Trump-Russia

Things Are Moving Fast

M. Noonan29 Comments

Just a lot going on, huh? But let’s start with something a bit smaller in the grand scheme of things – mostly because I expected it.

Megyn Kelly is learning a harsh lesson. Remember, her audience at Fox was right of center but then she got into a fight with Trump and became a critic of the President. Presto!, she’s hired by NBC…who were hoping she’d be a right of center voice attacking the President on a popular show. Well, turns out that there isn’t much of a market for rightwing critics of the President and her show didn’t so much tank in the ratings as never had ratings to begin with. But, she did have the $69 million contract. What to do?

The staff at Megyn Kelly Today got a chance to speak with human resources on Wednesday, and voice their concerns about the host of their show.

An NBC insider tells DailyMail.com that employees on the show made it very clear to that they were ‘disgusted’ by Kelly’s blackface comments and ‘didn’t like her personally.’

Staffers were also informed by NBC that they were members of the Today team at a time when (their) jobs appeared to be on the line.

Meanwhile, a member of the NBC team tells DailyMail.com that there will be another meeting on Thursday at 10am after NBC made the decision to keep Kelly off the air for the remainder of the week.

‘Given the circumstances, Megyn Kelly Today will be on tape the rest of the week,’ said an NBC spokesperson.

When this first blew up, I didn’t even bother looking into what she said – knowing in advance that whatever she said wasn’t remotely racist. The Mrs finally looked it up and played it for me: yep, not racist. But, that is beside the point. The point is that she’s a barnacle for NBC and as she’s not a leftist, she has to go. And go without getting all of her $69 million (they’ll have to pay her a hefty sum, I’m sure…but it won’t be near the full amount, I’ll bet – but, even if they have to shell out the full amount, it still benefits as they can possibly get a money-maker in that time slot). Now, had Kelly been a lifetime leftist, this wouldn’t have happened: the left keeps all manner of failed shows on TV because they meet a particular leftwing demand. But Kelly wasn’t one of them – she’s now learning that if you are non-left, you have no friends on the left. Ever. The left will use you, but it won’t love you – and it’ll knife you as soon as you no longer serve as an anti-right tool. Never Trump should take note – but they won’t: like all appeasers, they are only hoping the alligator eats them last.

Nothing really new about the whole bomb thing – just more yadda, yadda, yadda about how it means we’re supposed to surrender to the left. To which all of us are saying: “Yeah, no”. Legal Insurrection has a good run-down on it. My guess: leftwing hoax designed to hammer the GOP. I know a lot of people push back against that – but, remember, we’re dealing with people who really have made stuff up in the past for political reasons. From “racist” notes on receipts to “hands up, don’t shoot” inspired riots. Fake bombs are simply not outside the realm of possibility for the left.

Still seeing more good news for the GOP in early voting, but I’m getting suspicious that everyone, right and left, is just confirming their biases. Because of various actions I still expect the GOP to do pretty well on the 6th – it is clearly not going the way the Democrats were expecting even a month ago – but I think, in the end, we’re all just going to have to wait for the votes to be counted before we can be sure. It is notoriously difficult to predict how mid-terms go because you never know what the electorate will look like. I discount the polls because I simply don’t expect the electorate to be 42% independents voting 60/40 for the Democrats. I could be like that, and if it is, the GOP will get slaughtered. But, I don’t expect it. I expect the breakdown to be more 35% GOP, 32% Dem, 37% Independent…but with the independents breaking slightly GOP and more Dems voting GOP than GOPers voting Dem. But, we’ll see.

UPDATE: Watch this clip of an MSMer complaining about having “Fake News” shouted at him by a random person. Important bit: it happened in Queens. Not exactly a MAGA stronghold. If people in Queens are following the President on this, I can only suspect a very large shift in national attitudes which may well show up surprisingly on the 6th.

Stocks took another dump yesterday but are rebounding a bit, so far, today. To me, this looks like a mere market correction. If so, there could be another 10% downside for the Dow (ie, a total drop of about 2,500 more points). Nothing to get worked up about – also, the market doesn’t like uncertainty and until the mid-terms are sorted out, no one really knows what the next two years will be like.

I haven’t said much about the Khashoggi murder mostly because I don’t care about it. Meaning: I do care that a fellow human being was killed and I do hope those who did it are punished…but I don’t care in the sense that I don’t see this as something Americans or America needs to get bent out of shape about. It seems to me that the real intent behind blowing this murder up to epic proportions is to drive a wedge between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The parties who would benefit from this would be Turkey and Iran – and especially Iran. I’ve written in the past about Saudi Arabia – I don’t really like it. It is, to me, a sort of Mafia family which got control of a nation (one of the funniest jokes made on this was along the lines of “Khashoggi was going to be made, but there was a problem and there’s nothing we could do about it” – taken from that famous scene in Goodfellas). But, Iran is a much larger problem than Saudi Arabia and Turkey is rapidly turning into a full-blown enemy of the United States. I’m not prepared to allow Iran and Turkey to take over the Middle East because the less-dangerous Mafia family did something wrong.

And as long as we’re on the subject – ISIS has issued new threats to carry out knife and gun attacks in “Crusader nations”. Which means they’ll pick soft targets and murder as many unarmed people as they can. Safest place: any American gun show or shooting range. They won’t show up there.

The Trump/Russia thing continues to grind on. Sharyl Attkisson has some interesting things about it:

…there’s now an impressive body of public evidence to address another facet of this international controversy: collusion against Trump.

Evidence on this matter has trickled out slowly over the course of about two years. It has come in the form of sworn testimony from witnesses interviewed by Congress, information revealed by the Justice Department’s inspector general, government documents and text messages, and court files.

Taken together in context, the evidence points to two important findings. First, U.S. government insiders, colluding with numerous foreign citizens and governments, conspired to interfere in the 2016 election. Second, after the election, these figures conspired to undermine, oust, and perhaps even frame Trump and some of his associates.

I figure Mueller will shut it down after the mid-terms. If the Democrats win the House, with some sort of recommendation for impeachment of Trump. If GOP wins the House, then with a scathing statement of how bad Trump is, but no recommendation either way. If the GOP does win the House, then that is probably the best outcome for the GOP and for Trump…and toothless shriek. If it comes out that way, then I was wrong to urge Trump to fire Mueller.

Advertisements

Open Thread

M. Noonan8 Comments

Rachel Rollins won the Democrat primary for Suffolk County, MA District Attorney…and, given the nature of things, this means she’s the new DA. She’s promised to “decline to prosecute”, unless a supervisor’s permission is obtained, such crimes as trespassing, shoplifting, disorderly conduct, receiving stolen property, driving without a license, minor in possession of alcohol, drug possession with intent to distribute. Everything old is new, again – especially for liberals, who haven’t had a new idea in a century. This is precisely what did starting in the 1950’s – going easy on “minor” crimes because, well, they were being committed by poor boys who were simply acting out of frustration over poverty and lack of opportunity. The result was our murder rate in the 1970’s. This is just the per usual virtue signalling from leftists who will never, ever spend the night in a crime infested neighborhood.

Some Lefty rando on Twitter decided to get into Robert O’Neill’s face when O’Neill mildly pointed out that Obama still can’t say “Radical Islam”. The Lefty said:

He kinda killed Osama Bin Laden, so….

Thing is, O’Neill was part of Seal Team 6, which took out Bin Laden…the rest of the Lefty rando’s day didn’t go so well on Twitter.

Papadopoulos got 14 days. Trump pointed out that it cost $28 million to get to this…$2 million per day spent in jail.

Corey Stewart wants to have an ICE Tea Party on September 15th outside the Fairfax, VA ICE office.

Woman gets dumped, and Robert Stacy McCain has an interesting take on it.

Open Thread

M. Noonan19 Comments

California passed a bill to require all corporate boards to have at least one woman – because you tender, little ladies just can’t get there on your own, I guess.

Robert Stacy McCain notes the “wilding” problem in Chicago – and links to this article:

After spending the day at Oak Street Beach, the girlfriend claims she and her boyfriend were walking back to their car at around 6 p.m. in the vicinity of the 900 block of North Lake Shore Drive when they were surrounded by “20-to-25 offenders who gathered around them,” Hopkins said.

“She described a completely unprovoked attack with no warning. Her and her boyfriend were enjoying the day on the beach. They were walking back to their car minding their own business and, with no warning at all, they were surrounded by this large group and they did absolutely nothing to provoke it,” Hopkins said.

“They started a confrontation and, at some point, the victim was struck in the head and fell to the ground.”

Civilization is a thing veneer, folks. And lots of very bad people figured that out a long time ago – mostly notable Lenin, Hitler and Stalin. You rip the lid off, and people will do the most astonishingly savage things. Not all of them – but enough will. People just take peace for granted – security of life and property. But the general security we enjoyed in our cities wasn’t a natural event. It grew over a thousand years during which time everyone went around armed and punishments for even relatively minor crimes were brutal: in 18th century London, most men carried a sword and you could be flogged for petty theft. The idea that one shouldn’t commit a crime didn’t come naturally: it was literally beaten into the population. Its been a long time since the pound of flesh has really been extracted and, meanwhile, we’ve been essentially telling the rising generations that being a criminal is cool. What happened in that article is the natural result – and the natural result of that will be everyone eventually going around armed and a return to savage punishments for even minor offenses. And don’t think this all “just happened”…as I said, bad people long ago figured out that civilization is a weak reed…and those who hate our civilization (and they are legion among us) see things like the “wilding” as just another means of tearing down the hated civilization.

What is the Trump/Russia thing? Don Surber puts it all in a very complete nutshell:

The real news was the breakfast itself, which was relegated to Paragraph 14: “One of the meetings he recounted was a Washington breakfast attended by Steele, a Steele associate and Ohr. Ohr’s wife, Nellie, who worked for Fusion GPS, the political research firm that hired Steele, attended at least part of it.”

Ohr was not only married to a woman who worked for the company Hillary and the DNC hired to get dirt on Donald John Trump, but Ohr was meeting with the man in charge of delivering the dossier.

The only collusion with Russians was Steele and his sources at the Kremlin getting together to put together a dossier aimed at bringing down a duly elected American president.

It is all anyone needs to know – the Trump/Russia thing was cooked up by people determined to get Trump. The end. Shut it down – fire Mueller.

The reason we don’t have a Democracy is because our Founders knew that a full Democracy was too risky – remember, all the Athenians had to do to win the Peloponnesian War was not vote to execute a batch of successful admirals. The Founders kept the people away from full power, and that is a good thing, because popular passions can get out of hand. On the other hand, those yapping about “saving Democracy” under Trump dislike Democracy as much as the Founders did…especially as a fully functioning Democracy would probably force into exile most of those now claiming to be Democracy’s defenders.

The Never-Ending Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory

M. Noonan6 Comments

The House Intel committee came to it’s conclusion:

The House Intelligence Committee has released findings from its upcoming report on the Trump-Russia affair — and its main conclusion is that it has discovered no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.

“We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians,” the committee said in a one-page summary of its findings released Monday afternoon.

In addition, the committee took issue with the intelligence community assessment of Russian motivations in the 2016 election. The committee agrees with the assessment that the Russians did, in fact, try to interfere — the findings cite “Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015-2016 and their use of social media to sow discord.” But the committee disagrees with the intelligence community judgment that Russian President Vladimir Putin specifically tried to help President Trump win the election.

Of course, we all knew this, already. These findings, though resulting from an exhaustive investigation, won’t convince our Progressives nor the Never Trumpers that there’s nothing to see here. They are all too invested in it, and they are invested in it because all of them were deeply invested in Hillary winning. Not just in the sense of her, personally, winning but in her winning proving conclusive that everyone who backed Trump was a complete idiot. Make no mistake about it: there is a lot of ego involved here.

You might recall that I predicted the 2006 mid-term elections not just wrong – but so incredibly, stupidly wrong that, in hindsight, I had to be a complete fool not to have seen it coming. I had, in that time, let the wish become the father of the thought. I didn’t want the Democrats to win, and so I went about for months finding reasons to justify my pre-conceived notion. Everyone can fall prey to this. But, for me, it was an excellent learning experience. I mostly learned that things can always go very different from what you expect. From that day to this, you might have noticed that I don’t make hard and fast political predictions. I always hedge my statements – “may”, “might”, “could be”, and so on. I made my mistake, took my lumps and moved on – because I’m not an egoist. The Progressives and the Never Trumpers very much are. And they are hanging on to Trump-Russia because as long as it exists, it explains away their mistake. They weren’t wrong, you see? Russia colluded with Trump! That’s how Trump won!

Now, to be sure, you can’t nail these guys down. As Ace points out, they are like the “soft” 9/11 Truthers…they won’t specifically state what they believe, but they’ll glide around hinting at this or that statement which backs up the main part of the theory (in 9/11 Trutherism, that Bush knew about and/or planned the 9/11 attacks). If you ask Trump-Russia theorists to fill in the blanks: “Putin did (blank) to help Trump win in return for (blank)”, you’ll never get them to fill them in. They can’t – they don’t dare because anything put into those blanks is going to be so clearly absurd as to be laughable. There was nothing Putin could do to alter the election and there was nothing Trump could do that would help Putin. Period. But the true believers keep at it – because it is their security blanket. Their assurance that they didn’t just get it wrong.

Getting it wrong is about the worst feeling you can have, after all. When you’ve done something bone-headed, you just feel the worst. You’d rather have been caught robbing a bank or something. Nothing is worse than looking like a fool – at least, for most of us. A few saints have risen above such things, but most of us are slaves to our dignity…to our pride. Not seeing the obvious in 2016 – that Trump was running a campaign tailor-made to pull in disaffected Democrats and thus would likely get him over 270 – is a bitter pill to swallow. Only one Never Trumper I know has really swallowed it – he freely admitted after the election that he simply refused to see the proof that Trump at least had a solid shot (what he missed, most egregiously, was the massive shift in voter registration to the GOP in Pennsylvania).

The longer anyone keeps with a mistake, the more invested they get in defending the mistake. So we can rely on it that the people who still believe in Trump-Russia will keep on believing it. Twenty years from now they’ll still bring it up from time to time. Just as we still have people mumbling about 9/11, so we’ll hear mumbles about Trump-Russia forever. Fortunately, most of us can ignore it, if we haven’t already. There’s nothing to find because there’s no possibility it can be true. And the really good news is that people who are lashed themselves to the mast of stupidity will keep on being stupid, thus making it more likely we’ll win in years to come.

Crime Network, Inc.

Cluster54 Comments

We are currently witnessing the largest attempted cover up of the most egregious political malfeasance our country has ever experienced, and the media is complicit. What is being revealed is a crime network led by the Clinton’s and aided and abetted by the Obama administration, Deep State bureaucrats, and the numerous media members who willingly promote the Democrat talking points in exchange for an invite to the hippest DC soiree, and if it weren’t for the election of Donald Trump, we would not be hearing of any of this. We would not know that James Comey and the FBI lied to the FISA courts three times to secure a warrant to spy on an American citizen. We would not know that Hillary Clinton used a private server to conduct her StateSec business and in the process compromised national security. We would not know that the exoneration of Hillary Clinton pertaining to that server, began even before the investigation. We would not know that the DNC rigged the primary to ensure a Hillary Clinton candidacy in the first place, and we would not know that the DNC destroyed servers and cell phones to keep them away from the eyes of law enforcement. And these are just the crimes we have become familiar with – what is it that we still don’t know?

Did Russia manipulate the Obama’s and the Clinton’s to acquire uranium? Was that the “flexibility” Obama promised Medvedved? How extensive and evasive were Lois Lerner’s actions at the IRS? How political were the actions of the ATF with the Fast & Furious debacle that resulted in the death of border guard Brian Terry? Why was Ghaddaffi deposed, and what was Sidney Blumenthal doing in Libya?

And you know what? They all had convinced themselves that Hillary was going to win and all of this would have been swept under the rug. Well a funny thing happened on the way to the White House.

Post Superbowl Open Thread

M. Noonan67 Comments

I did watch the Superbowl – it was quite good. Still a bit too much SJW in the commercials, but the game, itself, was great as a game. I’d like to think the NFL has learned its lesson…but it probably hasn’t. The ratings for the Superbowl were at an 8 year low…and if the NFL wants to turn that around, they’d better drop the SJW drivel.

Of course, Philly then went on to behave rather badly. That is something I just don’t get – rioting after a game. But it seems a thing in the deep, blue cities. I’ll leave it to you to speculate why.

Always remember that the Trump/Russia thing started with the paranoid conspiracy theory that Putin had altered votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan to throw the election to Trump. This did not happen. We know it didn’t happen because you can’t do that – it isn’t physically possible…and, of course, Stein’s recounts confirmed that the vote was valid. But that didn’t stop the Democrats from running with it. They just can’t get over the fact that Hillary lost – and so, here we are, 14 months later, still wallowing in their psychological stew. But do keep in mind where it came from – it is like starting a math equation with 1+1=3: no matter what you do after that, it will be wrong. Those who are trying to claim that this or that aspect of the Trump/Russia investigation is valid are being quite silly about the whole thing…the underlying basis of it is false; all that follows from that underlying basis is also false. It can’t be otherwise…no amount of addition to a lie will ever make a lie true. This is why I’m quite confident that Trump will never be tripped up over Trump/Russia…there’s nothing to trip him up over. Its also why I think that Trump should just shut it down: yeah, it would cause shrieks, but that will be rapidly drowned out by rising wages and increased employment.

Steele apparently had a second dossier about Trump…and it was peddled back and forth between State and Team Hillary. This is the real scandal: that Obama’s Administration placed itself at Hillary’s disposal for the 2016 campaign. That is what we need to investigate.

A Colt’s linebacker was killed by a drunk driver…this tragedy apparently caused by an illegal immigrant. There’s a reason to enforce the laws, folks.

The MSM is getting filled with heart-wrenching stories of poor, sweet Dreamers being deported by that cruel, racist Trump…and Don Surber digs into one and finds, surprise!, that the MSM isn’t really giving the whole story. Of course they aren’t. Bottom line, folks, is that getting deported from the United States isn’t easy. You’ve really got to work at it, especially if you’ve been here any length of time. The subject of the linked story did work at it – getting convicted on drug offenses. Obama let him skate, Trump is enforcing the law.

We have been working on a thing called a “railgun” for a while…and haven’t done a very good job at it. Now, China is picking up the idea. This is bad news – we daren’t let China get ahead of us on this. This is revolutionary stuff – it could be as decisive a change to naval warfare as was the introduction of the aircraft carrier. The railgun will fire a projectile at about Mach 7 and will have a range of about 100 miles…though I’ve read that this could be extended to 200 miles. There is no explosive…it is just a piece of metal fired so fast that it completely destroys whatever it hits (think about it: we’re basically reviving the cannon ball…and this might revive the Battleship: we were about to build the USS Montana BB-67 when we dropped the Battleship concept, so I say we go with that when we start again). Nothing in anyone’s inventory at present can withstand it (though, I’ve also read of some new metals being developed which might provide protection against it…in the battle between offense and defense, there’s never a final answer). The main thing is that if such a weapon is practical (and it looks like it is, though more R&D is necessary), then we want them…and we want them before anyone else has them. Imagine a ship carrying, say, four such weapons parked 20 miles off an enemy coast…anything up to 80 miles inland from it is doomed. Time for Trump to get busy on this – and I think he is: you might recall he wants an end to the Defense budget sequestration and it has been, partially, lack of money which has held us back here.

Open Thread

M. Noonan65 Comments

Marcy Miller, a Twitter friend of mine, keeps up on Arizona history:

By five a.m. on a cold November 2, 1889, Gila County Sheriff Glenn Reynolds and his deputy, William A. Holmes, had barely begun the second day of their long trek from Globe to the Yuma Territorial Prison with nine prisoners. Eight of the convicts were Apaches – one of them the infamous Apache Kid, another Pash-Tan-Tah – and the remaining prisoner a Mexican man named Jesus Avott. The prisoners rode in a stagecoach driven by its owner, Eugene Middleton. Next to Middleton sat Deputy Holmes, riding shotgun, while Sheriff Reynolds accompanied them on horseback…

Read the whole thing. Interesting slice of old west history.

So, they voted to Release The Memo – we’ll see if Trump approves it. I bet he will – but even if he doesn’t, I understand the House can still release it. At any rate, things are rapidly heating up on this front. From what I’ve read, it seems pretty clear to me that the Obama Administration cooked up a reason to spy on the Trump Campaign in order to aid Hillary’s quest for the White House and when Trump wound up winning, they switched it over to a story about Trump colluding with Russia to win the election. We’re all used to Democrats getting away with stuff like this – but this is really big. Like, Watergate was nothing compared to it big. We’ll see how it comes out.

Google has a new camera that will neatly keep track of your every move. I really don’t understand why anyone buys these things. Look, I like being connected, too…but we’re already in enough databases: why give people permission to essentially spy on you 24/7? Want to know what really set me off on how bad things are getting? Some months back the Mrs and I were walking through a store and I mentioned that we needed to buy more treats for the dog…almost instantly, an ad for dog treats at that store popped up in my Facebook timeline. The fricking thing was listening to me and matched what I said to where I was! I don’t like that, at all. I’ve taken to occasionally entirely shutting off my phone so that there is at least some blocks of time no one knows where I am. But, you just watch: eventually not having your phone on and with you will be seen as evidence against you. 1984 turned out to be an instruction manual.

A possibly intoxicated Gam Gam was last seen reading passages from a pack of lies at the Grammy’s. For some odd reason, this resulted in very low TV ratings for the Grammy Awards. Go figure.

MSMer, in the spirit of 1984, throws the actual news coverage of the 2016 into the Memory Hole and announces that the MSM was too tough on Hillary.

Allahpundit, who really has been allowing his disdain for Trump to get the better of him, wants Trump to jettison the televised State of the Union. I don’t see any reason for this – other than a fierce desire on the part of some to deny Trump a widely-watched, national platform. Heck with that – just having him up there giving the speech will bug our Progressive friends…and that is always a worthy object.

Donald Surber points out that some people coming to ardently support the Wall are illegal immigrants…specifically those who would benefit from the codification of DACA. When you think about it, it makes sense: Democrats might want the DACA people stuck in legal limbo in order to wring whatever political advantage they can out of it…but the actual, flesh and blood human beings involved probably just want to get themselves to legal status so they don’t have to worry about it any more. This is a very illustrative thing: Democrats don’t actually give a darn about anyone. It is perfectly ok, in their minds, if people suffer if they think that suffering can get them power and wealth. The thing for the GOP to do is to figure out a way to explain this – not just to DACA types, but all the various social groups the Democrats keep poor and hopeless. We want them to rise and live their lives in independent dignity…Democrats just want them poor and hopeless because that way they may be suckered into voting Democrat.