The House Intelligence Committee has completed its investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and will issue a report saying that it found no evidence of collusion. They did find evidence that some meetings were held by Trump campaign officials that should not have been held, but not of collusion.
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, says they didn’t interview enough people and the 300,000 documents they reviewed were not enough, but, when asked, Schiff can’t point to any proof of collusion that the committee uncovered. It appears that Schiff, an extremely partisan Democrat, is in the same camp with special prosecutor Bob Mueller – who is supposedly nonpartisan – in believing that if they look under enough rocks eventually they are going to find something.
The committee did find proof that the Hillary Clinton campaign was working with Russians to get dirt on Donald Trump and paid Russians to provide that dirt, but the mainstream media, Democrats and Mueller are not interested in the Clinton campaign colluding with Russians, only the Trump campaign.
The whole thing has been a colossal waste of time and money. If this all started, as they are now saying, because Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos got drunk and started spouting off to an Australian diplomat closely linked to the Clintons about how important he was to the Trump campaign, it is even dumber than it first appeared. Papadopoulos was trying to get a paying job – something that he failed at miserably.
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I don’t get what special prosecutor Mueller is doing other than running up his billable hours and making a small fortune for himself and the Clinton supporters he hired to work for him.
Mueller has discovered that Russians were involved in an anti-Trump rally that took place in Charlotte after the election. I don’t get how being involved in an anti-Trump rally after the election could possibly affect the election when all the votes had been counted and Trump declared the winner.
It also seems inconceivable that Trump, or people who work for Trump, would be colluding with the Russians to plan an anti-Trump rally after the election.
So why is this big news and why does Mueller care?
The next report will be that people in Greensboro were reportedly “rushin” to work the day after the election. Mueller will not understand that in the South we drop our g’s at the end of words, and his team will spend millions of dollars trying to figure out why people were said to be “rushin” after the election.
Really, this investigation by a man known to be a poor investigator but a great bureaucrat has reached the point of ridiculousness. It’s time for Mueller to go back to doing whatever it was he was doing before he decided to chase after every mention of a Russian in the US.
After Mueller hired his team full of people with severe conflicts of interest and evidence of extreme bias against Trump, he should have been fired. At that point Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who hired Mueller, should have simply told him to go home and then hired an unbiased and impartial special prosecutor. The problem with that scenario is that Rosenstein is in this Justice Department collusion against Trump up to his eyeballs. Rosenstein didn’t hire Mueller because he was looking for someone fair and unbiased but because he was looking for someone who would stop at nothing to get Trump.
This was a setup from the beginning. The whole seedy plan fell into place when Attorney General Jeff Sessions, instead of standing up for himself, agreed to recuse himself from any Russian collusion investigation because he was in the same room with the Russian ambassador at an event, and either did or did not speak to him directly, and he didn’t note this as a significant contact with Russians during the campaign season.
Sessions walked into a not-too-carefully laid trap and the Democrats got exactly what they wanted.
Now that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is gone, maybe Trump will focus on his attorney general, who definitely needs to spend more time with his family.
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Another huge story breaking in The Washington Post and The New York Times is that Erik Prince, who had no position in the Trump transition team, met for about a half an hour at a hotel bar in the Seychelles with a Russian businessman.
This is the kind of explosive stuff that Mueller is finding. It happened shortly before Trump’s inauguration, so it couldn’t have possibly had anything to do with Trump colluding with the Russians to affect the presidential election, which is the charge – although that seems to have been long forgotten by Mueller.
Prince didn’t work for Trump in an official or unofficial capacity, and he admits having a beer with the Russian because he was introduced to him.
I guess it has reached the point where any American who supported Trump who has met with any Russian for the past five years is going to be investigated by Mueller, and then that investigation will be leaked to the mainstream media so that they can make a big deal out of it.
The mainstream media keep reporting that Mueller is investigating if the meeting was an attempt by Trump to create a backchannel to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What if it was? It’s not illegal for leaders to communicate through backchannels. Considering the current political beliefs of the folks in the State Department, it’s a good thing. The “front channel” would be the State Department, and just about anything else is a backchannel.
It happens all the time. A lot of successful negotiations start out as backchannel communications because one side or the other wants to make an offer that they don’t want to be made public unless it is accepted. If they go through official channels there are all kinds of records of the offer. So they backchannel it first, and when things get to a certain point then they move over into the official domain.
Under President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, followed by John Kerry. Do you think people who believed that Hillary Clinton and Kerry were good and effective secretaries of state are going to be happy working for anyone appointed by Trump?
It is now known that people in the State Department were working to provide Christopher Steele, who was hired by the Clinton campaign to find dirt on Trump, with information. Do you think Trump trusts these people to communicate for him?
Trump needs to put a stop to this investigation. The Democrats will howl and the mainstream media will go absolutely nuts, but the investigation hasn’t turned up any evidence of Trump colluding with the Russians in over a year and now they are swatting at flies and claiming they are killing elephants.
Sessions should fire Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and put someone in his place who will tell Mueller his investigation is over. If Sessions won’t, and it doesn’t appear he will, then Trump needs to send Sessions packing and get someone in there who has the get up and go to take action.
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Some people like to say that they vote for the person not the party, and that sounds like what everyone should do. But the reality is that in the state legislature and Congress it makes much more sense to vote for the party. A Democrat in Congress is going to vote with the Democrats when they need the vote.
The Democrats have much more party discipline than the Republicans. In the Republican Party, you have folks like Sen. John McCain, who is more of a Democrat than a Republican on a lot of issues, and he’s going to vote however he wants.
When the Democrats vote against their party, it is usually because they have been released by the leadership because they don’t need the vote.
If the Republicans had that kind of party discipline they could get a lot more done, but the Republicans don’t.
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So Trump doesn’t know anything about foreign diplomacy, and doing things like calling North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “Little Rocket Man” would end any hope of negotiating with Kim – as would sending aircraft carriers to sit in international waters near North Korea, as would Trump claiming his button was bigger than Kim’s and it works, as would refusing to take military intervention off the table.
It looks like all those predictions were wrong. North Korea sent athletes and cheerleaders to the Olympics in South Korea – something that was thought impossible because of the tension between the two countries.
Now Kim is saying he will meet with Trump. It doesn’t mean they will meet, but the very fact that Kim said he would is a huge step in the right direction.
As far as tariffs go, do you think that the fact that Canada and Mexico are exempted from the tariffs on steel and aluminum might speed up the NAFTA negotiations? If Trump grows weary of negotiating NAFTA, he could end their exemptions.
Trump’s brand of foreign policy is uniquely his own, but it does seem to be working.
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People make fun of Al Gore all the time for flying around the country in private jets, riding in limousines, paying outrageous power bills at his huge homes and then preaching to the rest of the world about how burning fossil fuels is going to destroy the earth.
Gore is a Democrat and was Bill Clinton’s vice president, so a certain amount of hypocrisy is expected. Besides, if Gore hadn’t invented the internet for us, we wouldn’t even know about his hypocrisy.
But really, former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is now preaching to people about global warming – a man who used his private jet like most people use their cars to commute to work and who drives around in Hummers. I would imagine that the explosions in just one of his movies put more pollutants in the air than most people do in their lifetimes.
It’s a shame he’s still a Republican, since he seems to have left any hint of Republican ideals behind.
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Trump went to Pennsylvania to campaign for Republican congressional candidate Rick Saccone and he was criticized by the mainstream media for giving a campaign speech. He was there to campaign – of course it was a campaign speech.
When Hillary Clinton was running for president, President Obama traveled all over the country giving campaign speeches and the mainstream media were OK with that.
It seems what really rattles the mainstream media is that Trump does it so well. Trump knows how to work a crowd.
What the mainstream media should do is sit down in front of a monitor and watch a Trump campaign event and then watch a Hillary Clinton campaign event. If they would do that, they might be able to figure out why Trump won.
Trump’s events were exciting. He worked the crowd, answering questions that were shouted to him, and always getting off script – if there was in fact a script at all.
Hillary Clinton occasionally looked up from the teleprompter, and at times read the stage directions. She had no rapport with the audience.
Presidents campaign all the time for candidates in their parties.
What is interesting about the Saccone race against Democrat Conor Lamb, which on Wednesday morning is still in doubt, is that it really doesn’t make any difference. It is a big race because the media says it is, and both parties have poured ridiculous amounts of money into a race that will be forgotten about as soon as it is decided.
Regardless of who is the winner, the Republicans will continue to have more than enough votes in the House to pass anything the Republicans want to pass. The new congressman will go to Washington and disappear. A freshman congressman being elected for a few months is not going to change anything.
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The Trump administration is trying to do something about the absurd ethanol regulations that were put in place in the administration of President George W. Bush.
It is ridiculous that we have to burn ethanol in our cars. It lowers gas mileage, isn’t good for engines and, in some ways, ethanol is a more damaging pollutant than gasoline. Plus ethanol is extremely tough on small motors.
It was a dumb idea, but now the farm states demand that it be kept in place because farmers can make so much money growing corn.
According to some studies, ethanol production uses more energy than it produces. The studies have been disputed, but the net production of energy isn’t much.
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California has put a hold on new solar energy plants because the amount of electricity being produced is causing problems. The problem in simple terms is that electricity from a solar plant is not consistent, but we want the electricity in our homes, factories and businesses to be consistent.
Imagine if when the sun suddenly goes behind a cloud if the electricity to your house or business just as suddenly dropped to 10 percent of what it had been.
There are so many solar and wind plants in California they threaten to bring the entire grid down, and California has been giving electricity to neighboring states.
Part of the problem is that a gas, oil, coal or nuclear power plant can’t be revved up immediately. It’s not like a car where you can put the pedal to the metal and take off. It takes time to get a huge generating facility up to full power, which is needed when the solar plants go down. The power companies know the solar plants are doing down at night and can plan for it. But the benefit of solar energy is not what solar proponents say it is. The power company has to be able to produce all the electricity produced by solar power by other means because at best solar plants only operate during daylight hours, and during the day it is not consistent.
Solar plants increase rather than decrease the electrical infrastructure needs.
An easy fix is to take away the government subsidies for solar and wind power. If people want to use solar power, let them pay for it.
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Although Attorney General Sessions has so far refused to appoint a second special prosecutor to look into the abuses of the FBI, which have been uncovered by congressional committees, such as using the Steele Dossier – paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee – to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, he did tell Fox News last week that he had hired a prosecutor outside Washington, DC, with many years of experience to investigate the FISA warrant issue.
Sessions has said that he is open to hiring a second special prosecutor but is waiting, evidently, for a report from this as yet unnamed person he has hired to investigate, as well as the report from the inspector general who is reportedly wrapping up his investigation of the FBI and the Justice Department in these matters.
Trump has pointed out that the inspector general is an Obama appointee and indicated he doesn’t have a lot of confidence in his investigation.
It’s hard to believe the Justice Department is going to do a thorough job of investigating itself when the corruption goes up to the highest levels of the FBI and Justice Department.
The fact that Sessions has felt the need to go outside the department to bring in someone else, even though he has not appointed a special prosecutor, is at least an indication that Sessions has some doubts that the inspector general is doing the job that needs to be done.
It is possible to be too patient. When Sessions was asked about having dinner with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Solicitor General Ben Bristow, Sessions had nice comments about Bristow, but all he said about Rosenstein was, “He’s my deputy.” That sounds like condemnation with faint praise. What Trump should be asking is, why is he your deputy? Do you have faith in him?
It is easy for long-term bureaucrats to isolate the appointee at the top of the ladder so that they are receiving limited information about what is going on in their department. One has to hope this is what is happening in the Justice Department. Sessions is inundated with reports on relatively minor matters and, mixed in, there is scant information about what is really happening.
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Hillary Clinton is never going to be president. If the Justice Department would stop investigating Trump and do an actual investigation of the Hillary Clinton home brew server and the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton could find herself living in jail, but she’s not going to be living in the White House.
So it’s time for Hillary Clinton to tell the American people what is wrong with her. In India, with two people helping her, she couldn’t make it down a flight of stone stairs without her legs going out from under her. She keeps falling, fainting, coughing and looking like something weird is going on inside her head and then snapping back.
It really doesn’t matter what is wrong with her because she is done as a politician. She doesn’t have to lie about being in great health. She is 70 years old and it is normal for people in their 70s to experience some health problems, so why keep up the wall of lies that she is in tip top shape? People frequently trip, but rarely does a fall result in broken bones or complete collapse as it does for Hillary Clinton.
When she collapsed at a 9/11 event in 2016, she was dead weight and had to be dragged and lifted into the waiting Secret Service mobile. A lot of different health issues could cause that. Why not tell us which one it is? Really, do healthy people take their doctor with them to an event and end up being dragged back to the car?
On this book tour she fell in London and broke a toe, and then she would have fallen in India and might have seriously injured herself if she hadn’t been assisted by two men. Even with all that assistance she did manage to sprain her wrist.
By the way, the problem with Hillary Clinton’s book, What Happened, is punctuation. The title should be “What Happened?” Hillary Clinton seems to still have no clue because she has been living in a bubble since 1992 – that’s over 25 years of being out of touch with people.
According to her statements, she thinks that the over 60 million people who voted for Trump are all dumb, racist rednecks. The only reason any woman voted for Trump was because their husbands made them.
Hillary Clinton should take a look at the Republican Party some time. It is chock-full of strong, successful, opinionated women, many of whom can’t stand Hillary Clinton and everything she stands for.
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Here is some really good economic news that the mainstream media would be boasting about nonstop if Obama were president: Small business owners have more confidence in the economy than anytime since 1983. The current rate of small business owner confidence is the second highest it has ever been.
This means that small businesses – where the vast majority of Americans work – are spending money. They have confidence that the economy is improving so they are willing to invest in their own companies, buying more equipment, expanding their operations and giving their employees raises.
It is tremendously good economic news, but isn’t getting much media attention because it makes Trump look good.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren keeps giving her enemies ammunition because she won’t admit that she was wrong. She says that claiming some Native American ancestry didn’t help her get a job at the University of Pennsylvania or Harvard University. Yeah, right.
If it wasn’t considered, why was it known? Who your ancestors are is not usually part of a job application. No one has ever asked me about my grandparents, great grandparents or great great grandparents on any job interview I have ever had.
But it appears that Warren has no Native American ancestors. If she does, she would be stupid not to take the DNA test and get it behind her.
But she could also get it behind her by simply saying that, from the stories she heard growing up, she assumed that she did have some Native American blood, but now it appears she was mistaken. Would that really be so awful to admit that you misunderstood your family history? It wouldn’t be if you hadn’t used that supposed ancestry to get jobs, which it appears she did.
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When the Republicans are out of power, they talk about spending cuts. When they are in power they spend. The Democrats are more honest about spending. They want to spend more no matter who is in control.
But it’s sad to see the Republican Party forget all about reducing spending and behave like the Democrats when it comes to overall spending.
There is some difference in where the two parties want to spend money. The Democrats want to give more away to their base; the Republicans want to spend more on the military. But the federal government at some point has to reduce spending. It is never going to happen under the Democrats, so the only hope is that Republicans will remember some of their campaign promises and start looking for ways to cut spending.
It isn’t true that they have to find billion dollar reductions every time. Even a billion dollars has become nothing in the federal budget. What has to change is the attitude. The budget didn’t rise to $4 trillion overnight, and it won’t be reduced to something reasonable in a couple of years. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be reduced.
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Its bothers me every time I read that the tax cuts for corporations were permanent and the personal income tax cuts were temporary. It is a great lie because it is true – technically the corporate tax cuts are permanent. But what does that mean? It means that Congress next week, next month, next year or next millennium could change them. It does mean that if Congress never takes any action on taxes again they will remain in place, but what are the chances of that?
The personal tax reductions are temporary because they had to be to meet some spending formula. But again, they can be changed anytime Congress chooses to change them. But if Congress never does anything on personal taxes again, it’s true the tax cuts will expire.
It is possible that Congress won’t deal with taxes for the next 10 years, but it seems unlikely. Trump wants to reduce people’s taxes even more and the Democrats want to take away the tax cuts the Republicans have already put in place.
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Some people seemed surprised that Trump let Secretary of State Tillerson go. It’s been coming for a long time. Trump doesn’t play his cards close to his vest. He holds them up for everyone to see.
Tillerson called Trump a moron (actually, it was worse than that because he used a word to emphasize just what kind of moron he was) where reporters could hear him.
In his crash course in international diplomacy at the State Department, was Tillerson not paying attention during the lecture about not getting caught by the media calling your boss ugly names?
Trump laughed it off at the time, but Trump doesn’t take slights like that well – especially from his own people.
Tillerson and Trump have significant disagreements on foreign policy. It’s hard for a secretary of state to work for a president if they have vastly different opinions on foreign policy.
The two also have a problem in that they are both accustomed to being in charge. I don’t imagine Tillerson liked Trump telling him what to do. The only part of the whole affair that I wonder about is, if on the day of his Africa trip where Tillerson claimed to be sick, was he was really on the phone all day trying to save his job. It does seem a little odd to take a day off and then get fired. Maybe Trump didn’t like the fact that he took a day off.
But it would make sense for Tillerson to claim to be sick. I mean the secretary of state can hardly cancel appointments and give the reason as, “I have to try to save my job.”
The word is that the rank and file in the State Department are delighted, because they hated Tillerson. The fact that the people working at the State Department hate Tillerson is a sign he was doing a good job.
State Department employees are overall impossible to deal with. It sometimes appears to me that the US sends a certain personality type overseas to try and convince the world that all Americans are jerks. I know there are some very fine people working in the State Department, but the number of obnoxious jerks in the State Department is far out of proportion to what it is in the rest of country.
In my opinion, the US would have better foreign relations if it sent average Americans from small cities and towns in flyover country to represent it overseas rather than the group we choose to send who, to put it mildly, tend to not be very friendly, helpful or neighborly.
If Mike Pompeo is reading this, I nominate myself to work in the embassy in Portugal. I love the people and the country and I know a lot about the country’s history, which is important to the people.
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All the talk of Russian attempts to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential elections reveal once again the brilliance of our founding fathers when they devised the Electoral College method of electing a president.
There is no national vote for the president. There is, in fact, no national election. If there were, it would be far easier to manipulate.
What we have are 50 separate and not equal elections for the president. As Hillary Clinton still has not learned, the presidential election is not about who gets the most votes, it is about who wins the most electors.
Winning California by a couple million votes may make a candidate look good, but in the end it contributes no more to their win than if they won California by one vote. Each state election is separate.
And it gets worse, or better. In North Carolina, there is a statewide tally, but it is determined by adding the votes cast in each of 100 counties. Each county has its own board of elections and makes determinations on which ballots count and which are thrown out.
To hack an election in North Carolina, someone could try to hack the election computers in Mecklenburg, Wake and Guilford Counties; but the voters in the rest of the state far outnumber those in the three most populous counties. Furthermore, the election computers are not online. They aren’t hooked up to the internet, meaning that you would have to get inside them to hack them. It is a great system because it has so many moving parts.
Look at the presidential election. The state to hack would have been California because it has the most electoral votes; but it would have done no good because the vote was overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. There is no way enough votes could have been added to make Trump the winner. New York, another huge state, was the same way. To change the outcome of the presidential election, Russia, or whoever was interested, would have had to hack into the computers in a number of states where the election was close enough to make a difference, which means the hacker would have to know what states those were long before the election, then get into the election computers and affect the totals.
It doesn’t mean there is no voter fraud, because there is, but changing the outcome of a presidential election would be tough.
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On a United Airlines flight, a woman was ordered by the flight attendant to place her dog in the overhead compartment. She protested but did as she was told and the dog died.
If the woman had refused to put the dog in the overhead compartment and placed the carrying case under the seat in front of her as the actual regulations require, she would have violated federal law.
Why is it a violation of federal law to disobey a flight attendant? They are not trained law enforcement officers. They are flight attendants. On a normal flight they show people how to operate a seatbelt, point vaguely at areas that may or may not be exits, bring people food and drink, collect trash, make people put their seats in the upright position and say goodbye to passengers when they leave the plane. But if a passenger doesn’t follow the instructions of the flight attendant they have committed a federal crime. It is absurd.
