RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/04/politically-correct

It’s practically a cliché when an old guy or a conservative complains about declining moral standards. But with the news of a professed pedophile now openly seeking a seat in Congress and placing his pedophilia front and center as part of his platform, I feel fairly secure in passing judgment on our society. Something is very wrong here.

Nathan Larson, 37, who has gone on record to proclaim that he is a pedophile and rapist is running for a congressional seat in Virginia. Larson’s political platform includes the legalization of child pornography, marital rape, incest, abolition of child protective services, and a repeal of the 19th Amendment.

When asked by Huffington Post reporters whether he merely writes about pedophilia or engages in it, he proudly proclaimed, “It’s a mix of both.” He also admitted to running and posting in chat rooms dedicated to promoting rape and pedophilia. In one of these, using the administrator pseudonym “Lysander,” Larson noted:

I just want to bang my daughter, actually, but even if it were legal, I’m not sure it would happen, since i don’t have custody. After sex with kids is legalized, parents (or other guardians) will still be gatekeepers to some extent, and a lot of them will want to bang their own kids and not share with others.

Charming. Thankfully, he lost custody of his child. But his first wife committed suicide after he reportedly abused and raped her repeatedly.

The Huffington Post could barely contain itself as Trump’s name came up. The article concluded with a quote in which Larson compares himself to President Trump: “A lot of people who disagreed with someone like Trump . . . might vote for them anyway just because the establishment doesn’t like them.” (I’d love to see what was left out of those ellipses). The article seems to attempt to smear Trump supporters with the brush of this one reprobate.

Larson calls his platform “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian.” I have no clue what that means, but I’m fairly sure that Ron Paul and Gary Johnson would want nothing to do with this guy. Regardless where and to whom Larson lends his “support” or compares himself, or with what party he claims to affiliate, reasonable people—regardless of politics or party—would agree he is beyond the pale.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/04/the-scandal-on

Consider the following alternate reality.

Imagine that it is now summer 2024. A 78-year-old lame-duck President Trump is winding down his second term, basking in positive polls. His dutiful vice president in waiting, Mike Pence, is at last getting his chance to run for president. Imagine also that Pence is a shoo-in, facing long-shot, hard-leftist, and octogenarian Senator Bernie Sanders. Polls show an impending Pence landslide.

Team Trump is nevertheless horrified about the slight chance that the nation could conceivably elect an ossified, self-proclaimed socialist. It accuses Sanders of wanting to turn upside down free-market capitalism, and to nullify the entire eight-year Trump agenda.

Allies abroad in 2024 are especially worried about the neutralist Sanders, who has promised to recalibrate all of America’s alliances.

Worrisome to lame-duck President Trump are also the supposed machinations of the Iranian theocracy. Furious over Trump’s prior cancellation of the Iran deal in 2018, eager to have crippling sanctions at last lifted, and hoping that a Sanders presidency might restore Obama-era détente, Iranian operatives are reportedly not shy about their preference for a Sanders presidency.

The Iranians are rumored to have hired operatives to hack into various Republican email accounts in efforts to embarrass the Pence candidacy—and to have facilitated third parties to release the embarrassing email exchanges.

The 2024 Pence campaign in response is furious that throughout the campaign cycle, such leaks have disseminated information that Pence aides had rigged the rules of the Republican Party’s nominating process to eliminate Republican primary rivals. They are worried that the hacked emails will reveal that debate questions were given to Pence in advance by a sympathetic Fox news analyst and later Republican National Committee head. And the leaked emails reveal that conservative journalists were sending their stories in advance to be checked by Pence officials. The Iranians insist that they have not hacked any Republican-related email accounts.

As a reaction to such unproven rumors of Iranian collusion, a sympathetic Trump administration decides to intervene to thwart a supposed clear and present danger to U.S. national security.

Kim Kardashian is taking heat for her stances on prison reform after she spoke out in support of Alice Marie Johnson, a woman who was convicted of drug trafficking.

She met with President Trump on Wednesday to discuss sentencing and reforms, particularly for non-violent first time offenders. Also at the meeting was Shawn Holley, Johnson’s lawyer, who is being funded by Kardashian. Trump has called for harsher sentencing for drug dealers in the face of growing national concern over the opioid epidemic.

Johnson’s story first was brought to light by a video by Mic.

After the loss of her job, Johnson says that she was unable to find something quick enough to make money, so she made a choice she admits was horrible and turned to dealing drugs. She was caught, and sentenced to life in prison despite it being her first time drug offense. Since her crime was a federal offense, she is not eligible for parole. She’s one of 3,278 people serving a life sentence without parole despite their offense being nonviolent. While in prison she’s missed the births of her grandchildren, and the deaths of her parents. She’s now 62 years old.

While in prison, Johnson has spent her time writing plays for her fellow inmates to act in. She enjoys encouraging them, and inspiring them to be better, and discovering positive directions for their futures. She’s also worked as a mentor to help other women cope with their sentences.

For the more than 20 years that Johnson has been in prison, she has had no disciplinary infractions. Prison staff have written letters of support of Johnson and her hopes for a presidential pardon. She was not one of the 231 people that Barack Obama pardoned, and has shifted to calling for prison reform. She admits that she has made a mistake, but that that mistake shouldn’t be the only thing that matters in her life.

Kardashian’s interest in Johnson’s case began with the Mic video, and she tweeted her feelings about how unfair Johnson’s sentence was back in 2017.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/03/carter-page-is-t

It’s hard to get a read on Carter Page.

Since the Trump campaign volunteer became a central figure in the Obama administration’s plot to sabotage Donald Trump’s candidacy and undermine—if not destroy—his presidency, Page has been the target of numerous death threats. He is mocked by opinion writers and the public. (Just check out the replies to any tweet he posts.)

While Trump antagonist Stormy Daniels earns sympathetic coverage and victim status in the pages of major newspapers and even some conservative publications, Page’s plight is largely ignored. On Fox News in April, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) unkindly called him a “clown.” Leaders of his own government spied on him for a year, framing him as a traitorous villain in their stunning scheme to mount the most deceitful political warfare against a presidential candidate in U.S. history. His professional and personal life have suffered greatly.

Yet Page, 47, maintains an upbeat attitude and keeps a smile on his face. “I think Carter has been through more of a meat grinder than I have and he’s handled it as a gentleman,” former Trump campaign advisor Michael Caputo told Laura Ingraham in joint interview with Page last month. “It looks like they were really abusing Carter, really treating him poorly, and I think a lot of us owe Carter an apology.”

But Page isn’t looking for apologies or sympathy: He is looking for justice. “This has been a long, torturous road, but I think the truth will start to come out a little bit,” he told me in a phone interview last month. “The [U.S.] Naval Academy gave me good training . . . to prepare for battle and roll with the punches.”

Page’s approach to handling his unwanted role in the Trump-Russia collusion ruse is a mix of patriotism and naiveté, if not stubbornness. He met with federal and congressional investigators without any legal representation: “I have nothing to hide,” he repeatedly insists. (In addition to the MBA and Ph.D. he already has, Page is now pursuing a law degree.) As he makes the rounds on cable news shows to discuss new revelations about his ties to a so-called federal informant, Page gives off the vibe that he is embracing the fame he earned the hard way.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/06/james_clapper_piece_of_work.html

Listening to James Clapper, erstwhile Director of National Intelligence, defend his actions during the 2016 presidential campaign can make you squirm with embarrassment, even if you start by supposing he’s telling the truth.

Asked why he didn’t advise the Trump campaign about the threat of Russian infiltration of his campaign that was being investigated by the intel agencies, Clapper averred that it wasn’t his place to do that, that he was reporting to the policymakers.

One may wonder what good is a Director of National Intelligence who doesn’t do something positive in such a situation, like urge the policymakers to inform the Trump campaign if he wasn’t going to do it himself.

Actually, that’s “policymaker,” singular, since Clapper reported directly to the president. Why didn’t Clapper advise the president that the Trump campaign should know about possible Russian infiltration of his staff?

Well, that would have involved actually doing something, taking action, making things happen, staking out a position and pushing it. And that sort of thing is entirely foreign to James Clapper’s character.

Clapper is, and always has been, a professional toady. His act has never been to do anything decisive but rather to look wise, waffle sagaciously and pretend to be informed. To alert Trump to what was going on would have run against the current of Clapper’s Deep State DNA.

A contemptuous shell of a man? Sure. A total waste of taxpayer money for his salary? Certainly. So what? He had his prestige, his sinecure and his fat pension and who are you, anyway?

Clapper and his Deep State should fill you with disgust. He embodies the characterless, soulless, Gollum-type ego that buries itself in the bowels of its host and, like a termite in a log, steadily rots it from within.

Clapper or Brennan, Comey or Mueller, McCabe or Strzok, on and on, their names are legion.

THAT’S LINE FROM A PHILIP ROTH NOVEL….BUT HERE EVEN MAUREEN DOWD CRITICIZES HIS TERMINAL SELF RIGHTEOUSNESS. RSK
Obama – Just Too Good for Us By Maureen Dowd https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/02/opinion/sunday/obama-ben-rhodes-world-as-it-is.html

WASHINGTON — It was a moment of peak Spock.

Hours after the globe-rattling election of a man whom Barack Obama has total disdain for, a toon who would take a chain saw to the former president’s legacy on policy and decency, Obama sent a message to his adviser Ben Rhodes: “There are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth.”

Perhaps Obama should have used a different line with a celestial theme by Shakespeare: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

As president, Obama always found us wanting. We were constantly disappointing him. He would tell us the right thing to do and then sigh and purse his lips when his instructions were not followed.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected, Rhodes writes in his new book, “The World as It Is,” Obama asked his aides, “What if we were wrong?”

But in his next breath, the president made it clear that what he meant was: What if we were wrong in being so right? What if we were too good for these people?

“Maybe we pushed too far,” the president continued. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.”

So really, he’s not acknowledging any flaws but simply wondering if we were even more benighted than he thought. He’s saying that, sadly, we were not enlightened enough for the momentous changes wrought by the smartest people in the world — or even evolved enough for the first African-American president.

“Sometimes I wonder whether I was 10 or 20 years too early,” Obama mused to aides.

We just weren’t ready for his amazing awesomeness.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/george-papadopoulos-case-needs-closer-look/Is the former campaign adviser accused of misrepresenting his subjective state of mind, not objective reality?

Congress should be taking a very hard look at the prosecution of George Papadopoulos. To these eyes, the harder one looks, the more the Papadopoulos case appears to be much ado about nothing. That is no small thing: The “much ado” here is a purported Trump–Russia conspiracy to subvert a presidential election.

There has always been something fishy about the charge filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against Papadopoulos, who was a green-as-grass 28-year-old when he made the big primary-season move from Ben Carson–campaign novice to Trump-campaign novice. Peruse the “Statement of the Offense,” filed by Mueller’s lead prosecutor on the case, Jeannie S. Rhee (who is fresh from a stint representing the Clinton Foundation — and donating $5,400 to the Hillary Clinton campaign). You find that there is collusion with Russia pouring off every one of the document’s 13 pages — meetings with shadowy figures portrayed as Kremlin operatives, apparent schemes to undermine Mrs. Clinton, ambitious plans for pow-wows between candidate Trump and strongman Putin.

Yet . . . there is no charge having anything to do with “collusion” — in the criminal-law sense of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to commit “cyber-espionage” or otherwise sabotage the 2016 election.

Instead, after the big 13-page wind-up, Papadopoulos ends up pleading guilty to a minor false-statements charge — one that is convoluted and, in the scheme of things, trivial. In essence, Papadopoulos is said to have lied about the timing and scope of his contact with the Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud. Mueller, Rhee & Co. allege that Papadopoulos falsely claimed that the contacts started before he joined the Trump campaign. It turns out that they started on March 14, 2016; this was some time after he “learned he would be a foreign policy advisor for the campaign” (page 3, paragraph 4) but a week before the campaign’s March 21 announcement that he was a campaign “policy advisor” (page 4, paragraph 6).

http://acdemocracy.org/

Re-writing history has become a staple of former President Barack Obama, as exhibited by his bragging “I didn’t have scandals.” He had. But throughout his time in office, and even now, the “fact-checkers” of most of the progressive-Left media outlets continue to gleefully act as his echo-chamber (recall Ben Ben Rhodes boasting to the New York Times Magazine, on May 7, 2016, ” We created an echo chamber…to help create the narrative.” )

When the Obama administration failed to prevent scandals from reaching the public, the media eagerly echoed the Obama White House version of events, often competing on providing cover-up stories, never failing to pounce upon and deride anyone critical of his policies.

Two incidents that took many Americans lives stand out. The first is the selling of guns to Mexican criminals, allegedly to monitor them. The scandal led Congress to hold Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, in contempt. The second is the Benghazi affair, in which the Obama Administration lied about the reason for and the terror attack against the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, in which US Ambassador J. Christopher Steven and three other American officers lost their lives, and four others were gravely wounded.

There were other scandals, but an especially brazen exploit has yet to be probed. It is the Obama administration’s January 2016 laundering and delivering at least $1.7 billion, in cash, in non-U.S. currency, as material support to the foremost state sponsor of terrorism, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry and other officials acknowledged they knew this action was a violation of the U.S. laws. Moreover, in a press-conference in Davos, in January 2016, then-secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged that some of the money “will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-real-reason-why-the-fbi-had-a-spy-in-the-trump-campaign/

The FBI had a human source in the Trump campaign, and nearly everyone commenting on it is wrong. This will set the record straight.

On July 31, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the election and possible collusion with the Trump campaign. Before launching the full investigation, the FBI sent a confidential human source (CHS) to spy on a Trump campaign adviser. The CHS was reportedly Stefan Halper, a slick political operative for past GOP campaigns and a foreign policy expert with extensive CIA and MI6 connections.

Halper is the latest twist in a Trump-Russia collusion narrative that has been peddled past its expiration date. The question is, did the Obama administration have the authority to spy on the Trump campaign? The answer is—sort of, but not really. The devil, as they say, is in the details.

As stated by FBI Director James Comey, the investigation into Russian interference and any links with the Trump campaign was not a regular criminal investigation but a “counterintelligence” investigation. A national security operation of this sort comprises three stages: threat assessment, preliminary investigation, and full investigation. The FBI Domestic Investigations and Operations Guidel (DIOG) has established specific requirements at each stage.

http://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/390228-london-bridges-falling-down-curious-origins-of-fbis-trump-russia-probe
The bridge to the Russia investigation wasn’t erected in Moscow during the summer of the 2016 election.

It originated earlier, 1,700 miles away in London, where foreign figures contacted Trump campaign advisers and provided the FBI with hearsay allegations of Trump-Russia collusion, bureau documents and interviews of government insiders reveal. These contacts in spring 2016 — some from trusted intelligence sources, others from Hillary Clinton supporters — occurred well before FBI headquarters authorized an official counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016.

The new timeline makes one wonder: Did the FBI follow its rules governing informants?
Here’s what a congressman and an intelligence expert think.

“The revelation of purposeful contact initiated by alleged confidential human sources prior to any FBI investigation is troublesome,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), an ally of President Trump and chairman of a House subcommittee that’s taking an increasingly aggressive oversight role in the scandal, told me. “This new information begs the questions: Who were the informants working for, who were they reporting to and why has the [Department of Justice] and FBI gone to such great lengths to hide these contacts?”

Kevin Brock agrees that Congress has legitimate questions. The retired FBI assistant director for intelligence supervised the rewriting of bureau rules governing sources, under then-director Robert Mueller a decade ago. Those rules forbid the FBI from directing a human source to target an American until a formally predicated investigative file is opened.