RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-are-the-fbi-and-cia-hiding-1533078662

Did the Central Intelligence Agency lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation down a rabbit hole in the counterintelligence investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign?

Although the FBI’s case officially began July 31, 2016, there had been investigative activity before that date. John Brennan’s CIA might have directed activity in Britain, which could be a problem because of longstanding agreements that the U.S. will not conduct intelligence operations there. It would explain why the FBI continues to stonewall Congress as to the inquiry’s origin.

Further, what we know about the case’s origin does not meet the threshold required by the attorney general guidelines for opening a counterintelligence case. That standard requires “predicate information,” or “articulable facts.”

From what has been made public, all that passes for predicate information in this matter originated in Britain. Stefan Halper, an American who ran the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge, had been a CIA source in the past. Recent press reports describe him as an FBI informant. Joseph Mifsud, another U.K.-based academic with ties to Western intelligence, met with Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016. Mr. Mifsud reportedly mentioned “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Then, on May 10, Mr. Papadopoulos met with Australian Ambassador Alexander Downer in London, to whom he relayed the claim about “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton.

Peter Strzok, the FBI’s deputy assistant director, went to London Aug. 2, 2016, two days after the case was opened, ostensibly to interview Mr. Downer about his conversation with Mr. Papadopoulos. But what about the earlier investigative activity? The FBI would not usually maintain an informant in England. It is far likelier that in the spring of 2016 Mr. Halper was providing information to British intelligence or directly to the CIA, where Mr. Brennan was already pushing the collusion narrative.

James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, has acknowledged that “intelligence agencies” were looking into the collusion allegations in spring 2016. The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that British intelligence had been suspicious about contacts between associates of Mr. Trump’s campaign and possible Russian agents. That prompted Robert Hannigan, then head of Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, to pass information to Mr. Brennan. With only these suspicions, Mr. Brennan pressured the FBI into launching its counterintelligence probe. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.city-journal.org/html/closing-skills-gap-16083.html

According to the Department of Labor, more than 6.5 million jobs remain unfilled because employers can’t find workers with the necessary skills. Some of this shortfall may reflect the fact that U.S. unemployment rate is historically low, but much of it stems from inadequate worker training. The problem shows up clearly in the widening wage gap for skilled work, which extends beyond the well-documented distinction between the earnings of the college-educated and those with only a high school diploma or less. Across the spectrum of work, the premium for skill continues to grow.

As the baby boomers retire, many skilled workers will leave the productive economy. Just to sustain existing levels of productivity, their replacements will need to rise to their predecessors’ skill level quickly. Global competition will continue to exert pressure, regardless of President Trump’s tariffs. Low wages in emerging economies have drawn manufacturing of simpler, low-value-added products offshore, leaving our high-wage economy with little choice but to turn to more complex, high-value-added products, which demand a better-trained workforce. Rapid technological progress will make its own demands for skilled labor: nearly one in five of today’s jobs did not exist in 1980. More recently, artificial intelligence has threatened to replace less-skilled workers—and even some higher-skilled ones—through automation. American workers will need to upgrade their skills continuously to stay ahead of these economic pressures.

Washington has been slow to respond until now. The Trump White House has supported the expansion of apprenticeship programs and is now pressing legislation to increase access to technical education, most notably through the Perkins Career and Technical Education bill. Executive orders aim to expand training, which the White House refers to as “workforce development.” Adding to such ad hoc efforts, the administration has promised to develop a concerted strategy for “training and retraining” workers for “high-demand industries.”

A recent report by the Council of Economic Advisors lays out the difficulties in meeting the training challenge. Though all interested parties—individuals, employers, government entities, even social-welfare organizations—have strong incentives to train more workers, each group also faces impediments to success. Few individuals can afford to pay the costs or take the necessary time away from work for retraining. Nor is it clear which training or which credential fits the work on offer. Employers, fearful that workers will take their newly acquired skills to competitors, are reluctant to contribute to outside training programs. Government and nonprofits devoted to workforce development are struggling to identify the best ways to get workers trained in a timely fashion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/rod-rosenstein-impeachment-bad-idea/

This is not the way to hold the executive branch accountable.

In what was, at best, a serious tactical error, a relative handful of House conservatives attempted to file articles of impeachment against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The effort was quickly abandoned owing to a lack of support — including from many Republican lawmakers who believe it is essential to hold investigative agencies accountable for abuses of their legal authorities during the 2016 campaign. The impeachment gambit risks setting back that cause.

There are five articles that purport to allege impeachable offenses. I say “purport” advisedly. It is not just that no actionable misconduct on Rosenstein’s part has been established at this point. More fundamentally, some of the articles do not even state “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the applicable constitutional standard for impeachment and removal.

There are several other flaws, but I’ll deal with the two most important. First, the sponsors of the impeachment gambit conveniently overlook the fact that the deputy attorney general has a boss: President Trump. Their use of Rosenstein as a political piñata cannot obscure their studied failure to mention that the president could order the disclosure they demand at any time. This undermines Congress’s worthy examination of investigative abuses by bolstering the Democrats’ claim that Republicans are engaged in political theater to discredit the Mueller probe.

Second, Santa Claus has a better chance of being impeached than Rod Rosenstein. An impeachment attempt that is overwhelmingly defeated encourages the very misconduct it targets.

Judgment Calls Are Not Impeachable Offenses — Articles I and V
High crimes and misdemeanors are egregious violations of an official’s public trust, as I outlined in Faithless Execution, my 2014 book on the role of impeachment in our constitutional framework. For a balanced, accessible explanation of this topic, I also commend to readers Professor Cass Sunstein’s recent book, Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide.

Impeachable offenses need not be criminal-law violations; indeed, many abuses of government power are not codified as crimes in the penal code. And there is no judicial check on impeachment; Congress alone decides how it’s used. But the Framers were quite clear that impeachment is not intended to address policy differences or good-faith legal positions that turn out to be wrong (or, at least, to be rejected by the courts). They designed the impeachment power so that it would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to use that way. An impeachment gambit that fails to pass the House by a majority vote, to say nothing of removing the official from office with a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate, only emboldens the alleged wrongdoer.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/robert-mueller-investigation-perception-inequality/

What is disturbing about the Mueller investigation is not per se that a special counsel is looking into charges of wrongdoing known as “collusion,” but that he is indicting or leveraging suspects, amid a larger landscape of related perceived wrongdoers, who so far have not been subject to the same federal zeal.

We do not know all the details, but the public wonders exactly why Michael Flynn was leveraged to confess about lying to federal authorities (in theory, in part due to surveillance obtained by questionable FISA warrants), while, for example, Clinton aides Human Abedin and Cheryl Mills were given partial immunity for their reported misleading statements about their knowledge of the Clinton email server.

People rightly wonder whether there will be consequences facing Andrew McCabe for allegedly lying about leaking to federal investigators, or for the flagrant way that John Brennan has so serially prevaricated under oath to Congress (about Senate staff computers, drone collateral damage, and the seeding of the Steele dossier).

If it turns out that DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled FISA justices by not disclosing that they knew the Steele dossier was a product of Clinton-purchased opposition research, or that the collaborative news accounts they cited to the court were in truth circular offspring of the Steele dossier, then certainly they should be held legally accountable. The logical inference would be that they feared such full and honest disclosures might endanger the granting of the warrants.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/origins-of-second-civil-war-globalism-tech-boom-immigration-campus-radicalism/
Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . Are they leading us toward an 1861?

How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.

Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.

We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife. Red and blue states ensure that locale magnifies differences that were mostly manageable during the administrations of Ford, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes, and Clinton.

What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?

Globalization
Globalization had an unfortunate effect of undermining national unity. It created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/30/progressive

Donald Trump has certainly changed the rules of presidential behavior, through his nonstop campaign rallies, tweets, and press conferences. What his critics call lowering the bar of presidential decorum by unfettered and often crude invective, Trump dubs the “new presidential.”

His style has become a sort of “don’t-tread-on-me” combativeness. In truth, Trump at home and abroad is mostly retaliatory. His theory seems to be that no slight should go unanswered. When Trump retorts in kind or trumps the original attack, he believes he adds yet another brick to his wall of deterrence—and exposes the sometimes dormant and disguised irrational hatred of the Left.

But what the Left loses in its slugfests with Trump are some once-supposed cherished leftist principles, justified by the short-term advantage of nullifying the Trump agenda.

Indeed, it is eerie that almost all the canons of progressive orthodoxy no longer apply. And they will no longer be taken seriously after Trump is long gone. Certainly, those lost principles will be impossible to reassert when Democrats return to power and seek sanctuary in the very ideas they have now so utterly trashed.

Liberals, who now warn of Trump’s “war on the press” long ago excused Eric Holder’s monitoring of the Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen. And they had no problem with John Brennan lying under oath when he claimed the Obama CIA had not monitored the computers of Senate staffers (he would lie brazenly again under oath about drone collateral damage and his role in seeding the Steele dossier).

Likewise, they snoozed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress in his denial of government surveillance of U.S. citizens. Both were seen at the time to be useful liars. Their partisanship and exemption from any consequences for past lying under oath led to lucrative cable news gigs—proof, as it were, of their innate Trump hatred. Their legacy is that lying under oath now is not a sin, much less illegal.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/07/patriotism_the_secret_of_trumps_success.html

The driving force behind Trump’s winning for America is his powerful patriotism. Patriotism is a virtue that our politicians talk about a lot, in utterly empty ways. Many Democrats think it is a vice. The left wing of the Democratic Party mistakes it for white nationalism. Trump lives American patriotism. It is the reason he ran for president and the reason he won. He knows we are a great country.

Trump recognizes and is comfortable with power – his personal power, America’s power. He does not think power is toxic. He thinks American and presidential power is wonderful and meant to be used for our common, national good.

Our president loves to build. He used to build big apartment and hotel towers with his name on them. Now he is building up America, because he loves America. President Trump’s patriotism has these two equal parts: a strong economy and a strong military. His eye is always on the prize of jobs and security.

Patriotism overflows in his speech on achieving a quarter of 4.1% growth for the economy and the return of fallen heroes’ remains from North Korea.

In everything we do, in every action we take, we are fighting for loyal, hardworking, patriotic citizens of our blessed nation. We’re making our country great again. We’re respected again all over the world. Our military will soon be stronger than it’s ever been, by far.

Unlike his political rivals, President Trump wants to use our full power. We do not need to be intimidated by anybody – not China, not the E.U., not Russia, not Iran, not terrorists. We are the powerhouse. Trump seeks to create win-win situations, but he will not compromise on American interests. If someone is going to lose, it is going to be the other side, not we.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3769/Communism-Is-as-Socialism-Does-and-Vice-Versa.aspx

They argue and split hairs, they fight and break heads, they work together and destroy liberty because they all travel to the same soul-crushing destination. As far as liberty-loving anti-communists are concerned, communists and socialists — and “democractic socialists,” Fabians, progressives, Alinskyites (not to mention most Democrats and an awful lot of Republicans), etc. — believe in the same centrally planned, varyingly totalitarian vision for America that the founding fathers would have had to declare independence from all over again.

To that point of ideological convergence, a couple of quotations

The first is from Rene Wormser, a renowned lawyer specializing in estate planning and taxation who served admirably as the general counsel of the Reece committee, the second of two 1950s congressional committees investigating the Marxist/socialist/communist/progressive/etc./etc./etc. subversion of the great American foundations, which, of course, undergirded the subversion of our educational institutions.

Reflecting on both committees’ work, Wormser wrote the following on pp. 177-178 of his extremely important book, Foundations:

Socialist Penetration

The two recent Congressional investigations were largely concerned with “subversion.” The Cox Committee interpreted this term to include only international communism of the Stalinist brand and organized fascism. The Reece Committee, in the course of its work, came to give the term broader or deeper meaning. Neither investigation established sharply, however, the characteristics of Communist activity which would be clearly held to be subversive. In the public mind, the term “subversion” is generally confined to Moscow-directed Communist activity, or that of domestic Communists allied in an international conspiracy. The emphasis on a search for organized Communist penetration of foundations absorbed much of the energy of the investigators and detracted somewhat from the efficacy of their general inquiry into “subversion.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/08/13/berkeley-free-speech-why-liberal-gave-up-college/

A liberal explains why he gave up on Berkeley

There were seven men climbing the hillside, through thickets of sagebrush and lupine, through groves of oak and pine. Finally they came to an outcropping of rock, which they scaled. From there, they could see the bay, rippling in the afternoon light. Two ships were out there, heading for the open waters of the Pacific. The glorious moment called for recognition; Frederick Billings, a Vermonter who’d come west during the Gold Rush, supplied the grace note, in the form of a verse from George Berkeley, the 18th-century English philosopher: “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” That was how Berkeley, Calif., got its name.

I wasn’t there, obviously, but my imagination pulled me like a tide to that moment during the three years I spent in Berkeley with my wife and two children. I am a terribly plodding runner, but nevertheless an avid one. Daily I huffed up those very same hills, and looked at that very same bay, and filled with the very same wonder of those men 152 years ago. This was especially so when fog obscured the skyscrapers of San Francisco, effacing the human element, leaving only you and water, the tops of hills, the milky, cloud-covered sky.

But this was fantasy. Below, the frontier settlement of 1866 was no longer. Descending back to town always left me coated in a thin film of dread. I was sinfully sour with my wife and children, perfectly graceless with the in-laws who had wholly funded our move from New York to California. By the time I realized that I hated the place, it was with tremendous relief, as when a spouse realizes that a marriage has run its course even as her counterpart cluelessly makes vacation plans. But it would take a rather long while to figure out why, and what that irreducible antipathy had to do with liberalism — Berkeley’s and my own.

Bishop Berkeley would prove a prescient namesake for this Northern California city that has made its sibling across the bay, San Francisco, seem staid by comparison. Berkeley was a subjective idealist who argued that there was no world apart from the world each one of us experienced. “To be is to be perceived,” he famously postulated. Today’s popular injunction to “live your truth” is the simpleton cousin of Berkeley’s insight that there wasn’t any other truth to be lived.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/07/30/americans-need-clear

The Department of Justice last week released copies of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant applications that James Comey’s FBI used to begin electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor. While much of the FISA warrants were heavily redacted, it’s clear the FBI used the politically motivated Steele dossier as the primary basis for their applications.

Understand what that means: a piece of partisan propaganda funded by the Democrats, compiled by an ex-British spy, filled with “intelligence” that has never been corroborated, let alone sourced, was used to justify spying on a U.S. citizen, on U.S. soil, in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. This behavior has more in common with Communist Russia and KGB tactics than with anything traditionally associated with our constitutional republic—though this shouldn’t be surprising with Commie-lover John Brennan’s fingerprints all over this entire process.

Understand, too, that James Comey admitted under oath that in January 2017, when he was briefing President-elect Trump on the truly sensational parts of the dossier, the FBI director described the document to Trump as salacious and unverified. Yet the Steele dossier was used three more times to justify continued surveillance of Page.