Why Doesn't Anybody Talk About This?

The Blaze newsletter, one of a few newsletters I get every day (more newsletters than are useful most of the time) had a story that hit a sore spot with me.  It talked about the Sinaloa area of Mexico being in open warfare as drug kingpin El Chapo's son was arrested and the city was turned into a war zone. 

A significant Mexican military force swooped into the city of Culiacan to take Ovidio Guzman into custody. The Mexican army ordered Blackhawk helicopter gunships to attack a convoy of 25 cartel vehicles – some sporting machine guns.

Mexican law enforcement was able to arrest Guzman. However, 10 Mexican military personnel and one Culiacan policeman were killed during the operation, according to Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval. There were 17 police officers and 35 military personnel injured during the firefight. Authorities believe 19 members of the Sinaloa drug cartel died during the mission.

I'm gonna say a few things that I think are so obvious I don't need to go find references for.  I ordinarily look for references, but today those are going to sound like "everybody knows."  

Everybody knows there's a handful of drug cartels in Mexico and they essentially control the government.  That implies this raid might well have been one cartel fighting the others.  I've heard the Mexican military has been bought and paid for by the cartels - or maybe one cartel and they're trying to eliminate competition.

But it goes farther than that.  Everybody has seen some version of this:

Everybody has heard of the horrific death toll from cheap Chinese fentanyl and carfentil smuggled into the US.  Everybody knows the cartels make money smuggling drugs and people into the US, including human trafficking children for pedophiles.  The allegation is children are raped until they "wear out" and then are killed off.  

Everybody knows the border is wide open thanks to the bungling leadership of Biden and his pegboy, Mayorkas.  Everybody knows it's not incompetence, it's deliberate.  By design and intention.

Yeah, Brandon says the border is secure.  And pretty much everybody who lives in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the southern tip of California will laugh at him.  If the border really being secure was even in the top 100 things the administration cared about they wouldn't have done this:

Everybody also knows that Biden is corrupt as hell.  Just do a web search for the term "10% for the big guy" for cripes sake, if this is news.  Go do a web search for him getting his drug-addled son onto the board of Burisma in Ukraine.  

In light of all of these things, and more, it also seems highly likely that agencies on our side of the border are also being paid off by the cartels.  That people in our government are owned by the cartels too; profiting off this drug and human trafficking.  

How come we haven't heard one word about such an investigation?  Oh, yeah.  That's right.  The DOJ is just as corrupt as those four clowns in the above meme and the rest of the regime.  They probably make tons of money off the cartels as well.  Nobody would survive looking into this.  You can bet any body part you'd like that the propaganda media sure won't look into it.

You may heard the story earlier in the week that Trump says if he's president again, he'll go against the cartels with the full military might of the US.  

"When I am president, it will be the policy of the United States to take down the cartels, just as we took down ISIS and the ISIS caliphate – and just as, unlike the situation we are in today, we had a very, very strong border,"

His mistake in his first go-'round was underestimating just how total the deep state corruption was.  Sounds like the same thing despite being subject to it continuously since 2015.   

 

The Splintering of Society Gathers Steam

If there's any company in the country that best embodies the concept of "we don't depend on the government, we help each other when need be," it would be - or it should have been - GoFundMe or GFM (nope,  no linkies from me.)  By now, just about everybody has heard the story of how they decided, apparently based on rumors from one or two sources, that they were going to confiscate all the donations from everyone who had donated to the Canadian truck drivers and give that money to places people never intended it to go.  If you haven't seen it, there's a good summary with a ton of comments on Irish's blog.  

It was a fast changing story and continues to be.  It's rumored their legal department quickly told the asshole who made that pronouncement that they couldn't do that - it violates many laws.  Within hours it turned into, "donors who want a refund should request one" and then apparently turned into, "we'll just refund everyone's donations."  As of 2PM this afternoon, Florida's Attorney General Ashley Moody announced her office has begun criminal investigation into GFM, as have the Attorneys General of Georgia, Missouri, Texas, West Virginia and Louisiana.  So far.  I bet by Monday afternoon it will be a majority of the states, not just the "Red states."  

Like most people, I've donated through GFM several times, most recently to help Mike of Cold Fury.  I won't go back to GFM until I see some sort of statement, as close to ironclad as can be, to never, ever change donations over to something other than pledged.  And then only if I believe it.  

As I see it, GFM is responsible for this whole thing, so they should return their 2.9% handling fee and reimburse card holders for any expenses from their credit card companies.  They should refund any expenses donors incurred.

If the government of Canada wanted to outlaw people giving the truckers money, I don't see how that could be legal - what's the difference between sending a guy $20 via PayPal instead of handing him a $20 bill? - but IANAL and that's especially true for Canadian law.   Even if Canada somehow forbade the donations, there shouldn't be a nanosecond of GFM giving anything to Black Lives Matter or anyone else.  The payment should be refused, the donation page should be shut down and they shouldn't get remotely near the corner they've painted themselves into.

Meanwhile, the free market does what it does best: there are alternatives to GoFundMe.  The group or groups that are requesting the funds seem to have moved to GiveSendGo, which calls itself the #1 free Christian crowdfunding site in the top banner on the page.  I know nothing about them.  There's absolutely no reason for anyone in the crowdfunding business to encourage or prefer donations in any political direction.  It would be like them saying, "we can't host your fundraiser to help your grandmother battle cancer unless she swears she never votes Republican."  No sane person should ever think or say that, but GFM has obviously violated it.  

Michael Flynn's New Attorney: FBI Actions 'Worse Than Entrapment’

Attorney Sidney Powell has taken on the case of Lt. General Michael Flynn, who served as President Trump's first National Security Advisor and was - by all accounts - railroaded into a guilty plea for lying to the FBI even though none of the agents who had spoken with him thought he was lying.  You might have seen her on TV if you watch lots of news; I recognized her instantly although I didn't really know her name or who she was.

Michael Flynn's attorney, Sydney Powell

She has come out with metaphorical guns blasting, according to this article from Free Pressers.  The first salvo she fired was in a private letter to Attorney General William Barr.

In the first paragraph of a private letter she sent to Barr, “Powell requested an outside auditor not associated in any way with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team,” Rowan Scarborough wrote in a Feb. 16 report for The Washington Times.

“She argued that Mueller’s lawyers threatened Flynn’s son with prosecution to persuade the retired officer to plead guilty to lying to the FBI.”Powell wrote in the letter to Barr: “We request the appointment of new government counsel with no connection to the Special Counsel team of attorneys or agents to conduct review of the entire Flynn case for Brady material that has not been produced and prosecutorial misconduct writ large.”

“Brady material” is exculpatory evidence that both sides in a trial are obligated to provide for each other.

The letter apparently had the desired effect, as AG Barr has opened an independent investigation of the prosecution of General Flynn.  Mrs. Powell pointed out many facts about the investigation of General Flynn that's a collection of “things that make you go hmmm.”  Even casual consumers of news will recognize enough that just ain't right to question everything.

For one, she said, the FBI officially put Flynn under investigation in August 2016 in its Russian election interference probe but didn’t tell him during two encounters over six months.

An agent visited the Trump presidential campaign under the guise of a defensive briefing on Russian interference. In fact the agent was there to surreptitiously investigate Flynn, according to a report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz.

Six months after opening the probe into Flynn, two FBI agents, including Trump antagonist Peter Strzok, on Jan. 24, 2017, visited Flynn at the White House under the guise of a friendly chat about national security. At that point, the FBI had no evidence of a Trump-Russia conspiracy outside of the Christopher Steele dossier, which Republicans say turned out to be a Kremlin hoax.

During the presidential transition, the U.S. had intercepted calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador in which they talked about sanctions.
...
Inside the Obama Justice Department there was talk of investigating Flynn for violating the Logan Act, a 1799 law barring civilian interference in foreign policy for which no one has ever been convicted.
...
In her June letter to Mr. Barr, Ms. Powell recited her version of events. She said prosecutor Brandon Van Grack later acknowledged that the Flynn call was “perfectly legal.” It did not violate the Logan Act, which appeared to be the basis for the FBI visiting Flynn that day.

“There was no ‘Logan Act violation,’ and everyone knew it,” Ms. Powell wrote. “Yet General Flynn was illegally unmasked by the Obama administration and his call leaked to explode the ‘Russia collusion’ narrative in the press. The FBI interview was worse than ‘entrapment.’ He was led to believe he was having a casual conversation with friends about a training exercise from a day or two before, when in truth, it was a set-up-tantamount to a ‘frame, manipulated by Yates, Comey, Strzok, McCabe, and others to take General Flynn out of the administration. [Mueller team] then used it to pressure him to try to take out President Trump.”

It's a bit of a long and convoluted story, and I recommend you read the whole piece at the Washington Times because it goes into the parallel attacks against Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. 

Yesterday, Townhall Columnist Kurt Schlichter put up a piece called, “Burn Down the DOJ and Start Over” arguing it might well be too corrupt to save.  The only alternative is to burn it to the ground, salt the earth, and start over elsewhere. 

I want you to tell me, without bursting into laughter, that I am still supposed to respect our federal law enforcement institutions. I keep hearing about these wonderful keepers of norms and rules and stuff deserve our awe, and then I see the tawdry, self-serving and scummy way they operate, and gee – there’s a disconnect. A big one. If the price of our society is submitting to these corrupt and incompetent people of garbage, well, then I say burn it all down.

The more I read about things like this case, the more I agree with Kurt. 

How The Tea Party Was Murdered

It's not often that I rerun pieces I've written in the past, but I think I have good reason. 

Blog Brother Borepatch (one of those of you who got me started) put up a piece this morning auspiciously about how Charles Martel turned back the caliphate but that was really addressing what 2A supporters - especially in Virginia and other states where rights are under attack - need to do in the wake of Monday's rally against Governor Jolson Klanrobe's anti-gun antics (Jolson Klanrobe is the memorable name Kurt Schlicter at Townhall.com used today - paywall warning). 

His punch line, repeated several times, was “Yeah, this is hard and not as much fun as a rally.  Campaigning to win is hard.”

This immediately brought back thoughts of the Tea Party and the perception it was brought down from the inside.  That's only true if you think of the inside as much broader than it was.  The Tea Party was killed by organized political operatives taking advantage of the naivety of Tea Party members.  Here's where I quote from a piece I put up in 2016, How the Tea Party Was Killed Off.  This is a lesson everyone in Virginia, here in Florida, New Hampshire, and anywhere else a rally is being held should keep in mind.  Presented here with some word smithing so it makes sense to me, the author, over 3 years later.

How the Tea Party Was Killed Off

Remember the Tea Party?  They were a political force to be reckoned with in the 2010 elections, but by the 2012 elections had been rendered ineffective.  It turns out it wasn't a natural occurrence and it certainly wasn't that they ran out of things to do.  At least according to this operative, who says he was involved, the tea party was killed off; murdered.   What killed them was the very corruption and cronyism they rose up to fight. 

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause.

The tea party actually started to rise during the last years of the W; so it absolutely didn't start as reaction to Obama (the reflexive reaction of the media and the left was, of course, to call the tea party racist).  Instead, the impetus was a reaction to the profligate spending along with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  When Obama swept into office, of course, both of those things continued.  Add in the passing of Obamacare, the only major social program in history to be voted in by one party, along with the lies that went along with it ("if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor", "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it" and more), and anger at Washington exploded.  Tea party rallies started happening.

As Peggy Noonan noted in 2010, the tea party wasn't a wing of the Republican party, as the left wing media thought, so much as a critique of it.  The tea party wasn't a national organization and it originally had little or nothing to do with the idea we saw widely displayed on signs, "Taxed Enough Already".  It was an organic uprising; a leaderless system, or starfish organization as they're called.

Republicans inside the Beltway reacted to the burgeoning Tea Party with glee but uncertainty about how to channel the grass-roots energy usually reserved for the left. A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner," or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan." The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you’re doing” “This can’t wait.” One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7 million from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87 percent of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7 million raised was used to support political candidates.

I don't think I get many uninformed readers here, so you know that as a rule in life, when someone talks to you with the urgency seen in those examples ("stop what you're doing"... "this can't wait"), you're being hustled.  Walk away or ignore it.  It's like the slimy car salesman who hits you with, "what can I do to get you into this car today?" 

Personally, I've always been suspicious of the Tea Party Patriots and a few other groups that put themselves forward as leaders of the leaderless organization.

Today, the Tea Party movement is dead, and Trump has co-opted the remnants. What was left of the Tea Party split for a while between Trump and, while he was still in the race, Ted Cruz, who was backed by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots group spent just 10 percent of the $14.4 million it collected actually supporting candidates, with the rest going to consultants and vendors and Martin’s hefty salary of $15,000 per month; in all, she makes an estimated $450,000 a year from her Tea Party-related ventures.

Folks, have you ever heard of Charity Navigator?   No, they don't - can't - have a file on every group that's going to ask you for money, but it's a good place to start.  I Will Never Give a Dime to an organization that puts 10% of what it collects into its stated purpose, like the Tea Party Patriots.  That's even worse than the 13% cited for TPLF in the first quote by POLITICO.  Another good place to go is OpenSecrets.org.  You can view a group’s track record in minutes. How much goes toward candidate contributions or so-called independent expenditures, which are supposed to be spent on the candidate (though even those can be thinly veiled solicitations if the "ask" or landing page directs to the PAC and not the candidate).

I'm not going to cite the whole article, you should definitely read the whole thing, but I will leave you with the author's summary of what happened.

But any insurgent movement needs oxygen in the form of victories or other measured progress in order to sustain itself and grow. By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement. Every dollar swallowed up in PAC overhead or vendor fees was a dollar that did not go to federal Tea Party candidates in crucial primaries or general elections. This allowed the GOP to easily defeat or ignore them (with some rare exceptions). Second, the PACs drained money especially from local Tea Party groups, some of which were actively trying to grow the movement electorally from the ground up, at the school board and city council level. Lacking results five years on, interest in the movement waned—all that was left were the PACs and their lists.

It's really common to hear people complaining about what a corrupt place DC is (you've heard "Den of Criminals") is.   I say that and think that.  I didn't know anything compared to what's in that article.  To grab a quote from Walter Hudson at PJ Media, where I first saw the link to this story:

This is where our attention needs to be. This is the real establishment, not elected leaders in Washington, but a swirling flock of vultures that feed on the corpses of great expectation.

These PACs, that preyed upon Tea Party supporters like a flock of vultures feeding on an injured but still-living prey animal, are the real reason they're gone.

Tiny Caribbean Country Dominica Is China's Base in the Americas?

For years, you've probably heard about China pushing into Africa.  This article from the Heritage Foundation is dated 2006 about China pushing into Africa, doing infrastructure projects to get into those countries for oil, minerals and more.  It has been going on a long time.

I learn today from an article reprinted by FreePressers that China seems to have pushed into tiny Dominica as their entry into the Americas.

Dominica — population 72,000 — has been the spearhead of much of the People’s Republic of China’s strategic operations in the Caribbean Basin.

From this base, the PRC has engineered its support for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (even though his Administration has lost much international recognition), Cuba, Bolivia, and elsewhere, and has been used as a major base for intelligence and political operations against the US and elsewhere in the Americas.

Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit has also worked diligently with the PRC to support Iranian covert activities to circumvent U.S. embargoes.

Why Dominica?  Dominica is small, not even 300 square miles, and out in the eastern Caribbean area commonly called the Windward islands.  Dominica's about 1/5 the size of Rhode Island, the smallest state in the US, and its population is also tiny.  If that cited 72,000 population is accurate, every man woman and child on Dominica could fit in the Los Angeles Coliseum. 

Although part of the UK Commonwealth, there is no High Commission in Dominica nor is there a U.S. embassy.  By contrast, the Chinese Embassy, outside the Dominican capital, Roseau, is, disproportionately large, and clearly a base for regional operations, particularly by the Ministry of State Security (MSS), Beijing’s national-level intelligence service.  The MSS is said to be active throughout South and Central America.

It's not surprising that a special election being held there on December 6th hasn't made the news here in the US.  That would entail doing real journalism; something other than staring into Adam Schiff's eyes or breathlessly trying to cover for the DNC.  It also hasn't made the news in the UK, although for a better reason than the Schiff Show; they have their own special election on December 12th.  Since nobody's watching, it's a good time to try to pull off an election scam. 

The result of the PRC’s engagement has been, over the 15 years Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit (Dominica Labor Party) has been in office, that Dominica has become the hub of a large network of illegal activities which have funded the effective suppression of anything like democracy on the island.

It is for this reason that many foreign political observers and some Dominicans have said that the opposition United Workers Party/Team Dominica (conservative) movement should boycott the Dec. 6 election as a protest to the advance steps Skerrit, 47, and his team have undertaken to ensure that, regardless of voter intention, he would win a fourth consecutive term in office. After all, the opposition had unsuccessfully taken its protests against vote rigging to the courts in past elections which Skerrit has claimed victory. Why should it expect the 2019 elections to be different?

Why participate in the charade? After all, the Skerrit Government absolutely rejected the combined report of Joint CARICOM (Caribbean Community), Commonwealth, OAS (Organization of American States) Task Force mission to Dominica, Aug. 6-9, urging electoral reform and political dialog before any future election.

Indeed, it is probable that Skerrit called the Dec. 6 election specifically to head off any requirement to institute reforms which would guarantee a transparent, free and fair election.

(Image source)

Somehow, I think if the conservative United Workers Party/Team Dominica boycotted the election it would have no effect the Skerrit government; they'll declare victory no matter what.  It sounds like China's expansion into the Americas will be unaffected.  

Offered for your consideration...

On the Cartel Slaughter, Calls for General Pershing, and The Bigger Picture

In light of the brutal slaughter of an American Mormon family apparently by drug cartel members in Northern Mexico, there's a palpable “why are we allowing this?” mood in the blogosphere.  There are calls for a modern day General John “Black Jack” Pershing to go into Mexico and wipe out the cartels.  I don't have problem with that, myself.  If we know who killed this family, that cartel should be asking for an 0300 visit, but I wouldn't do it with valuable operators like we did with Al Baghdadi.  A visit by an air wing of A-10s, B-2s, or a few C-130s with MOABs seems adequate. 

The problem isn't our lack of a general who could wipe out the Mexican military, should they decide to get in the way.  The problem is that this is a tangled web that covers both sides of the border, and if we're going to wipe out this sort of problem, both sides need targeted raids. 

Back in August of 2012, I posted about an interesting article I ran across with details on the Fast and Furious gun running program that Barack Obama and his Attorney General Eric Holder had implemented.  It was widely believed that the purpose of F&F was to show American guns are ending up in Mexico as some sort of argument for more gun control.  A “logistics coordinator” for the Sinaloa cartel named Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, had testified it wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and the Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels. 

In effect, the U.S. government was going to use the Sinaloa cartel to kill off the other cartels, and in return for getting rid of them, Uncle Sam was going to give Sinaloa the US drug market.

I re-visited the details of that 2012 story last July and found that the legal cases had gone forward but the story hadn't materially changed.  

Since my knowledge of this story was essentially frozen in 2012, I looked up Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla (there are other family members in the cartel, so you have search the whole name) to find he did a plea deal with the feds to "cooperate with authorities" and potentially stay out of long term lockup.  I found a Forbes article from 2014 saying the same things as the Blaze article my post was based on in 2012.  I've not found anything conclusive saying it was admitted to in court, but there is evidence that the US deal with the Sinaloa cartel was real, and there's a trail of bodies to back it up.

By appearances, I see this as saying there are groups in the Deep State who are behind allowing the Sinaloa cartel to access US drug markets, and I've got to believe there's some money flowing north along with those drugs, to the pockets of the Deep State Actors on this side of the border who are profiting from the deal.  Those Actors are partly responsible for the deaths of those women and children in Mexico on Monday evening.  It's easy to say people dying from the War on Some Drugs are dying by their own choices.  These women and children were innocent bystanders who crossed some sort of invisible line and simply ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Soldiers and police officers guard packages of seized marijuana during a presentation for the media in Tijuana, Mexico. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

The Perfectly Legal Corruption No One Cares About

That's the title of a column by Derek Hunter on Townhall today.  Excellent article but maybe 1/100th as long as it could be.

The media is in a tizzy over the lawfare framing of General Michael Flynn, attorney Michael Cohen, and everyone else being ruined by the Robert Mueller investigations.

General Flynn had been the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, so surely he must have known the stakes in talking with the FBI, even though they said it was just a chat so no need for a lawyer.  Surely that must be what they call a perjury trap: if you remember one detail wrong, one detail that doesn't match the transcripts (again, transcripts that Flynn must have known they'd have) or remember one thing differently than someone else has testified, you're guilty of perjury.  Even if you're right and the first guy was lying.

What do you think is more likely? That Michael Flynn couldn’t perfectly recall the contents of a phone call made while on vacation, or that Flynn decided that he’d lie to the FBI’s face without any legal counsel over the contents of a phone call where nothing illegal is discussed?

Like Derek Hunter, it's hard to care much less than I do about Trump paying off a couple of whores to keep silent about having sex with him 12 years ago. He wasn't president at the time, he wasn't even running for office.  He was "just" another New York City billionaire - a private businessman.

What I don’t like is when people whose salaries we’re all paying use more of our tax dollars to pay off people they’ve harassed and keep that quiet.

There have been more than 260 settlements costing more than $17 million, paid for by you and me, so our elected Members for Congress can avoid being held responsible for things they’re now clutching their pearls over the President having done with his own money.

The use of public tax money for the same thing, by elected congressmen and senators, is disgusting, reprehensible and vile.  It should have never been allowed - just like allowing the same senators and representatives to engage in insider trading and other things "normal people" will get arrested for should never have happened.

California Democrat Maxine Waters won her first term in Congress in 1990 with 79 percent of the vote. Her toughest reelection bid came in 2012 when she squeaked by with 71 percent. Yet every two years she raises a campaign war chest for that foregone conclusion.

With the millions of dollars she’s raised, Waters has paid her own daughter, Karen, more than $800,000 since 2004 to run a statewide mail campaign promoting other Democrats. This past election, where Waters took 75.8 percent of the vote, was a good year for Karen too. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Karen is now owed $183,022.15 on top of the $108,000 she has already collected during the midterms.” Nice pay for essentially licking stamps.

Missouri Democrat William Lacy Clay Jr. was first elected in 2000 with a scant 75 percent of the vote. His closest reelection bid was in 2002 when he only managed 70 percent.

With his reelection a mere formality, he won this year with 80.1 percent, Clay still managed to slide a substantial chunk of his campaign cash to his sister. Michelle Clay is a lawyer who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, a full 809 miles from Congressman Clay’s district. The Free Beacon reported, “From Jan. 4 until Oct. 31, 2018, Rep. Clay Jr. disbursed numerous payments ranging from $500 to $10,000 and totaling $198,500 to his sister's firm.”
...
[Last year, retiring] congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL), who paid his wife almost $400,000 between 2010 and then. That’s a nice nest egg to add to a Congressional pension, isn’t it?

These Members of Congress are not unique, and it’s not a scam limited to one party, and most disturbingly, it’s not even a crime. When you set the rules, the rules are always in your favor.

And that last paragraph is the problem.  It's not limited to one party and it's not even a crime.  These stories are only scratching the surface.  As soon as one scam is clamped down on (remember the congressional check-kiting scandal of 1992?) they come up with another.  They can always find a legal way to steal money. 

(Nominated to chair - not sure it's a done deal yet, but "elections have consequences" you know)

Edit to add 2034 EST:  This is post #3000 in the life of this blog.  I'm not quite sure what to say, other than "day-um".

The King of Junk Food Science is Out

Last February, I ran a story about Brian Wansink, whom I called the King of Junk Food Science.  According to ARS Technica yesterday, Wansink is out at Cornell University.

Brian Wansink, the Cornell nutrition researcher who was world-renowned for his massively popular, commonsense-style dieting studies before ultimately going down in flames in a beefy statistics scandal, has now resigned—with a considerably slimmer publication record.

JAMA’s editorial board retracted six studies co-authored by Wansink from its network of prestigious publications on Wednesday, September 19. The latest retractions bring Wansink’s total retraction count to 13, [Note: that page shows 35 papers retracted at this time - SiG] according to a database compiled by watchdog publication Retraction Watch. Fifteen of Wansink’s other studies have also been formally corrected.

Amid this latest course in the scandal, Cornell reported today, September 20, that Wansink has resigned from his position, effective at the end of the current academic year. In a statement emailed to Ars, Cornell Provost Michael Kotlikoff said that an internal investigation by a faculty committee found that “Professor Wansink committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.”

The important part of the article last February is what ultimately got Wansink out of his job: he wasn't doing science, he was trying to find things that would catch public attention and go viral.  The way it's supposed to work is that a researcher comes up with a hypothesis and then does an experiment to determine if their hypothesis is true; more precisely, they evaluate the null hypothesis that the experimental results were random and not due to their hypothesis.  Wansink would collect gobs of data and then try to find hypotheses that are true based on that data.

But, in a November 2016 blog post, Wansink inadvertently sank his own fame by noting that he encouraged his graduate students to go on statistical fishing trips, pushing them to net unintended conclusions from otherwise null nutrition experiment results. This is a huge red flag to researchers because such statistical fishing is a well-established method for reeling in false positives and meaningless statistical blips, like finding a link between cabbage and innie belly buttons. Moreover, many researchers see the dubious approach as fueling a crisis in social sciences in which findings from key studies—like Wansink’s—are not reproducible by other researchers, calling into question their original validity.

The blogged confession led to several other researchers sifting through Wansink’s studies and stats. Prime among those researchers is education researcher and blogger Tim van der Zee of Leiden University in the Netherlands. By last year, van der Zee and colleagues had identified at least 42 Wansink studies with alleged issues ranging from minor to severe. Those studies had collectively been cited by other researchers 3,700 times, been published in over 25 journals and eight books, and spanned 20 years of research, van der Zee noted.

As I've talked about in these pages before, there are several serious crises going on in science these days.  The biggest is reflected in the August 2005 paper by John P. A. Ioannidis which has become one of the most downloaded papers ever, "Why Most Published Research Findings are False".  Ioannidis points out that the majority of scientific papers are wrong; as much as 70% of published science is wrong.  Not just biomedical but hard sciences like particle physics. 

But maximising a single figure of merit, such as statistical significance, is never enough: witness the “pentaquark” saga. Quarks are normally seen only two or three at a time, but in the mid-2000s various labs found evidence of bizarre five-quark composites. The analyses met the five-sigma test. But the data were not “blinded” properly; the analysts knew a lot about where the numbers were coming from. When an experiment is not blinded, the chances that the experimenters will see what they “should” see rise. This is why people analysing clinical-trials data should be blinded to whether data come from the “study group” or the control group. When looked for with proper blinding, the previously ubiquitous pentaquarks disappeared.

Simply, the peer review process is broken - perhaps irreparably.

Science itself, as it currently works, may well also be badly broken. In the Spring/Summer 2016 issue of the new journal The New Atlantis, some important points were brought up.  As I excerpted in August of 2016.

As WWII came to a close, there was an acknowledgement of how much that scientific teams had contributed to the victory and a deliberate effort to keep those teams together.  Vannevar Bush, the MIT engineer called the “General of Physics” by Time Magazine, was the public face behind this push.  He pushed a vision so appealing in its imagery that everyone bought into it.

Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.

Through example after example Sarewitz demonstrates that the progress of the late 20th century was virtually never, “free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice”, but instead was almost always science being managed, being driven on specific topics for specific applications.   Scientific knowledge advances most rapidly, and is of most value to society, when it is steered to solve problems — especially those related to technological innovation.  Could it be that the War on Cancer has floundered because there's nobody in charge; nobody driving toward a goal and asking specific people specific questions? 

The typical academic scientist in a university lab may bristle at the thought of being given an assignment by a boss somewhere, and being held accountable for results.  Nevertheless, a persuasive argument can be made that this might be the way to fix science.

Five Thirty Eight did an experiment to show the kinds of spurious correlations that arise from using the typical tools of dietary studies: food frequency questionnaires and recall studies.  Their study demonstrated that eating egg rolls was strongly associated with dog ownership, and that eating cabbage was strongly associated with having an "innie bellybutton".  That's some real Brian Wansink quality science there!

Brian Wansink in a publicity photo.  AP Photo by Mike Groll - from Buzz Feed 

A Little More on Florida's New Anti-Opioid Law

If you haven't followed it, there has been an active discussion about what might be reasons behind the the post I put up mentioning Florida's new opioid law on Monday.

To sum it up, I don't see any disagreement that the root cause of the so-called opioid crisis is the government at all levels attacking prescription pain pills when the actual problem is people using heroin, which is often cut with fentanyl that the cartels buy because it's cheap, powerful and available by the pound from China.  It also happens to have a very small gap between doses that will get buyers high and those that will kill them.

There has been some talk pondering exactly who is behind this and who's benefiting the most.  This afternoon, I remembered a story from 2012 that leads me to a group I hadn't thought of: the Fed.gov.

In 2012, the story showed up and then quickly vanished that a high-ranking official from the Sinaloa Cartel, alleged that "Operation Fast and Furious" was not about specifically about running guns to Mexico to get gun control legislation, but that it was to supply the Sinaloa cartel specifically.  Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the cartel’s “logistics coordinator”, was in US federal prison in awaiting trial and made the claim.

Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 — during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations — as long as the intel kept coming.

A perfectly reasonable question might be why would the US fed.gov get in bed with the Sinaloa cartel.  At the time, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico appeared to imply it was well known that what Zambada-Niebla alleged was true.  He said U.S. agencies “don’t fight drug traffickers,” instead “they try to manage the drug trade.”

Back in 2012, I speculated on this a bit.  Perhaps it was part of a plan to shut down the cartels.  The US would provide guns to Sinaloa; for information, then use that info to kill off the competing cartels, so the cartel gets both guns and the US anti-drug forces to kill off their competitors.  That sounds like Sinaloa gets all the benefits, and gives up nothing of value to them.  In fact, it seems worse than that.  It seems that what the US DOJ/DEA offered Sinaloa was unrestricted access to the US drug markets - apparently in trade for nothing.

If the US had wiped out the competition and then figuratively nuked the Sinaloa cartel, all the cartels would be gone and the border problems might conceivably drop to a small fraction of what we have now.  Solving problems, of course, is bad for the federal government and all entrenched bureaucracies.  They're going to be there in perpetuity, so there's no incentive to "work themselves out of a job". 

As a comment to that 2012 blog post pointed out, and as we all know, this is nothing new.

In 1970 SHOCK! The CIA uses the Vietnam war as cover to smuggle heroin out of the golden triangle. SHOCK! 1982 the US uses the war in El Salvador to smuggle heroin AND cocaine IN and GUNS out of the US. SHOCK guns to IRAN(1983). This has gone on with every president from AT least WW2 [Note - edited to add some spelling corrections - SiG]

Typically, I think this "black money" is used to fund things without getting budget money from congress, as it did with Iran-Contra mentioned in that comment.  It's not that congress is reluctant to borrow money (or get it created out of thin air); it's that money the deep black agencies get entirely off the books never entails an investigation or sitting in a chair in front of a board saying, "I'm sorry, senator, but I have no recollection of that".

Since my knowledge of this story was essentially frozen in 2012, I looked up Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla (there are other family members in the cartel, so you have search the whole name) to find he did a plea deal with the feds to "cooperate with authorities" and potentially stay out of long term lockup.  I found a Forbes article from 2014 saying the same things as the Blaze article my post was based on in 2012.  I've not found anything conclusive saying it was admitted to in court, but there is evidence that the US deal with the Sinaloa cartel was real, and there's a trail of bodies to back it up.

If we're really still allowing the Sinaloa cartel to traffic drugs into the states (the articles said they had a big center of operations in Chicago), that would explain lots.  Reporters ask who benefits from the opioid crisis and immediately attack "big pharma"; maybe they should be looking at big government. 

 

A Looming Government Shutdown? It's Like Old Times

Ah, gee.  It's like old times, gang.  We haven't had a pending fake shutdown in forever!  Gosh, it must have been back when the Administration Party and "Party of No" wore different tags.  So long ago... It was September of 2016.  I can barely remember that.  Do you recall where you were?  Do you even remember how old you were?  Someday, we'll all talk about the great government shutdown of 2017, too.  At this rate, it'll be around a year from now. 

As always, this is a bunch of melodramatic theater; made-up crap so that they can avoid doing their real job (creating and passing actual budgets) and instead pass their Continuing Resolutions, which (IMO) is done for that great DC buzzword Plausible Deniability.   
 

At least this time, they're not invoking the mythical debt ceiling.  As I've said more times than I can recall, we don't have a debt ceiling.  It has never, once in history, been lowered.  It has never, once in history, not been raised.  Once or twice, it was held steady for a few extra weeks, but it has always been raised.

If I recall correctly, the last time they actually went though the silly government shutdown ritual was 2013. 

Back in October 2013, Democrats and Republicans fought over the implementation of parts of the Affordable Car Act and the debt ceiling. The sides couldn’t agree on a continuing resolution to fund federal government operations, and the federal government saw a 16-day shutdown as a result.

Obama - vindictive, obnoxious little prick that he is - made a point of shutting down things that were popular, such as public lands, memorials and parks which cost more to put roadblocks and barricades on than to leave open.  WWII veterans were blocked from visiting their memorial.   Classy things like that.

Sorry if I seem jaded, I just think it's kabuki theater; brinksmanship so that the Evil party can show they're doing something to stop the Stupid party, and the Stupid party misreading the public's contempt for the situation that causes these arguments. 

The very last line in this cartoon from VirtualShackles.com (which I've used multiple times) sums it up perfectly.  Paraphrasing to fit the situation  "Just sit on the agreement a bit longer so we look like heroes." 

SEIU Is a Corrupt Bunch of Thugs

And in other news, water is wet and fire will burn.

Back on March 30th, the Daily Signal ran a story about Patricia Johansen of Minnesota who worked as a care giver for her two special-needs grandchildren.  This must have been something other than grandmotherly concern because she was getting paid by someone, apparently the state's Medicaid office, because she recently found that her paycheck was being reduced to pay union dues.

Since she never agreed to join the union that represents such Medicaid-eligible caregivers in Minnesota, Johansen was surprised to discover that union dues had been deducted from her benefit check for about four months.

In an affidavit, the Fergus Falls resident says she is convinced the union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, forged her signature so it could start deducting the dues.

Here it turns into the kind of story you would think it is, involving a political appointee by Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton; an appointee who's accused of conducting this fraud, as well as “fraudulent signatures, nonexistent voters, and ballot tampering” in a 2014 unionization election.  They're going to get right on it.  Honest.

In the wake of the 3/30 article, people started contacting the Daily Signal to report they also had their signatures forged by the SEIU, in various parts of the country.

Dear Daily Signal: I live on the South Shore in Massachusetts, and the same thing happened to me. I was a personal care assistant for a number of years for a young boy, Joey, and was paid by Cerebral Palsy of Massachusetts.

The union began taking money out of my paycheck. I made several calls to complain about it and got nowhere. I even called my state senator, and that got me nowhere. This is Massachusetts, of course.

The one that stands out is the guy claiming to have been an SEIU officer fighting this kind of corruption.

Dear Daily Signal: I’m an activist and organizer who worked for a short time, from October to December 2012, as lead organizer for SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, which, pre-scandal, was called SEIU 6434 in California. The local was in the middle of a huge leadership corruption scandal when I was hired with the charge of bringing the union back to the workers.

I was fired after a few months when I brought up these very concerns ...

The care workers through their paycheck deductions support the exorbitant salaries of staffers and high-level union administrators. Most members have no idea how much these administrators make. The care workers themselves get really nothing in return from the union.—E. Garcia  

To echo what I said at the top, next thing you know they're going to tell us water will wet us and fire will burn.  It's not just that SEIU is a bunch of lawless thugs, this particular scam isn't new.  I wrote about a case in Michigan back in 2011.  I suppose, though, it's illustrative that it's still going on.  Things like this are part of the structural reasons we're headed for economic collapse; the SEIU donates money to Democrat politicians, when they get elected, they pass laws or appoint the right people to carry out operations like these that transfer taxpayer money back to the SEIU.  It's the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine you'll see.  SEIU gives dues money to Democrats, Democrats give taxpayer money to the SEIU, who give part of the taxpayer money back to the Democrats, and on it goes.  No one ever gets punished, no one ever gets in trouble, the machine just keeps spinning.

Remember back during the days of TEA Party protests, when the SEIU thugs beat down Kenneth Gladney for selling Tee shirts, and then got away with it in St. Louis courts? 

 

Florida's RINO Infestation

My out-of-state friends have probably not heard that a great package of gun bills is apparently being scuttled in the Florida Senate, again - just like last year, by an influential Republican, again - just like last year, a Republican who made public commitments to being a supporter of the 2nd amendment, again - just like last year.

The RINO this year is the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Anitere Flores of Miami.  Miguel at Gun Free Zone has been doing the yeoman's work of reporting on this with important pieces starting yesterday, March 9th, when the story broke.  Miquel's first report summarizes as follows:

Flores, a key vote on the Judiciary Committee, vowed she wouldn’t support Steube’s 10 other bills, which means they would have virtually no chance of making it onto the Senate floor. 

Flores is one of five Republicans and four Democrats on the committee, so if she votes against bills and all Democrats vote in lockstep, Steube’s gun bills would be sent to their graves early.

Senator Greg Steube, who is referred to here, is a genuine advocate for Florida's law-abiding gun owners, and had originally (January) proposed a single large bill that embodied campus carry, open carry, carry in the "non-sterile" parts of airports (such as where the Ft. Lauderdale airport attack took place), courthouse accommodations, and more.  He broke it into 10 smaller bills after concerns that one portion might block all the others.

Marion Hammer, the NRA-ILA representative in Tallahassee and former NRA President responded to questions this way:

"I cannot tell you why Sen. Flores suddenly turned on law-abiding gun owners because I do not know.  (Until yesterday she had a 100% rating with NRA and USF)

I cannot tell you if Sen. Flores was acting on her own behalf or on behalf of the Senate President or Senate Leadership because I do not know.

I cannot tell you whether or not she has the power to kill all pro-gun bills and not allow the Senate to vote on them because I do not know.  But -- as the old saying goes -- "it ain't over 'till it's over,"  and this is only Day 2 of the 2017 Legislative session.

And finally, am I giving up for this session? ABSOLUTELY NOT.  I represent law-abiding gun owners statewide and they depend on me to fight for them and I will."

Like Miguel and others, I've sent the Senate President my own comments, which start like this:

It's being widely reported that Ms. Flores effectively turned her back on her supporters and said she wouldn’t support any of Senator Steube’s 10 gun proposals.  Whether this is simply being a turncoat or if it's the result of bribery or other corruption, readers can't say but it's a betrayal of her supporters and all of Florida's law-abiding gun owners.  In spite of her anti-gun vote promise, in recently (post-Pulse club shooting) writing pro-2nd amendment letters to Marion Hammer, Ms. Flores clearly and plainly said she was on the side of legal gun owners.  In reversing direction she has betrayed not just all of her supporters, but has cast a pall over every Republican elected official in the state.

Anitere Flores, right, with Michelle Gajda, head of the Florida chapter of Michael Bloomberg's (the most dependable asshole in American politics (tm)) "Moms Demand Action".

Miguel proposes a simple approach: reset every senator's NRA grade to zero.   We no longer grade on PR statements or returned questionnaires: we grade on results.  Pass laws restoring our rights, you get good grades.  Block them, you get left at zero.  Unfortunately, I don't think that's right either.  To Michelle Gajda and her fellow travelers, a zero from the NRA is a good grade and I don't want to give her a good grade.  Likewise, Senator Steube really is a better advocate and friend than Flores, so if we go by the idea that nobody gets above zero if the laws aren't passed, he ends up rated the same as she does.  She's the roadblock and needs to be seen as the roadblock.  I don't think there is a fix for someone flipping like this, until the primaries, by which time we're fighting a rear-guard action to try and get rid of them to keep them from doing more damage.  Again - just like last year. 

That Old Revolving Door Still Be Revolving

Meet Mary Jo White.

As that web page points out, Mary Jo White is the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, appointed in 2013 by Barack Obama.  Actually, "was the chairman" is the proper tense because she left the agency upon Trump's inauguration and is now headed back to where she came from before she headed the SEC, the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, the New York-based law firm whose litigation department she previously headed.

“I got a call at 12:01 on Jan. 20, asking me to rejoin the firm,” said Ms. White, whose departure from the S.E.C. took effect that day. “And since I had a speech in San Diego, I used that time on planes to decide whether I wanted to practice law again.”

(12:01?  AM, I presume?)  You see, Ms. White's job at Debevoise & Plimpton was defending companies from the Securities and Exchange Commission.   She went from defending corporations against the SEC to regulating and policing corporations at the SEC, and is now going back to defending those corporations from the SEC again.

Wall Street on Parade puts it this way:

The news is also highly significant because it will mark the fourth time in four decades that Mary Jo White has spun through the revolving doors of Debevoise & Plimpton (where she represented serial law violators) to government service (prosecuting serial law violators). 

If you're feeling dizzy, that's why it's called the revolving door.

The New York Times adds this little tidbit.

One of her chief lieutenants in that effort, Andrew J. Ceresney, also rejoined Debevoise after serving with her as director of the S.E.C.’s division of enforcement.

I wonder if young Mr. Ceresney will be her successor in revolving the door between the SEC and Debevoise & Plimpton?  It's like the revolving door between the fed.gov and Goldman Sachs that led to them being referred to as Government Sachs.  

For his part, President Trump has nominated Jay Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer from the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, to replace White.  Clayton, who has not had his confirmation hearing, is expected to push for less regulations easing the burden on IPOs and the disclosures involved.

He has already laid out a capital formation agenda to Trump surrogates who interviewed him, a source familiar with the process said. And he has expressed interest in tackling some regulations involving accounting and compliance procedures that financial industry players say get in the way of deals and initial public offerings.

The firm of Sullivan & Cromwell has defended some of the big (TBTF) banks but I don't see allegations he was involved personally.  It appears he has less of the cozy relationships than Mary Jo White with Debevoise & Plimpton, and less than the Government Sachs Employment Complex. 

The Deep State Hit Job On Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn

It has been interesting to watch the news unfolding today detailing what appears to be nothing short of a hit job, a political career assassination, against Lt. General Michael Flynn by members of the Deep State.

The story several people seem to be quoting is the Washington Free Beacon's Adam Credo's article, alleging that the classified information was leaked to the press by Obama appointees in the CIA determined to preserve the Iran nuclear giveaway program deal.

The abrupt resignation Monday evening of White House national security adviser Michael Flynn is the culmination of a secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidantes to handicap President Donald Trump's national security apparatus and preserve the nuclear deal with Iran, according to multiple sources in and out of the White House who described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media.

The effort, said to include former Obama administration adviser Ben Rhodes—the architect of a separate White House effort to create what he described as a pro-Iran echo chamber—included a small task force of Obama loyalists who deluged media outlets with stories aimed at eroding Flynn's credibility, multiple sources revealed.

A "secret, months-long campaign" means these agencies have been plotting to take him down since well before the inauguration.  Gen. Flynn was known as a critic of the Iran deal, and of the CIA for so badly bungling the management of the Mideast in the wake of the wind down in Iraq.  The Blaze adds:

Flynn was one of the most vociferous critics of the Iran Deal and ridding him from Trump’s administration helps the cause to keep the agreement in place, despite repeated statements by Trump that he would dismantle what he called, “the worst deal ever negotiated.”

The whole thing seems to go back to secret aspects of the Iranian deal, and the Deep State's desire to keep them secret.  They were scared Flynn was going to somehow let those secrets out.

A third source who serves as a congressional adviser and was involved in the 2015 fight over the Iran deal told the Free Beacon that the Obama administration feared that Flynn would expose the secret agreements with Iran.

"The Obama administration knew that Flynn was going to release the secret documents around the Iran deal, which would blow up their myth that it was a good deal that rolled back Iran," the source said. "So in December the Obama NSC started going to work with their favorite reporters, selectively leaking damaging and incomplete information about Flynn."

The laughable New York Times, living up to my version of their motto; "all the news we feel fit to make up",  tried to imply that the leak of information was to let the media know that Trump was colluding with the Russians during the election (yawn) but even the intelligence report put down that lie. The Times left out this important sentence.

The officials interviewed in recent weeks said that, so far, they had seen no evidence of such cooperation.

The most in-depth coverage seems to be from Patrick Poole at PJ Media (whom I've already quoted), and specifically gets into the legalities of what these "intelligence community" people did.  

House Intel Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is demanding to know why Flynn's conversations were being wiretapped. As one of the congressional "Big 8," if there were a covert program targeting Flynn, he would be one of the few to know:

“Any intelligence agency cannot listen to Americans’ phone calls,” Nunes told reporters Tuesday night. “If there’s inadvertent collection that you know is overseas there’s a whole process in place for that.”
...
“So in this case it would be General Flynn and then how did that happen. Then if they did that, then how does all that get out to the public which is another leak of classified information,” Nunes added. “I’m pretty sure the FBI didn’t have a warrant on Michael Flynn.” [bold in the original - SiG]

and

Here's Eli Lake at Bloomberg:

There is another component to this story as well -- as Trump himself just tweeted. It's very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

Trump famously said he intended to drain the swamp.  This swamp is filled with 12' long gators and they're fighting back.  The intelligence agencies and other political hacks are putting on a shameful display of insider politics at its worst.  While most commentators have talked about this for what it is, I heard Jason Buttrill on the Blaze, a former member of the intelligence community, talking like they just did the country a tremendous favor, but it sure doesn't sound that way to me.  It sounds like the intelligence community is trying to destroy the administration as John Robb talked about two months ago.  Apparently, it all centers on Obama appointees to the agencies trying to maintain what they view as their legacy.  Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Adviser for the Obama administration at the time, said that they viewed the Iran Deal as the Obamacare of his second term, meaning it was just as important to his presidential legacy.

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn testifies during a hearing before the House Intelligence Committee. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Have The Tea Party's Killers Hit the Gunnies, Too?

Last August, I wrote a piece on how the Tea Party was killed off.  In brief, they were killed off by professional fund raisers and political activists: the very thing the Tea Party got started to kill off.

Republicans inside the Beltway reacted to the burgeoning Tea Party with glee but uncertainty about how to channel the grass-roots energy usually reserved for the left. A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner," or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan." The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you’re doing” “This can’t wait.” One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7 million from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87 percent of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7 million raised was used to support political candidates.

Miguel at Gun Free Zone posted a piece today about the National Association for Gun Rights, NAGR, and I find the parallels striking. Miguel, in turn, links to an old article on the Blaze, that's sill relevant.

As it turns out, NAGR is just one of a pack of ankle-biter groups, all of which trace back to Mike Rothfeld. Among this web of Rothfeld groups are Campaign for Liberty, Foundation for Applied Conservative Leadership, and Council for Freedom and Enterprise.  Nice names. What they all share is the Rothfeld secret sauce — best described by the wizard himself:

“I am a professional junk mailer. I am a professional telemarketer. I’m a professional spammer — like, a hundred million pieces of emails a month. And I’m a professional negative campaigner. And I’m damn proud of all four.”

While most of us abhor negative campaigning, we can at least understand it as an effort to induce people to choose Option A over Option B. But that isn’t the game Rothfeld and Dudley Brown are playing.

I've mentioned before that I've been a member of NAGR before and became displeased with them for a couple of reasons.  The biggest is the never ending stream of emails like the previously mentioned "stop what you're doing!", urgent response required type.  The legend of the "boy who cried wolf" that we learn while we're growing up is a good one to keep in mind.  Perhaps a better idea to keep in mind is that when someone is urgently demanding your money now, now, now, experience says the chances are good you're being hustled.  They want you to donate the money now and not think about it.  As the author of that original Blaze piece put it

Riddell’s article recounted one instance in which an NAGR Mississippi e-mail blast solicited funds to help them fight against an ammunition registration bill. The only problem was that the bill had died in committee a month before the e-mail was sent.

NAGR has branded itself as the conservative alternative to the NRA, one not beholden to Washington insiders. But some Second Amendment advocates think the group’s main claim to fame is stoking the fears of the less-informed for-profit.

Similarly, I recall a NAGR mailing from "Dudley Brown" railing against a piece of legislation in the Florida Senate that wasn't there anymore.  Rothfeld may be "damn proud" of being a spammer and telemarketer, but apparently complete truthfulness isn't one of the things the organizations are "damn proud" of.

NAGR Affiliates. 

NAGR bills itself as the "No-Compromise Gun Rights Group" and attacks the NRA.  But compromise itself isn't a bad thing.  The bad thing is continually backing up in compromise and saying, "this is as far as we go" only to contradict yourself in a year or two.  Compromise on the attack is what the other side has been doing for a century and I don't think anyone would say it hasn't worked for them.  Every few years they push and push and get as far as they can.  Once they've moved the bar, (or the Overton Window if you prefer) they start from farther along "next time".  If the R2KBA side went in to this legislative session with the argument "nullify the 1934 NFA" and in September we found the best we could do was the compromise, "OK, we agree the prohibition on short barreled rifles and shotguns is silly so we'll remove that, and we'll make silencers a $5 tax, but we will not deregulate full auto weapons and we're keeping the AOW class", who wouldn't take that compromise?  Would you turn that down because it's not perfect, total victory? 

Look, it's your money; give it to whom you want.  I think it's a waste to give to these Rothfeld organizations like NAGR because I see the parallels to the destruction of the Tea Party movement.  If Rothfeld's groups suck up all the funding and spends it all on themselves, like all those groups that killed off the Tea Party, could they kill off the Pro-2A side? 

Hillary Aide Broke Her Phones

Several people have commented on the FBI's Hillary document dump.  With this administration you know any incriminating documents are going to be released on the Friday before a holiday weekend, when they figure no one is paying attention, and they were true to form yesterday.  Tam sums it up well.

This is about as plausible as "the dog ate my homework". She claimed she didn't know that the "c" meant "confidential", that nobody told her that she should retain work emails as they are part of the public record. Further along in the article, she throws her staff under the bus, in effect claiming that her underlings and minions told the dog to eat her homework.

For the uninitiated, "Confidential" is fully classified, it's just the lowest rung on the ladder of Confidential, Secret and Top Secret.  Anything that is classified has to be handled according to procedure.  At the very least, anyone of the rest of us who handled classified material like this would have been fired, or moved out of a position that involved classified information.  I still believe we'd be in jail.  None of those explanations, of not remembering her training or of having difficulty since her stroke would matter. 

Over the last month, we've been getting dribs and drabs implying that there's no freaking way that Comey should have thought there was "no evidence of intent".  Hillary used BleachBit for cryin' out loud!  BleachBit is designed to make it hard for anyone to figure what was on a hard drive.  BleachBit is advertising they stifled the FBI investigation.  One doesn't need a tool like BleachBit to delete yoga-related emails.  This is "no evidence of criminal intent"?

Then we learned that the story of using a single email account for convenience, and a single device (Blackberry) was a lie and there were 13 different devices, several of which the FBI has not be able to get their hands on to search.  In yesterday's document dump we learn that an aide admits to destroying a couple of those devices with a hammer, or by breaking them in half.

It used to be a regular policy that the only way to declassify a hard drive was with a hammer, but it's not clear that protecting classified data is what was going on here.  It could simply be hiding evidence from the FBI - obstruction of justice. 

There's no way that Comey could have not known these things were going on - this document dump is from the July 2nd FBI interview with Hillary - and yet he said there was nothing there to prosecute.  As the little cartoon in the right panel says, anyone else would be in jail.  To be, perhaps, redundantly clear, Comey himself said anyone else would be in jail.  From his final statement: 

“To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now. As a result, although the Department of Justice makes final decisions on matters like this, we are expressing to Justice our view that no charges are appropriate in this case.”

Thanks, Director Comey, you little chickenshit.  You've discredited the FBI and sealed our fate as nation of privileged men, not a nation of laws.