So where are the lawsuits against Steele from the Democrats?
I mean, if I had spent the kind of money that Democrats did to obtain that dossier and it turns out to be exposed as complete garbage, I’m dragging his butt the court before the echo dies.
But, no, nothing from the Democrats, nothing from Hillary Clinton. And, unlike so many people who have crossed the Clintons before, Steele himself is still alive so obviously the Clintons aren’t annoyed with this situation that they paid for despite it having been proven as totally false.
So where is the anger? Could it be that the Democrats got what they paid for? An absolute piece of crap that could be thrown at the wall in the hopes it would stick and save Hillary Clinton’s candidacy?
Or is there something deeper going on here? It has been pointed out several times that the left will always accuse the other side of what they’ve been doing. Can it be that this was a document designed to take the heat off of Hillary Clinton and Company for their collusion with the Russians? That they got precisely what they paid for?
Well, maybe not so mysterious.
The case against former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn has taken a strange turn, as U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras abruptly recused himself Thursday night with no explanation. Contreras is an Obama appointee who also sat on the FISA court while the Trump team was under surveillance by the Obama administration.
I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody.
And, while the article goes on to suggest that the judge that is actually replacing Contreras is a Clinton appointee, I see several references to his being appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1984. If these other references are true, that certainly puts a shaft of sunlight on what otherwise has been a dismal time for the FISA court.
However, this starts to get a little strange…
What is arguably most disturbing about this case is that then-National Security Adviser Flynn was pushed into a perjury trap by Obama administration holdovers at the Justice Department who concocted an unorthodox legal rationale for subjecting Flynn to an FBI interrogation four days after he took office, testing Flynn’s recollection of the conversations while the FBI agents had transcripts of the calls intercepted by the National Security Agency.
In other words, the Justice Department wasn’t seeking information about what Flynn said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak – the intelligence agencies already had that information. Instead, Flynn was being quizzed on his precise recollection of the conversations and nailed for lying when his recollections deviated from the transcripts.
For Americans who worry about how the pervasive surveillance powers of the U.S. government could be put to use criminalizing otherwise constitutionally protected speech and political associations, Flynn’s prosecution represents a troubling precedent.
… Which raises the question of why the judge is recusing himself now, particularly. One gets the distinct impression that things are being uncovered that make the judge or his betters more than a little bit uncomfortable.
This…
Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, praised the Communist state as “extraordinary”, saying: “You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs”. Instead, there is a “positive national conscience”.
The bishop told the Spanish-language edition of Vatican Insider that in China “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say.”
Bishop Sánchez Sorondo said that China was implementing Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’ better than many other countries and praised it for defending Paris Climate Accord. “In that, it is assuming a moral leadership that others have abandoned”, he added.
He accused US president Donald Trump of being “manipulated” by global oil firms, and said that, as opposed to those who follow “liberal thought”, the Chinese are working for the greater good of the planet.
Sigh.
I’m not Catholic myself but I have a number of Catholic friends and I have to tell you that a good number of them will quietly agree that there’s a problem.
It strikes me that the quietly agreeing is part of the problem. It’s getting to the point where it’s time for another Reformation I believe.
Personally, I keep waiting for this Pope to tell us all how abortion is a sacrament of God…. And maybe that’s when Reformation II will take hold.
Let’s be clear about this…
There’s a difference between discrediting an entire law enforcement agency and discrediting the political appointees set over them which basically turn them into a political weapon.
I wonder if the retelling of that history will include black Democrat Congressman sitting on their hands, while President Donald Trump announces record low black unemployment.
I’ve said it for years now, and that event is proof of the saying:
The worst thing you can possibly do to a Democrat is to provide an actual solution to a problem… Because once you do you will eliminate their capacity for demagoguing it.
I don’t know, it could be just me, but does anybody else find it strange that we have a fully loaded garbage truck parked on the railroad tracks in front of a Amtrak train with 200 plus Republican members of Congress on board, in Charlottesville Virginia? 
Glenn says:
ROGER KIMBALL: I wanted Ted Cruz to be President, but Donald Trump is working.Yeah, I was a Cruz fan, and before that a Walker and Paul fan, but I strongly doubt any of them would have done as well in their first year as Trump has done. And, you know, the press would have called them Hitler, too.
Mmmmmmm… While I agree that’s Trump is working, I still insist Ted Cruz would have done better.
No arguments that Donald Trump is doing better than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, but as I’ve said many times before in these spaces, doing better than Obama and or Hillary Clinton really isn’t all that much of a challenge.
And I still wonder if conservatives wouldn’t have come out of the deal a bit stronger had Hillary Clinton actually managed to pull off cheating her way into the White House. I think that would have been the wake-up call in a very large way that the American people wanted conservatives and not the Democrat light version of the GOP.
All that said, I do have to say also that Trump has been something of a surprise with the amount of successes he’s had. He’s getting reasonably good guidance and that is a help.
I will continue to praise him when he’s right and I will continue to run him through the thresher when I think he deserves it. But I have to say that for the most part, he is better than I figured he would be.
And anyone that sets the left’s teeth on edge like this has got to be worth the price of admission..
Here we have John Kerry and Robert Muller in the same class together.
Gee I wonder why nobody’s mentioned this link before… Maybe now we have some idea of why John Kerry is making noises about running for president again.
So now the FBI is filling their diaper because they think there are some factual omissions in the Nunez memo.
Well the solution seems obvious to me. Release the information that you’re claiming that the memo doesn’t cover.
But let’s look at this from an institutional standpoint. Let’s say we have a local police department against which the number of charges of criminal activity have come up.
Do we trust the the Judgment of that reportedly polluted Department to investigate itself? No, we deal with it by way of other means.
The FBI it is clear became a political actor in the most recent election. Release the memo. Do it now.
Update..
According to at least a couple of sources the memo will probably be released in the morning.
Good. It’s about time.
Okay gang, was it Drool on his face or was it ChapStick as he claims?
Either way that goes, let’s face it… Joe Kennedy III was not the best choice for the Democrat party response to the SOTU..
I mean we’re talking about somebody who is richer and whiter than cheesecake, and certainly the proverbial picture of privileged.
Leaving aside that the man was absolutely balmy in the response, the rest of it should have been enough to win an Oscar for best comedy.
As John Hinderaker noted on Twitter, if this is the big hope for the Democrat Party, they’re are in worse trouble than we thought…
Over at Glenn’s Place, Mark Tapscott observes…
Brendan Kirby at LifeZette<>checked the clips and found some uncanny similarities between Trump’s statements on immigration issues and those made by Slick Willie to the first Republican Congress in 40 years.
Well, yeah..
So the Democrats were sitting on their hands last night for something that when Bill Clinton was in office they applauded wildly, and unreservedly.
It’s clear that the Democrat Party of today is beginning to understand that illegal aliens are willing to do the job that nobody else is willing to do. Which is of course to vote Democrat. They view it as their only salvation from Oblivion.
SOTU, ‘Rats rebuttal, future of the party. When asked why they picked Joseph Kennedy III to give the party’s response to the President’s State of the Union speech, the reply was that Kennedy:
The Democrats said they chose Joe Kennedy III to deliver their response because he represents the future of their party. If that is true, they are in deeper trouble than we thought
Hat tip: John Hinderaker, Power Line.
We know that Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, B.J. Clinton or Mrs. Clinton hardly represent anyone’s thpolitical future. Yet the party that supports diversity and unlimited immigrants, calls a privileged, white, male, drunkard their party’s future. Maybe Mrs. Pelosi knows something about Kennedy’s sexual preference?
For a long time now I’ve been wondering at what point would Democrats (and those further to the left, even) would run out of things to be offended about.
Well, I have to tell you that I wonder no longer because we have officially reached the bottom of the pile.
Now that the Cleveland Indians have dropped their controversial “Chief Wahoo” logo, should Notre Dame’s athletic teams cease to be called the Fighting Irish and abandon the Leprechaun mascot?
“The answer,” ESPN host Max Kellerman said Tuesday, “is yes.”
Kellerman made the comments on ESPN’s morning debate show “First Take,” which he co-hosts with Stephen A. Smith.
So Kellerman gets paid millions of dollars a year to comment on the boxing world. And the only headline he’s managed to get so far is this one, which arguably isn’t even his venue?
You look across the plethora of sports teams…. I can’t think of a single one that somebody couldn’t claim they were offended by. At what point does this nonsense stop? Do we get Syracuse University to change its name because oranges are offended?
Do we next call for a ban on Lucky Charms cereal?
I will guarantee you that 99% of the people that are supposedly offended by the Fighting Irish logo and nickname are not Irish, 99% of the people that claim they are offended by Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians and for that matter the Washington Redskins, are not Indians, and so on…. And I will guarantee you that 100% of the people who claimed to be offended by this stuff don’t go to the games, are not sports fans, and never will be.
So the question becomes then, what these people who claim to be offended are gaining by all of this.
Simply put, they’re stroking their own ego. That’s really what this is all about. It’s an insipid need to feel superior to others.
The trouble of course is that the ability to think of itself risks offending somebody. The two are inextricably linked. To offer any such thought aloud is a rock sure certainty to offend somebody.
So the ultimate effective all of this is to shut down independent thought. Thought Control in other words.
Is that really the direction we want to be going?
Holy female bovine feces, the Schiff just his the fan, from the Washington Post, via Red State:
Within the FBI, some of Steele’s work was eventually incorporated into a 2016 application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, according to people familiar with the matter. Republican lawmakers have suggested that Steele provided bad information to the FBI, leading to a broader probe of Trump associates.
People familiar with the memo said it does not conclusively say whether Steele intentionally passed suspect information to the FBI or simply made a mistake.
Reax:
This is a huge revelation…if true. The FBI had to certify to a judge that the information they were submitting was validated. The admission that there is a question over whether the information provided by Steele was bad accidentally or on purpose is totally immaterial. If the information was bad, the FBI certified its validity to a FISA court judge. That, my friends, is a metaphor for the entire Russia collusion investigation.
Some stooge in the Federal Bureau of Investigation used a piece of fiction funded by Mrs. Clinton in an attempt to sabotage an election.
A great speech, but the real story was their reaction to it of course.
“Hillary Clinton wearing white is groundbreaking.”
Then..
“Melina wearing white is a dog whistle for white power.”
Or, if you like…
“Melina is wearing white to protest her husband”
That pretty much sums up the coverage of the State of the Union Address last night.
The real spectacle of the night was the Democrats, the Congressional Black Caucus included sitting on their hands while the president announced record low unemployment for black Americans. Rather telling, that.
I would say the Democrats and the press (but I repeat myself) are losing their bloody minds over this, but I think that was accomplished a long time ago.
