WASHINGTON (AP) ‐ "I’m not in the theater business," Judge T.S. Ellis asserted during jury selection in Paul Manafort’s financial fraud trial. "You have to be better-looking for that."
Objection, Your Honor.
The trial of President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman has plenty of drama and it’s coming from the judge.
Easily exasperated, and with a sharp wit, the U.S. district judge called out attorneys for both sides this week when he heard they’d been rolling their eyes, apparently at him. The judge judged their expressions to mean, "Why do we have to put up with this idiot judge?"
Privately, lawyers who have appeared before him say Thomas Selby Ellis III likes to be seen as the smartest person in the courtroom, not a huge leap for a judge. With his Princeton-Harvard-Oxford education and experience spanning consequential cases in an era of war and terrorism ‐ "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh’s among them ‐ Ellis is known to cut lawyers down to size, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much.
That’s what happened when Justice Department attorney Michael Dreeben, a legend in legal circles, appeared at a pre-trial hearing in the Manafort case. As soon as Dreeben began making his arguments for the prosecution, Ellis cut in ‐ "Would you spell your name for the record?" That’s not a question he asks others appearing in his Washington-area Eastern District of Virginia court.
[The Hill] Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein is "clearly obstructing justice" and should be fired if he does not produce documents sought by Congress, President Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon has told The Hill.
Trump should order Rosenstein to turn over all documents sought from the Department of Justice within 72 hours, Bannon said.
"If he doesn’t do it in 72 hours, he’s fired. I’d fire him."
Bannon spoke to The Hill on Wednesday, amid a renewed press from Trump and his allies to strike back against the legal challenges confronting the president.
Conservatives in the House threatened to impeach Rosenstein last week before pulling back on the effort after Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) announced his opposition. It was clear the group did not have the votes to win an impeachment vote on the floor, but it is possible they will return to the issue in September ‐ or push to hold Rosenstein in contempt if documents are not provided to Congress.
On Wednesday, the president caused an uproar with a tweet calling on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to "stop this rigged Witch Hunt right now" ‐ a reference to the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Critics said the tweet itself could be considered part of an effort by the president to obstruct justice.
Posted as a comment late yesterday by our own KBK:
[Intellihub] Both the FBI and CIA have played the American people for fools by not disclosing the fact that Peter Strzok is a double agent of the U.S. government and has been sheep-dipped by the CIA.
A sheep-dipped Peter Strzok has been covertly operating as the Section Chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterespionage Group during his secret 24 year tenure with the agency while masquerading as Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counterintelligence Division where he was in charge of investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email server along with the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.
The bombshell information published first on BrassBalls.blog reveals that the "joint CIA/FBI position was created by Congress in 1996" which allowed Strzok to hold both posts.
An unclassified document printed on FBI letterhead dated January 20, 2016, which contains the subject line "Supplemental Classification Review and Determination" was addressed to the Bureau of National Security’s Assistant Secretary Gregory B. Starr from Peter Strzok who is listed as "Section Chief" of the "Counterespionage Section" in reference to Strzok’s CIA post. Keep in mind, this is not an FBI post as Strzok’s position at the FBI is "Deputy Assistant Director Counterintelligence Division" not "Section Chief" which is a CIA post. 'Sheep-dipped' - A term used to describe someone on loan or temporary assignment to the CIA from another government agency.
#1
If he was supposed to be the vector for info back and forth between the CIA and FBI, esp prior to 911, then is 911 in big part due to him not giving CIA info about Binny and the hijacking plot to the FBI.
#4
So much for that 'wall' between law enforcement and intelligence communities that contributed to 9/11. Posted by Procopius2k
Incompetence, Pro-Islamic political correctness, and denial were found at about equal levels on both sides of the wall. The wall however, become the convenient scapegoat.
#7
Thus making him the perfect pipeline from Brennan/Jarrett/Obama into the Bureau for the dossier. As the onion is peeled back, those fingerprint begin to appear on evidence of political actions rivaling any misconduct in Presidential history. The Stalinization of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies .....
[NationalReview] What is disturbing about the Mueller investigation is not per se that a special counsel is looking into charges of wrongdoing known as "collusion," but that he is indicting or leveraging suspects, amid a larger landscape of related perceived wrongdoers, who so far have not been subject to the same federal zeal.
We do not know all the details, but the public wonders exactly why Michael Flynn was leveraged to confess about lying to federal authorities (in theory, in part due to surveillance obtained by questionable FISA warrants), while, for example, Clinton aides Human Abedin and Cheryl Mills were given partial immunity for their reported misleading statements about their knowledge of the Clinton email server.
People rightly wonder whether there will be consequences facing Andrew McCabe for allegedly lying about leaking to federal investigators, or for the flagrant way that John Brennan has so serially prevaricated under oath to Congress (about Senate staff computers, drone collateral damage, and the seeding of the Steele dossier).
If it turns out that DOJ and FBI officials deliberately misled FISA justices by not disclosing that they knew the Steele dossier was a product of Clinton-purchased opposition research, or that the collaborative news accounts they cited to the court were in truth circular offspring of the Steele dossier, then certainly they should be held legally accountable. The logical inference would be that they feared such full and honest disclosures might endanger the granting of the warrants.
[McClatchyDC] Once upon a time this part of summer, especially August, was known as the dog days. Everything slowed w-a-y d-o-w-n like a snoozing hound. Schools were out. So was the sun. Make that Sun. Everyone, it seemed, was on vacation or about to be. Including those slow-motion clowns in Washington.
The definition of important news changed too during those somnolent summer weeks. I once wrote a newspaper story about a dog that found his owner’s missing wallet and brought it home. On one humid August afternoon, that made the front page.
You may have noticed things have changed. News happens fast now. Very fast. Too fast. Every day. Every hour. No. Every minute.
Continued on Page 49
[Townhall] Having grown up in New Jersey, you understand that Democrats are a tax and spend party and even liberals in the state understand it. The Garden State is a case study in mass exodus; it’s just too expensive to live there anymore. Are there signs that the Democrats get it? Maybe‐the heavily Democratic legislature in Trenton had to tell Governor Phil Murphy that his tax increase agenda was more or less not going to happen. Taxes still went up, but it was not the insane proposal the governor’s office had pushed. Still, I doubt Demorats in these states will find rational solution to their fiscal woes. After decades of irresponsibility, these states are approaching a day of reckoning. It's the usual blue state madness crew: New Jersey, New York, Illinois, and California. For some, pension payments are a struggle (via Fox Business):
Connecticut may be the richest state in the country, on a per capita basis, but it's racked up a sizable debt worth more than $53 billion ‐ and it could be taxpayers who are forced to bail out the Constitution State, according to the former governor of Indiana.
"Someone’s going to the barbershop," Mitch Daniels, a Republican, said during an interview with FOX Business’ Stuart Varney on Thursday. "The first will be the taxpayers, already beleaguered in some of these states."
And Connecticut isn’t the only state struggling with a debt crisis: California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York are unable to make pension payments to retired government workers.
In Illinois, for instance, vendors wait months to be paid by a government that’s $30 billion in debt, and one whose bonds are just one notch above junk bond status, according to Daniels. New York’s more than $356 billion in debt; New Jersey more than $104 billion; and California more than $428 billion.
#1
Government employee pensions, an agreement made by two wolves on how to cut up the sheep. The level of taxes and confiscations needed to support them crosses over to involuntary servitude of the citizenry. It is obvious the pols never fulfilled their fiduciary responsibilities to people, but rather sold them into future bondage.
#4
Indeed B. The cancer that is liberalism has metastasized even here in red state Idaho at least in Boise. It's well known that the "North End" houses liberals, Hippies and fellow travelers.
#7
Get rid of all the pensions inflated at the last minute by administrative transfers to high-paying positions for the last year before retirement, and get rid of double-dipping a second pension by transferring to another branch of government after the first retirement. That would go a long ways towards mitigating the overall problem.
#9
...I've considered for a while that had Felonia Von Pantsuit won in 2016, this would have come to the fore a while back, and we'd be hearing about how it takes a village and that we had to help out those states.
And for what it's worth, I suspect it's far, far worse than we're being told and that the worst states are holding on by their fingernails, desperately hoping for a Blue Wave in November because that will be the last hope they have for a Federal bailout. If they don't get a Dem Congress with a veto-proof majority, they're dead meat. I'd say probably next spring the dominos will start going down.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/03/2018 12:09 Comments ||
Top||
#10
It's not even liberalism in CT -- it's cronyism in the destructive symbiotic relationship between pols and their incompetent,tax-fattened in-laws in public unions.
Posted by: Regular joe ||
08/03/2018 14:06 Comments ||
Top||
#11
Another significant factor was/is the unionization of government employees.
#15
Return the states to territorial status until their financial house is in order.
The first 13 states were never federal territories. They were each sovereign states to begin with that entered into a compact know as the Constitution, which means they can not revert to territorial status.
[WND] To listen to political psychologists and demographers, women are "abandoning the Republican Party" and voting for progressive policies because "they care about reproductive rights."
Get it? Women "care." What do they care about? "Rights."
The implication, at least, is that "the gender gap in American politics" is related to something women possess in greater abundance than men: virtue.
Put bluntly, women believe they have a right to have their uteruses suctioned at society’s expense. For this, they are portrayed favorably by those citing these proclivities.
Whereas women are depicted as voting from a place of virtue, men are described by the same cognoscenti as "sticking with the Republicans" for reasons less righteous.
Men are "buttressing the Republican Party," complained the Economist, in an article claiming to "mansplain" why male voters ‐ young even more so than old ‐ are sticking with the GOP.
If not for men, the party "would otherwise be falling over." As spare and as strong as the Economist’s text always is; the writer was unmistakably cross.
Academics conducting surveys no longer stick to reporting the trends observed in their often-dubious data, but attach value judgments thereto.
[VOX] "They are not traditional socialists. There is no call for communal ownership of production," said an MSNBC anchor while attempting to define "democratic socialism," a term that has burst onto the political scene since the unexpected win of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York primary for a House of Representatives seat.
"I am open to persuasion on this, but my instinct is that if what you mean by ’democratic socialism’ is ’stuff FDR proposed’ you might be better off using a more all-American reference point like the New Deal or FDR," Vox senior correspondent Matt Yglesias said.
"Democratic Socialists will not be covered [by the media] as the radicals that they are," Glenn Beck said on his show. "They’ll be covered as ’innovative, millennial-friendly upstarts with fresh ideas’ when they’re really diet-Communism."
"It’s petrifying to me that this is being normalized," said Meghan McCain on The View.
The phrase is indeed everywhere. In addition to Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and now New York gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon have claimed the label. Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the country’s largest socialist group, is seeing its membership explode from 6,000 in summer 2016 to more than 45,000 today. And the media doesn’t quite know what to make of it all.
I’m a staff writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of DSA, and here’s the truth: In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism. And we want to do that by pursuing a reform agenda today in an effort to revive a politics focused on class hierarchy and inequality in the United States. The eventual goal is to transform the world to promote everyone’s needs rather than to produce massive profits for a small handful of citizens.
#6
slavery could be "democratic" 51% could vote to enslave the 49%.
They could vote every year to renew and it would be democratic.
It's a constitution that limits state power and ensures equal (which entails a small states as equal gets messy when it comes to entitlements) treatment by the state which is important.
#7
Call it National Socialism. They have less obvious propaganda but they have the racism, the enforcement thugs, and their actual plan may not be invasion of neighbors but they have a similar fluid concept of national borders.
[PJ] On Wednesday night, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. accused Attorney General Jeff Sessions of being a "phony" who has pretended to support Donald Trump going back almost two years.
This charge came a day after President Trump tweeted that Sessions "should" end Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. This was not an order, and indeed the statement seemed more calculated just to attack the Mueller probe without officially calling for its end.
Even so, Falwell trained his sights on Sessions, suggesting that the attorney general's lack of action against Mueller proved he was a "phony," and had been one since before the 2016 election.
"Strangely, [Jeff Sessions] appeared unannounced at [Liberty University] the night before the 2016 election on a bus tour," Falwell recalled. "I told students but could get almost none of them to come hear him. Could it be our students were the first to see he was a phony pretending to be pro-[Donald Trump]?"
[Real Clear Politics] President Trump has been criticized for politicizing the intelligence community by threatening to strip the security clearances of former top officials including John Brennan and James Clapper. But numerous past and present senior intelligence officials say that the Obama administration started the politicization -- and that revoking the clearances of those who abuse the privilege for partisan purposes may help right the ship.
"As is often the case with the Trump administration, the rollout of the policy is bad, but the idea driving the policy is sound," said one senior intelligence official who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke to RealClearInvestigations only on condition of anonymity. "Under some Obama-era intelligence chiefs, intelligence was used as a political weapon. We need to root that out, not reward it."
It is not clear if the White House is moving forward on Trump’s threats last month to revoke those clearances. After Brennan’s continued media attacks on Trump following the Helsinki summit with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Sen. Rand Paul advised the president to strip him of his clearance. The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Some sources say former CIA director Brennan, ex-director of national intelligence Clapper and others with security clearances were emboldened to pursue political agendas through the anti-Trump media, in a climate of impunity created by the Justice Department’s failure to prosecute leaks attending Donald Trump’s election. Notable among the leaks, they said, was a top unnamed official’s "unmasking" of Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn in a January 2017 Washington Post column by David Ignatius, sourced to classified intercepts of Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. Leaking such classified information is a felony.
#1
What took this so long? These pieces of shit have not had ANY Need To Know for quite a while. One of them is a fucking commie, and both are likely unindicted felons for their disclosure of classified information to unauthorized persons.
[National Review] Earlier today, the New York Times announced that it had hired Sarah Jeong to join its editorial board, and ‐ like clockwork ‐ controversial old tweets promptly surfaced. In them, Jeong expressed some rather interesting views of "[dumba** f***ing] white people," musing about how much joy she gets "out of being cruel to old white men" and how "white men are [bullsh**]."
For good measure she also compared white people to "groveling goblins" and questioned why they’re "genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun." In a statement, Jeong expressed her regret and explained that she was engaging in "counter-trolling" designed to mimic the language of racists who harassed her online.
The Times is standing by its hire. Good. It’s time to end termination-by-Twitter and debate bad ideas head-on. (As for whether the Times and other elite outlets will display the same fortitude when a conservative is the target of online outrage, I’ll believe it when I see it.)
But it’s one thing to argue that Jeong should be given a chance to prove herself at the Times, and another entirely to justify the content of the tweets themselves. Yet that’s what part of left-wing Twitter did.
The argument isn’t just that the tweets were satire. Rather, numerous liberals took on the very notion that anti-white racism exists, or matters at all. These tweets are representative of the idea:
#2
Judging people by the color of their skin is racism pure and simple. Adding 'power' to the formation is simply a dodge to allow folks to hate whites without guilt.
[Townhall] Nikki Haley is not wrong about much, but she was dead wrong when she told a conservative audience that we should not be owning the libs. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We must own the libs. Liberal ownership ‐ the mockery of these pretentious twits, along with their goofy Fredocon enablers ‐ is vital, even essential, to the success of our conservative counterrevolution.
Ambassador Haley (who we cons like) wonders, "I know that it's fun and that it can feel good, but step back and think about what you're accomplishing when you do this ‐ are you persuading anyone?" Except this is not about persuasion anymore. The left has rejected reason in favor of hatred. Only pain will teach them, and if it doesn’t teach them at least it might deter them from messing with us. That’s why all 21st century conservatives have a duty to kick pinko booty. Eventual goal is to make sure no true believers - most of "the Left" are just conformists and/or mob looters - hold any position where they can exert influence over our lives..
#2
Both are right. Simply owning lefys is not enough, it is best to be persuasive in your logic as you own them. You will never change the lefty mind but you might change the minds of other readers.
Then again simply owning them is better than letting them win by default which was the tactic for decades and it proved a losing one.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[WND] To listen to political psychologists and demographers, women are "abandoning the Republican Party" and voting for progressive policies because "they care about reproductive rights."
[VOX] "They are not traditional socialists. There is no call for communal ownership of production," said an MSNBC anchor while attempting to define "democratic socialism," a term that has burst onto the political scene since the unexpected win of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York primary for a House of Representatives seat.
[Real Clear Politics] President Trump has been criticized for politicizing the intelligence community by threatening to strip the security clearances of former top officials including John Brennan and James Clapper. But numerous past and present senior intelligence officials say that the Obama administration started the politicization -- and that revoking the clearances of those who abuse the privilege for partisan purposes may help right the ship.
