An old friend – we first met in 1971 – walked back into my life today. Haven’t seen him since 1987. He first popped up a few weeks ago at another friend’s house…just knocked on his door and said “hello”. Now, he’s called me – using the number the other friend gave him. It is very strange to hear a voice from such a long time ago come back. But, it is also quite splendid. There aren’t, I think, too many people that really get into your heart. This friend is one of them. We only talked briefly – going over the largest aspects of each others lives since we parted. I’m hoping to get together soon so we can really talk over what each of us has done. This shows that true friendship never ends – we were talking as if we’d seen each other last week rather than decades ago. So, a good day for me.
Senator McCain is gone. I’ve obviously had some strenuous political disagreements with him. I’ll leave those aside for a bit. I prefer, right now, just to remember him as a hero of my youth. But I will say I oppose appointing his widow to his seat – there is something, in my view, just terribly un-American in doing that.
Mark Krikorian has something interesting about the Tibbetts murder:
…Tibbetts’s killer is reported to have lived in the United States for seven years, from age 17, and worked at an Iowa dairy farm for four of those years. He worked on the books, having used a stolen identity to get past the Social Security–number check (not E-Verify) used by his employer. His lawyer said that the killer “diligently filed tax returns legally with the IRS.” He had a car registered in someone else’s name and managed to drive for years without a license. He had a child with a high-school classmate of Tibbetts’s, meaning he was presumably listed as the father on the birth certificate.
That’s a lot of interaction with our institutions. That an illegal alien can do all that — for years — without raising a red flag represents a profound failure of policy…
It is that, but John Hinderaker notes that it is something more:
So the Social Security Administration and the IRS are not cooperating in the enforcement of federal law, which is the prime duty of the executive branch, according to Article II of the Constitution. President Trump runs both of those agencies. Why can’t he make them shape up? That question is the key to understanding American politics in the 21st Century.
The government is increasingly just doing whatever it wants. But that isn’t how it is supposed to work. We gave Donald Trump this power – not some unelected bureaucrats. It is very much time that we, the people, start to take charge of our government. One thing we haven’t really considered is that the bureaucrats should be term limited. No one should make a career out of being a bureaucrat. Other than military, perhaps no one should be permitted to work for the federal government for more than ten years?
Some Prog SJW type was just booted by ESPN…likely because ESPN is figuring out that when people tune into sports, they are trying to escape politics for a while.
DNC sets the rule that there has to be an equal number of men and women on their party committees…but, if gender is a social construct, how can they know?
Blogs For Victory 
Headline this morning at MarkertWatch to the effect that S&P 500 and NASDAQ hitting new all-time highs is a sign of “panic buying.” Now I’ve heard of panic selling, but never panic buying. Headline should have said, Market soaring to new highs indicative of the effectiveness of Trump’s economic policies and high investor confidence.
It must be bad because Reasons.
LOL. Yeah, so many people are thinking to themselves “Everything is going to hell and the wheels are ready to fall off, so I’m going to go out and invest in the future and buy some stock at its highest price ever, because, uh, I’m scared the price might just keep going up and that is why I think the wheels are going to fall off, and uh, when that happens the market will crash and I want to be sure I got in at the top of the market because, uh…..”
You and I think so much alike it’s scary.
Good for you Mark …. from personal experience reconnecting can be both good and bad so good luck
The new deal with Mexico sounds promising and now Canada is wanting back in ….. the MSM will spin this and say that Trump just wants a distraction from the Manafort and Cohen stories, which of course is their narrative. So think about that for a minute ….. the media will blame the President for working for the American people instead of addressing their questions and concerns on their efforts to discredit him. I predict that will actually happen.
So I guess I will take over as the resident Kurt Schlichter fan and here’s another beauty from him:
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/08/27/its-time-for-a-conservative-purge-n2513270
“pseudocons”. I love it.
Just a personal note to this emotionally stunted country. It’s ok not to like someone, and it’s ok to denigrate someone because of that dislike – it happens everyday and it’s called being human. Trump and McCain had a healthy dislike for each other and that too is ok, so keep this in mind as the networks spend the bulk of their broadcast day bemoaning the civility of the President while ignoring the pettiness of McCain and themselves.
I thought US Ambassador to Germany Peter Thiel said it best:
“I got to meet a lot of people running for president on the U.S. Republican side in 2016 and they all felt like zombies,” he said during a Monday event on entrepreneurship in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “They couldn’t say anything different other than programmed ideological soundbites.” Trump, Thiel said, is “a very healthy corrective to that.”
“I fully understand why people think of President Trump as a rude, mean person,” Thiel said. “But I think that’s often better than telling beautiful lies about the way the country is working.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/2018/08/27/peter-thiel-says-trump-is-the-republican-who-isn-t-a-zombie#gs.Mp9tfJc
Hmmmm. The only 2016 candidate I heard actually talking about ideology was Cruz, and he seemed pretty animated and un-zombie-like.
And: “…beautiful lies about the way the country is working.”” ?????
Yes, he did manage to work in some appreciation for Trump’s different style, but in a pretty uncomplimentary way, and I’m not impressed by the guy.
Cruz is still a top choice for 2024 for me. Trouble is, we might have too many first-raters that year. Pence has certainly shown he’s good. There’s still a shot for Walker. Abbot will likely be in the mix. We might have an overabundance of people who are really good…and as they’ll split the early vote, there’s no telling who might emerge.
One of the problems we had last time was too many people vying for the top slot, and only some of them really qualified. I thought Cruz was the best of the lot. Looking back on that field, I now tend to think we might not have gotten what we wanted, but we did get what we needed.
I think we underestimated the freakish power of the Left in this country. I was still thinking of them as the old Democrat Party—wrong, but still Americans at heart. I think that mask would have been ripped off no matter who beat Hillary, and of all the Republican field competing for the nomination only Trump had the background of dealing, and dealing effectively, with thugs. We have seen the old Democrat Party disappear under the weight of the International Left and its appointed representatives in the United States, and the International Left is the Left of Lenin and Stalin and Pol Pot and Castro—vicious, wholly unprincipled and dangerous. As much as I liked, and still like, Cruz I think electing him would have been like sending Payton Manning into a rugby match where the players were recruited from penitentiaries and had brass knuckles.
If only the media had time to cover this story:
– A Chinese-owned company penetrated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to sources briefed on the matter.
– The company inserted code that forwarded copies of Clinton’s emails to the Chinese company in real time.
– The Intelligence Community Inspector General warned of the problem, but the FBI subsequently failed to act, Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert said during a July hearing.
The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation.
The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.
https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/27/china-hacked-clinton-server/
Let’s not forget that these included emails between the Secretary of State and the President of the United States, who conspired to break several laws to keep these communications outside the jurisdiction of FOIA requests.
To put it more bluntly, to keep them hidden from citizens of the United States, which was evidently a bigger concern than keeping them hidden from other nations, such as China or Russia.
I may have a way to quiet some of the squealing from the Left about impeaching Trump.
Setting aside the fact that impeachment would not remove him from office, I think it would be fun to start a rumor that if impeached Trump will resign and then Pence will appoint Ted Cruz as his VP.
And then stand back and watch more heads explode. Don’t worry, it won’t be messy—–there isn’t anything inside them.
If we get our hands on the emails now in the possession of China, I think someone should go through them and isolate every email sent by someone in government who had signed the document stating understanding of the law regarding protection of the security of sensitive information. Anyone who signed that document and then emailed the Secretary of State on an obviously non-government email server should be indicted and prosecuted, as Hillary herself should be. Each of those people was complicit in her crime, and that includes Obama.
I’m wondering just how many compromised people we have in government – it simply must be a lot. As Instapundit says, we have the world’s worst experts. They do seem rather dumb. Greedy, too. Take a dumb, greedy person and put them into positions of authority, and the smart people will take advantage of them, ruthlessly. The Chinese are pretty smart.
The thing is, we don’t need all those people. This country is full of smart, motivated people who would jump at the chance to step up into a position that is now filled by a career whatever.
As I said, I would like to see every person who was complicit in using Clinton’s illegal server who would have known it was illegal prosecuted for doing so. That is, every person in a position of trust that called for him or her to sign the same papers she did.
Think about it—-imagine a couple of hundred bureaucrats facing arrest, arraignment and prosecution for violation of the Espionage Act. And “a couple of hundred” is a very conservative estimate. It would send the message that this administration takes national security very very seriously, and could tie in with the emphasis on border security. It would get rid of a lot of dead weight, a lot of which is left over from earlier Leftist administrations.
The term “debridement” refers to the manual removal of dead tissue, usually by vigorous scrubbing or even peeling, necessary for the growth of healthy new tissue. I think our government is so deeply damaged that we are more than ready for political debridement, and this is the kind of egregious offense that would justify it.
Basically, if you signed the official agreement to protect and defend and secure all sensitive information—-I don’t remember the exact wording but I looked it up once, to see exactly what Hillary had signed , at least once and maybe twice as First Lady, once as a Senator and once as Secretary of State, and the wording is strong and unambiguous—–and then you went on to violate that agreement by communicating on an unsecured server, you should pay the penalties laid out in your agreement. There is no excuse for doing this, as the email address was clearly not a government address.
If your excuse is that it was the only way you could do your job, you might be able to plea down, but every person should be held accountable, and I think most would have gone along with it because they were politically aligned with and loyal to Hillary. But a basic tenet of our form of government is that we are all equal under the law, and one of the Left is that we are all equal but some are more equal than others. I think it is time to lay out the differences between the two, and stop letting political and financial elites operate under a different system of law.
MSNBC just spent about 20 seconds on the Clinton email story and of course they dismissed it as an old story and nothing more than a distraction and then proceeded to played a clip from a China spokesman denying the claim …… of which they believed !! Because of course everyone knows this is all Russia related.
Hey, CNN has its script, just as the subversive trolls have theirs, and it takes a while to get a new script out there.
But wait a minute—-isn’t this the same group of clowns excoriating Trump for not having enough respect for the skill, brilliance and integrity of our intelligence community?
The main theme on anti-Trump sites is to call anyone who is not a rabid TDSer a “Russian troll” and making comments about the weather in Russia, etc. It is funny, in a way, because it is so utterly stupid and infantile it can’t possibly influence anyone, but it does telegraph what the Left thinks it might be able to sell to enough voters this fall.
That is why they can’t deal with the whole China thing. It’s a little late to start calling sane people “Chinese trolls”.
And they are scared scared scared. They thought these emails were gone, and they were safe. Now they know they could pop up at any time, and that a list of all the Dems who were complicit in Hillary’s Espionage Act crimes, next to the list of all the Dems in Congress who made Congressional records and communications available to whoever the Awans worked for, could be very very dangerous to the party.
I’d still love to see those lists published as names of those who will be called in for interviews regarding why they violated their own security agreements to use a server that was clearly not a government server for confidential, or at least sensitive, communications, and comments that this is what happens when you put Dems in charge of important stuff. Like national security.
It would be especially interesting if a lot of those names were of people who are on the ballot in November. And if it included law enforcement officials who knew this was going on and looked the other way, if any of them could be named.