The “Trump Jr.” story is evolving into a story of *Democrat* collusion with Russia.

• We learned yesterday that Natalia Veselnitskaya is basically a Democrat activist (as well as anti-Magnitsky) and in 2015, the Obama administration moved Heaven and Earth to get Veselnitskaya into the U.S.

  Why would Democrats want her to meet (under false pretenses or whatever) with the Trump campaign? Well…

• Loretta Lynch allegedly wiretapped Manafort’s phone during the Trump Jr. meeting. If true, it would be illegal wiretapping; in June 2016, the Obama administration had not yet gotten the FISA warrant(s) to do surveillance on the Trump campaign.
• Was Fusion GPS (hired by Democrats to get the infamous, fake “Trump dossier” going) present at the meeting, as part of Natalia Veselnitskaya’s party? Why, yes they were. From the same link:
  

  The meeting included Donald Trump Jr., Manafort, Jared Kushner, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Fusion GPS associate Rinat Akhmetshin – a Russian-American lobbyist who confirmed today that he was present during the June 2016 sit-down.

  Incidentally, Akhmetsin was an unregistered Russian lobbyist working against the Magnitsy Act – same as Veselnitskaya and, for that matter, same position on the Magnitsky Act (against it) as Hillary Clinton.

• Is Fusion GPS now lawyering up? Possibly.
  

  Fusion GPS, the firm behind the discredited 35 page Trump-Russia ‘dossier,’ was co-founded by Glenn Simpson, who abruptly canceled his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week in light of recent events linking the democrat opposition research firm to a second attempt to take down the Trumps.

  Also discussed in this article.

• For fun: In 1996, Time magazine openly cheered U.S. interference in Russian elections.

Scott Adams has dubbed the Trump Jr scandal #NothingGate – There’s nothing there, but it sure is terrible.

We all know the signs. A couple hours ago, MSNBC was quoting campaign finance law about how campaigns are not supposed to take foreign contributions.

FOR REAL. Yes, I Laughed Out Loud. Right in front of everybody at the gym.

The law clearly talks about money and OBJECTS (the ordinary meaning of “things”) of value. Here is what they were quoting:

A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election.

First, the words are written *on the foreign national*. Second: Only in a McCarthy-ite, Salem Witch Hunt world could the words be stretched to cover knowledge (which, in the context of a campaign, is called opposition research). AND…AND…AND…IF the words are indeed to be stretched so very far, then Hillary’s campaign was equally-or-even-more guilty.

Seriously…Are these people thinking at all? Well, we know they’re not. This is “what insanity looks like”. These people aren’t following any rational thought process.

Why would they not? The obvious reason: Deflection. Distraction.

• Let’s not talk about Hillary’s campaign violations.
• Let’s not talk about her campaign’s meetings with officials of a foreign government, in an effort to obtain valuable knowledge (or opposition research) on her opponent from those foreign officials.
• Let’s not talk about all the Saudi money (which would be illegal indeed) in her campaign.
• Let’s not talk about the Hillary campaign’s documented, illegal levels of collusion with the media.
• Let’s not talk about all the Fake News, “Hillary is ahead!” and “Hillary is a lock to win!”, that the media perpetrated to try to depress Republican/Trump voter turnout.
• Let’s not talk about the basic fact that she was a terrible candidate – and she lost.
• Let’s not talk about the massive Clinton Foundation corruption.
• Let’s not talk about Hillary’s collusion in giving Russia 20% of America’s uranium supply, apparently in exchange for hefty speaking fees and other yuge donations.
• Let’s not talk about her campaign chair, John Podesta, and his brother being on Russia’s payroll for years.
• Let’s not talk about Hillary and the Obama administration colluding to obstruct justice, in the Hillary e-mail investigation.
• Let’s not talk about the indictments coming, hopefully, for James “Leaker” Comey.
• Let’s not talk about the unbelievable scandal of the Obama administration spying on domestic political opponents. And the intelligence agencies going along with it.
• Let’s not talk about the fact that the entire “Russia hacking narrative” has been a lie from minute one and, accordingly, the leadership of U.S. intelligence agencies are seriously politicized and compromised, meaning President Trump had better clean house – for America’s good.
• Let’s not talk about the Trump administration’s progress and successes.
• No, no, no. Deflect, deny, distract, handwave, keep screaming “Trump!!!!1!”

Fortunately, none of this needs to matter. The Controlled Media, the Left, and the “political class” have lost a lot of power. What we’re seeing now are the throes of their cognitive dissonance; their refusal to believe it. Having done nothing whatsoever wrong in this matter, Trump – and Trump Jr. – need only stay strong and clear-headed, and they will survive; and survival is victory.

My one, little doubt about this situation would be: Whether they will stay strong? We shall see. I know, I know…their track record argues that they will.

At a U.S. college, mobs of neo-Nazi alt-Right fascist thugs have been roaming the campus, smashing windows and bashing people they disagree with. Kristallnacht!

Except that it’s Evergreen College and actually, it’s mobs of leftie fascist thugs roaming the campus, smashing windows and bashing people they disagree with.

Weinstein, the professor at the center of the sh*t storm, is claiming some students were even hit, but says they won’t report it to the police.

Why is this not national news? One guess…

A few other items for you that touch upon the theme of immoral left-wingers and/or watching left-wingers’ heads explode, while the media focus strangely on other things.

• The House Oversight Committee states that, yes, President Obama and AG Holder obstructed investigation of Fast and Furious and, per Fox, “tried to hide the facts from the loved ones of slain Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.”
  

  “The Department of Justice and ATF had no intention of looking for honest answers and being transparent,” said Grassley, now chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a staunch supporter of whistleblowers.

  “In fact, from the onset, bureaucrats employed shameless delay tactics to obstruct the investigation.”

  ATF Agent John Dodson, one of those whistleblowers, confirmed Grassley’s testimony. He relayed to the Committee that the [Obama] DOJ has “tried to discredit him by subjecting him to internal investigations, putting him under surveillance, denying him promotions and ostracizing him.”

  RTWT.

• Courtney Love calls Linda Sarsour “a vile disgrace to women and all mankind.”
• Trump’s judicial nominations: Another thing he’s doing right.

Bonus item: France says no trace of Russia hacking Macron.

The head of the French government’s cyber security agency, which investigated leaks from President Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign, says they found no trace of a notorious Russian hacking group behind the attack.

About a month ago, I had noted the eagerness (and absurdity) of U.S. media in accusing Russia.

Making a pitch for Democratic candidates in 2014, President Obama told big donors in California Thursday night that Democrats favor free-market solutions and less government regulation.

“It turns out we’re pretty common-sense folks,” Mr. Obama said at a fundraiser at a private home in Palo Alto, Calif. “We believe in the free market [and] a light touch when it comes to regulations.”

This, like pretty much everything else that comes out of his pie-hole, was a big fat lie.

President Barack Obama’s last year in office set a high watermark for new federal rules and regulations as the outgoing Democrat sought to leave his mark on the country through a “pen and phone” strategy.

The total number of Federal Register pages in 2016 rose nearly 20 percent to 95,894, the most ever, and the number of final rules, at 3,853, was the most since 2005, according to a new report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Democrats once claimed not to be socialists (they claim that much less these days). They made this claim on the thin reed that since the state had not officially taken over all industry, they weren’t really practicing socialism.

But if the Government is micromanaging via regulation every decision a business can make… hiring, firing, location of capital assets, the form and specification of products … then what is the difference, really?

Sadly, the Republican half of the Washington Uniparty has shown only the most modest inclination to rein in these regulatory abuses.

Yet another story that should be all over the media, but I haven’t seen it much. (If you have, let me know.)

Why wouldn’t it be covered? I find that it reflects great discredit on the Establishment (both political parties, Deep State and Controlled Media). As I started to say yesterday, they have ways to decide what you’re going to hear about. For as long as they can, they will bury stories that don’t fit their agenda.

To review some background:

• Under the 4th Amendment, the government isn’t supposed to spy on U.S. people without a court-ordered warrant.
• “The FISA Court” is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 “to oversee requests for surveillance warrants against foreign spies inside the United States by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” (Wiki)
  Note, foreign.
• But FISA Court hearings are secret and only the government and the court judge are present, like a kangaroo court. The adversarial system is abandoned.
• As such, FISA tends to be very lenient to the government. Over time, they have created a secret body of law that gives the government sweeping powers to do domestic warrantless surveillance under an alleged “special needs exception” to the 4th Amendment.
• One example – In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked a FISA order that requires phone companies to provide a daily, ongoing feed of everyone’s phone call data to the NSA. Super invasive!
• Even so, FISA isn’t toothless and doesn’t approve everything – as you shall see. They need to preserve respectability, at least in their own eyes.
• FISA judges are appointed solely by the Chief Justice of the United States. In this regard, Establishment Republicans control the FISA court.

That’s just background. Now for the news, as reported by John Solomon and Sara Carter at Circa.com.

Under President Obama, the NSA secretly conducted years of surveillance and searches on Americans that not even the secret, super-lenient FISA Court would approve.

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community…

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm…

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.

The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true…

The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself…

RTWT. Naturally, the NSA is scrambling to reassure people that it has fixed the problem. Riiiiiiiight. And Susan Rice didn’t lie and none of the surveillance data was ever misused against Obama opponents or improperly unmasked. Riiiiiiiight.

To people who understand civil liberties and limited government, all this is a huge deal that shows how far out of control the U.S. “intelligence community” (Deep State) has gotten. Chris Farrell at Judicial Watch compares it to President Lincoln’s suspension of habeus corpus during the U.S. Civil War.

Where is the Special Counsel on this?

Or the media coverage? Bush’s NSA did some illegal surveillance in the 2000s – and in 2005, was duly slammed by The New York Times. A large kerfuffle. “But that was then.” It served the interests of someone powerful – someone in deep alliance with, or control of, The New York Times – to weaken Bush. Not so much with Obama, eh?

See the FISA Court’s declassified order spanking the Obama administration, here. By the way, note how large sections of the relevant law and dockets are blacked out, showing how the FISA system has created secret law that the citizens aren’t supposed to know about. That’s horrible.

Also from Circa: Comey’s FBI was neck deep in the abuses.

The FBI has illegally shared raw intelligence about Americans with unauthorized third parties and violated other constitutional privacy protections, according to newly declassified government documents that undercut the bureau’s public assurances…

Anthony Weiner is to plead guilty “to a single charge of transferring obscene material to a minor, pursuant to a plea agreement…”

This is the same Anthony Weiner who

• is still married to Hillary Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin
• had thousands of Hillary Clinton’s illegally-handled emails on the same laptop that he used to commit his sex crimes with minors
• caused former FBI Director Comey to reappear in the news last October, which many Democrats believe (probably wrongly) to be the cause of Hillary’s election loss.

It’s sad how Clintonites deflect the blame to Comey and Russia for all that, rather than putting it where it belongs on Weiner, Abedin and the Clintons themselves.

“A likely result of the plea is that Mr. Weiner would end up as a registered sex offender, although a final determination has yet to be made…”

UPDATE: Huma has finally just filed for divorce.

In other news, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange Rape Investigation Is Dropped in Sweden.

The accusations were always of a “he said, she said” nature, with Assange saying that he had met the alleged victim several times amicably, for consensual sex.

The announcement represents a victory for Mr. Assange, 45, an Australian…

[but] In Britain, he still faces a warrant for failing to appear in court, and the Metropolitan Police in London said on Friday that they would arrest Mr. Assange, who has maintained his innocence, if he were to try to leave the [Ecuadorian] embassy…

[U.S.] Prosecutors have long been exploring the idea of charging Mr. Assange as a conspirator in the underlying offense of illegal theft of documents…

[but] The Obama-era Justice Department, which had gone as far as to present some evidence about WikiLeaks to a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., was deterred from pursuing the case further because it proved difficult to distinguish what WikiLeaks had done in publishing the classified information provided by Ms. Manning from what The New York Times and many other mainstream news organizations do.

Most news organizations that cover national security and foreign affairs regularly publish information from sources that is considered classified by the United States government. By long-established tradition, however, only the government officials who provide such information have been prosecuted, not the journalists who publish it.

IN STILL OTHER NEWS: Evidence has emerged that, while still just a candidate, the President conspired with Iranian mullahs to undermine the foreign policy of the existing administration. Which meets a reasonable definition of treason!

Oh, wait – it was President Obama, while still just a candidate, conspiring with Iranian mullahs to undermine the foreign policy of the Bush administration. And lefties haven’t given the tiniest crap about it.

The unimportant Stephen Colbert makes a fact-free slam about President Trump fellating Vladimir Putin. Nothing worth mentioning, there.

He imagines that he’s being relevant or edgy or manly. Still nothing worth mentioning.

People ask what would happen if any comedian made such a slam on President Obama (who, in a most embarrassing moment in 2012, promised the Russians to be nicer than he was letting on with American voters). Example #1,234,511,998 to point out the Left’s double standards. True, but still not much to mention.

Then #FireColbert becomes a thing as people start noticing that Colbert’s slur was essentially, um, homophobic.

Taking double standards to a new low, left-wing celebrities defend Colbert’s slur. (Among them, the execrable George Takei.)

Predictably, Colbert claims the devil made him do it (Trump).

What happens next?

I meant to do this awhile back, updating previous posts in the series.

When President Obama left office on January 20, 2017, the U.S. national debt was $19.9 trillion. ($14.4 trillion held by the public; $5.5 trillion “intragovernmental”, for example, Treasury bonds held by Social Security.)

When Obama took office on January 20, 2009, the U.S. national debt was $10.6 trillion. ($6.3 trillion held by the public; $4.3 intragovernmental)

Obama more-than-doubled the part of the U.S. national debt that everyone agrees is important (what’s “held by the public”). And he nearly doubled the total.

And for what? Eight years of the weakest economy “recovery” on record.

Remember how we always suspected the Obama Administration was cooking the books on the unemployment numbers? We pretty much have confirmation on that.  This whistleblower tried to blow the whistle on data falsification at the Obama Department of Commerce, and was punished for it.

Let’s look at the one case that set Butler off — the cheating done by Buckmon, who is now deceased.

Buckmon would complete more than 100 cases in 10 days — more than three times his peers.

It turns out that Buckmon wasn’t actually surveying people. He was making up data and collecting overtime to account for the time it would have taken to get those interviews.

And this one man alone was cheating on such a large scale that it could affect the national jobless numbers since the bureau’s Current Population Survey is scientifically weighted and each response counts as 5,000 households.

So Buckmon’s 100 cases equaled 500,000 households — and he wasn’t the only one caught faking data, Butler said.

Last Tuesday, Obama gave his “farewell” address, which prompted all sorts of ridiculous, weepy posts from Obama supporters about how “classy” he was and how much they would miss him, and how his administration was “scandal-free.” Needless to say, these folks will remain clueless as to why Trump won in November as long as they put Obama on a pedestal. Most of us don’t remember the last eight years with any fondness at all. Instead, we remember a thin-skinned, spiteful, petty man who always had his mind set on one thing, and that was advancing his own power and his party’s grip on power.

Back in October 2013, I wrote a post where I called Obama’s administration the Dawn Davenport Presidency, and it has remained as true in the intervening years as it was then. At the time, I used the website meme creator to create a meme which I considered using to illustrate that post, but I didn’t post it at the time. Now that there are only five days remaining in Obama’s second term, I am bringing it back, because it provides one explanation for what happened with the voters in 2016.

Of course, this election was also about Hillary Clinton.

In the past week, there has been a lot of buzz about Meryl Streep’s harangue at the Golden Globe Awards. Over the summer, though, Streep also attracted attention for two things, her film about Florence Foster Jenkins, and her deranged appearance during her speech at the Democrat National Convention in August. The Jenkins film was what interested me, though, because it seemed to offer a perfect metaphor for Clinton’s political career. Florence Foster Jenkins was famous for having a tin ear and little talent in her chosen field. She benefited largely from her husband’s connections.

Last February at ZeroHedge, I saw a great post outlining Hillary Clinton’s Six Foreign Policy Catastrophes where a commenter named Elliott Eldrich memorably declared: “Hillary’s greatest ability is her uncanny talent for producing the most wretched results imaginable, and then loudly claiming how amazing her accomplishments are. I believe it’s because she somehow manages to convince herself of this first, which makes selling it to others all the easier. She’s the Florence Foster Jenkins of statecraft.”
(more…)

I hope future readers (if any) realize that the title is ironic. Left-liberals claim that we’re living in a climate of hate. If we are: It’s the hatred that is spewed by America’s Left.

First: Yesterday, President Obama clarified that he will NOT call off the anti-Trump protestors.

“I would not advise people who feel strongly or are concerned about some of the issues that have been raised over the course of the campaign, I would not advise them to be silent,” Obama said during a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Obama said protests are just something Trump would have to get used to as the leader of the free world.

“I’ve been the subject of protests during the course of my eight years,” he said. “And I suspect that there’s not a president in our history that hasn’t been subject to these protests.”

…Obama [said] that the right of free speech should be exercised…

Let’s be clear: This is beyond baloney. Obama never faced protests where conservatives smashed windows, set fires, and physically attacked his supporters in the streets. Destroying property and people isn’t “free speech”.

As lefties told everyone last spring, when the Left’s paid agitators were trying to foment violence at Trump rallies: The leader’s duty to denounce the violence and insist on peaceful speech/protest from his supporters. That is Obama’s duty, now. Once more, the clown Obama disgraces America and himself.

And by the way: Obama didn’t face protestors in any number, until long after he was sworn in and did some (bad) things. While we’re at it, Merkel’s Germany does not let German citizens have free speech. The article describes Germans who were threatened with jail for criticizing Germany’s refugee influx on social media. Pathetic!

Some other items:

• Bernie Sanders calls on Democratic Party to recognize the despair of people in the working, middle classes. But wait…That would require Democrats to recognize the truth, that Obama was a poor President whose economic “recovery” is a sham.
• Staying on economics: Is Trump already saving U.S. jobs? Ford advises Trump that they’ve cancelled plans to move jobs to Mexico.
• How Queen Cersei Lost, part 99: Nelsonville, OH voted for Obama by huge margins – then flipped to Trump. Trigger warning: it’s a PuffHo link. But no stupid “racism” accusations; it’s a pretty good article.
• Piers Morgan explains to millenials what losing is. “So suck it up you squealing softies, get back to work or college, and if you want to win next time, get a candidate who’s a winner not a loser.”

  For reals – It seems like another good article. Shocking, because I remember Piers as one of the Left’s smuggest pompous asses. Is he joking here? Or has he changed?

• Walter Olson has a worthwhile column: No, Trump won’t roll back gay rights. “I was not a Trump backer… but [I] see the pattern. Since he began testing the political waters in the 1980s he has repeatedly and visibly distanced himself from the rut much of the GOP was mired in on [gay] issues.”

  Another one on gays and Trump, from Joseph R. Murray II.

Let’s catch up on how the left-wingers’ feared Climate of Hate is doing. Most of this is via Instapundit.

• President Obama in 2013: “You don’t like a particular policy or a particular president? Then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don’t break it. Don’t break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That’s not being faithful to what this country’s about.”

  Obama today? Kinda silent.

• Those lefties harrassing the Electoral College to get them to vote Hillary are doing it right… for Trump. Oh, so right!

  “They attack my religion, they attack my politics, they tell me that I must be a terrible father, I must be a terrible American, they use foul language — every swear word,” reported one. By the way, Politico published the list of electors.

• Americans’ confidence in Trump is growing. Coincidence?
• One libertarian has the right idea: He treats all this as a Teaching Moment to explain gun ownership and self-defense to liberals.
• The incomparable Mark Steyn rounds up a lot more. “Just a thought, but, if you keep insisting that half your fellow citizens are haters, maybe you’re the hater.”

And, to give credit where it’s due: Tom Hanks Breaks from Hollywood Pack and Says He Hopes Trump Does Well.

“This is the United States of America. We’ll go on. There’s great like-minded people out there who are Americans first and Republicans or Democrats second,” Hanks told THR. “I hope the president-elect does such a great job that I vote for his re-election in four years.”

UPDATE: Good read from J.C. Bourke, Why All The Hippies Morphed Into Campus Fascists.

How could Hillary of the House Clinton, First of her Name, Queen of the Little People and the Media, Protector of the Sixty States – have not been crowned?

Answer is below the fold. (more…)

When Mohammedan Democrat Omar Marteen committed mass murder at a gay disco in Orlando, Florida, the Obama Administration professed to have no clue about his motives. The media were fed a line that he literally had nothing to do with ISIS, and only declared himself a jihadist when he was on the phone to police. He had no prior links to ISIS, and they even floated the idea that he was an oppressed gay man who for some reason decided to shoot up a gay disco for reasons having nothing to do with Islam or terror.

And those who have believed every other lie the Obama Administration and its media surrogates have told them embraced this lie too.

Months after the fact, it comes out, in the form of one those Friday night document drops the regime uses when they wasnt to bury a story, that Omar Mateen had been heavily invested in ISIS propaganda for a long time.

The bulk of the evidence supporting the conclusion that Mateen was motivated by his support for ISIS wasn’t revealed until last week when Orlando authorities finally made Mateen’s phone conversations with police public in transcript form. From the Wall Street Journal:

Yo, the airstrike that killed Abu Wahid a few weeks ago—That’s what triggered it, okay?” he told the police negotiator, an apparent reference in the transcript to the Islamic State commander.

Abu Wahib, whose real name is Shaker Wahib al-Fahdawi, was known as one of the group’s more Internet-savvy leaders, often appearing in propaganda videos.

Only an “avid consumer” of Islamic State propaganda would know when Abu Wahib was killed, said Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

“This isn’t somebody who decided that night he was going to wrap his personal grievances around ISIS,” Mr. Hughes said.

Obama and the Democrat-Media Complex put out what they wanted to be true (“Nothing to do with Islam or terror, it was all about teh gunnz”) and the people who wanted to believe the Narrative — though it defied all reason and common sense — lapped it up.

But you knew that already.

The Obama administration is stonewalling the American people regarding the president’s illegal and increasingly suspicious Iransom payoff. The administration refuses to divulge any further information about the $1.7 billion the president acknowledges paying the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. Grilled on Wednesday about how Obama managed to pay the final $1.3 billion installment — particularly given the president’s claim that it is not possible to send Tehran a check or wire-transfer — State Department spokesman Mark Toner decreed that the administration would continue “withholding this information” in order “to protect confidentiality.”

And let’s not beat around the bush about it, the money Obama sent to Iran will be used to murder Americans and other innocent people. (Just like the guns he sent to the Mexican drug cartels were used to kill people. Obama just loves helping criminal gangs and terrorists kill people.)

The Democrat Media Complex has displayed a distinctive lack of curiosity about where the Obama Administration came up with the $1.7 Billion they sent to the Terror-Sponsoring, Islamist “Death to America” Regime in Tehran. But one reporter that still practices journalism (and not repackaging of DNC Talking Points) did some digging and discovered that… like Denny Hastert went to prison for… the Obama Administration structured payments to Iran to avoid congressional scrutiny.

In her New York Sun report on Monday, we learned that she hit pay dirt: stumbling upon a bizarre string of 13 identical money transfers of $99,999,999.99 each — yes, all of them one cent less than $100 million — paid out of an obscure Treasury Department stash known as the “Judgment Fund.” The transfers were made — to whom, it is not said — on January 19, just two days after the administration announced it had reached the $1.7 billion settlement with Iran. They aggregate to just 13 cents shy of $1.3 billion, the same amount the State Department claims Iran was owed in “interest” from the $400 million that our government had been holding since the shah deposited it in a failed arms deal just prior to the Khomeini revolution.

But paying off the world’s leading sponsors of terror using a structuring scheme other Americans have gone to prison for is perfectly all right when Obama does it because he supports gay marriage and transgender bathrooms. Am I right?

The size of the U.S. deficit isn’t the only thing they lie about. Unemployment is another.

Last week, The New York Times trumpeted, Jobs Roar Back With Gain of 287,000 in June, Easing Worry, with the official unemployment rate at 4.9%. Isn’t it wonderful?

“Wow, this one takes my breath away,” said Diane Swonk, an independent economist in Chicago.

Ooh, she’s “independent” – that makes her reaction valid! But here’s the real story.

• The same jobs report has downward-revised the previous months’ numbers (from bad to horrible).
• In the Bush years, the media would treat a jobs number in the 200k range as a crisis.
• The Obama so-called “recovery” is the Weakest. On. Record.
• Most of the jobs created in the Obama years, including the recent jobs report, are part-time and low-paying.
• In the Obama years, tens of millions of Americans have given up even hoping for a job. “Labor force participation” has plummeted to lows not seen since the 1970s.
• If we use the participation rate from early 2009 when Obama took office, the unemployment rate is 11%. (And that’s ignoring under-employment / the part-time jobs.)
• And no, the declining participation isn’t because “the Baby Boomers are retiring”. They’re not retiring. Under Obama, they can’t afford it. They’ve been coming out of retirement, to take those low-paying, part-time Obamajobs from young people.
• Young people face a crisis; many can’t get an entry-level job.

Perhaps this is why President Obama has the highest U.S. suicide rate in 30 years.

First, let’s do a National Debt update. You’ll see why, in a minute.

As of this day, the U.S. national debt is $19.3 trillion. ($13.9 trillion held by the public; $5.4 trillion “intragovernmental”, for example, Treasury bonds held by Social Security.)

When President Obama took over from President Bush, it was $10.6 trillion. ($6.3 trillion held by the public; $4.3 intragovernmental)

So, Obama has already more-than-doubled the part of the U.S. national debt that everyone agrees is important (what’s “held by the public”). And he’s on track to double the total, by the time he leaves office.

But there’s more. On this day 3 years ago, the total was $16.7 trillion. So, over the past 3 years, the U.S. operating deficit – the money that the U.S. Treasury actually had to borrow to pay for stuff – has been $2.6 trillion, or roughly $865 billion per year.

That’s funny because the three most recent U.S. budget deficits are supposed to be much smaller. 2014 – $483 billion, 2015 – $438 billion, 2016 – $616 billion; for a total of $1.5 trillion. (September-ending fiscal year means a 2-3 month shift from the dates I used above; but that does not alter the story drastically.)

What does it mean? It means they’re lying to us about the size of the U.S. budget deficit. And they’ve been lying for years, as I’ve blogged previously.

Oh, you could say “Come now, the accounting numbers are accurate, they’re just using some budget/accounting tricks to hide a big chunk of their spending-and-borrowing.” But I consider tricks to be lies. Don’t you?

According to left-wingers like MSNBC and Rachel Maddow, or even the Dear Leader Himself, His Dear Leadership has reduced the U.S. annual budget deficit by 2/3. No, pumpkins. It hasn’t. You lie.

President Obama teared up during a speech on gun control. I don’t think he’s cried like that since Reggie Love said, “It’s not you, it’s me…”

See that Putin? See that ISIS? Yeah, I bet they’re quaking in their boots.

Or laughing. Like they laughed at this.

He also denied once again that he was going to confiscate guns. You can file that promise between “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” and “Don’t be silly, it’s not like people with religious objections are going to be forced to participate in gay weddings.”

And that wasn’t the only lie in the speech today.

“A violent felon can buy the exact same weapon over the internet with no background check, no questions asked.”

Really? Please provide me with the URL of that website where it’s totally legal for a convicted felon to do that.

Update: The partisan hacks at Politifact rated the statement as “mostly true,” using tortured logic that amounts to “people can use the internet to get illegal things.” Yes, you can use Craigslist or Facebook to hook up with heroin or an underage prostitute; but expanded backgrounds checks won’t change that either.

The measures he announced today are baby steps… but they are baby steps in the direction of the ultimate goal of outlawing the private ownership of firearms, as admitted by the founder of the National Council to Control Handguns (which was rebranded as the Brady Campaign), Democrat members of the New Jersey Legislature, and more recently by a Maryland Deputy Attorney General.

But anyway, the tears are meant to show he cares.

He cares a lot.

Yeah, you bet he cares a lot. Yeah.

(more…)

Remember the Left going on and on about President Bush’s supposedly “illegal” and “unilateral” Iraq war? When, in reality, the Bush administration had gone to great lengths to obtain (and did obtain) authorization for Iraq from both Congress and the U.N.

Even Senator Obama got in on the act, saying later in 2007 that “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.” His words were correct – but again, irrelevant to the Bush case (since Bush had Congressional, bipartisan approval).

Then President Obama felt like bombing Libya out of the blue (no terrorist threat was involved – until after Ghaddafi was gone). And he sought no authorization from Congress. Did the Left care? A little; but really not much.

President Peace Prize also went on to embroil the U.S. in wars in Syria and Ukraine – unilaterally and with no authorization. And to blow any gains of the Iraq war, allowing ISIS to take hold; an event that President Orwell referred to as his having “ended the war”.

Now that he has done so, he proposes to resume the Iraq war. Except this time, he finally wants authorization first. I suppose that’s nice of him. I suppose we must be grateful, to such a terribly great man, for the small graces that he grants to us, his subjects.