More Random Thoughts and Op Eds.

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America is starting to run out of Americans – GOPUSA
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Another Rant followed by my own market view. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Mueller apparently accomplished his goal.

Unable to find Trump guilty of collusion he decided to open the door by inviting radical Democrats to impeach him for obstructing an investigation which found no guilt and actually became  a witch hunt because early on Mueller realized he could not legally get rid of Trump so he set him up to be thrown out based on political reasons which will also fail.

Personally I find an effort to impeach repugnant but hope Democrats pursue this effort because it should insure Trump's deserved  re-election if he can keep the economy on track and resolve trade issues. (See 2, 2a  and 2b below.)
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As the Barr noose begins to tighten I would expect discord cause by the desire to  save their necks to result in many at each other's throats. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Obviously a lot of us were wrong about the possible success of a China deal. The Chinese simply reverted to their long standing ways of refusing to comply with the world rules of trade and IP. It is why Trump needs to stand strong.  It is now or never with China. We are now in a major game of chicken. However, the underlying situation has not changed. Both sides need to do a deal. China continues to have a material slowdown and a flight of producers to other countries. They can sustain this for some time by using subsidies and lowering the Yuan to be more competitive, but in the end they need to decide to suffer or change how they do business. A much lower Yuan means the tariffs are partially offset and affect Americans less. Since this is a worldwide issue, the Chinese do not have an out anywhere else, and Trump is not going to roll over at this point. If he were to give in, he would blow his entire pitch that he is tough on trade, and on Chinese theft of IP. He will not do that, or it could cost the election as much as tariffs may cause some slowdown in GDP. My guess is, enough sourcing will move factories out of China, or will be replaced with producers in other countries over the next year, that the US will be able to win this battle of wills. It will be painful for some for a while, but not so bad as many predict. Xi has publicly said he will not give in on IP transfer issues, so this could be a long fight. The Chinese at this point are likely seeing the Dems try to unseat Trump and figure they can hold out for another 18 months. The Dems are doing real damage to the US with their attacks on Trump which will get much worse as the election nears. The press screaming that tariffs are wrong and will hurt Trump in 2020 is also very damaging, as the Chinese will read that as Trump is under heavy pressure to relent. He will hold out. In the end a lot of the election outcome will depend on the Supremes upholding Trump’s executive privilege and his right to keep his financials and tax returns private, and on how they view his right to build the wall and stop the flood of illegals, along with a Roe decision. There is no way to predict any of that.  Keep in mind that all the academic and other models that have predicted the election accurately in the past several elections, have Trump winning. Last time I predicted Trump would win.  I predict that again. Biden has far too many bad issues and is too old, and the rest of the Dems are empty suits who are pushing left wing agendas. If Trump wins the Chinese will have to rethink a trade war. We will see what happens at the end of June when they meet face to face.  I predict not much of anything will change at that meeting, and then things will now get ugly.

Realities in China. The government reported industrial profits fell 3.4% last quarter, and nobody knows what the real number is. 90% of new jobs are created in the private sector, so the real problems are buried in fraudulent accounting. There is such widespread fraud in Chinese business that there is no well-established credit monitoring market. The government is trying to prop up the economy by making financing available to all these companies which eventually results in billions of bad loans and zombie companies like they have in Italy. It is not sustainable. Financing losses is not a way to grow the economy.  Private lenders have become very wary of lending to even good operations.  I have seen what happens in China from one of those lenders who went out of business due to fraud on the part of borrowers and one of his lending staff. The average new company in China dies in just over two years, and that was before tariffs. In the US it is 7years. State owned companies get financing to keep them going, but they are terribly inefficient, as is the case for almost any government run company. Many more foreign companies are now wary of doing business in China which will dramatically reduce foreign investment and technology transfer on which they depended. Once tariffs kick in, and more companies move out of the country, and more foreign companies source elsewhere, the Chinese will have very serious economic problems, and that is what Trump is counting on. 

Rare earths are found in several friendly places outside China. It is a matter now of ramping up mining and production to offset lost supplies from China, which is happening. China could shut off supplies which would be a real issue, but it can be overcome with time. China would lose a lot of cash income. The question is how much is in  the US strategic stockpile, and the stockpiles of companies. It is likely the government has large stockpiles as this threat has been there and well known for more than 2 years.

The world, and especially the EU, is in a massive political transition. Trump was just the start of the trend. The EU parliament elections had the far right, and far left, winning major sectors of the voters. Brexit is a clear signal of voters fed up with the centralized control by Brussels. The next prime minister will be strongly pro-Brexit, and a hard Brexit is now much more likely. Italy voted for anti-EU leaders, as did Austria and Hungary and Poland. Germany is done with Merkel and her party, and may go far right due to the mass immigration. Macron has only minimal support. In short, the whole of the EU is in flux and the old leadership is on the way out. Where it goes from here is likely to be messy, and may lead to a break-up of the EU sooner than many predict, or at least a rebalancing of power with Germany much less in control. Watch to see who becomes the next chairman of the ECB to see where power really lies. The EU is no place to be investing now. In addition to the EU, Brazil went right, and a had major shift in politics. Australia just surprised everyone with their election. Abe, who is aligned with Trump, is going to win the upcoming election. Modi is aligned with Trump and just won by a big margin.  Netanyahu is a big Trump supporter and won, despite his potential legal troubles. But now they have new elections. There was a surprise winner in Ukraine. The old, liberal, central government control of everything, and high taxes policies, are being voted out across the world because they failed. For all the press talk of Trump alienating every leader across the world, his guys are winning every major election. What this all says is there will be uncertainty and unclear direction around the world for the next couple of years as new policies are put in place and new governments take power. It also says the Dems in the US are missing the trend, and are going opposite of what the world is saying and experiencing, which is a turn away from more government controls, more regulation, and a lack of strong economic growth, other than the US.

The payments industry is in the early stages of a massive shift to how payments are made and processed. As young people become adults they are going cashless and with swipe cards. There is a huge amount of venture cash going into the space right now, but it is very unclear who the winners are going to be. One thing is for sure, cash is going away. It is not possible to know who will be the winners, but it will be two or three at most. 

My view of Mueller press conference. 1. It is never the role of a prosecutor to say someone is innocent. They only prosecute, or shut up. Mueller did a bad copy of Comey/Clinton which the Dems at the time said was improper. 2. Mueller did grave damage to the country, and he made it clear he is deeply biased, as many suspected. He destroyed his own credibility. He should have simply said, I am closing the investigation today, and the report speaks for itself, and he should have done that in a press release. 3. Now China, Iran, Kim, the EU, and Maduro will just try to ignore Trump assuming he is going to be gone. 4. This is a terrible disaster for the country and the world. It sets back any real hope of deals with China and N Korea. 5. Mueller was totally irresponsible and disgraceful, by egging on the Dems to impeach, which was clearly his goal. Barr will have to respond, and so will Rosenstein who was in the room when Mueller said the OLC was not the issue that led to no decision on obstruction. Either Barr or Mueller are lying, and Rosenstein can solve that very quickly.  My bet is Barr is telling the truth. Rosenstein needs to speak up as to who is lying. 6. Nadler and Pelosi have already blown any semblance of any real investigation and trial. He already has claimed Trump fully guilty of obstruction, collusion and lying. Then he is supposed to be the leader of an objective Congressional investigation for impeachment. What a disgrace. Keep in mind that the overriding rule in America is innocent until proven guilty. It is not for Mueller, a prosecutor, saying we would have said he is innocent if we could have proven it. Prosecutors do not prove a negative. This was historic damage to the country by Mueller, and it is irreparable.  However, in the end it will backfire on the Dems. Polls overwhelmingly (65%) say do not try to impeach.  The public is fed up with this, and are far more interested in jobs, wages, healthcare, trade deals, and immigration, on which the Dems have done nothing other than propose government run healthcare, which voters do not want. The weird thing is, Mueller may have helped reelect Trump by setting the Dems agenda to be impeachment instead of doing anything useful. It will be all the press talks about. Now Pelosi may compound the problem for Dems by not holding a vote on USMCA after Canada and Mexico approve it. Her base will be angry. Doing nothing on immigration will be a big issue in the election. She will not give Trump what is needed. Voters generally will be angry. 

Here is the latest insanity in what goes on in private high schools. In NYC there is an elite private girls school named Spence. For some reason I cannot imagine why, they asked the girls in one grade to say how they sex identify.  14 out of 32 said they were transgender. I can assure you from what I know about these schools, (my daughter attended one) all 32 are normal girls. It is really scary that 14 think they are transgender. What we do not know is what the parents did, other than one who pulled her daughter out. Nor do we know what the school did, or said, but if they asked that question, one can assume they think it was a fine question, and the response was politically correct. How are these girls going to grow up to have a normal sex life, or normal boy girl relationship. What are they going to be thinking when they go to college. What kind of question is this to ask of impressionable high school kids. This is what is going on at top elite private schools. 

Since it was Memorial day just passed, it is a very good time to appreciate the sacrifices millions made to defend the world, and this country. Because history is no longer taught in many high schools, and not in most colleges, the kids have no idea what we did to make it possible for them to live their prosperous and wonderful life.  They go about their lives in freedom, with lots of new devices, enormous opportunities for a prosperous life, and with an economy better than any prior generations ever experienced. They think they are entitled to much more, because they have no basis to judge how far we have come in the economy, and jobs, ending mass racism, providing opportunity for everyone, and providing a life filled with technological goodies to make their lives and health far better and easier.  They instead, denigrate the flag, capitalism, the country and the office of the president. It would be self-evident if they read history how socialism has been a disaster across the world and history. The evidence stares them in the face today, but they are too brainwashed to listen. They think it is OK to shout down any speaker who challenges their thinking. Worse yet, universities allow then to do it, and faculty even encourage this. Many even reject the constitutional requirement of freedom of speech and believe it should be regulated. They have no clue what that would really mean, because they have no idea what happened, and still happens, in dictatorships, and they never read 1984. They do not even understand how their way of thinking on campus would lead to what is happening in China today where everyone is watched, tracked, controlled and made to conform. That is exactly what happens on many campuses today with speech codes and bias response teams, diversity teams, and the like. Conform or you can be expelled, students and professors alike. There is no base from which they can just sit and look around at the wonderful life they lead, and all of the freedoms and things they have today. I am reading a biography of Gorbachev now. If every college kid had to read it they would never think socialism is better than capitalism. There is a reason China has 90% of its companies privately owned. They know socialism in full form is a failure, and private capitalism is need to grow an economy. All of their state run and owned companies are an inefficient mess.

1a) When I leave town you generally get increased volatility and this time even the climate went wild.  We missed the tornado's in Dayton and Toledo on our way to Pittsburgh and got to visit two great regional museums again.

Technically the market has deteriorated and run out of positive news. The yield inversion is an ominous warning but should prove wrong because  I do not foresee a recession.

Trump does not have a lot of time to get the economic train back on track.  The Chinese know this.

a) First, I believe Trump miscalculated. The Chinese cannot lose face because their rule remains an unnatural one.  People want to be free and any crack in their "Great Wall" is viewed as a threat.

Therefore, I suspect, even though our economy is stronger than theirs at this time, Trump is going to have to eat some crow and accommodate in some manner.

What Trump undertook was necessary and could benefit us over the longer term but our political structure seldom accommodates our ability to be as effective against our main adversaries in control of their people, as we could, because our political party's are too contentious, want to maintain power and this negates their ability to do what is beneficial for the nation's needs.

b) The Fed is probably going to cut interest rates but I seriously doubt, after a few days of knee jerk reaction, this will result in anything beneficial sans trade accommodations/resolutions.

c) When The Oval Office is unsettled Wall Street is impacted and the desire to impeach Trump will hang heavy over the markets and undercut Trump's strength in his negotiating posture.  In other words, weak as China's economy may be,  they probably  have the ability to hang tough, should hey choose to do so,  with the election coming  in conjunction with an imperiled president, even though they would benefit from a resolution of the trade impasse. 

I believe China knows future dominance favors them if they do not miscalculate and The Western World continues to remain beset by internalization issues which they have brought upon themselves.

d) Conclusion, I am not sanguine about the market and expect further declines near term until a base has been established.

That said I do not believe we going into a recession.

But then what do I know?

e) And then there is that pesky mosquito named Iran. (See 4 and 4a below.)

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2) Robert Mueller’s Parting Shot

The special counsel gives House Democrats an impeachment nod.

By  The Editorial Board

Robert Mueller is an honorable man, as Marc Antony might have put it. And in his public statement Wednesday we saw a special counsel who went out of his way not to absolve Donald Trump and may have put his thumb on the scale toward impeachment.

Mr. Mueller offered no new facts about his probe at a press appearance in which he read a statement and took no questions. The event was mainly intended to deflect bipartisan requests that he testify on Capitol Hill about his 448-page report on Russia and the Trump campaign. He may have succeeded in that deflection, but not without taking revenge on the President who has criticized his probe.

The special counsel said the Russians he indicted for interfering in the 2016 election are innocent until proven guilty. About Mr. Trump he said only that “there was insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy” between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Yet as his report shows beyond doubt, there is no evidence of a conspiracy, broad or narrow. His report recounts a series of contacts between individual Russians and Trump officials that were of no great consequence and are connected by nothing more than coincidence. Mr. Mueller should have said this clearly on Wednesday.

Regarding obstruction of justice, Mr. Mueller suggested that the reason his office reached no prosecutorial decision is because Justice Department rules don’t allow the indictment of a President while in office. “Charging the president with a crime was, therefore, not an option we could consider,” he said Wednesday.

He thus left it hanging for everyone else to infer whether he would have indicted Mr. Trump if he were not a sitting President. And he left Attorney General William Barr to take responsibility for reaching the prosecutorial judgment that Mr. Mueller refused to make. Mr. Mueller added to this sneaky anti-Trump implication by noting that “the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting President of wrong doing.” What else could he mean but Congress and impeachment?

Yet Mr. Mueller’s analysis of the obstruction evidence in his own report makes clear that no investigation was obstructed. Not the FBI’s counterintelligence probe, and not his own. No witnesses were interfered with, and Mr. Mueller was allowed over two years to issue nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants and interview anyone he wanted, including anyone in the White House.

Mr. Trump sometimes showed his exasperation, and bad judgment, in suggesting to more than one adviser that Mr. Mueller be fired, but no one acted on it. The special counsel probe rolled on without interference. Yet on Wednesday Mr. Mueller would only say that “if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Since when do prosecutors make it their job to pronounce whether someone they investigate is exonerated? Their job is to indict, or not, and if not then keep quiet.

Mr. Mueller finished his statement with an ode to “the attorneys, the FBI agents, and analysts, the professional staff who helped us conduct this investigation in a fair and independent manner.” These individuals, he said, “were of the highest integrity.”

Does that include Andrew McCabe, the former deputy FBI director who is being investigated for lying to investigators? Does he mean Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the FBI paramours whose antipathy for Donald Trump is obvious from their text messages? Mr. Strzok was part of Mr. Mueller’s investigating team until those texts were discovered.

Does Mr. Mueller also mean the FBI officials who used the politically motivated, and since discredited, Steele dossier to persuade a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue a warrant to spy on Trump adviser Carter Page? Mr. Mueller didn’t appear to want to investigate that part of the Russia story. Was that behavior of “the highest integrity”?

Mr. Mueller would have better served the country and his own reputation if he had simply done what he claimed he wants to do and let his report speak for itself. Instead he has weighed in for the Democrats who want to impeach the President, though he doesn’t have to be politically accountable as he skips town. This is the core problem with special counsels who think they answer only to themselves.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t as fortunate. The media and backbench pressure will now build on her to open an impeachment inquiry to charge Donald Trump with obstructing an investigation that wasn’t obstructed into a conspiracy that didn’t exist. Unlike the honorable Mr. Mueller, House Democrats will be accountable at the ballot box in 2020.

2a)

Bob Mueller Boxes the Democrats in on Impeachment

If Democrats try to do impeachment, they run the risk of throwing their presidential candidates off message and providing an opening for Donald Trump. All the conversation will be about impeachment and the Democrats will not really be able to contrast themselves with the President issue by issue. It'll just be impeachment and, again, the voters are ready to move on. Meanwhile, the President will assail the Democrats for trying to ruin his good economy.So either the Democrats must rush to do impeachment now or they must abandon it to avoid looking political and getting thrown off message. If they abandon it, they are going to dishearten their base and risk sabotaging Joe Biden's candidacy by emboldening a progressive candidate who wages war against the Democrats for a failure to impeachment.Bob Mueller may have done the President no favors, but he did not do the Democrats any favors either.

I don’t buy the conventional wisdom that impeaching Bill Clinton in 1999 actually helped the Democrats. In fact, I think the failure of the Senate to convict Clinton, with Arlen Specter pulling his stunt, revved up Republican activists and helped George W. Bush cross a finish line he would not have otherwise crossed.

Arguably, Democrats impeaching Trump only to have the Senate Republicans block it would fire up Democratic activists with even more passion than they have now. Regardless, I think Bob Mueller has boxed the Democrats in on impeachment. At his press conference yesterday, Mueller said

A special counsel’s office is part of the Department of Justice, and by regulation, it was bound by that department policy. Charging the president with a crime was therefore not an option we could consider. The department’s written opinion explaining the policy makes several important points that further informed our handling of the obstruction investigation. Those points are summarized in our report and I will describe two of them for you. First, the opinion explicitly permits the investigation of a sitting president because it is important to preserve evidence while memories are fresh and documents available. Among other things, that evidence could be used if there were co-conspirators who could be charged now. And second, the opinion says that the Constitution requires a process other than the criminal justice system to formally accuse a sitting president of wrongdoing.

In other words, if the Democrats want what they perceive as justice, they must impeach Trump. Additionally, Mueller says he will not testify so Democrats will not get the luxury of having Bob Mueller do their public dirty work for them. They will have to do it themselves.

The longer Democrats drag this out, the less serious they look. They keep saying they need to consider impeachment without doing it. That makes them look like they’re interested in the politics of it, not the reality of it. The American public is largely ready to move on and voters think this issue can be dealt with at the ballot box. For Democrats to make this stick, they will have to make the public care about the issue again.

If Democrats try to do impeachment, they run the risk of throwing their presidential candidates off message and providing an opening for Donald Trump. All the conversation will be about impeachment and the Democrats will not really be able to contrast themselves with the President issue by issue. It’ll just be impeachment and, again, the voters are ready to move on. Meanwhile, the President will assail the Democrats for trying to ruin his good economy.

So either the Democrats must rush to do impeachment now or they must abandon it to avoid looking political and getting thrown off message. If they abandon it, they are going to dishearten their base and risk sabotaging Joe Biden’s candidacy by emboldening a progressive candidate who wages war against the Democrats for a failure to impeachment.

Bob Mueller may have done the President no favors, but he did not do the Democrats any favors either.


2b)

Mark Penn: Pelosi, Dems wrong to hound Trump with continuing investigations

Posted by Ruth King

Impeach him! He has disobeyed Congress!

Those words rang out both this week and in 1868. While the themes then and now are the same, hopefully the outcome will be different.

The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson is widely recognized as one of the most embarrassing moments in American history, in which unrestrained partisanship almost won the day. But it was also a day in which one senator, as recounted by President John F. Kennedy in his book “Profiles in Courage,” stopped us from becoming just another banana republic.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., missed her “Profiles in Courage” moment Thursday, adding “villainous” to her laundry list of accusations against President Trump. Rather than stand firm against her caucus and move the country forward, she caved and started to call the assertion of executive privilege a “cover-up.”

Pelosi might oppose it and might fight it in the courts, but it’s no cover-up. It’s a clear and legally appropriate message that enough is enough.

Remember that there were already multiple all-out congressional investigations over the last two years in addition to Special Counsel Robert Mueller issuing 2,800 subpoenas, interviewing 500 witnesses and ordering 280 interceptions of communications while employing 40 FBI agents and 19 lawyers.

America cannot operate this way. Hounding presidents with investigations cannot become a substitute for elections. I did not believe it in 1998 when President Bill Clinton was impeached and I don’t believe it now.

Americans routinely vote for a divided government and so if this is not stopped it will grind down our ability to govern at all, which is precisely the goal of many pushing this approach.

We are a nation based on orderly elections and transfer of power. We are based on the equal application of our laws and not allowing legislatures to single out individuals and families for persecution.

Those in Congress who are continuing this effort may score some points with a frenzied base. But I believe those who are engaged on a one-sided, unrestrained effort to violate the rights of political opponents will, as in 1998 when Republicans lost seats after their impeachment battle against Clinton, pay a price in 2020.

They will pay an even heavier price to history when Americans look back on this period and say that our intelligence operations and media deliberately whipped up the public over Russia collusion crimes that never existed. And Congress, it seems, has not learned the lessons of 1868 or even 1998.

Rather than a thin majority in one house of Congress that the Democrats have today, the Republicans in 1868 had super majorities that were veto-proof. They manufactured an issue alleging that the president had fired the secretary of war in violation of a congressional act that required Congress to approve removing Cabinet officials. Sound familiar?

As recounted in Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage,” one Republican senator blocked the vote in the Senate. Even after the Senate was adjourned 10 days to pressure him, he stood firm and prevented President Johnson’s removal from office.

The Tenure Act on which the impeachment was based was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as violating the separation of powers.

The Constitution survived even the presidency of Andrew Johnson. The Constitution is once again being put to a test. No, not by President Trump, but by those who gained a majority in Congress and are once again misusing their authority.

The impeachment clause was put in the Constitution in the event of treason and other high crimes, not to be used as a weapon of political rage by those who lost an election.

President Trump, it is now confirmed, was under investigation from before he was even elected. He cooperated in unprecedented ways with the Mueller investigation that was by any measure a scorched-earth review of virtually every connection that anyone in the Trump orbit had with anything Russian.

There is not a single account of an inappropriate contact by Trump with anyone or anything Russian. Indeed, had he done something like leaning over to the Russian president, as President Barack Obama did in 2012, and whispered that he would have more “flexibility” after the election to negotiate on missile defense, Democrats would be shouting collusion and treason.

But it didn’t happen. The $40 million Mueller report is unambiguous that despite attempts by Russians, Trump and his campaign did not take the bait. According to George Papadopoulos and other sources, we are now learning that some of those approaches may have been from the FBI or CIA itself.

Without a doubt, the president was frustrated at being investigated to the ends of the Earth for something he didn’t do and that put a cloud over his entire presidency.

Trump did not, as Nixon did, pay hush money to witnesses. He did not, as Hillary Clinton did, destroy emails under subpoena. He did not, as President Bill Clinton did, lie under oath.

Trump considered firing the special counsel and had a fight with his own counsel over it. He tried to get messages through to his own attorney general that he was innocent.

Remember that the investigators had targeted Trump’s son and that the president’s friends, like Roger Stone, were being arrested by armed armadas for allegedly lying to Congress about inconsequential matters that would never be prosecuted except as a tactic to put extreme pressure on them.

In America, people have a constitutional right to protect themselves. They have that right when attacked in their homes and when unfairly investigated by the government. They have a panoply of rights to due process, equal treatment under the law, protection from unfair searches and seizures, and indictment by a grand jury.

Innocence is not a corrupt motive. It is an honest motive, and while even innocent people still could violate the law, a violation takes more than possibly exercising constitutional authority to fire an independent counsel.

That same issue – firing administration officials – was itself litigated in the embarrassing impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Unlike Johnson, who fired his war secretary, Trump backed down and didn’t even remove the special counsel, letting him complete his report.

While the Mueller investigation was ongoing, the former heads of national intelligence, the FBI and the CIA were on cable TV almost daily acting far more like political hacks than intelligence professionals. Their post-administration actions strongly suggest they had harbored that same animus during the campaign and transition.

Indicted alleged conmen like Michael Avenatti were allowed to use the president and his family like punching bags with impunity. They were all riding a celebrity gravy train of books, speeches and TV appearances created by the popularity of pushing the false Russia conspiracy theories.

Trump’s attitude today is simple. He endured this crazy, even unjustified investigation, so now let him govern and in 18 months we will have an election.

Instead, too many House Democrats, without any Republican support on their committees, have launched unrestrained and unprecedented new investigations of not only the president, but also his family and his businesses – falsely using their limited powers of subpoena in broad and unprecedented ways. New York state is even passing constitutionally prohibited bills of attainder to help them.

The Democrats have a choice – learn the lessons of history and walk back from endless investigations, or push forward and face the likely wrath of the voters for being no better than the last group the public fired from their job.

There’s a reason congressional approval is in the 20s in polls, while the president, the Supreme Court and almost every other institution of our government scores higher. It’s all about making the right choices for our country, not for a party.

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3) He Did It, Not Me! By Victor Davis Hanson

Ruth King

“No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump. Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted. And so in response, we now hear: “He did it, not me!”

There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been permitted to range well beyond his mandate of “Russian collusion.” He outsourced much of the selection of his “dream team” and “all-star” staff of attorneys to his deputy, Andrew Weissman. In turn, Weissman—who commiserated with Hillary Clinton at her ill-fated “victory” party on the evening of her defeat—stocked the team with Trump-haters, liberals and progressives, Clinton donors, a few who had previously served as attorneys for the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton or Obama aides. Most of these were themselves briefed during the early dissemination of the fraudulent Steele dossier.

Yet after all the bias, prosecutorial leveraging, the process crimes, the perjury traps, and after 22 months, $34 million, and a 440-plus page report, Mueller’s “hunter-killer” team did not establish that President Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the 2016 election.

In fact, Mueller could not find prosecutable “obstruction” of justice by Trump to impair the investigation of what Mueller concluded was not a crime.

The Wolves Turn On Each Other
Now we turn to the real unspoken question: how did it happen that the top machinery of the U.S. government meddled in an election, and sought to sabotage a presidential transition and early presidency?

Note well: none of the leveraged targets of Robert Mueller turned state’s evidence to accuse Donald Trump of “collusion,” the object of the special counsel’s investigation, although to have done so would have mightily helped their cause and given them John Dean iconic status among leftists. In contrast, we have scarcely begun to investigate wrongdoing at the intelligence and justice departments and already the suspects are fingering each other.

James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment—as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced?

Why would not they still be vying to take credit for warning President Obama that Donald J. Trump was a likely sexual pervert, with a pathological hatred of Obama, as manifested in Trump’s alleged Moscow debauchery—a reprobate who used his subordinates to steal the election from Hillary Clinton and who still must somehow be stopped at all costs?

That entire bought fantasy was the subtext of why Mueller was appointed in the first place. It was the basis for the persistent support to this day among the media and progressives for the now discredited notion of “collusion.”

If our noble public servants really believed all that to be true, would not Comey and Brennan instead now be arguing that each, not the other, was bold and smart enough to have included the seminal dossier into a presidential briefing? Comey in public still insists that the dossier is not discredited, though in all his sanctimonious televised sermons, he never has provided any details that support the supposed veracity of Steele’s charges. Why then is Comey not demanding that the FBI take credit for bringing this key piece of intelligence to Obama’s attention rather than fobbing off such an important feat to the rival CIA?

Why, for that matter, are Andrew McCabe and James Comey at odds?

The commonality of their respective sworn testimonies has been that Trump was and remains a danger to the republic—to the extent that McCabe admittedly staged a comical coup attempt and Comey committed a likely felony in leaking to the media classified documents that had memorialized his versions of his own confidential conversations with the president.

Why, given their protestation of innocence and their cry-of-the-heart leaking to save us, would not McCabe and Comey be heaping praise on each other, as each tried to outdo the other in pursuing extraordinary measures to end the clear and present danger of Donald Trump?

McCabe has testified that the dossier was the anchoring evidence that the FBI presented to the FISA court. Comey denies that fact. But once more why would they disagree? And why would they be at odds over supposedly noble leaking to the press?

McCabe claims Comey allowed him to leak gossip and rumors about Trump’s culpability; Comey says he did no such thing. But should not both still be bragging that they had the guts to seed the dossier and related confidential information to the media to the stop the national threat of Donald Trump?

We know that Comey has no intrinsic objection to scattering classified information, because he has bragged that he did just that after his firing to help appoint a special counsel. We know in addition that McCabe has no problem with divulging confidential information because to the media he has accused Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, in a confidential conversation, of volunteering to wear a wire in hopes of entrapping the President of the United States at some incriminating moment.

For the Good of the People?
Why again are McCabe and Comey pointing fingers at each other as leakers and purveyors or ruinous gossip, when both have admittedly leaked and are apparently proud of it, reasoning that they did it for us, the people, in our moment of peril from our president whom the people elected?

Why are McCabe and Rosenstein at odds? The former says the latter was willing to record stealthily his conversations with Trump in an effort to remove him, the latter says it was a joke and that McCabe engineered such a discussion. But why the disconnect? Both in varying ways have tried to obstruct declassification of government documents that might suggest government overreach under the Justice Department and FBI. Both seem at odds with Trump, both the man and his presidency. Why then are not each vying with the other for the greater credit of nearly engineering a coup to remove an existential threat like Donald Trump, a supposedly legal act under their allegedly mutually referenced application of the 25th Amendment?

These are rhetorical questions because we know the answers: our top officials at the DOJ, CIA, FBI, and NSC, as well as James Clapper as director of national intelligence, likely broke federal law, betrayed their agencies, and in general acted in an abjectly unethical manner on the premises that 1) Hillary Clinton would be the next president and their behavior would be rewarded; and 2) in the aftermath of her defeat and after Trump became president, that Trump could either be removed or so discredited that their own prior illegality would either never come to light or would be contextualized as noble resistance.

Until election night, they seemed to have been correct in their assumptions.

Given the subsequent serial efforts of #TheResistance to remove or destroy president-elect and President Trump—the suits to overturn the voting in three states, the attempted subversion of the Electoral College voting, the efforts to invoke the Emoluments Clause, the Logan Act, and the 25th Amendment, the early impeachment vote, the recusal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Mueller investigation, and the brouhaha over Stormy Daniels, the Trump tax returns, Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti—these officials still believed that their prior behavior would either eventually be praised or at least excused. But they bet foolishly against the viability of Trump.

The appointment of William Barr as attorney general has sobered the lawbreakers, and perhaps soon the media, which may not wish to go down the drain with their erstwhile FBI and CIA speaking-truth-to-power heroes.

No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump.

Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted.

And so in response, we now hear: “He did it, not me!”

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4) Iran’s proxy war is the real problem

While a full-scale war with Tehran does not appear likely in the near future, low-intensity conflict against the West and its allies already is already being waged all over the world.

By Ruthie Blum

Sunday night’s landing of a Katyusha rocket less than half a mile from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad was not merely the latest provocation on the part of Tehran in its battle of wills with Washington. More importantly, it verified Israeli intelligence revealing stockpiles of Iranian ballistic missiles in Iraq, poised to strike American targets. It also vindicated the dispatch of U.S. warships and fighter jets to the Persian Gulf, and the State Department’s order that all non-essential diplomatic personnel evacuate Iraq immediately.

The rocket attack, then, did not come as a total shock. Still, it came two weeks after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suddenly canceled a trip to Germany and headed to Baghdad to warn Iraqi leaders about Iran’s growing influence on their soil and threat to their sovereignty.

On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump made two statements that illustrate his administration’s dilemma about when or whether to engage in actual battle with the Islamic Republic.

In the afternoon, he tweeted: “If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!”

Yet in an interview with Fox News that aired Sunday evening, he said, “ … [T]they can’t be threatening us … and I’m not … somebody that wants to go into war. … I don’t want to fight. But you do have situations like Iran. You can’t let them have nuclear weapons—you just can’t let that happen.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif shot back at Trump on social media.

Alluding to U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both of whom have been accused of trying to manipulate Trump into going to war, he tweeted: “Goaded by #B Team, @realdonaldTrump hopes to achieve what Alexander, Genghis & other aggressors failed to do. Iranians have stood tall for millennia while aggressors all gone. #EconomicTerrorism & genocidal taunts won’t ‘end Iran.’ #NeverThreatenAnIranian. Try respect—it works!”

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, however, stated recently that “war is not in the offing. … We do not want a war, and neither does the United States, which knows it does not stand to gain anything from a war. … Iranian willpower is strong because Iran puts its trust in Allah. The boastful and bullying enemy has no real strength.”

In spite of Iran’s “bluster and bluff”—as Jonathan Tobin has called the regime’s attempt to extricate itself from the corner of crippling sanctions into which Trump has forced it—Tehran clearly knows that it is no match for the might of the U.S. military. Its leaders also are aware, however, that Americans are never keen on going to war. Especially when persuaded by propaganda that they are doing so in order to defend a third country. You know, like Israel, for instance, whose prime minister has been shouting about the global danger of a nuclear Iran for decades.

And that brings us to the real problem facing the Trump administration right now. While a full-scale war with Iran does not appear likely in the near future, low-intensity conflict against the West and its allies already is being waged by Iran’s proxies all over the world.

Indeed, Iran-backed Shi’ite militias and terrorist organizations have been committing atrocities well beyond the Middle East. Israel has been on the front lines of this incessant guerilla onslaught, attempting simultaneously to fight off genocidal groups and individuals along its borders without launching a military offensive on an actual country.

Fending off Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps members in Syria, the only democracy in the region takes great care not to kill the civilians used by the terrorists ruling their governments (and living in their midst) as human shields and canon fodder.

In such asymmetric warfare, definitive victory is elusive, if not impossible.

Herein lies Iran’s current advantage over the United States.

In an article on Friday in the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese daily, Al-Akhbaron—translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute—editor Ibrahim Al-Amin described Tehran’s global tentacles as follows: “The Soviet leader of old, Josef Stalin, was once asked about the nature of the ties between the Soviet Union—the center of the communist movement—and other communist forces around the world. He replied: ‘We support and sponsor all the communist parties in the world. Each of us operates according to his status and circumstances. If any [communist] party experiences a crisis in its country, we will see how we can assist it and figure out the best course of action. [And] if we are in crisis, the communists around the world will no doubt come to the aid of the Soviet Union.’ ”

According to Al-Amin, Iran not only “possesses an arsenal that threatens the farthest edges of Western Europe, and can also destroy all the centers of influence in the Middle East,” but has allies that will join it in war: a real army in Afghanistan; an influential force in Syria and Iraq; Hezbollah, a party with state-like powers; and vast capabilities in Yemen, as well as allies in Palestine and other parts of the Arab world who will feel the need to come to its aid … ”

The good news is that the Soviet Union was eventually defeated by the United States without a war. The bad news is that America did not achieve victory over the USSR until nearly 40 years after Stalin’s death.

Let us hope that toppling the evil regime of the ayatollahs takes far less time—with or without troops on the ground or bombs from the air. Our lives depend on it.

Ruthie Blum is an Israel-based journalist and author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.’ ” 

4a) Pompeo: We Will Not Allow Iran to Hide Behind Its Proxy Forces

By Nic Rowan

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a Tuesday interview that the United States will not allow Iran "to hide behind its proxy forces" in its offenses against American interests in the Middle East.

"We've made clear that we will not allow Iran to hide behind its proxy forces," Pompeo said on the Hugh Hewitt show. "But if American interests are attacked, whether by Iran directly or through its proxy forces, we will respond in an appropriate way against Iran."

Pompeo said that the main threat that Iran poses to the United States in the region is its "underwriting of these proxy forces." This includes any moves by Iran to destabilize the United States's anti-Iran strategy, Pompeo told Hewitt.

"Our strategy has been aimed at diminishing their capacity to support those proxy forces, whether as you described, it's missiles headed to Hezbollah, whether that's inside of Lebanon or in Syria itself, all the things they do to underwrite the Shia militias in Iraq, which fundamentally undermines the Iraqi government's capacity to stand up as an independent government," Pompeo said. "We've seen launches of Iranians missiles out of Yemen by the Houthi proxy forces. These are the kinds of activities that are incredibly destabilizing in the Middle East, and they are among the primary aims of our counter-Iran policy."

Pompeo also addressed the recent attacks on Saudi Arabian shipping in the Persian Gulf and on Saudi pipelines, saying "it seems like it's quite possible" that Iran was behind these attacks.

"We'll continue to develop the situation, and most importantly, we will continue to take acts that protect American interests and that work to deter Iran from misbehavior in the region, which has the real risk of escalating the situation such that the crude oil prices rise, there's chaos in the crude oil markets, something that Iran would see as advantageous to them as they attempt to continue to conduct the terror campaign that they have conducted all around the world for, frankly, the last 40 years," Pompeo said.

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