous classical music scores.  One of the more famous segments was "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," featuring Mickey Mouse. Mickey, as the apprentice, is tasked with the chore of fetching buckets of water. To spare himself the labor, he casts a spell so a broom can fetch the water for him. Mickey falls asleep while the broom toils away, flooding the sorcerer's chambers.Unable to break the spell, Mickey chops the broom into pieces. But each splinter comes to life as a new broom, fetching more water, worsening the flooding, until the sorcerer returns to break the spell. You can watch the scene here. Mickey Mouse's adventure is playing out with Trump's Hollywood star. Trump-haters, using a pickaxe, rather than Mickey's axe, destroyed Trump's star, only to have it multiply. Bigly. This is a common theme of the Trump presidency. Attempts to destroy him seem only to leave him stronger. Beginning before he was even elected, the "Access Hollywood" tape was Trump's October surprise, sure to derail his campaign. What happened? Trump happened, and he was elected. The Deep State conspired to pave the way for Hillary Clinton by exonerating her of crimes committed and instead indicting Trump for crimes not committed, crippling his presidency with a special counsel investigating everything except what he was charged with investigating, casting doubt over the legitimacy of Trump's election and presidency. Despite efforts of the Clinton-Obama Deep State cabal to take an axe to President Trump, all they have done is create greater support for him. Splinters of Mickey Mouse's broom are rising up in myriad ways in support of the president. Black support for President Trump has doubled since last year. This is a core Democrat constituency, and such an electoral shift spells doom for Democrat electoral prospects. The left cries "Trump is a racist" non-stop on cable news shows, taking an axe to the Trump broom. Yet the splinters come to life in the form of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, pop culture icons and Instagram celebrities, joining the Trump train – not to mention Diamond and Silk, Candace Owens, and others. The ultimate splinters from the axed Fantasia broom are the Q phenomenon. This is an as of yet unidentified group of presumed military intelligence insiders with White House access. Some call it a cult, despite the absence of a leader. Others call it LARPing or basically a joke, yet Q messages display an uncanny knack for predicting future events in a timely and accurate fashion. Make of it what you want, but Q represents thousands or millions of splinters of Mickey's axed broom, individuals doing their own research based on "Q drops," nuggets of open-sourced information that can be investigated, verified, and disseminated. Most of this is done anonymously, away from prying eyes or interference of the Deep State actors Q is exposing. Last are the media, with their relentless attacks on President Trump, over 90 percent negative coverage. They give little, if any, credit for Trump's accomplishments, especially on the economy and jobs, instead calling him a racist, a traitor, a Russian spy, or just an ignorant rube. Each swipe of the media axe at the president creates more disdain for and distrust of the media, and more sympathy a nd support of the president. Splinters of the chopped broom are the Americans who mock big media at rallies and on social media. From the Hollywood star to Q to the media, efforts of the left and other assorted Trump-haters simply chop the broom into splinters, creating more support, the opposite of the intended goal. Mickey Mouse set forces in motion that took on a life of their own, with unintended and unforeseen consequences far beyond his original goal. Trump-haters are beginning to experience much the same. Oblivious to what they have set into motion, they will be ill prepared for the consequences. For the rest of us, pass the popcorn as the show is just beginning. Brian C Joondeph, M.D., MPS is a Denver-based physician and writer. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4) The Legacies of Robert Mueller’s Investigations Some 450 days ago we were treated to melodramatic announcements from the media about the start-up of Robert Mueller’s “dream” and “all-star” team.
Reporters gushed in the general hysteria of the times that Mueller would no
doubt soon indict President Trump, some of his family, and almost anyone else
in his campaign—and therefore end the Trump aberration.
Press puff pieces highlighted the résumés of his superstars—of Lisa Page (no comment needed), Peter Strzok (less than no comment needed), Jeannie Rhee (a former attorney for the Clinton Foundation, Ben Rhodes, and for a bit Hillary Clinton), Andrew Weissman (Clinton zealot, Obama and DNC donor, and the cheerleader to Sally Yates’s refusal to carry out a presidential order), Aaron Zebley (the former attorney for Clinton staffer Justin Cooper who set up the infamous Clinton home server and smashed to bits her mobile devices), and a host of other pros, who were all shortly to prove Trump-Russian “collusion.”
Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much
less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.
Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.
The supposed high drama of election sabotage has descended into leveraging Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen and then outsourcing him and his baggage to federal prosecutors. The FBI, having seized from his home and office his stealthily recorded and secret tapes of his own alleged lawyer-client conversations with Trump, now hope to find therein something, anything, untoward with which they can accuse and damage the president.
Paul Manafort is to be exposed for what most already knew he was, a high-flying
What was billed as an investigation into high intrigue with the Kremlin, has now wheeler-dealer and influence-peddler along the lines of his Clintonite doppelganger, Tony Podesta. Mueller’s team at some point presumably will embarrass Trump concerning his Cohen-arranged hush deals about an alleged fling a decade earlier with a playboy bunny. devolved into questions surrounding one Stormy Daniels and Paul Manafort’s blue lizard jacket. Quite a come down. At some theoretical point, I guess Trump could face as much or as little downside in seeking to keep silent a past alleged hook-up, as Robert Mueller does now after keeping the public completely uninformed for months (not until early December 2017) about why much earlier he had fired both the disreputable Peter Strzok (August 2017), and Lisa Page (September 2017). Indeed, he went so far as to stagger their departures—apparently to obfuscate why they had left and their intimate connection in sending texts, expressing their shared loathing for the target of their own ongoing investigation.
Here is a snippet from a spoon-fed, gullible ABC News report on September 28,
2017—a belated and fallacious story by Mike Levine and Pierre Thomas about Lisa Page’s supposedly normal and scheduled departure from Mueller’s team “weeks ago.”The account turned out to be mostly fake news gathered from “sources said” and “one source” (who would that have been?):
The latest FBI veteran to leave, Lisa Page, was described by media accounts in June as a trial
attorney with “deep experience [in] money laundering and organized crime cases.” She was part of what Wired magazine called Mueller’s “investigatory dream team.” But weeks ago, Page left the Special Counsel’s office and returned to work in the office of the FBI’s general counsel, sources said. According to one source, Page joined Mueller’s team on a short, temporary assignment and always expected to return as soon as that assignment ended.
The preposterous “always expected to return” article also notes in passing the
much earlier, equally mysterious (“unclear”), but apparently unconnected departure of another dream team member:
It’s unclear why Strzok stepped away from Mueller’s team of nearly two dozen lawyers,
investigators and administrative staffers. Strzok, who has spent much of his law enforcement
career working counterintelligence cases and has been unanimously praised by government
officials who spoke with ABC News, is now working for the FBI’s human resources division.
One source told ABC News today he’s sorry Mueller’s team no longer has Strzok’s experience
and insight at its disposal.
All of that leaked puff piece was a contrived concealment of the truth—
orchestrated from the very top either of the FBI or Mueller investigation. For
months, the yarn deliberately deceived the American people about what had
been going on among some of the key players of Mueller’s team.
Mueller originally was appointed due to the contrived leaks from the Steele
dossier—a misnamed document that was more likely cobbled together by Glenn
Simpson and his wife of Fusion GPS for purposes of destroying Donald Trump’s
candidacy and then presidency. Mueller must have analyzed carefully what
amounts to this font of his entire investigation. And yet his team has so far
shown no interest in whether their own foundational document was used
fraudulently to obtain FISA warrants.
Mueller’s lawyers show little concern for whether Christopher Steele himself
colluded with Russians to find his dirt, or whether Hillary Clinton’s hiring of
Fusion GPS and Steele constituted a sort of Russian collusion in and of itself—
or whether Steele was mostly a fraud whose distant espionage past was seen by
the creative writers at Fusion GPS as useful window dressing in efforts to peddle
and seed the fictitious dossier as the work of serious spooks.
Much less does Mueller worry whether John Brennan, former CIA Director,
improperly seeded the dossier to various agencies to ensure it reached the media
before the election, or whether FBI Director John Comey lied about its pivotal
importance in obtaining a FISA warrant, or why Bruce Ohr, the fourth highest
official in the Justice Department, before and after the election, was meeting
with a fired Christopher Steele—supposed severed from FBI support—to pass
along his further gossip and dirt to the FBI, fueled by the suppressed fact that
Ohr’s wife was working with Steele and was a Fusion GPS operative intent on
seeing her “research” fertilized in the right government agencies to delegitimize
Trump.
In some sense, Mueller sought with the dossier to find wrongdoing elsewhere,
when it was right under his nose all along. Again, the circumstances of the
dossier’s creation and dissemination were the catalysts for the 2016 election
scandal.
Robert Mueller’s legacy will be not so much that he was chasing the white whales
of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort, or even that he is
another Patrick Fitzgerald desperate to indict Trump as the new Scooter Libby.
Instead, Mueller’s testament thus far will be one of willful blindness: he saw
nothing ethically or legally wrong, or dangerous to the republic, in a bought and
fictional dossier that fueled both his own reason to be, and in various ways was
central to an historic government effort to surveille, to infiltrate, to undermine,
and to discredit a political campaign first—and later to derail an elected
presidency.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any
eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for
our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist,
former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a
professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is
currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford
University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at
Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities
Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing
raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends
related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second
World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
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5) The Economy Won’t Save Republicans In TheMidtermsDonald Trump keeps bragging about the economy — an unemployment rate of just 3.9 percent, 3.7 million jobs created since he took office, consumer confidence up. Will this help the Republicans in the 2018 midterms? Probably not.
If anything, the good economic performance paradoxically will hurt the GOP.
Why? Because it’s not trickling down to ordinary people. Voters hear news
reports and claims about the strong economy but know that their own wages
are still lousy. This reinforces their sense that someone else is making off with
the gains. And the statistics bear them out. Because of structural changes in
What structural changes? A shift in power from the worker to the boss. A shift
to part-time, temp and contract work. An escalation in the war against unions.
This the first time in modern economic history that very low unemployment
rates and tight labor markets have not led to higher worker earnings. Regular
people may not grasp the finer nuances of labor market theory, but they know
when the boss is giving them a good screwing.
Same story with the tax cut. Republicans thought it would give them bragging rights with voters. But so little of it actually trickles down that Republican candidates have stopped bragging about it. Rather, Democrats hit pay dirt when they emphasize that the immense deficit created by the 10-year cuts have become the excuse for Republicans to target cuts in Social Security and Medicare. If anything, the picture is likely to worsen in the coming months — in three
respects. First, the huge tax cuts have created an old-fashioned deficit-driven
stimulus. That’s not a great idea when the economy is already at full employment because it creates concern about inflation. This is exaggerated in
this low-wage economy, but it gives the Federal Reserve a reason to hike
interest rates.
The Fed has held off on rate hikes for the moment but is likely to increase
interest rates in coming months, most likely in September, two months before
the midterm elections. These higher rates will cycle through to everything from
credit cards to home mortgages. Consumers will not experience higher
wages, but they will experience higher costs.
Secondly, corporations have put their savings from Republican tax cuts into
stock buybacks. This pumps up share value, enriching executives and
investors, but risks creating another financial bubble. And that is very likely to
pop on Trump’s watch.
And lastly, Trump’s trade war has not done serious damage to the economy
as a whole ― yet. But damage in key sectors that supported Trump is coming
soon, from manufacturing to soybeans.
So the economy displays strong numbers, on average and for the moment. But the average good performance is not benefiting workers, and it is not likely to last.
It takes quite a president to preside over an economy with unemployment
rates below 4 percent and not to benefit politically. This is not all Trump’s
doing. The erosion of labor bargaining power and the union bashing has been
occurring for decades, as has the failure to rein in speculative finance.
But the more that Trump and the Republicans try to brag about this economy,
the more they own it. And that’s good news for Democrats. It’s one more
topsy-turvy reality in TrumpWorld.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a professor at
Brandeis University’s Heller School. His new book is Can Democracy Survive
Global Capitalism? Follow him on Twitter at @rkuttnerwrites.
5a)This is not a hoax, and
things are not okay
Imagine that U.S. military leaders spent most of 1941 warning President
Franklin D. Roosevelt and his Democratic Party of a coming Pearl Harbor
attack. Then imagine history’s harsh judgment against FDR’s party had
it ignored those concerns, voted against efforts to fortify the Pacific fleet
and plotted the firing of generals who were working to expose the
looming Japanese threat. Historians would have rightly savaged these
politicians as traitors to their country.
Seventy-seven years later, President Trump and his Republican Party are
showing a disturbing ambivalence toward Russia’s attacks on U.S.
democracy. What exactly are we to make of their disturbing behavior?
Even after Trump’s intelligence chiefs handed Republicans
incontrovertible evidence of Russian malevolence, Trump dismissed the
warnings as a hoax, the GOP House Intelligence Committee chairman
secretly plotted against those leading the Russia investigation and Senate Republicans voted in lock step against a Democratic bill providing a stronger defense against future Russian attacks.
“The X-Files” this is not. The truth about Russia is out there, and it is staring every Republican right in the face.
Trump’s director of national intelligence said warning lights were “blinking red” and compared the threat level from Russia to what we faced leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The president’s secretary of homeland security declared that Russian
President Vladimir Putin’s plot against America placed “democracy
itself . . . in the cross hairs.”
The president’s FBI director, in that same news conference, warned
Americans that “the threat is not going away.”
But despite that clear and present danger, Trump still stubbornly sides
with an ex-KGB spy over his own law enforcement and intelligence
leaders. Just hours after his national security team delivered their harsh
warnings in a White House press briefing, Trump bellowed to a
Pennsylvania audience that “I had a great meeting with Putin. . . . Now
we’re being hindered by the Russian hoax. It’s a hoax, okay?”
No, Mr. President. This is not a hoax, and things are not okay.
The United States has already indicted more than two dozen Russians for
their involvement in the conspiracy to undermine U.S. elections . Twelve
of those indicted work for the Russian military intelligence agency, the
GRU, and allegedly launched their attacks against the United States in
the course of “their official capacities,” according to the Justice
Department . Those indictments charge that Putin ramped up his attacks
on the United States on July 27, 2016 — the day Trump asked Russia to
find Hillary Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing.”
We don’t know yet if Trump or his associates had any direct involvement
in Putin’s conspiracy to interfere in our electoral process. But only a fool
would suggest that the Russian leader is an innocent man. Special
detail how Russia’s military spy agency hacked into America’s
infrastructure and describes its ongoing efforts to destabilize our
country. The forensic evidence proving Putin’s cyberwar against the
United States is so comprehensive that neither the president nor his
sycophants in Congress deny in good faith that Russia has been
coordinating attacks against the United States for years.
So now is the time to ask again why Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani
is demanding a speedy end to the damning Russia investigation, when
the Whitewater probe of the Clintons lasted much longer. And why did
Vice President Pence spend months denying the Trump team’s contacts
with Russian officials, only to pivot this past year to calling for a quick
end to the investigation?
Will Pence’s future presidential primary challengers remember that
Americans would have never uncovered the scope and scale of Putin’s
plot against Western democracies if Pence had had his way? Do House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’s constituents in
California understand that their representative is trying to use his
chairmanship to destroy the careers of officials overseeing the Russia investigation? Let us hope the answer is yes.
One thing is certain: Republicans can no longer plead ignorance when it
comes to Putin. Our country’s national security community has sounded
the alarm. Congress has been warned that our democracy is under attack
by the Russians. How GOP leaders respond to this threat will determine
not only the legacy of their political party but also the resilience of a
political system they have carelessly ceded to a buffoon. Unless
Republican leaders begin putting country ahead of party, history’s
judgment against them all will be harsh.
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