President Donald John Trump tweeted that his campaign was “wiretapped” by President Barack Obama’s administration. The mainstream media, the Democrats and even a bunch of Republicans said Trump was paranoid and wrong.
In non-tweet terms, where there is no limit on the number of characters, it was explained that, by “wiretapped,” Trump meant electronic surveillance.
The word from the authorities who are supposed to know this kind of thing was that there were no Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants for Trump or his campaign.
Now, according to The Washington Post, which is hardly a Trump supporter, the FBI did get a FISA warrant to monitor Carter Page, an advisor to the Trump campaign.
It has also been revealed that Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice had Trump campaign staffers unmasked when they were intercepted talking to foreigners. It is legal for the US government to listen in on foreign communications, but when an American citizen’s communications are intercepted the identity of the American is supposed to be masked and only referred to as Citizen 1, Citizen 2 and so forth.
This was not done if the citizen happened to work for Trump.
So we now know the Obama administration did get a FISA warrant to listen to one Trump advisor and unmasked the other members of the Trump campaign when they were speaking to Russians and possibly people of other nationalities.
So Trump was right.
I suppose it is no surprise that the mainstream media are not reporting that it was wrong and Trump was right and that his campaign really was under surveillance by the Obama administration.
It might not be so bad if Obama had not participated in the campaign to replace him, but Obama did not sit this one out as many lame duck presidents have. Obama was actively and aggressively campaigning for Hillary Clinton in public and behind the scenes, using the power of the presidency to spy on her opponent.
It’s beginning to look a lot like an abuse of power.
President Richard Nixon was forced to resign because some people working for his campaign tried to bug Democratic National Committee headquarters. Spy technology has improved tremendously since then and you no longer have to actually bug people – their communications can be pulled out of the air. But does that make it acceptable to spy on the opposing party’s presidential campaign?
The conclusion of The Washington Post was that this was further proof that Trump was working with the Russians.
But what seems to be lost in all of this is that it is not illegal for an American, even an American working on a presidential campaign, to communicate with a foreigner, even a Russian. Americans working on presidential campaigns don’t give up their right to free speech.
You can rest assured that if the Obama administration had found any evidence of improper communications, we would have all known about it during the campaign.
Page, for instance, had worked in Moscow for several years. It is not the least bit unusual that he would still communicate and have business dealings with people in Moscow, and most of the people in Moscow are Russians.
As the evidence piles up, it appears that Trump was right. His campaign was being surveilled and the Obama administration was doing it.
*****
It’s shocking, utterly shocking that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons on his own people, including small children and babies. Not because Assad wouldn’t do that kind of thing – because we all know he has in the past – but because the Obama administration made a deal with Assad and Assad assured Obama that all his chemical weapons had been shipped out of the country.
It’s incredible to imagine that Assad would not only use chemical weapons on his own people, he but that he would lie to Obama.
The deal was that Obama wouldn’t bomb Syria if Assad turned over all his chemical weapons to Russia, and it turns out this evil dictator, who has no problem killing and torturing people, wasn’t completely honest.
I hate to say it, but it makes me wonder if there is any possibility that the Iranians also lied to Obama and his super negotiator John Kerry about their nuclear weapons program.
At the time, Obama and Kerry said that wasn’t possible because safeguards had been put in place where the Iranians would inspect their own facilities and report if they were violating the agreement. It actually makes sense for the Iranians, who are already there to inspect their own facilities, as long as they are honest. But now that we have discovered that Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin lied to Obama, it seems a possibility that the Iranians may have lied to Obama also.
It makes you wonder why in the world Trump ever wanted to be president. Personally I think it was because he thought he could save America. But considering what a mess Obama made of the world while he was president, you have to wonder. The most powerful man in the world can create a multitude of problems in eight years, and Obama did that.
*****
Isn’t it great when your opponent does exactly what you want them to do?
Nothing could be better for Republicans in Congress than to have the filibuster go away. The Democrats removed the filibuster for the appointment of federal judges, other than Supreme Court justices. It allowed Obama to appoint a host of extremely left-wing judges across the country.
Now, with the filibuster gone for Supreme Court appointments, when Trump gets another appointment, he won’t have to worry about the Democrats at all. He can appoint a justice just as conservative as the Republicans in the Senate will allow him to appoint.
It’s going to be a whole different ballgame, and it actually levels the playing field because, while the Republicans were largely playing by the rules and voting for judges based on their qualifications, not their political beliefs, the Democrats used their friends in the media to create such a furor over conservative judges that Republicans were forced to find judges who they thought were conservative but had no record.
It’s how now retired Justice David Souter got on the court. He didn’t have much of a paper trail, but, as it turned out, if he had had a record it would have been a liberal one.
*****
When I first heard about the US Tomahawk missile attack on a Syrian air base, I thought, at last we have a president who understands that it isn’t enough to be the most powerful nation in the world if you never use that power.
Obama said he would attack Syria when they used chemical weapons but didn’t. Trump didn’t say much but did.
However, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, along with the twin senators from the Trump-hater club, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, also came out in favor of the strike, it did make me wonder.
I suppose it falls under the monkey at a typewriter rule. If you get in front of television cameras every day, eventually the law of averages is going to catch up with you and you are going to say something that makes sense. Just like monkeys at a typewriter for infinity would at some point type War and Peace, or so the story goes.
*****
The Republicans – who now control the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, and with the appointment of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch now have a tenuous, narrow majority on the Supreme Court – are nevertheless being thwarted by the vast number of federal district court and courts of appeals judges appointed by Obama.
Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did away with the filibuster on all judicial appointments, except the Supreme Court, in order for Obama to pack the lower courts with judges so liberal that the Republicans would probably not have allowed a vote on them under the old filibuster rule.
The result is exactly what Reid, Obama and the rest of the far left, including the mainstream media, wanted. Just one example is that these courts have decided that drawing legislative district lines that favor the Republican Party are unconstitutional.
It is rather incredible that in the 240-year history of this country, previous judges have been unable to find this in the Constitution, but these liberal judges see it clear as day.
Federal judges are appointed for life and cannot be fired. They can, however, be impeached. But there is a far better way to deal with the problem that the federal courts are far more liberal than the population.
The Supreme Court is established by the Constitution, but all lower federal courts are created by Congress. If the Republicans in Congress would get their act together, which doesn’t seem likely, they could abolish all federal courts other than the Supreme Court and reestablish an entirely new system.
If Congress doesn’t want to go that far, it could abolish all the circuit courts of appeals and establish new ones, with all of the judges appointed by Trump. There is nothing in the Constitution that states the US will be divided into 13 judicial districts with a federal court of appeals for each district.
The Republicans could decide that all the current courts of appeals should be abolished and replaced with 10 district courts of appeals, or 20 courts of appeals, or that there should be two different levels of federal appeals courts, or that there should be no courts of appeals and all appeals should go directly to the Supreme Court.
A great argument can be made for it even if you ignore politics entirely. The circuits certainly don’t make any sense based on population. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals covers California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska and Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. The district has a population of over 61 million. The First Circuit Court of Appeals covers Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island and has a population of about 14 million people.
North Carolina is in the 4th Circuit along with South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. It has a population of about 30 million.
In other words, the districts wildly vary in population, and since the Supreme Court only hears a small percentage of the cases that are appealed to it, the courts of appeals have the final say in the interpretation of most federal law.
The 9th Circuit is therefore far more powerful than any other circuit, establishing federal law for about 20 percent of the nation.
It really doesn’t make any sense and should be fixed. Plus, if it were fixed, Trump could not rehire the liberal judges appointed by Democratic presidents but rehire the conservative judges, plus hire a whole bunch more conservative judges to fill vacant seats.
The liberals would howl about how unfair it is, and the mainstream media would howl the loudest, but it might bring some sanity back to the court system.
*****
Driving around last Saturday, I was trying to find something to listen to on the radio. What I found was that on commercial radio – the radio paid for by advertisers – I heard a lot of praise of Trump’s attack on Syria. On government radio – radio paid for by our tax dollars – I found nothing but people making fun of Trump.
On the government radio there wasn’t once nice word about Trump, so why in the world do I have to pay for the liberal Democrats to have airtime?
When liberal Democrats have tried radio talk shows they have failed. It seems the only way the liberals can get the money to broadcast their views over the radio airwaves is by forcing people like me, who disagree with most of what we hear, to pay for it with our taxes.
It’s a crazy system. I can see why Obama and the Democrats in Congress wanted to fund National Public Radio (NPR), but I can’t see any reason it should continue with Republicans in complete control of the government. If the roles were reversed, and NPR was conservative, Obama and the Democrats would have cut off funding on Jan. 20, 2009, when they had complete control of the federal government.
Why do the Republicans even need to discuss it? Pull the funding. Let NPR become what it claims to be – “listener supported radio.” If listeners truly want to support it, I’m all for it. But I don’t think one dime of my federal, state or local taxes should go to support liberal propaganda radio.
*****
The mainstream media are inclined to refer to illegal immigrants as simply immigrants. This is similar to calling shoplifters shoppers.
Legal immigrants jump through a lot of hoops to immigrate to the US. Many wait for years and fill out countless forms and pay big bucks for the privilege of living and working in the US.
Illegal immigrants don’t. They ignore the laws of the US and sneak across the border. The fact that they haven’t been caught and forced to return to their homes doesn’t make them legal anymore than a shoplifter who isn’t caught didn’t commit a crime.
Sanctuary cities maintain that violating federal law by coming to this country illegally is not a crime.
It is a crime. It is a crime that the Obama administration chose to ignore, but it is a crime nonetheless.
If Obama had treated shoppers and shoplifters alike, it wouldn’t mean that the shoplifters weren’t committing a crime. And the fact that Obama chose not to enforce federal laws on immigration in no way means that the people who entered this country illegally and are living here illegally, enjoying the economy that our laws have created, are not committing a crime every day they remain here.
The number of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border has fallen to less than half of what it was while Obama was president. As more people who are caught are sent home, it will drop further.
Then Trump has the issue of what to do with the illegal immigrants who are here and have been here for years, decades in some cases.
The question is, why should someone who violated the laws of this country and came here illegally be moved to the front of the immigration line ahead of the people who are attempting to immigrate here legally.
*****
In North Carolina last year, Sen. Richard Burr and his opponent, Deborah Ross, spent a measly $27 million combined on the race. In the Florida race, where Sen. Marco Rubio was elected, about $70 million was spent.
The Florida race at present is the most expensive in history, but you can expect that to fall by the wayside in 2018. With the nuclear option now in play for all judicial appointments and budget bills, you can expect Senate races to get a whole lot more expensive.
Only a few years ago, the US Senate was a gentlemen’s club, where everyone obeyed arcane rules, and those rules mainly worked to keep the Senate from doing anything. The minority had nearly as much power as the majority because a minority of 40 could block bills and appointments. To get a bill passed or someone appointed required a supermajority of 60 votes.
If the Republicans are smart they will move heaven and earth not to lose their majority and the Democrats who are smart will do everything in their power to get it back.
*****
The liberals are so much better at public relations than conservatives, or maybe they are better liars, which is a large part of public relations anyway.
But look at the illegal immigrant issue. The liberals have dropped the illegal part and, if you are opposed to illegal immigrants, presto change-o, you are opposed to all immigration, and “my parents or grandparents were immigrants and they were good hardworking Americans” is the argument you keep hearing.
Climate change is an even better example. If you don’t believe that man is causing the climate to change then you don’t believe in climate change and are a complete idiot. It’s wonderfully deceptive.
Remember Vice President Al Gore called it global warming, but then there was this little issue that the globe didn’t warm for about 18 years, which is a little hard to explain since man was producing greenhouse gases at the highest rate in history.
But climate change is a brilliant term. The climate is constantly changing and, guess what, animals become extinct. Entire species died out before man was even man. So we can’t be blamed for that.
Here’s another one. I don’t think the liberals invented this one because it is universally used, but the term “scrubbers” for the process of cleaning up the pollution from a coal plant is misleading.
Scrubbers sound like something you put in the smoke stack. I always think of huge brushes like people used to get down on their knees and scrub floors with.
A scrubber is a factory that processes the smoke and turns it into mostly harmless gases. Scrubbers take up a lot of space and are hugely complicated and expensive. The industry should have used some really long complicated expensive sounding word.
*****
This is just too silly for words. Now that Obama has been out of office for months, the liberal media are going back and actually fact checking the comments made by his disciples like Susan Rice and former Secretary of State John Kerry.
Of course, while Obama was still in the White House, Obama and his people could say whatever they wanted. Rice famously said the 13-hour-long, well-planned attack on the two US compounds in Benghazi, using heavy machine guns and mortars in addition to small arms, was the work of a spontaneous mob angry about a YouTube video.
Three years later, long after the possibility of causing any political damage to Obama is long gone, The Washington Post found the need to go back and fact check a statement Rice made in 2014, which was laughably false on its face at the time, and did award it four Pinocchios.
Maybe now The Washington Post will go back and fact check some of Obama’s big whoppers while he was president.
The idea that Syria had gotten rid of its chemical weapons, even the “known” chemical weapons, is dumb and based on the belief that the American people are stupid. Chemical weapons are not difficult to produce once the system is set up. What difference does it make how much they turn over to international authorities to destroy? They can make more.
*****
Since the November election – where the Republicans, despite the media predicting just the opposite, won just about every competitive race – the Democrats have done what politicians do. They have turned toward the people, which means they have moved right.
Obama was an anomaly in many ways. People voted for him because they liked him, liked the fact that he was black and thought he would be good for the country. Because, really, how many people could have voted for his policies? The first time he ran his slogan was “Hope and Change.” What kind of change? “Change you can believe in.” I wonder what historians are going to do with that in 50 years. But that doesn’t matter because it worked.
So the country elected a president in 2008 who turned out to be far to the left of most of the country. Obama moved back toward the middle for the 2012 election and managed to beat a terribly flawed Republican candidate. (A Republican candidate who can win a statewide race in Massachusetts is not going to appeal to the right-wing voters in the Republican Party.)
So we ended up with Obama for another four years, and without another election in his future Obama could be as liberal as he wanted, which turned out to be extremely liberal.
Having open borders is an extremely liberal position, and by administrative decrees and executive orders Obama was able to accomplish that. It appeared his goal was to get so many illegal immigrants in this country that they couldn’t be sent home.
Hillary Clinton is a horrible candidate, and then she was stuck defending Obama’s positions.
So the American people turned to the Republicans in a big way. Not just Trump, but in congressional races all over the country the Republicans won, as well as in the Senate races.
People seem obsessed with Trump, but it wasn’t just Trump. Voters all over the country elected Republicans to represent them.
Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the Democrats who did get elected turned right, and the ones now out in far left field are the media and the Hollywood crazies.
The media are far left of the mainstream Democratic Party. Look what happened after Trump ordered the missile attack on Syria. Both the House minority leader and the Senate minority leader supported it.
The mainstream media are absolutely against America using its enormous military power to try and effect change in the world. They believe in the Obama principle – talk softly and leave the big stick at home. But even Obama knew that he had to pretend to do something to defeat ISIS, so he had a bunch of US planes flying around with a lot of bombs that they didn’t drop.
But Obama wouldn’t even go after the oil production that was funding ISIS because it would cause environmental problems. When Russia got involved, Russian President Vladimir Putin took out the oil production in a matter of weeks. If you look back, it was after Russia destroyed the ISIS oil production and transportation facilities that ISIS started losing more battles than it was winning.
Obama wouldn’t even allow oil tanker trucks to be bombed unless leaflets were dropped first to alert the drivers that their trucks were going to be destroyed because, in Obama’s world, just because someone is working for ISIS and providing them with the means to torture and kill people doesn’t mean they are terrorists. It’s like not stopping the getaway car in a bank robbery gone bad because the driver of the car didn’t actually shoot anybody. And the mainstream media ate this crazy philosophy up.
*****
The fact checker scam by the mainstream media is so good that I’m thinking about starting a Rhino fact checker. Using the same techniques I think we could prove that anyone who said Earth was round, not flat, is a total liar, or even that water doesn’t boil at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. I think given time I could prove that water isn’t wet and deserts are not dry.
The Washington Post Fact Checker awarded Trump one Pinocchio for his statements that the drop in illegal immigration has been 64 percent.
Fact Checker states, “The 64 percent figure he uses is the total number of people apprehended or ‘deemed inadmissible’ at the southwest border in March 2017 (16,600) compared to the total number in March 2016 (46,150).”
The fact that what he said is true really doesn’t matter to the Fact Checker. One of the reasons it’s considered “shading of the fact” is that Trump didn’t say how he was responsible for the drop.
In other words, there is nothing wrong with the statement itself but Trump said it so it can’t be true, and the Fact Checker, to his credit, found a different way to look at the numbers where the statement wouldn’t be true.
Let’s go back the water-boiling example. Imagine if Trump in a speech said that water boiled at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and Fact Checker checks it and rates it as one Pinocchio because water only boils at 212 at sea level. In Denver, water boils at about 202 degrees, depending on what part of Denver you are in.
So clearly, if Trump said that water boiled at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, he would be accused of “shading the facts.”
If Obama had said that water boiled at 202 degrees, the Fact Checker would, however, have rated that as absolutely true because it is true in Denver, and although Obama didn’t say Denver in his statement, Fact Checker would be certain it was an inadvertent slip of the tongue and not substantive.
I continue to marvel at the brilliance of the fact checker scam because people buy it.
*****
According to the mainstream media, the Trump administration is bogged down with filling positions in the federal government. Trump has said, but evidently the mainstream media didn’t hear, that he doesn’t plan to fill many of the positions left vacant by Obama appointees.
If Trump does what he says he’s going to do and reduces the size of the federal government, it doesn’t make sense to fill every assistant under deputy position. The idea is that some of those positions won’t be needed because the divisions that they were going to head won’t exist or will be folded into another division.
If you appoint an assistant under deputy then you have someone on the inside lobbying for all the positions in that division to be filled.
Trump has said often that he thinks the federal government is administration heavy, so it fits with his philosophy to cut from the top.
*****
United Airlines got caught in a situation of being penny wise and pound foolish.
The airline offered passengers $800 to get off the flight from Chicago to Louisville and nobody took them up on it. Considering the amount of bad publicity and the amount they will eventually have to pay the Louisville doctor they forcibly removed from the plane bleeding, it would have been much wiser to offer $1,000, $2,000 or even $10,000 to get four people to leave the flight.
Nobody can do anything about corporations that have no consideration for their customers, but there is something about this entire situation that can be fixed. For some reason United Airlines was able to use local law enforcement to enforce what was an administrative decision.
There was no safety threat here. No one was going to be arrested. No laws had been broken. So why were the taxpayers footing the bill for United Airlines to enforce its policy on its own customers?
If United wants to throw customers off a plane, let United use its own people to throw them off the plane. There is no reason for government employees to get involved in enforcing an administrative decision by a private company.
I can’t imagine a ticket agent or a flight attendant wrestling the guy out of his seat, hitting him in the face or banging his head against something so that he was bleeding and then dragging him off the plane.
If United Airlines can’t enforce its own policies then perhaps it needs to change its policies.
