RUTHFULLY YOURS

In what looked like a coordinated messaging campaign over the weekend, the organized left threatened to “take to the streets” if and when President Trump fires Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

MarchForTruth was the “central organizing account” for the 150+ cities that demonstrated on June 3, 2017, “to call for urgency & transparency on #TrumpRussia.”

Soros-backed MoveOn.Org is organizing “emergency ‘Nobody is Above the Law’ rallies around the country” in the event Trump fires Mueller.

The anti-Trumpers have been in a lather over the possibility that the president could fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller before Christmas, after Congress leaves Washington for the winter recess.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that he has no plans to fire Mueller, but that didn’t stop Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) from repeating the “rumor” on California’s KQED News on Friday.

“The rumor on the Hill when I left yesterday was that the president was going to make a significant speech at the end of next week. And on December 22, when we are out of D.C., he was going to fire Robert Mueller,” Speier said.

Some prominent members of the Resistance spread the message this weekend, including President Obama’s former director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Attorney Walter Shaub, who resigned in July, was one of the first to tweet about “taking the streets” on Friday.

Shaub blocked everyone who reacted negatively to his hysterical tweet — including this writer, who wondered how he had managed to miss Hillary Clinton’s many ethical lapses while she was secretary of state (when he was Obama’s ethics czar).

Shaub later tweeted: “This tweet apparently triggered the tiki torch crowd. My theory is people with violent tendencies will hear violence in the language of peaceful protest. But you literally have to agree to the policy of nonviolence and complying with all law enforcement orders to sign up, so…”

Because everyone who finds him ridiculous is apparently a white supremacist.

Left-wing celebs soon jumped on the bandwagon.

Rob Reiner (aka “Meathead”) on Saturday morning urged his followers to prepare to “take the streets.”

George Takei encouraged “massive and sustained protests.”

Attorney and law professor Seth Abramson went on a long Twitter rant over the rumored firing, calling it a “constitutional crisis” and “actual emergency.”

Naturally, he too called upon his followers to “take to the streets.”

Worst of all, Eric Holder, Obama’s disgraced former attorney general, also called for massive protests if Trump ends the witch hunt:
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With last week’s confirmations of Don Willett and James Ho to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, President Trump set a record for most appellate judges confirmed in a president’s first year. Twelve judges have joined the federal circuit courts in 2017, beating by one the record previously held by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. The quality of these new appointees is exceptional, with seven having clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court and six appearing on Mr. Trump’s impressive list of potential high-court candidates.

Add Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation, and that’s quite a year. Even after Candidate Trump released his list of prospective justices, conservative legal elites were not at all confident that President Trump would—or would be able to—execute a concerted plan to put a stamp on the judicial branch. Credit goes to White House counsel Don McGahn, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley —and to the president, who deferred to their legal expertise and political strategy.

At the same time, with only six confirmed district-court judges, Mr. Trump’s total number of judicial appointments stands at 19, not even close to a record. While President Obama didn’t prioritize judges in his first term, George W. Bush filled 28 slots on the federal bench his rookie year and Bill Clinton 27 (plus Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ). Ronald Reagan had 40 lower-court judges confirmed his first year, along with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Many executive-branch positions remain vacant because Mr. Trump has not put forth nominees. Not so for judges. With 58 judicial nominations, Mr. Trump is second to George W. Bush at this point. Instead, the problem is that Senate Democrats have demanded “cloture” votes on all but one of the nominees. That is, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has forced votes on whether to proceed to a final vote, each of which eats up 30 hours of Senate floor time. That’s been the case even for district-court nominees, the closest of whose confirmation votes was 79-16 (the nays notably including potential 2020 presidential contenders Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ).

Not surprisingly, the votes on most of the circuit judges were much closer. Ralph Erickson sailed through to the Eighth Circuit 95-1, with only Ms. Warren in the negative. Kevin Newsom of the 11th Circuit somehow drew 16 Democratic ayes, for a 66-31 tally. But the others have faced a blue wall. With the occasional exception of Democrats representing states Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly, the votes were essentially party-line. While the average Bush and Obama circuit nominee received about 90% of senators’ vote—many confirmed unanimously or by voice vote—Mr. Trump’s have averaged less than 60%, and have all been subjected to both cloture and roll-call votes. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans are poised this week to cut taxes for most American workers and businesses, fulfilling a core campaign promise. But before the House and Senate vote, it’s worth noting that they may do so without a single Democrat in support. How has the party of the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s and the co-writers of the Reagan reform in the 1980s become implacably opposed to pro-growth tax policy?

A little history shows how remarkable this is. The Kennedy marginal tax-rate cuts were pushed by White House economist Walter Heller and powered the economic expansion for another half-decade. In the 1981 tax debate, William Brodhead of Michigan and other Ways and Means Democrats offered an amendment that cut the top rate on investment income to 50% from 70% in the first year.

The 1986 tax reform was driven as much by Democrats as by Ronald Reagan. Dick Gephardt and Dan Rostenkowski helped move it through the House, and Bill Bradley was a leading architect in the Senate. Thirty-three Democrats voted for the bill that passed the Senate 74-23 and cut the top marginal income tax rate to 28%.

Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993, but after his re-election he compromised with Newt Gingrich in 1997 to cut the capital-gains tax rate to 20% from 28%. That drove investment and growth through the rest of the decade. Even as recently as 2001, a dozen Democrats in the Senate and 28 in the House compromised with George W. Bush to cut the top income-tax rate to 35%.

Ten quick thoughts on the hideously corrupted “Russia investigation”.

1) Let me start with an immigrant’s observation: My sweetly naïve understanding of an “independent counsel” is that he should be “independent”. For example, even in the presently desiccated condition of the Commonwealth, it’s generally understood that, when you’ve got a problem and you want someone independent to investigate it, “independent” means outsider. Three examples off the top of my head:

~Twenty years ago, after the Good Friday Agreement, some guy was supposed to be appointed to supervise the decommissioning of weapons by paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. Obviously, if he’d been some hoity-toity English civil servant, the IRA would have said nuts to that. Likewise, if he’d been some Papist republican from Derry Town Council, the UVF would have told ’em to shove it. So they appointed a Canadian general, John de Chastelain …because he was an outsider, and thus independent of the competing interests.

~Likewise, in 2003, when various factions in the Solomon Islands risked tearing the joint apart, the guy brought in to sort it out was Australia’s Nick Warner (who steps down this weekend as head of Canberra’s Secret Intelligence Service) …because he was independent of those factions.

~And in 2009, when the Government of the Turks and Caicos Islands was suspended for corruption, it was after an investigation by the English judge Sir Robin Auld …because he was entirely independent of the various local sleazebags.

I appreciate that all the above is easier to do in the remnants of empire than it is in the American system. But there isn’t even the figleaf of “independence” when you appoint a career swamp-dweller like Robert Mueller, a man who has relationships with every player in Washington going back decades. The parade of hacks infesting the cable shows to inform us solemnly that they’ve known Mueller for years and he’s the very apotheosis of a straight shooter is, in fact, the strongest evidence of why he should never have been appointed: he’s the insiders’ insider. When Mueller decided to stage his pre-dawn swoop on Paul Manafort’s bedroom, for example, he was raiding the home of a longtime client of his own law firm, WilmerHale.

2) As for that “straight shooter” guff, as I wrote last year about the previous “eagle scout”:

Conservative commentators assured us that, when it comes to straight arrows, no arrow is straighter than FBI honcho James Comey – non-partisan, career public servant, will follow the evidence whereso’er it leads…

All bollocks. Bollocks on stilts… A 6′ 8″ gummi worm would be more of a straight arrow.

And so it goes with Comey’s successor as Trump’s Javert. My advice is that, whenever lifelong swampers assure us of the integrity of any individual, assume “straight arrow” is Beltway-speak for “slimey duplicitous permanent-state operator” and you can’t go wrong.

3) One of the first things Mueller did was to appoint FBI counter-intelligence honcho Peter Strzok to his “independent” team. He should not have done that. Not because Strzok is a Democrat (presumably almost everyone at the FBI votes either Democrat or Republican), but because Strzok had been a key player in Comey’s Hillary investigation. The investigators’ comparative treatment of the two candidates was already an issue, and the subject of the Russia investigation had already spent the better part of a year denouncing the investigation of his rival as a sham and a disgrace. In effect, Trump had already, without even knowing of the guy’s existence or his Zelig-like ubiquity, questioned Strzok’s integrity. So why appoint him to a second investigation?

4) Furthermore, why similarly appoint his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, to both investigations? The FBI has over 35,000 employees. Yet the same handful of key players are running both the Clinton and Trump cases, even though the latter is supposed to be “independent”. So the same operatives are meeting with MI6 dossier-concocter Christopher Steele, and going to the FISA court to get surveillance warrants, and entrapping Michael Flynn. The appalling Mueller effectively merged the two investigations into one continuous caper run soup to nuts by the same crowd. Phase One: Get Hillary off the hook. Phase Two: Get Trump on it.

5) Just as the Hillary investigation merged with the Trump investigation, so both merged with Fusion GPS, the oppo-research guys working for the Clinton campaign. The conflicts of interest intertwine so thoroughly that they reach up beyond the FBI into the highest reaches of the Department of Justice. At this stage, it would be no surprise to learn that Mueller and Comey had accidentally failed to disclose that they were the Chairman and Deputy Chairman of Fusion GPS. Am I exaggerating? By maybe a hair. This week it emerged that the Associate Deputy Attorney-General, Bruce Ohr, “failed to disclose” that his wife Nellie was working for Fusion GPS.

Oh, really? On the reception desk? As a security guard? No, she was hired by Fusion GPS to do anti-Trump research.

A series of new revelations about the FBI under James Comey has provided more evidence that partisan agents may have abused their agency positions for political purposes during the Hillary Clinton email investigation and 2016 presidential campaign.http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/14/fbi-hillary-clinton-email-investigation-peter-strz

Top FBI agent Peter Strzok, the public now knows, was removed from the Mueller investigation after a Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (IG) investigation revealed damning text messages between Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page.

The messages show Strzok and Page praising Clinton, discussing whether Strzok could use his position to protect the country from Donald Trump — whom they described as “that menace” — and referring to an unnamed “insurance policy” in case Trump beat Clinton.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office – that there’s no way he gets elected – but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40” Strzok said of Trump in one message to Page. “Andy” referred to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who has close ties to Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally.

Strzok is reported to be the agent who officially signed into existence the Russia investigation that now plagues the Trump administration.

During the Clinton investigation, Strzok led the interviews of top Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin — neither of whom faced consequences for making false statements in those interviews.

President Trump ought to direct his Justice Department and FBI to provide the House Intelligence Committee with the FISA warrant application — any FISA warrant application — in which they relied on information from the Steele dossier in seeking court permission to spy on the Trump campaign. It may well be that they did not rely on the dossier. It is ridiculous, though, that we are still in the dark about this.

I have long experience with how scrupulously the FBI and Justice Department work in the often controversial foreign-intelligence realm. They care deeply about their honorable reputation with the FISA court, just as the judges of that secret tribunal care deeply about not being perceived as a “rubber-stamp” for the government. I have thus given our agencies the benefit of the doubt here.

While urging that we have disclosure (with all due care to protect intelligence methods and sources), I have presumed that the FBI and DOJ would never fraudulently present the FISA court with fanciful claims attributed to anonymous Russian sources as if they were a refined product of U.S. intelligence collection and analysis. This, after all, is a “dossier” that former FBI director James Comey dismissed as “salacious and unverified” in Senate testimony just six months ago.

When a court is asked for a warrant, the government must provide the judge with a basis to believe the information proffered is credible — by vouching that the source has been reliable in the past, by corroborating the information offered, or both. If Comey adjudged Steele’s information unverified in June 2017, it had to have been unverified ten months earlier. That’s when the FBI and Justice Department obtained a FISA warrant for Carter Page, who had been loosely described as a Trump campaign adviser.

Consequently, I have assumed that the following happened. The FBI already had information that Page was something of an apologist for the Putin regime — although the record, we shall see, is more complex than that. Thus, the FBI and DOJ may have combined that information with some claims mined out of the dossier; but they would not have included Steele’s claims without corroborating them independently. This combination of information, doubtless added to by intelligence not known to us, was crafted into the application presented to the FISA court. This would be the normal, appropriate process.

The crucial question for the American Right today, as it has been for at least 60 years, is: What is the nature of its confrontation with modern liberalism?https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/15/disruptive-politics-in-the-trump-era-yuval-levin-or-victor-davis-hanson/

Is it a policy argument over how to achieve the common goals of liberal democracy? Are we working to expand liberty, equality, and prosperity for all citizens? Do we share the same principles with American liberals but differ with them over policy and how best to implement those principles? Is it really, as Yuval Levin has said, “a coherent debate between left and right forms of liberalism”?

Or is this conflict a much deeper existential struggle over the very nature of the American “regime” itself—its principles, values, institutions, mores, culture, education, citizenship, and “way of life”? Is it, as Victor Davis Hanson has put it, that we are in a “larger existential war for the soul of America”?

I would argue that Hanson is essentially correct: We are in the middle of a “regime” struggle.

Put another way: We are in an argument over the meaning of “the American way of life,” because the weight of opinion on the progressive Left rejects the classic constitutionally based American regime.

Instead, progressives envision a new way of governing in both politics and culture based on an individual’s race, ethnicity, and gender rather than on our common American citizenship.

Progressives don’t really deny this. Recall President Barack Obama, who in 2008 famously (or infamously) announced his administration would be “fundamentally transforming America.” America, as it actually existed at the time, was something Obama viewed as deeply problematic—permeated with “institutional” racism and sexism.

There can be no doubt that Obama understands the ongoing progressive-liberal campaign against conservatives and traditional America as a “regime struggle” (“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion” and “the arc of history” is trending their way). But somehow, many Americans still want to resist or deny the implications of these words.

The Foundations of Modern Conservatism

Sixty years earlier and across the political spectrum, the founding fathers of modern American conservatism in the mid-1950s at National Review also envisioned, not the give-and-take of bread and butter politics, but an existential conflict over the regime, i.e., over the “American way of life.”

In the premier issue of National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote that liberals “run just about everything….Radical conservatives in this country [among whose numbers he included himself and the NR editors]…when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those on the well-fed Right.”

This sounds familiar.

ERIC HOLDER REDUX?????RSK

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions said today that “fairness and justice” should be applied to personnel matters when enforcing “the highest standards of behavior” at the FBI.

Special counsel Robert Mueller removed FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page from his team in July after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered numerous text messages exchanged between the pair, who were engaged in an extramarital affair, that made disparaging remarks about President Trump, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and former Democratic Party presidential contenders Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley.

“The decision to remove Mr. Strzok off that case was made by Director Mueller, based upon the circumstances known to him,” Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the House Judiciary Committee this week. “…I’ve discussed this general issue with Director Mueller on several occasion. He understands the importance of ensuring that there’s no bias reflected in the conduct of the investigation.”

Outside the White House today, Trump said that “it’s a shame what’s happened with the FBI, but we’re going to rebuild the FBI and it’ll be bigger and better than ever.”

At a Justice Department press conference today, Sessions said his team “will not be reluctant to admit error” and “will never fail to monitor our people and we’re going to insist on the highest standards of behavior.”CONTINUE AT SITE

House and Senate conferees signed their tax agreement on Friday, and the bill that seems headed for passage next week is—Minor Miracle Dept.—better than what either body first passed. The bill’s corporate reform is far superior to its muddled rewrite of the individual code, but on balance this is the most pro-growth tax policy in decades.

The bill’s biggest achievement is reforming at long last the self-destructive U.S. corporate tax code. The top U.S. rate of 35%—highest in the developed world—will fall to 21% on Jan. 1. Cash currently held overseas will be taxed at a 15.5% one-time “deemed” repatriation rate, and America will move to a territorial system that allows money to be taxed where it is earned. The bill includes rules to prevent companies from concealing taxable income, especially on intangible assets such as intellectual property. And it sweeps away billions of dollars worth of industry-specific loopholes that misallocate capital.

All of this will go a long way to restoring American competitiveness that has eroded over several administrations. Even Barack Obama acknowledged this problem, though he declined to do anything lest some large business end up with a tax cut.

The same economists who presided over the weakest recovery since World War II now say none of this is needed with the economy finally growing at 3%. But the faster growth never materialized when they were in power, and this expansion has been notable for slow business investment and weak productivity growth.

This GOP tax reform—including five years of 100% immediate business expensing—is aimed directly at that weakness to keep the expansion going even as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates. This isn’t a demand-side “sugar high.” These business tax changes are supply-side reforms that will increase the economy’s productive capacity.

Reducing the cost of capital should raise business investment and invite a capital inflow to the U.S. More investment means more hiring and more productive workers, which is what increases wages. Especially with a tight labor market, the share of income that goes to workers should increase. After eight years of trying to redistribute income through higher taxes and more subsidies, why not try a return to growth economics?

Sixty-three percent of polled voters believe that the FBI has been resisting providing information to Congress on the Clinton and Trump investigations. This is a remarkable finding for an agency whose new head said a few days ago that the agency was in fine shape. No, it isn’t.

Fifty-four percent say special counsel Robert Mueller has conflicts of interest that prevent him from doing an unbiased job, also according to this month’s Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll. So, given this finding, the silence from the special counsel on the subject has become downright deafening.

These are significant findings about an operation that was supposed to bring more objectivity and less partisanship to the Trump-Russia investigation. Clearly these numbers indicate that there is a crisis in public confidence in both the FBI and Mueller. What makes these findings important is that, with Trump’s approval rating at 41 percent, these results include large numbers of voters who don’t like Trump yet who now agree that these investigations have veered off course.

After this poll was conducted, we learned that rogue agent Peter Strzok and his paramour, Lisa Page, both high-ranking members of the Mueller task force, discussed during the campaign how, in case Trump won, that they were developing, along with deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, what Strzok called an “insurance policy.” I can’t even imagine how badly these new facts will poll next month.

Our polling in November showed that 61 percent say the funding of the salacious GPS Fusion document should be investigated. Fifty-eight percent say that if Hillary Clinton and the Democrats funded the work, it could not be used by law enforcement. While this seems obvious to the public, Congress has not been able to get the answer to the question of just how this dossier was used and whether the FBI then paid some of the cost to legitimize it. Even greater numbers — 65 percent — said there needs to be an investigation of the Uranium One deal that netted the Clinton Foundation $140 million in foreign-based contributions that went undisclosed.