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Ruth King

$20 Billion Hidden in the Swamp: Feds Redact 255,000 Salaries By Adam Andrzejewski

The only thing the bureaucratic resistance hates more than President Trump is the disclosure of their own salaries. It’s a classic case of the bureaucracy protecting the bureaucracy, underscoring the resistance faced by the new administration.

Recently, Open the Books filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (pictured) for all federal employee names, titles, agencies, salaries, and bonus information. We’ve captured and posted online this data for the past 11 years. For the first time, we found missing information throughout the federal payroll disclosures. Here’s a sample of what we discovered from the FY2017 records:

254,839 federal salaries were redacted in the federal civil service payroll (just 3,416 salaries were redacted in FY2016).
68 federal departments redacted salaries. Even small agencies like the National Transportation Services Board and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation redacted millions of dollars in salaries.
$20 billion in estimated payroll now lacks transparency.
A 7,360 percent increase in opacity hides one out of every five federal salaries.

Who’s the bureaucrat in charge? Not a Trump appointee – the president doesn’t even have a current nominee at OPM. So, the buck stops with new acting Director Kathleen McGettigan, a 25-year staffer who assumed the position because she was the next in line, not because the White House appointed her.

CORRUPTION AND ISLAM: EDWARD CLINE

I get tons of emails from Trump-friendly sites every day, and am overwhelmed by the voluntary and necessary task of reading the news, until I nod off in exhaustion. I thought the deluge had peaked during the 2016 presidential campaign, but the Niagara Falls of information keeps coming, creating clouds of fake news vapors. Now it’s not whether or not Trump wipes the floor with Hillary, but it’s the latest MSM conniption fit with hair being torn out in angry exasperation and furious foot-stamping, and over Trump’s hair. If it isn’t about whether or not the FISA memo ought to be released, to the style of Trump’s socks, then it’s about what he keeps on his “racist” Oval Office desk.

One thing that worries me about the FBI/State Department/NSA scandal is that one or all of the culprits named in the release of the FISA memo will not be punished; that is arrested, cuffed, charged, and hauled off to detention or put under house arrest with ankle bracelets before being tried for treason, plotting to overthrow a properly elected President, suborning Congress, and a baker’s dozen of other serious crimes.

None of these people should be allowed to live easily and go golfing after being outed as obsessed criminals: James Comey, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, John Podesta, Rod Rosenstein, Sally Yates, FBI agents Peter Strzok and his mistress, Lisa Page, and a dozen or more others afflicted with Never-Trump brain seizures, including Barack Obama, who, as then President, okayed the wire-tapping of Trump Tower in New York City. This operation was directed against President Trump, who should take it personally, if nothing else, and call for their arrests, but hasn’t (yet). Americans have not seen any indication that he will slap the guilty with iron gloves.

Christopher Steele, the one-time British spy and Trump dossier fabricator, ought to be extradited to the U.S. and made to answer for his contribution to a fraud.

On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, former British MI-6 Intelligence Officer Christopher Steele is going to extremes to avoiding answering questions from the United States Congress, while at the same time avoiding being videotaped and deposed in a multi-million dollar libel case brought against Buzzfeed.

At the very least, the culprits should be sentenced to the mandatory testing of consuming converted human waste as astronaut food, to see if it’s acceptable NASA fare to anyone in the astronaut corps.

Completely Missing the Point on Lisa Page’s Obama Text An FBI intel briefing of the former president shows the silliness of the Trump obstruction inquiry. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Ever watch one of those games in which it looks like the road team is inadvertently doing everything it can to give the game away but the home team is too inept to capitalize?

Welcome to the “Trump-Russia” investigation and the pro-Trump media’s coverage of the latest “stunning” revelation: a text in which two top FBI counterintelligence officials discuss the fact that the president “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

This has much of the conservative media crowing: The text, commentators exclaim, shows that Obama lied four months earlier when he claimed — hilariously, to be sure — that he never interfered in law-enforcement matters.

Uh, guys, counterintelligence is not law enforcement. If Obama demanded an intelligence briefing, that indicates he was doing what he was supposed to be doing as president.

Your play here is not that Obama is a liar. It is that the president is supposed to “interfere” in intelligence investigations. That makes the Trump-Russia obstruction narrative patently absurd.

If I sound a bit snarky, please cut me some slack. Since a time well before Robert Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, I have been harping on the critical distinction between counterintelligence investigations and criminal investigations. It is often missed, even by lawyers if they are unacquainted with national-security law. You can’t blame people for being confused: Both kinds of inquiries are called “investigations,” just as apples and oranges are both “fruits,” but they are very different things.

Criminal investigations are about prosecuting people who violate the penal law. Political officials are generally supposed to stay out of them because we are a rule-of-law society — we want individual cases to be decided strictly by the law, not by political considerations.

There is not, nor should there be, complete independence between politics and this law-enforcement mission: Law enforcement is an executive political responsibility; the president is accountable for it; he sets the government’s law-enforcement priorities; prosecutors and investigators exercise the president’s power, not their own; and the president has undeniable constitutional authority to wade into investigations — even to the point of pardoning law-breakers. Still, by and large, the president should not interfere in criminal cases. If the president does interfere, he should do so transparently: Issue a pardon or order the investigation closed, and take the political heat for it; don’t stage-manage a farce to make it look like your crony is being exonerated by a real investigation when everyone knows you will not permit charges to be filed (see, e.g., the Clinton emails case).

MY SAY: WHICH SENATOR SAID THIS?

“To me “bipartisan foreign policy” means a mutual effort, under our indispensable two-Party system, to unite our official voice at the water’s edge so that America speaks with maximum authority against those who would divide and conquer us and the free world. It does not involve the remotest surrender of free debate in determining our position. On the contrary, frank cooperation and free debate are indispensable to ultimate unity. In a word, it simply seeks national security ahead of partisan advantage. Every foreign policy must be totally debated (and I think the record proves it has been) and the “loyal opposition” is under special obligation to see that this occurs.”

It was Arthur H. Vandenberg Republican from Michigan who served in the Senate from 1928 to 1951. His relationship and collaborations with then Democrat President Harry Truman were legendary. Read more in :

Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World by Lawrence J. Haas

rsk

David Katharas: What a Jewish Pogrom Means

From the historical archives, a reminder of the thin line between barbarity and civilisation, and that civilisation cannot be taken for granted. (The image at left is of still-breathing victims of the Kiev pogrom of 1919; the pogrom described below seemingly occurred in 1885, and the author briefly mentions one that took place in 1905.)

This article was printed in The Australian Worker, 16 August 1933; it was entitled ‘What a Jewish Pogrom Means’.

For centuries the Jews have been persecuted. But have you ever realised the terror of a pogrom? This description of anti-Jewish riots by David Katharas refers to pre-war Russia, but it might easily be Germany to-day.

This story may help Christians to realise the. horror with which world Jewry has heard of the outbreak of anti-Semitism in Germany, and the depth of feeling behind the protests of our people against the Nazi attacks on the Jews.

I am a trader in the City of London, but Russia is the country of my birth.

I am one of many thousands of Jews in this country and America who have lived through the terror of persecution in Eastern Europe, and who know what anti-Semitism can mean at the hands of the more brutal of the European peoples.

My mind goes back to a spring evening in the town of Kiev in South Russia [Ukraine].

There are five of us huddled in a corner of a back room — my parents, my two young sisters and myself. We children are clutching my father’s arms, too terrified to speak or even to weep.

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: JOHN JAMES FOR THE SENATE IN MICHIGAN

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/10/25/john_james_could_be_the_future_republicans_have_been_waiting_for_135352.html
John James Could Be the Future Republicans Have Been Waiting for Salena Zeto

DETROIT — John James emerges with confidence from a charter high school in the northwest side of the city that used to be an elementary school. It is a stride any parents would hope to see in their son or daughter when they graduate from this school, founded by Jalen Rose, former NBA player and member of the University of Michigan’s legendary “Fab Five” squad.

Outside the leafy campus of Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, parents wait for their children to emerge as a handful of students play on the clay basketball court. James, a member of the school’s board, has just finished a board meeting to discuss his decision to run for the Michigan Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.

He’s no Kid Rock, and that is a good thing for the Republican Party.

Death of an NFL Dreamer Illegal Guatemalan kills African American Edwin Jackson. February 8, 2018 Lloyd Billingsley

By one estimate, only 6 percent of American high-school seniors will play college football and Edwin Jackson of Westlake High School in Atlanta was a walk-on at Georgia Southern University. Jackson played well but the odds of making it to the National Football League were not in his favor.

Of some 20,000 college freshmen only 1.5 percent will make an NFL roster and no NFL team showed much interest in Edwin Jackson. Instead of giving up, he went the free-agent route and after release by the Arizona Cardinals he found a home with the Indianapolis Colts. In the eight games he started for the team, Jackson recorded 66 tackles. In the NFL, performance counts and at 26, the hard-working linebacker had the best of his career before him.

By all indications, Jackson was popular with teammates and careful to avoid trouble off the field. Indeed, while out late last weekend, Jackson showed the good sense to take Uber rather than drive. He doubtless planned to watch the Super Bowl but Edwin Jackson would not tune in or ever play another game in the National Football League.

Early on Sunday, a Ford F-150 pickup slammed into Jackson and driver Jeffrey Monroe, 54, who had pulled to the side of Interstate 70 in Indiana. Both men perished in the impact and the driver fled. Police chased down Alex Cabrera Gonsales but that name turned out to be fake.

The man who killed Edwin Jackson was actually Manuel Orrego-Savala, 37. He had no driver’s license and his blood-alcohol level was 0.239, three times the legal limit. The politically correct would say he had a problem with “substance abuse” but in reality he’s a drunk who was not supposed to be in the United States in the first place.

‘Delegitimizing’ Mueller? Don’t Blame the Nunes Memo The FBI and Justice Department hyped Trump–Russia collusion. Rod Rosenstein can right that wrong. By Andrew C. McCarthy

The most bitter dispute over the Nunes memo involves Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. This might seem odd since the memo, published last week by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Devin Nunes (R. Calif.), does not address the Mueller investigation. Rather, it homes in on potential abuses of foreign-intelligence-collection authorities by Obama-era Justice Department and FBI officials, said to have occurred many months before Mueller was appointed.

Nevertheless, it is simply a fact that many ardent supporters of President Trump claim the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation is destroyed by revelations in the Nunes memo — particularly, the improper use of the unverified Steele dossier to obtain a FISA-court warrant to spy on Carter Page, who had been a Trump campaign adviser. The idea is that without the Steele dossier, there would be no Trump-Russia narrative, and thus no collusion investigation — which is how Trump supporters perceive the Mueller probe.

Naturally, this has prompted a vitriolic response. Trump critics see the Mueller investigation as the path to impeachment, and thus anathematize Chairman Nunes as a Trumpist hack bent on razing the FBI — longtime bête noire of the Left, which, through the alchemy of Trump derangement, has suddenly become great a pillar of Our Values.

But the Trump-deranged have only themselves to blame.

FISA-gate Is Scarier than Watergate The press used to uncover government wrongdoing. Today’s press is defending it. By Victor Davis Hanson

The Watergate scandal of 1972–74 was uncovered largely because of outraged Democratic politicians and a bulldog media. They both claimed that they had saved American democracy from the Nixon administration’s attempt to warp the CIA and FBI to cover up an otherwise minor, though illegal, political break-in.

In the Iran-Contra affair of 1985–87, the media and liberal activists uncovered wrongdoing by some rogue members of the Reagan government. They warned of government overreach and of using the “Deep State” to subvert the law for political purposes.

We are now in the midst of a third great modern scandal. Members of the Obama administration’s Department of Justice sought court approval for the surveillance of Carter Page, allegedly for colluding with Russian interests, and extended the surveillance three times.

But none of these government officials told the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the warrant requests were based on an unverified dossier that had originated as a hit piece funded in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump during the current 2016 campaign.

Nor did these officials reveal that the author of the dossier, Christopher Steele, had already been dropped as a reliable source by the FBI for leaking to the press.

From out of the slime, Sidney Blumenthal rears his head again By Monica Showalter

When the question of who cooked up the gross, repulsive contents of the Steele Dossier is asked, is anyone surprised the name of Hillary Clinton’s consigliere, Sid Blumenthal, comes up?

Blumenthal has that kind of mind, and sure enough we read of him again. This time, there’s a new memo, created by Senate Republicans Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham about the creation of the Steele dossier, and apparently one of the contributors was Sid Blumenthal. According to Fox News:

Last month, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., made a criminal referral regarding Steele to the FBI. The referral, parts of which were declassified Monday, included a reference to “a foreign source [who] gave information to an unnamed associate of Hillary and Bill Clinton, who then gave information to an unnamed official in the Obama State Department, who then gave the information to Steele.”

In another section, the referral stated that Steele received information from “a foreign sub-source who is in touch with (redacted), a contact of (redacted), a friend of the Clintons, who passed it to (redacted).'”

Rep. Trey Gowdy, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, strongly hinted to Fox News that the “friend of Hillary Clinton” was Blumenthal:

When host Martha MacCallum asked if he was referring to Blumenthal, Gowdy answered, “That’d be really warm. You’re warm, yeah.”