Hillary Clinton Archives

The Resistance at the library: they’re reading and weeping

June 4, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

A trip to the local library makes clear that the Resistance is not dying. It is, instead gathering steam, preparing for martyrdom and explosion.

For the past few days, my time has not been my own, which is how I found myself staring at the “new in non-fiction” shelf at our local library. My home is unusual in that the younger generation prefers paper books while I, in part because of my less-than-perfect vision, love being able to read on my iPad, where I can make the text a little larger and the light a little brighter.

Thankfully, my library has signed on to the Libby App, so I have access to many recently published books, all with the aforementioned adjustable text size and bright light. Still, today was a day on which the younger generation was in charge, so I got a chance to see in concentrated form the books my Marin library thinks (probably correctly) that its patrons want to read.

If you ever wanted to know (a) that there really are two Americas and (b) that the self-styled Resistance is still struggling to understand how small-minded, tribalist Americans could reject its Utopian vision of a world in which all Leftist dreams are realized, my library is the place to go. On the few shelves dedicated to “new in non-fiction,” I saw all of the following Resistance books. Most had multiple copies gracing the shelves presumably because of high demand.

In addition to the books’ titles, I’ve included some quotations from the reviews that the books’ various publishers included on the Amazon pages. These reviews are a microcosm of everything the Left hates about Trump — which is everything that the Left hates about America. Trump’s America is one in which modern racism is a Leftist social construct that can be done away with through an exuberant economy; border policies that keep out illegal aliens who take away jobs from minority Americans; national security that acknowledges a violent, colonialist streak in Islam; climate policies that acknowledge change but manage it wisely rather than using it as an excuse to push America back into pre-industrial darkness; and, of course, old-fashioned patriotism.

For the Left, this American vision is a daily, living nightmare that they must dissect and destroy. And so, without further ado, the books on my library’s shelves: [Read more…]

President Trump, our behaviorist in chief, schools Kim Jong Un

May 24, 2018 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Kim Jong Un’s temper tantrum upon mention of Libya was predictable, so I’m betting Trump put that out there on purpose to continue using behaviorism on Kim.

Back in my kids’ pre-school days, one of the moms told a very funny story. She had been struggling to get her three-year-old to put on his shoes before he left the house. He thought this was a terrible idea and would throw a temper tantrum every time she told him to put on his shoes. When the tantrum ended, and he put his shoes on, she would give him a cookie to reward him for putting on his shoes.

It was only after going through this routine for several weeks that she realized that her son thought that the tantrum was a prerequisite to the cookie. In other words, she had managed to train him to tantrum first, put on shoes second.

What my friend described was behaviorism gone wrong. Good behaviorism, though, produces better outcomes. Before I go further, I’d better explain what I mean by “behaviorism.” Wikipedia offers a leaden definition:

Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals. It assumes that all behaviors are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual’s history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with the individual’s current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of inheritance in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental factors.

Yeah, whatever. Let me try to explain the concept as I understand it:

When you are dealing with a third-party (or a dog), and you want to change that third party’s (or dog’s) behavior, the reality is that, absent brute force, you it’s almost impossible actually to change someone else’s behavior. Like the famous light bulb, they have to want to change. The best that you can do when your current behavior is not effecting a change in the other person or dog is to change your behavior to see if that affects their responses. It’s essentially motivational training.

Dog training offers a good example. The old way of housebreaking dogs involved screaming at the dog if one found a puddle in the house and then rubbing the dog’s nose in it. This effectively terrorized dogs, but that did not mean they associated our behavior with the principle that they should do their business outside. Our psychological cues made no sense to them.

Sensible behaviorism says that we should create conditions within which the dog will succeed: Because dogs do not like to soil their immediate environment, we should keep them in that environment in the lead-up to their anticipated walk to prevent pre-walk accidents. Then, when the time is right, we take them outside and expose them to scent stimuli that will encourage them to do their business. Immediately upon their having done so, we praise them or give them a treat. Our behavior is no longer irrationally punitive but is, instead, purposefully positive. This encourages the dog to change its own behavior and to view the back yard, rather than the living room, as its toilet.

The same holds true in dealing with children. I will deny with the last breath in my body that I was a very good parent. I did figure out, however, that a child who is having a tantrum is demanding attention. The best way to deal with a tantrum, provided that the child is not hurting himself, someone else, or your house, is to ignore the child. The result was that my children never threw tantrums because there was nothing in it for them to do so. [Read more…]

New York Times has no standing to talk about the rule of law

April 11, 2018 by Bookworm 6 Comments

I refuse to listen to the hypocritical New York Times when it suddenly discovers the rule of law and starts to care about a president’s associates.

A Progressive friend was tremendously excited about an editorial in the New York Times. In it, the editorial board exulted about the fact that the president is exposed for all to see: an unsavory con man with no respect for the rule of law. I think it’s worth quoting a part of it:

Mr. Obama has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Democrat leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence. . . .

Yeah, you caught me — I switched out president names (Obama for Trump) and political parties (Democrats for Republicans). In fact, the New York Times is in full-throated condemnation about Trump’s disdain for the rule of law, the unsavory characters with which he surrounds himself, his open disrespect for the media and law enforcement, and his shenanigans to achieve and retain power.

Much to my Progressive friend’s dismay, I was not impressed, stating only that the New York Times lacked any standing to voice these concerns because it had been completely silent about Obama’s disdain for the rule of law, the unsavory characters with which he surrounded himself, or his shenanigans to achieve and retain power. The Progressive did not want to hear details, instead castigating me for living in a bubble and having no respect for the rule of law.

Had I not been shut down, I would have said this: First, I knew exactly what kind of person I was getting with Donald Trump. I knew he was sleazy, I knew he was unfaithful to his wives, I knew that he had sleazy friends (witness his friendship with the Clintons), and I knew that he was willing to push his way around the law if he could. I also knew that he loved his country, that he has a deserved reputation for getting things done, and that he was not Hillary, the ultimate grifter, sleaze, and law-breaker. Since he’s been president, I’ve cut all ties with caring about his sometimes less-than-savory past. He’s done nothing but good for American interests at home and abroad, and he’s done so within both the letter and spirit of the Constitution. [Read more…]

Outrageous — the FBI raid on Michael Cohen (Update 2)

April 9, 2018 by Wolf Howling 36 Comments

The FBI gave Hillary a free pass for national security violations; now it conducted an outrageous raid against Trump’s attorney right before the IG report.

This morning, the DOJ, based on allegations passed on by Bob Mueller, executed a warrant on Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, sweeping up a host of material covered by attorney client privilege. Indications are that the information related to Stormy Daniels, something completely unrelated to a single thing about Trump-Russian collusion.

[Update 1: By all accounts, Cohen was fully cooperating with the FBI and DOJ. So why and how this warrant? The procedure for issuing this particular warrant would have had to pass a high bar and involved multiple people at DOJ. My suspicion, reinforced by the following from Liz Shields at PJM, is that it is the mother of all fishing expeditions:

One thing is curious: Mr. Cohen was cooperating with the authorities, so why were the jackboots brought in? A special team of agents will need to go through the material in order to identify communications that are protected under attorney-client relationship. If the New York agents just happen to find something relevant to Mueller’s investigation they can turn it over to the special counsel, The New York Times reports.

So just who made the decision to seek a warrant in this matter? We’re still waiting to find out. It is just being reported that the AG for the Southern District of New York, a Trump appointee, was recused from this matter and he, just like Jeff Sessions did with Rosenstein, turned the matter over to someone else in his office — all with the approval of Rosenstein. Rosenstein also approved the warrant at issue here.]

[Update: Andy McCarthy, writing at NRO, puts the investigation of Cohen in perspective:

Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was caught hiding the sources of 1,300 large campaign donations, aggregating to nearly $2 million. The campaign also accepted more than $1.3 million in unlawful donations from contributors who had already given the legal maximum.

Under federal law, such campaign-finance violations, if they aggregate to just $25,000 in a calendar year, may be treated as felonies punishable by up to five years’ imprisonment . . .

The Obama campaign did not have a defense; it argued in mitigation that the unlawful donations constituted a negligible fraction of the monumental amount it had raised from millions of “grass-roots” donors. Compelling? Maybe not, but enough to convince the Obama Justice Department not to prosecute the Obama campaign — shocking, I know. During the Christmas holiday season right after the 2012 campaign, with Obama safely reelected and nobody paying much attention, the matter was quietly settled with the payment of a $375,000 fine.

Is the $130,000 in hush money Donald Trump’s personal lawyer paid to porn star Stormy Daniels on the eve of the 2016 election a campaign-finance violation? Probably, although it’s a point of contention. Even if we stipulate that it is, though, we’re talking comparative chump change.

Yet, as that lawyer, Michael Cohen, has discovered, what was not a crime in the Obama days is the crime of the century now. . . .

This is a mockery of equal justice, which makes the execution of this warrant look like an utter abuse of our legal system, all in an effort to overturn the results of the 2016 election.]

This warrant is from the same bastards who have yet – two years after the fact – to execute a warrant to verify that the single most basic fact of the collusion story, that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians. This from the same bastards that allowed Hillary to maintain her private server for months after it became known that she had run all State Dept. business through that server, all but certainly exposing thousands of confidential, secret and top secret documents and items of information in violation of our state secrets laws. During that time, Hillary and her attorney wiped that server clean. And now these bastards, seemingly having found nothing on which to charge Trump relating to Russian collusion, and having given Hillary and her team a pass on crystal clear felonies, go after Trump and/or his personal attorney on a technical violation of election law? These worthless bastards are out of control.

It is hard to express just how outrageous this is [Update: though Alan Dershowitz does a good job of it]:

The attorney–client privilege is one of the oldest recognized privileges for confidential communications. The United States Supreme Court has stated that by assuring confidentiality, the privilege encourages clients to make “full and frank” disclosures to their attorneys, who are then better able to provide candid advice and effective representation.

Indeed, the Attorney Client privilege is not merely judge made law well over a century old, it is part of the Federal Rules of Evidence passed into law by Congress. If a prosecutor is even thinking of violating it, he has a high bar to overcome. That is doubly so in this case where the warrant was issued ex parte, without any chance for Trump or his attorney to object and be heard. [Read more…]

John Pavlovitz shows that Leftist arguments are fact-free and hate-filled

April 8, 2018 by Bookworm 17 Comments

John Pavlovitz is a hugely popular Progressive preacher. He also exemplifies everything that’s wrong with how Progressives approach Trump’s presidency.

Screenshot of John Pavlovitz home page

Have you ever heard of John Pavlovitz?

Right. I hadn’t heard of him either. Still, thanks to the wonders of the internet, you can quickly learn about him.

According to Pavlovitz’s online bio, he’s a “ministry veteran,” which is his weird way of saying that he’s been a practicing minister for a while. He says that he is “trying to figure out how to love people well and to live-out the red letters of Jesus.” Get that? He’s about “lov[ing] people well.” He’s also a Leftist darling:

Pavlovitz, forty-eight, is a Wake Forest resident, minister at North Raleigh Community Church, and father of two young kids. He’s also the writer behind Stuff that Needs to be Said, a blog that calls out hypocrisy in plain language, with the president and his ardent followers within the religious right earning particular scorn.

His style—compassion paired with a no-bullshit, emperor-wears-no-clothes attitude, all informed by an inclusive brand of Christianity—has endeared him to millions of readers. This year alone, twenty-three million people have viewed his blog, and he has over sixty thousand Twitter followers. His words have been featured in Slate, Cosmopolitan, and Quartz.

Pavlovitz has written a book: A Bigger Table: Building Messy, Authentic, and Hopeful Spiritual Community. According to his website, it “shares a bit of John’s story and a vision for spiritual community that allows everyone a place.” In it, he explains that “we don’t have to share someone’s experience to respect their road. As we move beyond the lazy theology and easy caricatures that seek to remove any gray from people’s lives, we can meet them in that grayness, right where they are without demanding that they become something else in order to earn proximity to us or to a God who loves them dearly.”

Did you get all that? He’s selling his vision of love, fellowship, understanding, and oneness with God. Isn’t that beautiful? What a nice man. Anyone with that kind of commitment to love, community, and respect must be the kind of person who would reach across the political aisle using mutual respect as a basis for developing a common polity that serves all of America, right?

Wrong! Forget about it! Pavlovitz is a true Progressive and that trumps faith any time. He hates you and everything you stand for.

And here’s the really funny thing about his hypocrisy and his hatred: If you work your way down the list of all the things he says are wrong with you, the evil conservative, you will discover an absence of actual facts and lots of psychological projection. (For those unversed in therapy speak, psychological projection happens when someone tries to deny the ugliness within by projecting it upon innocent others.)

With that introduction, allow me to fisk Pavlovitz’s most recent post, entitled “Trump-Supporting Friend — This Really isn’t About Donald Trump.” Or, as I call it, “When It Comes To The Incredible Hatred And Bile Built Up Inside Of Me, It’s Not Me, It’s You.” I’ll quote Pavlovitz and follow each quotation with my comments:

Trump-supporting friend,

What we’ve got here is, failure to communicate…

I know you think I’m preoccupied with this President; that he is the reason I’m so angry and bitter and frustrated these days—but you’re wrong.

He’s not lying. As you will see, Pavlovitz is indeed angry, bitter, and frustrated — and it’s all your fault.

This isn’t about Donald Trump.

It’s never been about him.

Well, it may not be about Trump, but prepare yourself for a catalog of Trump’s alleged wrongdoings, all based upon misstated facts, irrelevancies, or opinion in lieu of facts.

It wasn’t about him during the campaign or on Election Day.

Well, thank Heavens for small mercies. Pavlovitz at least forgives Trump for his temerity in campaigning and winning against Pavlovitz’s express wishes.

It wasn’t about him when recordings of him boasting about sexual assaults surfaced.

In common with all Progressives (and NeverTrumpers), Pavlovitz is incapable of listening to what Trump said. What Trump said is that he made moves on one woman and backed off immediately when she said “no.” What he also said, speaking in the abstract, is that when you’re a rich, famous billionaire, you can do anything you want with women and they’ll let you. Bruce Bialosky, who was on the road with ELO during the height of their fame, agrees: [Read more…]

Mueller’s First Indictments – Some Answers and Some Predictable Media Spin

February 17, 2018 by Wolf Howling 20 Comments

The Mueller indictments show that no American conspired with the Russians — and that the Russians successfully acted to “sow discord” in the U.S. political system.

After suffering through a year of hysteria and the disruption of our national politics by our neo-Marxist progs trying to undo the election, Americans deserve the entire truth about what happened. We received some of it yesterday when the Special Counsel delivered his first series of indictments against thirteen Russian nationals, working through two Russian front corporations, for crimes relating to interference with the 2016 election.

The indictments go a long way, though not all the way, to clearing the Trump campaign of conspiring with the Russians. They put the Russian efforts into context — their operation was small. The facts definitively establish that Russian support of Trump was a by-product, not an end goal of the operation. Equally important, Rod Rosenstein explicitly stated that no American citizen, let alone anyone in the Trump campaign, was knowingly complicit in the actions described in the indictment.

One of the striking things to come out of the indictment was how small the Russian operation was. In terms of money and manpower, it was an operation involving 13 named defendants and several hundred employees working through two Russian corporate entities, all on a combined budget of no more than $2 million a month from 2014 through the end of 2016 (Indictment, ¶¶ 10-11). To put that into perspective, during 2016 campaign, candidates on both sides, along with their supporters and PACs, spent hundreds of millions during the primaries; then they spent $2.65 billion during the four+ month general election season. It does not seem possible that such limited scale Russian activities would have made the slightest difference to the outcome of the 2016 election. And indeed, Rod Rosenstein, in announcing the indictments, explicitly stated that there is nothing in the indictment to suggest that the activities of the Russians had any impact on the outcome of the 2016 elections. [Read more…]

Bookworm Beat 2/11/18 — the Olympics illustrated edition and open thread

February 11, 2018 by Bookworm 26 Comments

It’s been a while since my last illustrated edition, but with the Olympics in play for a few days, the memes are starting to emerge.

I no longer watch the Olympics. It was fun back in the days of Cold War tension and carefully curated, and quite entertaining, three-hour stories every evening (before we knew we were the victims of curated stories). Remember when the media used to root against the Soviets (and, before that, against the Nazis)? Nowadays, with a media engaged in a slobbering love affair with a high official from one of the worst countries in world history; with endless, banal, stupid talking heads; and with a parade of generic, high-performing athletes on 24 hours a day . . . well, it’s just not my thing.

[Read more…]

Reviewing an online BYU high school Honors Government class

February 8, 2018 by Bookworm 6 Comments

Reviewing Unit 1 of BYU’s online Honors Government class suggests it’s no better than the high school class; the only advantage is that students save time.

There’s an interesting unofficial experiment taking place at Little Bookworm’s high school: Rather than sitting through a semester of Government (five days a week for five months or so), many of the kids have discovered that they can get the same credit if they sign up for an online, independent study U.S. Honors Government class that BYU offers.

Those kids who have taken the government class say that they cover the same amount of material that they were covering in the classroom, except that, if they power through the online material, they can finish it in a three-day weekend. It’s not just the time-saving aspect that appeals to them. The school’s teacher is apparently boring. The online material is also boring (more on that in a minute), but 15 hours of boring is a lot better than the 70 or so classroom hours they would otherwise spend on U.S. government, not even counting homework.

I’m happy to report that the classroom teachers are feeling threatened. According to Little Bookworm, when several kids were in the hallway discussing the online class option, a teacher who walked by said, “You’re taking my job away.”

Dear Public School Teacher: Welcome to the wonderful world of competition. Maybe now you’ll up your game and stop being boring, often vindictive, arbitrary and capricious, ideologically driven, and all the other sins that too often show up in teachers whose tenure, combined with the aforementioned lack of competition, mean that they have sinecures, no matter their academic sins.

So that’s the good stuff. All is not perfect, though, in the world of BYU’s online U.S. Government class. The writing is horrible, the information inaccurate or ill-informed, and the tests unfair (something that is offset by the fact that students can get all the answers online and take the test twice to perfect their grades). Let me elaborate: [Read more…]

The true tale of the Steele Dossier and the Russia Conspiracy

January 31, 2018 by Wolf Howling 10 Comments

New facts show that the so-called Russia conspiracy was in fact a product of savvy Russians and credulous, willing, and very dishonest Democrat operatives.

This Trump-Russia collusion narrative is looking more and more like an incredibly intelligent mix of publicly available facts wrapped around some damning pieces of knowing slanders and fictions, all of which were then given the imprimatur of verisimilitude by attaching a retired British spy, Christopher Steele’s name to the whole misbegotten mess. None of the damning pieces have been proven, though several key bits have been disproven. Edward Jay Epstein recently opined at Powerline that the Steele Dossier, to the extent it seems to contain actual information from Russian sources, seems to contain Russian curated disinformation at best.

I am rapidly concluding that the Dossier may represent more than Russian meddling. Certainly Russia meddled. That’s what it does. But in this case, it seems to have gotten some help on the home front. There are far too many coincidences, far too many things that don’t make sense, and in several cases, dogs that don’t bark, for me to believe that, within America’s borders, those working on the Steele Dossier assembled it in good faith as honest, genuine investigatory work. It might be, but that is not the direction in which the known undisputed facts point at the moment.

In addition to reading this post, I recommend you read two other things. The first is Victor Davis Hanson’s article, Hillary’s “sure” victory explains most everything. The second is my post briefly explaining FISA and the questions that the FBI and DOJ have yet to answer about abusing FISA in the Trump-Russia matter. Both will help make sense of the events of the past two years and the tale I tell below.

In the coming days, I will also publish a detailed timeline listing all the relevant events and explaining why many of the key ones are problematic. It is very long. Before throwing you into that deep end, this post simplifies the timeline narrative and lets you see most of the major the issues without having to hack your way through the . . . I would say weeds, but it really is a triple-canopy jungle.

This post, relying on the facts set out in my soon-to-be-published timeline, gives you an insight into what was going on in the Hillary campaign. You’ll see that the evolving Trump-Russia narrative dovetailed perfectly with the struggle Hillary’s campaign had to overturn voters’ firm conviction that it was impossible for anyone to be more corrupt than Hillary.

So, with that preamble, let me ask you to step back in time and pretend you’re a top political operative in the DNC Now, close your eyes and make spooky noises as you travel back through slime, time and space. When you open your eyes, you see that the calendar on the wall shows that today is April 30, 2016.

April 30 . . . and your gal, Hillary Clinton, is tapped as a shoe-in for the nomination. And looking at the crowded Republican primary field, you know it’s a hop, skip and a jump from nomination to her walk on a red carpet, showered with a glittering combination of male tear drops and fragments of glass from the broken ceiling, as she heads to her coronation . . . uh, inauguration.

It’s a beautiful vision. But in the meantime, something has gone wrong. Very wrong.

Now, don’t misunderstand — not everything has gone wrong. The DNC is an arm of Clinton, Inc., bought and paid for, and it is doing her bidding. The DNC has stacked the primary deck in her favor and Hillary has virtually all the super-delegates in her bag.

The MSM is on her side and is pushing Donald Trump’s nomination on the theory that he will be her weakest opponent, Donald Trump. The MSM’s work seems to have paid off, as it is becoming ever more apparent that Trump is going to win the Republican nomination. All of that is great . . . but there are still a few irritants preventing you from reveling in the moment.

The main irritant is that Hillary is still on the ropes with the public for the email scandal that was first exposed almost a year ago. And worse, that public — including all those darn Deplorables — will get to vote for President in six months.

These likely voters know that Hillary, while Secretary of State, put tens of thousands of America’s secrets at risk by running them through an unsecured private server, the entire purpose of which was to thwart Congressional investigations and watchdog groups, something itself completely illegal. (This particular irritant, incidentally, if proven can be punished with 20 years in prison and a ban on ever again holding public office – which may explain why Comey didn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole when he exonerated Hillary on 5 July.) The Russians and every other American competitor and enemy, from China to Iran to the fat boy in Pyongyang, may have copies of all her emails during her time as Secretary of State, exposing both her and our nation to blackmail.

The FBI and DOJ are giving the appearance of investigating Hillary’s wrongdoings, but giving her exoneration a veneer of an honest investigation takes time. The FBI needs to interview witnesses and give them immunity. They need time to make side deals to destroy evidence. The grand jury needs . . . whoops, forgot: Unlike virtually every other criminal case the DOJ and FBI investigate, they haven’t bothered to impanel a grand jury. Someone needs to write (and edit) an exoneration statement, so it doesn’t get thrown together carelessly at the last minute, after you’ve heard and discarded the evidence. And all of this is a pain in the ass when you keep getting interrupted by having to do all these check-the-box “key” witness interviews.

And all the while all this is going on, no one trusts Hillary. She can’t shake the scandal, despite her trying out a new excuse – usually laughable, as even you admit – on a weekly basis.

Still worse, Hillary is facing a real primary challenge from Bernie the Red, despite the fact that the super-delegates will ensure he can’t possibly win. Still, he’s seriously hurting m’lady’s “inevitability” narrative, especially because young Democrat voters, those with the stars still in their eyes, are almost as bothered as the Deplorables are by Hillary’s email “issues.”

Finally, to pile on the irritants bedeviling inevitability. you learn that Hillary’s Campaign Chairman, John Podesta, fell for a phishing scam and now Wikileaks has all the DNC’s and Podesta’s emails. Who knows what dirty laundry lies at the bottom of that black hole?

So many problems it makes even the most confident head spin. You shake yourself — time to get back to concentrating on pulling this tired old donkey across the finish line. You decide that what you are going to need is an opponent who makes Hillary look like an angel dressed in shining white robes; one that makes her seem an avatar of ethics and purity in comparison.

Impossible? You say, Ha! [Read more…]

Critically important: FISA, the NSA, and the 4th Amendment

January 29, 2018 by Wolf Howling 20 Comments

With FISA and the NSA in the news, learn why abusing them isn’t arcane procedural stuff but is, instead, critically important to American freedom.

Did the Obama administration illegally use its power in multiple ways to access NSA intercepts so that it could gain intelligence on – and kneecap – Trump’s administration? If so, then this is a scandal that dwarfs everything that happened during Watergate and highlights the real danger to our republic flowing from government abuse of NSA’s capabilities.

With luck, we’ll very soon read the House Intelligence Committee’s four-page document summarizing its investigation into alleged FISA abuses and the Trump-Russia collusion. If we’re very lucky, that document will have attached to it the declassified intelligence and court documents supporting its contentions. And just today, Rep. Trey Gowdy teased the contents of the House memo:

If you think your viewers want to know whether or not the dossier was used in [FISA] court proceedings, whether or not it was vetted before it was used, whether or not it’s ever been vetted — if you are interested in who paid for the dossier, if you are interested in Christopher Steele’s relationship with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, then, yes, you will want the memo to come out.”

“Do you want to know that the Democratic National Committee paid for material that was never vetted, that was included in a court proceeding?” . . . . “Do you want to know whether or not the primary source in these court proceedings had a bias against one candidate? Do you want to know whether or not he said he’d do anything to keep that candidate from becoming president?”

Much of what Rep. Gowdy is referring to centers around NSA intercepts and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, otherwise known as FISA. To understand just how the NSA, FISA, and the 4th Amendment fit together in the drama playing out before us, read on.

Fourth Amendment

To fully appreciate the meaning and purpose behind the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution, one needs to travel back to the American colonies, around 1760. That was when the colonists, who considered themselves staunch British subjects, began to understand that the British government in London was not treating them well at all.

One of the government’s unfair acts was to impose such high taxes on certain commodities that the taxes threatened the entire colonial economy (and made life far more expensive for the British on the mainland). Some American colonists began smuggling those commodities, just as Brits themselves were extensively doing in England of the time.

The government in London responded in 1760 with “writs of assistance.” There will not be a test, but it will help you interpret contemporary events if you understand “writs of assistance.” These writs were open-ended search warrants authorizing a government agent to search private property — anywhere, at anytime — for contraband without ever having to show to a Court that the agent reasonably believed the search would actually yield contraband. Such a “general warrant” was both a threat to British citizens and a profit source for those British agents who used the writs to line their own pockets in what was an incredibly abusive system.

In the 20th century, Director of Stalin’s Secret Police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll find the crime.” He could easily have said the same about the mid-18th century British Crown’s systematic abuse of general warrants such as writs of assistance.

This abuse came to a head in London (and was, at the time, a cause célèbre throughout the colonies) when King George III authorized a general warrant against a political opponent, John Wilkes, in the hope that searching Wilkes’ home would produce evidence of something — anything — the Crown could use to pin a crime on Wilkes. ” British agents, having rooted through Wilkes’ private writings, found nothing worse than a truly bawdy poem. They seized the poem and proceeded to create a crime by surreptitiously publishing it as if Wilkes had done so himself – that being a necessary element of the crime of blasphemy in the U.K. of 1760 – and then charging Wilkes with the crime. Wilkes was then expelled from Parliament and fled to France.

When it came to drafting the Bill of Rights, the Founding Fathers remembered well the abuses to which the British government put general warrants and writs of assistance. For over two centuries, the 4th Amendment has protected American citizens from officials seeking to settle scores or obtain power by wrongfully imposing themselves into and onto private property despite having no having probable cause to believe any crime has been committed.

Not only are these searches illegal, but if our society is to remain free, government can never be allowed the power to conduct such unfounded searches. Nor can government be allowed to leverage these illegal searches into weaponizing FISA for political intelligence or political hits. In this regard, I am specifically referring to the successful political hit the FBI conducted on Michael Flynn using FISA intercepts, an outrage of its own that I will address at the end of this post. [Read more…]

Why did Michael Flynn plead guilty to a big Nothingburger?

December 4, 2017 by Bookworm 25 Comments

My best guess: Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to telling a lie about legal conduct because he was taking the fall for someone very important.

Michael Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying about something that wasn’t a crime, earning himself the very real possibility of jail time. The interview in which he allegedly stated this lie was with FBI agent Peter Strzok.

Strzok is an interesting guy or, at least, has left an interesting trail of slime wherever he’s been. He was was relegated to desk duty in July when Mueller allegedly learned that Strzok had been sending seriously anti-Trump, pro-Hillary tweets to an FBI attorney with whom he’d been having an extramartial affair. I say Mueller “allegedly learned” because I wouldn’t be surprised if Strzok’s affair and his fanatical support for Hillary Clinton weren’t open secrets in the Progressive FBI bureaucracy, just as every Lefty in the business knew about people such as Harvey Weinstein or Matt Lauer.

Strzok was also the man who discretely downgraded Hillary’s overtly criminal act into just a little bit of passing carelessness and interviewed her without putting her under oath or recording the interview. And then, based upon Flynn’s failure to track perfectly conversations that may or may not have been rightfully recorded he ensured that Flynn is facing jail time.

Now that we have a pretty good handle on all of the Big Lies coming out of the FBI and Mueller’s investigation, the big question is this: Why did Michael Flynn plead guilty to lying about something that wasn’t a crime in the first instance?

I’m willing to bet big money that two things led to him pleading guilty: [Read more…]

A cursory look at some of the day’s most interesting news

November 6, 2017 by Bookworm 37 Comments

Every day lately brings some interesting news. This post sums up a few of the top stories, along with my opinions about why they matter.

I’m watching, fascinated, as events unfold in Saudi Arabia. I suspect Trump has a hand in it and I certainly hope the Crown Prince’s modernization push goes well. If it doesn’t, much badness will follow. I wish I had more to offer, but absent more concrete information about arrests, exiles, helicopter crashes, and alleged Lebanese war declarations, I’m in wait-and-see mode.

I haven’t missed the fact that the killer in Texas got his gun because the government — in the form of the Air Force — failed to put his felony conviction into the gun registry databases. The problem with gun control, of course, is that it not only leaves most of the guns with the government, it also puts government in charge of the guns remaining in citizen hands. As best as I can tell, government see-saws between over-zealous and completely incompetent.

The other thing I haven’t missed about the tragedy in Texas is that it was citizens who saved the day. An NRA instructor with an AR-15 attacked the killer, causing him to stop shooting. (I keep telling my Lefty friends that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun . . . and that it can take a long time before the police show up with their guns.) Then, it was two citizens who chased the killer down, causing him to crash his car. At that point, that human detritus either died from a self-inflicted shot or from an AR-15 bullet. I don’t know and I don’t care.

Incidentally, the heroic citizens who saved the day are Stephen Willeford, the NRA instructor who stopped the madness, and Johnnie Langendorff, the man who gave chase (with Willeford in the car with him). I refuse to name the killer. He deserves to be disparaged anonymously and then forgotten entirely.

I continue to believe what I tell anyone who is willing to listen to my views about the Second Amendment: There is no such thing as perfect safety. When we avoid one danger, we tend to pitch o ourselves headlong into another. Combustion engines were hailed in the early 20th century as the answer to terrible (horse) pollution. Nobody envisioned lead and other toxic emissions. Modern football helmets, were seen as the ultimate head protection. Nobody predicted that (a) players would start to use their heads like battering rams and (b) modern players, instead of being wiry little guys, would be giants.

When it comes to guns, the invariably unimaginative Leftists see only that guns kill people. They don’t see that guns save people (as happened with Willeford’s appearance on the scene of what could have been a much more terrible outcome). They don’t see that government is a terribly inefficient engine to protect us from guns.

Most of all, they don’t see (or refuse to see) that the surest way to die on the wrong end of a gun is to leave all guns in government hands. Those who could bear witness to this fact are dead — they’re dead in every land, ghetto, and concentration camp that the Nazis controlled; they’re dead in every land that the Soviets controlled; they’re dead in every place that the Maoists governed; and they’re dead in Cuba, North Korea, vast swathes of Africa and Latin America, and in every place in which Islamofascists gain control.

If I have to accept — as we all must — that there is no such thing as perfect safety, I’d rather put my faith in my fellow Americans than in my government. And yes, only Progressives could be stupid enough to demand government control over guns at the same time that they’re still vociferously claiming that our government is in the hands of a madman. That cognitive dissonance alone shows just how bad their arguments are. (You can read more of my thoughts on the subject here.) [Read more…]

I’m not a hypocrite when I don’t see Trump as a sexual predator

November 5, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

I have six reasons why I don’t think Trump is a sexual predator akin to the Hollywood mashers. Do you agree? And if you do, do you have even better reasons?

I was with a group of friends yesterday, all of whom are anti-Trump Progressives. (And yes, I do have such friends because if I didn’t, I’d be a very lonely person here in True Blue, where I live.)

At one point in the evening, our conversation worked its way over to the subject of sexual predators. All the women were very careful to name Ailes and O’Reilly, but they couldn’t avoid Woody Allen (none will see his movies any more), Harvey Weinstein (an example of the problems women face), Bill Cosby (who would have believed it?) and Kevin Spacey (such a talented actor, but his career is over).

It would have been surprising if the conversation at that point hadn’t turned to Donald Trump. After all, if their own side is bad, the other side must be much worse. So it was that one of the women alluded to a poster making the rounds on Facebook. It wasn’t exactly the one reproduced below (which I couldn’t find), but it was similar:

My first instinct was to defend Trump. My second instinct was that, with five of them and one of me, all that would happen would be a verbal beat-down, without my being able to change anyone’s mind. Frankly, if I can’t move someone a little to the individual liberty side of the political spectrum, I don’t waste my time.

And then there was my third instinct. This involved asking myself why I’m not a hypocrite for forgiving Trump whatever sexual sins he committed in the 1970s and 1980s, and absolving him today of being a sexual predator. I decided that, before I engage with any Progressives, I’d better have a clear answer to that in my mind.

So, the end result is this list of reasons explaining why I’m not a hypocrite when I don’t castigate Trump as a sexual predator. Please feel free to attack my weak reasons, strengthen my strong ones, and add reasons that I missed: [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 11/4/17 — Day of Rage edition

November 4, 2017 by Bookworm 12 Comments

As I’m still groggy from fighting migraines, Wolf Howling wrote this Bookworm Beat, a glorious potpourri showing that the good guys are mostly winning.

Today was supposed to be a big day, with Antifa raging in the streets and less-violently inclined Leftists screaming at the heavens. When I search for stories about either of these Day of Rage protests, though, I find nothing. I guess it’s hard to get up on a cold Fall morning when you live in your parents’ basement or partied hard the night before in your college dorm.

I’m a little inert today too for an entirely different reason: I’ve been adjusting my daily anti-migraine medication. The adjustment seems to be working, because I haven’t had a migraine since I made the change, but the downside is that the increased dosage makes me sleepy and dims my mental energy. Both those problems will pass with time, but for now, even though I’m paying attention to the news, I can’t seem to rouse myself to write about it.

Fortunately for the Bookworm’s reputation as a purveyor of interesting content, my friend Wolf Howling send me an email chock full of interesting information. For your enjoyment and edification, therefore, I present to you the Wolf Howling edition of today’s Bookworm Beat:

Teen Vogue is caput. Conde Nast announced today that Teen Vogue is getting the axe.

The New York-based publisher, which has instilled a hiring freeze, will slash about 80 jobs, equal to a decrease of about 2.5 percent of its 3,000-person workforce. Budgets across departments are also expected to get a haircut, with the worst-performing divisions and magazines getting cuts of up to 20 percent. As part of that mandate, Condé is reducing the frequencies of most of its titles and will shutter Teen Vogue in print.

(Bookworm here: Wolf Howling is not the only one who remembered my utter disdain for Teen Vogue — which I expressed here, here, here, and here. I got emails from several other people and am grateful to all of them for keeping that wonderful news right in front of me.)

A man who had been arrested asked for a “lawyer [,] dog” Depending upon how you read it, the man either called the police officer “dog” (which is definitely better than calling him “pig”) or asked for an actual “lawyer dog.” The Louisiana court held it was the latter and, dogs with law degrees being in short supply, concluded that the police had no obligation to the man to hunt up that particular type of lawyer before questioning him. [Read more…]

Peter Thiel’s excellent point about political correctness and indulgences

November 2, 2017 by Bookworm 56 Comments

When Peter Thiel compared Political Correctness and the Catholic Church in 1517, he revealed how truly corrupt Political Correctness really is.

Harvey Weinstein Antisemitism Predator Rape Political Correctness

Harvey Weinstein was so certain that political correctness would whitewash his sins.

I had the pleasure last night of attending an event at which Peter Thiel was the main speaker. Before he started speaking I knew that he was one of PayPal’s founders and one of Facebook’s earliest investors, that he openly supported Trump’s candidacy, and that he destroyed Gawker for outing him.

After Thiel’s speech, I knew a bit more: He’s a committed conservative-libertarian, he’s a lawyer, he’s extraordinarily well-read, and he’s a truly creative, highly intelligent thinker. Also, there’s no obvious artifice about him. He may be a billionaire, but he doesn’t view his membership in that club as proof of his brilliance. Instead, he’s an iconoclast who thinks deeply about things and, through his conclusions, proves his brilliance.

Thiel began his talk* by examining whether our society’s technology is flat-lining. He challenges the conventional wisdom is that we’re still in an upward technological trend, but that the low-hanging fruit is gone, and the geniuses have dried up. He feels the opposite is true: We’re stagnating now, there’s a great deal more fruit than just the low-hanging variety, and there is untapped genius out there.

The big question, of course, is why there is untapped genius? The most obvious answer is funding. In the computer world, where innovation is still happening, guys (mostly guys) can do what’s been done since the 1970s: Come up with a great idea at their home computer and, through hard work, intelligence, and luck, leverage that idea into something people need or want, and that then makes its inventors very, very rich.

However, there’s trouble brewing in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) world. Contrary to popular wisdom, which is that all STEM college majors will result in better paying jobs than any liberal arts major could, the only two STEM majors with a serious job market are Computer Science and Petrochemical Engineering. In everything else, a large pool of people is competing for the same money.

More than that, those handing out the money want to invest in sure things. That means the only projects getting financed are the safe ones, the ones that don’t challenge the status quo, and that don’t come out with some major, counter-intuitive thinking that could change an existing paradigm.

The problem for science types is that, in the 21st century, while one can still come up with computer technology on the cheap, it’s impossible to do so in the sciences. While early scientists once needed a microscope, a Bunsen burner, a few Petri dishes, and a note pad, today’s scientists rely upon equipment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. They can function only with corporate, academic, or government funding. This turns every lab into a fiefdom, in which a large number of people are competing for a finite slice of research dollars and fame.

Which gets us to political correctness. Thiel sees political correctness as something akin to this famous video moment, with the blooming flowers emanating from a man’s head standing in for American energy and innovation, and the foot being political correctness: [Read more…]