Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Was Seth Rich Killed over the Steele Dossier? By Daniel John Sobieski

If we are to believe the transcript of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, released unexpectedly by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the search for a smoking gun in the dossier scandal may lead us to a dead body, at least according to Simpson’s lawyer:

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in August 2017, Glenn Simpson was questioned about whether he tried to “assess the credibility” of sources behind information uncovered by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who compiled the dossier.

“Yes, but I’m not going to get into sourcing information,” Simpson said.

Asked again what “steps he took to verify their credibility,” Simpson declined to answer.

His lawyer, Joshua Levy, then intervened and said Simpson was just trying to protect his sources.

“Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work,” Levy said.

The interview didn’t pursue the line of questioning further.

Well, maybe somebody should pursue this hand grenade tossed in the middle of the room. Whoa! Somebody’s already been killed as the result of the dossier put together by former British spy Christopher Steele from questionable Russian sources and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, and possibly used by the FBI to obtain FISA warrants to spy on the campaign of Hillary’s opponent, Donald J. Trump?

As shocking as this revelation may be, it dovetails nicely with fear expressed for her safety by former DNC chair Donna Brazile. In a stunning interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about her new book, Hacks, Brazile made cryptic references to murdered DNC I.T. staffer Seth Rich and revealed that afterward, she took the precautions one takes when one fears for his life.

PUERTO RICAN “JOURNALIST’ BLAMES THE SHORTAGES ON “THE JEW”

It has been nearly three months since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, and the island’s recovery has been slow. The U.S. territory is struggling with shortages of food and medical supplies, and a full 45% of residents still don’t have power.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz blames Washington for failing to devote adequate resources to Puerto Rico’s recovery — she recently dubbed President Trump the “disaster-in-chief”. But a journalist for El Nuevo Día, the newspaper with the largest circulation in Puerto Rico, has found a different culprit: “the Jew.”

Columnist Wilda Rodríguez wrote a piece on Monday, titled “What Does ‘The Jew’ Want From The Colony?” According to Rodríguez, it is “Wall Street types,” not politicians, that dictate U.S. policy. And, who are the power brokers on Wall Street?

“In the end, Congress will do what ‘the Jew’ wants, as the vulgar prototype of true power is called,” she wrote.

Rodríguez added a disclaimer: “No offense to people of that religion.” She even argued that the term is a source of pride for Israeli Jews.

“More than 20 years ago, the Israeli paper Ma’ariv had an article in Hebrew that explained how the Jews control Washington,” she wrote. “For Israelis, recognizing Jewish power over Washington is not an offensive statement. It is the victory of the Diaspora.”

President Trump and the Dangers of Armchair Psychiatry Medical professionals should stop attempting to diagnose the mental health of politicians from afar. By Marc Siegel

Back in 2006, when George W. Bush was still president, Duke University Medical Center professor of psychiatry Dr. Jonathan Davidson published a study that reviewed biographical sources for the first 37 presidents (from 1776 to 1974), and expert psychiatrists concluded that half suffered from mental illness, 27 percent while still in office. Twenty-four percent met the diagnostic criteria for depression at some point in their lives, including most famously Abraham Lincoln and Calvin Coolidge. Richard Nixon was treated for many years for stress by psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, and was severely depressed after leaving office. The psychiatrist who treated Nixon after Watergate has confirmed this to me. “Who wouldn’t be?” he said.

The key to all these cases was either a physician making an in-person assessment and coming up with a diagnostic impression and treatment plan or at least the president or those close to him recognizing the problem. What makes the current pundit-media attack on President Trump’s mental health most disturbing is that those leading the charge are either non-psychiatrists, or else have never examined the president, such as psychiatrist Dr. Bandy Lee of Yale, who traveled to Washington last month to brief twelve Democratic and one Republican lawmakers on President Trump’s supposed mental instability.

Dr. Lee’s claims come across as partisan meanness, and they undermine the integrity of the medical profession at a time when we are already spending too little actual face time with our patients. Philadelphia psychiatrist Dr. Claire Pouncey, writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, supported the actions of Dr. Lee, along with the book of essays she published, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. But Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, writing a response in the New England Journal of Medicine, called Pouncey and Lee’s actions “a misguided and dangerous morality.”

On Tuesday, the American Psychiatric Association reaffirmed its adherence to the so-called Goldwater Rule, which stipulates that member psychiatrists should not publicly discuss the mental health of a public figure, leader, or candidate. This rule is wise, protects our integrity as physicians, and continues to apply here.

Obama non-library ‘presidential center’ in Chicago devolving into a fiasco By Thomas Lifson

The first community organizer to become president has managed to anger community groups so much with his planned personal monument, aka a “presidential center,” that part of the plan was just scrapped.

Lolly Bowean of the Chicago Tribune reports:

Bowing to community pressure, the Obama Foundation has scrapped its plan for an above-ground parking garage and will instead build an underground facility below the presidential center in Jackson Park, officials said late Monday.

The original plan would have grabbed a treasured part of Chicago’s park system, the Midway (site of Chicago’s World’s Fair), for a two-story garage. The group Save the Midway sprang up to protect the historic public park land from a private developer (the Obama Foundation) appropriating the land for a private purpose (the Obama Center will not be part of the National Archives System):

The embarrassment is palpable:

After numerous meetings with the community and other valued stakeholders over the past months, the Foundation understands that many of those voices feel strongly that the parking for the OPC should be located within the OPC campus in Jackson Park. The Foundation has heard those voices, and has decided to locate the OPC’s parking underground in Jackson Park.

Oprah, Hollywood Heroine? By Bruce Bawer

Forget the whole ridiculous notion of making Oprah Winfrey president. Am I the only one who finds it supremely ironic that she, of all people, should now, with a single speech at the Golden Globe Awards, be designated by public acclamation as the voice of the #metoo movement?

Think about it. The #metoo scandal is about two things: (1) the abuse of Hollywood power by a bunch of horny dirtbags and (2), whether you like it or not, the pliancy of innumerable young starlets who, over the decades, succumbed to those men’s advances because they thought it would make them rich and famous.

Hollywood power, Hollywood wealth, Hollywood fame: who, let’s face it, has celebrated these things more ardently than Oprah?

On social networks, a photo of her kissing Harvey Weinstein’s earlobe has been shared widely as proof of hypocrisy. But I don’t know: does the picture prove hypocrisy, or does it depict Oprah’s genuine high regard – “reverence” may be a tad too strong – for a man who, after all, until his recent fall from grace, embodied Hollywood power, wealth, and fame? It seems to me that she gave him that smooch not because she needed to suck up to him – Oprah doesn’t need to suck up to anybody – but for the same reason Ireland-enchanted tourists kiss the Blarney Stone, even though it’s dripping with thousands of other people’s germs.

Look at her talk show. She did more than just interview celebrities and plug their projects. She treated the stars as gods, the chosen people, the Elect, routinely holding up even the most vapid of them as geniuses, experts, role models. Hosting Will and Jada Pinkett Smith – a pair of egomaniacs who’d forced their grade-school kids into showbiz – Oprah presented them as ideal parents, qualified to dispense advice on raising a family. When she brought on Jenny McCarthy, Playboy Playmate turned MTV host turned sort-of-actress, Oprah not only let this pinhead spew her ignorant, dangerous theories about childhood vaccination but gave every sign of taking her seriously.

Similarly, when sitcom diva Suzanne Somers instructed menopausal Oprah viewers to take massive hormone doses to feel young again, Oprah relegated genuine medical specialists (who uniformly repudiated Somers’ prescriptions) to the studio audience, where they weren’t allowed to speak unless called on. The point was clear: Somers’ fame made her amateur counsel more valuable than that of real authorities.

FBI Used Unverified Anti-Trump Dossier to Obtain FISA Warrant By Debra Heine

The FBI used the unverified anti-Trump dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to obtain the warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA), investigative journalist Sara Carter reported Wednesday.

Representatives of four committees — the House Intelligence Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, House Judiciary Committee, and Senate Judiciary Committee — have been able to examine FISA documents in a secure room at the Justice Department, according to the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.

They were not allowed to take the documents out of the room or to copy them, but they could make notes. They thus know the answer to the was-the-dossier-used-for-spying question.

The answer to the question is classified, however, and as of Wednesday morning, no one had yet leaked.

Nevertheless, later in the day, according to Carter, multiple sources told her that “the dossier was used along with other evidence to obtain the warrant” from the FISA court. Fox News’ Sean Hannity corroborated the news on his show Wednesday night, reporting that three separate sources told him the same thing.

Most of the 35-page dossier, which was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele for the liberal opposition research firm Fusion GPS, has either been proven wrong or remains unsubstantiated. In spite of this, the FBI used the DNC/Clinton campaign-sponsored dossier to seek and gain approval from the FISA court to surveil members of Trump’s campaign, sources claim.

“It’s outrageous and clearly should be thoroughly investigated,” a senior law enforcement source with knowledge of the process told Carter.

According to Carter, the sources “also stressed that there will be more information in the coming week regarding systemic ‘FISA abuse.’” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Fusion Transparency Rap Per Sen. Feinstein, let’s get the full FBI-Trump-Russia record out.

California Senator Dianne Feinstein is getting media raves for flouting Judiciary Committee rules Tuesday and releasing the testimony of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson without committee approval. Mrs. Feinstein’s disrespect for procedure aside, she has the right idea. Let’s make all of the Russian- Trump -FBI record public.

Democrats seem interested in revealing only what adds to their hope that Donald Trump canoodled with the Kremlin. This includes Mr. Simpson’s self-serving account of the origins of the infamous dossier about Mr. Trump that he hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele to compile. Mr. Simpson, a political gun for hire, spun a heroic tale of noble intentions and praise for Mr. Steele, calling him a “Boy Scout” with “quality” intelligence-gathering skills.

Yet Mr. Simpson couldn’t corroborate the dossier’s claims and had to backtrack on his newsiest allegation. Democrats and the media seized on his claim that the dossier supported information the FBI already had from “a human source from inside the Trump organization.” The Fusion CEO used the same language about a source “inside the Trump camp” last week in a New York Times op-ed.

Yet Fusion waited until after the testimony was released to inform its media friends that this was a “mischaracterization” by Mr. Simpson. Turns out he wasn’t referring to a confidential informant from within Team Trump, but to the fact the FBI had been tipped off by a foreign diplomat about a Trump staffer, George Papadopoulos. Mr. Simpson has a hard time telling a straight story.

The bigger point is that the public is in an evidence-free zone in which Democrats spin the dossier’s unproven claims, while Republicans speculate about the FBI’s partisan motives. The way out is to release to the public the documents the FBI used to justify spying on Trump officials during a presidential campaign. The good news is that Congressional investigators have finally obtained those documents from the FBI and Justice Department.

The swamp’s secrets, lies and media leaks. Daniel Greenfield

How Hillary’s FBI Allies Undermined Trump Before the Election

Peter Strzok wanted some insurance.

The senior FBI figure, who had participated in the Hillary email investigation, interviewed Flynn and had been part of Team Mueller, wasn’t looking to State Farm for his insurance needs.

Chatting with his mistress, an FBI lawyer who worked for Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Strzok worried that Trump might win. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” he wrote.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

It was the summer of an election year. The official odds all favored Hillary. But a failed FISA request had already been made. And the real insurance was still coming. Its policies would include a second successful FISA request, the Steele dossier, the mass unmasking of Trump officials and the Mueller witch hunt. The insurance still hasn’t paid off, but the men and women behind the coup are betting that it will.

By the time October rolled around, the cost of the insurance was still rising. In late October, as Election Day was coming up, Strzok and Page were looking over their own leaks to the media. They discussed the stories in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post that they had allegedly helped shape.

Leaking, not football, is the supreme sport of our nation’s capital. Sabotage and self-promotion are the two reasons that government types leak. And this was clearly sabotage. Election Day was coming up and a top investigation figure was seeding damaging stories about President Trump through the media.

“Article is out, but hidden behind paywall so can’t read it,” Strzok’s mistress texted him.

“Wsj? Boy that was fast. Should I ‘find’ it and tell the team?” he asked.

The team wasn’t aware of what Strzok was up to. And he didn’t want them to find out. Like other anti-Trump operatives, Strzok was playing a complicated double game. He was pretending to conduct fair investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, even as he wanted her to win and him to lose.

Donald Trump—the Grownup in the Room on Immigration By Roger L Simon

Donald Trump gets called crazy a lot. Or infantile. Or senile. More than a bit of projection may be operative in these allegations, however. Watching Tuesday’s televised discussion of immigration (video here) with Democratic and Republican congressional leaders, which the president opened to the media, it was hard not to come to an opposite conclusion.

Donald Trump was the real grownup in the room.

Yes, he made occasional jokes, but that’s what grownups do to relax tense situations. To get politicians from both sides of the aisle talking to each other cordially in the current hyper-partisan atmosphere is no easy feat. But Trump did that. He showed himself to be what many of us have thought him to be from the outset, whatever the attendant melodrama — a pragmatic businessman with moderately conservative views, even, dare I say it, sometimes weirdly wise. Above all, he is a man who likes to make progress, who wants to move things forward to a better day while recognizing that there is no perfect. How adult is that.

And, yes, it’s possible this event was arranged to counteract the bad publicity from Michael Wolff’s bilious, factually challenged book, but so what? Basically, Trump (with the help of the cameras) shamed his fellow and gal politicians into civility and evidently cajoled them into at least a partial solution, later, in closed session, to that most intractable of problems – immigration. If Trump were anything like his detractors say he is, he couldn’t have done either. He even urged them on to a more global solution on immigration, reminding the politicians at the table they were closer to that goal than they realized. If that’s crazy, maybe we need more of it.

But what of this partial solution? By its very nature, ideologues of the left and right will not be satisfied. (Are they ever?) Lefties want to solve DACA first and then, once the “Dreamers” have their “pathway to citizenship,” the left promises to deal with border security and such things as chain migration and the trendily named Diversity Visa Lottery later. Of course, that’s nonsense. They have no intention of doing anything to mitigate the latter two and to the former they will only pay lip service.

Every politician in the room knew that and so, of course, did Trump. He made sure it didn’t happen.

On the right, Anne Coulter and others of her ilk will doubtless be disappointed, to put it mildly, that an impregnable border wall will not immediately be erected across the entire Southern border and all eleven million illegal aliens summarily ejected from our country. They will claim Trump promised this during the campaign, and he did at moments, but if you were listening carefully, you knew where he was ultimately going — he hinted at it and more many times — compromise.

Iran and Daesh Lite in North America By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Recent mass demonstrations in Iran, and the government’s violent crackdown has been met with a deafening silence by Muslim “civil rights” organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Why have they refrained from supporting the Iranian people’s uprising to overthrow the oppressive mullahs? After all, the same organizations have vocally and financially supported the mass demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa that erupted in December 2010 and led to the rise of Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government and caused turmoil and destabilized these regions.

American and Canadian Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in the U.S. and Canada, the Muslim Student Association (MSA) in the U.S. and Canada, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) (including its Canadian branch), share the similar agenda and boards and serve as umbrellas to many smaller associations and community-based groups. Their charities aim to expand the implementation of their agenda, and a few of them have been identified as unindicted co-conspirator in Islamist terrorist financing trials in the U.S. Their common mission: dedication to “da’wah” (proselytization), building “an Islamic way of life in North America[, and] commitment to Islam as a total way of life” by practicing sharia (Islamic law). This desire to impose any version of Islam on society to establish global Islamic theocracy via political activism, has been accurately described by Prof. Clive Kessler as “political Islam” or “ISIS/Daesh lite.”

Political Islam has been successfully enforced by the mullahs in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Over the years, they have increased their efforts to enforce and spread political Islam everywhere. Their efforts did not stop with Shite groups; rather, they extended especially to Sunni Muslim Brotherhood offshoots such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, the first foreign trip of Egypt’s now deposed Muslim Brother president, Mohammed Morsi, was to visit Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s short-lived government (June 2012-July 2013) has failed because the Egyptian people rejected its oppression early on.

The ousting of the M.B. government was followed with banning its activities in Egypt and later in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria. But by then, the global Brotherhood’s movement has been well entrenched in the West, where their activities are not limited and often encouraged. The leaders of the Islamist movement have doubled their efforts to spread and whenever possible, to enforce political Islam on Muslims and infidels alike.