Friday, February 14, 2020

Winter is Coming for the Coup Crew



Well it's already leaking out so no sense in pussyfooting around it any longer. All this shiny object nonsense in the MSM right now is a nice distraction but it's not going to last because leaks are still happening, but it's the swamp what do you expect.

So all those chasing the monkey over Barr & Trump feuding take a seat.

Durham has been investigating the Obama’s response or lack of to Russia’s election interference in 2016.

He's assigned a team to hunt down the reason & proof Brennan and the IC hid the evidence & manipulating analysis about Moscow’s so called covert operation, to build the narrative that Trump colluded or was colluding at the time.

We all know Trump has attacked the IC that concluded that Russia secretly tried to help him win, and it was contrived just to try and delegitimize his election. So they purposely fostered a narrative seeking to delegitimize his victory.

Trump has been promoting the investigation by Durham, as the means to proving that a deep-state cabal conspired against him.

Durham has been questioning the early actions of the FBI and the IC who acted like they were struggling to understand the scope of Russia’s scheme, so they would never have to come up with any real proof. Because we all know what a really sneaky bastard Putin is!

However Durham has come to view with suspicion several clashes between analysts at different intelligence agencies over who could see each other’s highly sensitive secrets, but not all agreeing as Clapper and Brennan portrayed.

Durham has been chasing evidence that the CIA, under Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia & was trying to get to a particular result & was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture so they don't upset the goal.

Brennan had it in his plan to frame Trump as a Russian asset, a Manchurian if you will. Brennan has a genuine hatred for Trump and all he stands for.

So he ran assets overseas and used his point person in Europe to manage the assets directly while Brennan flew all over under at least three different passports dropping bread crumbs to back up the narrative.

Bureaucrats from the FBI and the NSA have been pushing back against Durham the entire time against Durham and his investigators, swamp resistance at it's finest.

They claim such an interpretation is wrong and based on a misunderstanding of how the intelligence community functions, which is spook talk for you don't know what we know.

NATSEC officials are typically cautious about sharing their most dark secrets, like source identities, even with other agencies inside the executive branch. Spooks are spooks, and they hold their power by not sharing with their bosses and other agencies.

Durham’s questioning is certain to add to accusations that Trump is using the DOJ to go after his perceived enemies, like Brennan, just get ready for that when this story breaks.

Brennan has been an outspoken critic of the president So he just needs to put his big boy ants on and suck it up. Brennan's time in the barrel is coming and it won't be pretty.

Barr coming under attack in recent days over senior intervention to lighten a prison sentencing recommendation by lower-level prosecutors for Stone is just a smokescreen.

The Durham investigation has sent shockwaves throughout the IC & rattled current and former intelligence officers.

There's little to no precedent existing for a criminal prosecutor to review the analytic judgment-making process of the IC, but they brought this shit on themselves, & the FISA abuse fueled this fury to clean house.

Most prosecutors are ill equipped to assess how analysts work, but Durham isn't like most prosecutors. He has put together a team that do know, former spooks, and Durham specializes in corruption.

The bar for making a legal judgment is really high, but the bar for an analytic decision is much lower, & leaves the door open for mischief.

But intelligence people in the know, that are honest realize Durham is now rookie at dealing with the spooks.

Remember Durham spent years investigating the CIA over its torture program and its destruction of interrogation video tapes Obama buried his findings and no one was ever charged, and Durham remembers. Durham's final report remains secret to this day.

If you remember who destroyed the tapes, was directly involved in the waterboarding, and walked away clean, after destroying all those tapes, and think about who was Brennan's point person in Europe during Crossfire Hurricane. Put your thinking caps one.

Brennan saved her ass and now she was beholding to him to carry out this hit on Trump. She has some answering to do, and it's not pretty.

Holder and Obama sealed everything, all they wanted was a narrative to release criminals from GTMO. Durham's investigation provided all the excuse Barry needed. Durham to this day, feels like he was used, and he was. It's his only blemish on his record of successes.

Durham is a longtime federal prosecutor who has repeatedly been asked, under administrations of both parties, to investigate accusations of wrongdoing by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Trump appointed him as the United States attorney for Connecticut in 2018, the smartest appointment he made next to Barr.

The DOJ has kept Durham’s work under wraps, in meaningful detail, pretty well, considering how many leaks there have been the last 3 years.

Durham has been specifically interested in how the IC came up with its analytical judgments, including its assessment that Russia was not merely sowing discord, but specifically sought to help Trump defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

When Horowitz released his report last year on the FBI’s Russia investigation, claiming he found no "documentary" or "testimonial" evidence senior law enforcement & intelligence officials had engaged in a high-level conspiracy to sabotage Trump, it set Durham off.

In a rare case Durham spoke up and I guarantee is sent chills throughout the system, because Durham stays out of the media for a reason, and for him to come forward was a big deal and a sign, shit is about to get real.

Durham and his team have examined all the emails among a small group of intelligence analysts from multiple agencies, including the CIA, FBI and NSA, who worked together to assess the Russian operation.

This is that hand picked group Clapper put together to spit out that garbage based on a CrowdStrike report put out a month earlier.

Investigators have interviewed those analysts and their supervisors about the motivations behind several episodes in which some sought access to delicate information from the other agencies and were told initially, at least that they couldn't see it, they stonewalled him.

A big fight was over the identity and placement of a CIA source inside the Kremlin. Analysts at the NSA wanted to know more about him to weigh the credibility of his information.

The CIA was initially reluctant to share details about the Russian’s identity but eventually gave in when Trump made a phone call and laid down the law.

Durham and his boys disagreed about how much weight to give the source’s information, and the IC’s eventual assessment reflected that division.

But the FBI and the CIA kept claiming with “high confidence” that Putin was specifically trying to help Trump win the election, the NSA kinda agreed but as Rogers said it had only “moderate confidence.”

Supposedly the informant and his family were extracted from Russia in 2017 and resettled in the US. Notably, the source had initially refused to leave when US officials proposed getting him out for his own safety, raising suspicions about whether he might be a double agent.

They have kept him from Durham and his investigators.

Durham is also focused on was a power struggle that centers on a certain data set & the disagreement concerns whether NSA analysts could see the raw information or whether the CIA, before sharing it.

The NSA needed to filter the data to mask names & other identifying details about Americans and American organizations. But the CIA was pushing back on all that. It was one of the reason Rogers shut down 702.

Rogers has spent a lot of time in Connecticut and it's not for the great maple syrup. Rogers is a main player in this investigation and it's one of the reasons he couldn't be DNI, because he's the main fact witness in all of this.

The problem is the filtering process involved FVEYs and Brennan was breaching the guidelines imposed by the attorney general.

The rules permit exceptions in cases where the identities are necessary to understand the information, which can lead to disputes about whether that standard has been met.

I'm hearing Powers was hand delivering datasets to foreign people outside FVEY. Her claim of she didn't unmask to 328 people in 2016, is falling short. The three part authentication is hard to fake for a reason.

Durham also differs over access to unclassified emails of American officials that the CIA claimed Russian government had previously hacked, including at the White House and State Department.

Durham thinks it was insiders like a lot of other people do, so look for the left to scream conspiracy theory.

A foreign ally’s intelligence service obtained its own copy of the stolen messages and provided drives with another reproduction of them to Durham's investigators, the FBI wanted to look at those files. Durham said not so fast, you had your chance before.

Evidently the ally had came forward in early 2016 and was pushed away by Brennan. Some members of the FBI argued that the Russian hackers’ chosen focus while the Kremlin’s election interference operation was gearing up might shed light on that operation.

Brennan & Comey overruled the case agents that knew about all the hard drives. Durham is building a case on possible obstruction and tampering, but there's a problem.

An index of the messages compiled by the foreign ally in 2016 showed up anonymously that they included emails from Barry Obama as well as members of Congress. The crap was soon to hit the fan.

Obama’s counsel, Neil Eggleston decided that investigators should not open all these drives Brennan & Comey had sat on, citing executive privilege and the possibility of a separation-of-powers uproar if the FBI sifted through lawmakers’ private messages.

One problem in making sense of these disputes between the intelligence agencies nearly four years later, is that officials did not caveat their emails with detailed descriptions of their motivations and rationales for balking.

That has left the messages open to multiple potential readings. The analysts could have been engaged in standard bureaucratic behavior like obeying the filtering process or hoarding sensitive information. Or perhaps they were trying to cover something up.

Durham and his team are looking for any potential basis to support making the latter reading, of a coverup. Durham has been fighting corruption his entire career and is really suspect.

This is the reason they sent for the Obama archives. And what did we find out a week ago? A bunch of Barry's archive files are missing. Imagine that.

So Durham is asking questions aimed at understanding how analysts reached their conclusion & who drove that process, & whether & how information from foreign governments or the CIA played any role in stoking suspicions at the FBI about Trump campaign links to Russia.

Standards issued by the ODNI require analysts to follow procedures aimed at ensuring objective, neutral and independent evaluations of the facts. Durham knows they weren't back in 2015-2016, he just has to prove it to make it stick.

Durham has interviewed past & present 7th floor FBI and field agents who worked on the bureau’s Russia investigation, Crossfire Hurricane, and the team of special counsel who took over the inquiry, including Mueller. They have also interviewed numerous CIA analysts.

Durham and his team also interviewed around a half-dozen current and former officials and analysts at the NSA, including as I said before Michael S. Rogers, last summer and again last fall.

But Durham has not interviewed Comey, McCabe or Brennan. He's not wasting time, because they have all lied under oath already.

Durham has requested Brennan’s emails, call logs and documents from the CIA to learn what he told other officials, including Comey, about his and the CIA’s views of the Steele dossier.

This entire pushback from day one started in the IC just like Chuckie warned, and has carried over because there's so much swamp. This makes Rudy taking down the five families in NYC look like arresting the girl scouts.

Keep watching for the MSM to spin this as it comes out as Trump is retaliating, it's all a conspiracy theory, all the same old bullshit but it's coming.

If you recall John Ratcliffe and Trey Gowdy both saying someone needs to look at the emails between Comey and Brennan, it reveals a lot. Well this is what Durham is after.

It's always the cover up that gets them caught.

FOR EVERYONE THAT KEEPS ASKING ABOUT OR MENTIONING THE DURHAM REPORT

US Attorneys don't write reports, they file indictments.

As I stated further up the thread, this takedown will make the takedown of the five families of NYC look like arresting the girl scouts.

It took Rudy years to build that case. I think Durham is doing a fantastic job

All the cynics say I'll believe it when I see it... 🖕

Durham will go down in history as the new Frank Church, except Durham isn't a politician he's a prosecutor 

Homicides are up 26 percent in 2020 Philadelphia.

But that doesn't matter to the new Chief!

Danielle Outlaw, who took over Monday as Philadelphia’s new police commissioner, said the nail polish she wore this week had been among the last things on her mind on her first day on the job.

But while making the rounds and introducing herself to the troops, Outlaw said, people kept pointing out that her black nail polish technically violated the department’s directives on appearance.

So in one of her first official actions as top cop, Outlaw changed the rule to allow for more stylish nails. And during an interview Wednesday, one of her first since taking over, Outlaw — the first black woman to lead the 6,500-member department — said that although the action might have seemed narrow, it reflects the type of broader change she believes is needed in policing.

“It’s the small things that allow us to feel not only welcome but supported,” she said. “It’s one thing to recruit me and say, ‘Oh yes, we want you.’ But if there’s no support system in place to say, ‘Not only do [we] want you, but we celebrate you and we recognize that you bring [something] different,’ … we’re not going to get the people that we say that we want.”

She said minority communities have deeply rooted mistrust of police because the profession was conceived as slave patrols — groups who sought to control the behavior and movements of slaves — and added that “in some places, [police departments] might further that institutionalized and systemic racism that many people have experienced.”

But she also said most cops today “have nothing to do with” the actions of the past, and said they sign up for the job out of a genuine desire to serve.

So although Homicides are up 26% in 2020, the cops can have stylish nail polish!!!!

Michael Avenatti found guilty in Nike extortion case

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 2:35 PM PT — Friday, February 14, 2020
Michael Avenatti has been found guilty of trying to extort Nike. On Friday, jurors in New York convicted the high-profile attorney on all three counts of extortion and fraud.
Avenatti tried to shake down the footwear giant by threatening to publicly accuse the company of paying amateur basketball players, unless the company agreed to pay him millions of dollars. His attorney said they are already planning to make an appeal.
“We are obviously disappointed in the verdict in this case, even surprised by it,” stated attorney Danya Perry. “But we have preserved some significant issues on appeal and will be pursuing that.”
Avenatti is currently being held in solitary confinement at the Manhattan Metropolitan Corrections Center.
The disgraced lawyer is also facing charges in two other cases. He is due back in court for sentencing on June 17, where he could receive up to 42 years in prison.
https://www.oann.com/michael-avenatti-found-guilty-in-nike-extortion-case/

Appeal Court rules Islamic marriages invalid in UK

A court has reversed a judgment from two years ago which found that a couple who had an Islamic wedding ceremony could legally divorce.
The High Court ruled in 2018 that the couple's Islamic "nikah" ceremony fell within English marriage law.
But the Court of Appeal has now said it was an "invalid" non-legal ceremony.
Judges said the fact they intended to have a further civil ceremony meant they must have known their Islamic marriage had no legal effect in the UK.
The Attorney General appealed against the original court decision.
The case involved the divorce of Nasreen Akhter and Mohammed Shabaz Khan, who have four children.
The couple had an Islamic wedding ceremony in a west London restaurant in 1998 in the presence of an imam and about 150 guests, but no civil ceremony subsequently took place, despite Mrs Akhter repeatedly raising the issue.
They separated in 2016 and Mr Khan tried to block his wife's divorce petition two years ago on the basis they had not been legally married in the first place.

'Sharia law only'

Mrs Akhter argued their Islamic faith marriage was valid, as was her application for divorce, and that she was entitled to the same legal protection and settlement offered in the UK to legally married couples.

Her application for divorce was analysed during a trial in the Family Division of the High Court and Mr Justice Williams delivered a written judgment in the summer of 2018.
He ruled that since the couple held themselves out to the world at large as husband and wife, Mrs Akhter was correct and their union should be recognised because their vows had similar expectations to that of a British marriage contract.

The Court of Appeal overturned that decision on Friday and said the marriage was "invalid" under English marriage law.
It explained the wedding was "a non-qualifying ceremony" because it was not performed in a building registered for weddings, no certificates had been issued and no registrar was present.
"The parties were not marrying under the provisions of English law", the appeal judges said.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-51508974

It appears that the jury was tainted

It appears that the jury in

the Roger Stone trial was tainted


From beginning to end, Robert Mueller and his squad used Roger Stone as an object lesson to frighten anyone who had high-level contact with the Trump campaign in the lead-up to and immediately after the election.  Stone is not a savory character, but the treatment meted out to Stone, now 67, had a revolting aura of police state hanging about it from the start.  Now it turns out that this un-American police state set up a kangaroo trial to shuttle Stone into prison.

The Mueller mob started its press against Stone in January 2019, when Stone, who ought to have been a generic white-collar criminal:
... was instead subjected to a humiliating midnight predawn raid with cars full of riot gear–clad FBI agents, all staged before the cameras of CNN, which was exclusively granted access to the scene worthy of an action movie.  [Update: It is not clear who leaked news of the raid to CNN, having the effect of staging it for the most anti-Trump of networks.] This is similar to the treatment of Paul Manafort, but with the added indignity of CNN cameras.
Stone, a first-timer, was eventually convicted of lying to Congress, interfering in the House's Russian Collusion Hoax investigation, and tampering with a witness.  All of these charges sound serious, but the first two are garden-variety politics and a routine occurrence in D.C.  As for the third, the witness at the receiving end of the fulminating threats Stone issued recognized them for the language of an angry, impotent man and found them laughable.

Despite all this, Mueller's cadre asked the judge to impose a seven- to nine-year prison term for Stone.  While this is technically within the reach of the laws Stone violated, it's a grotesque demand for an elderly, first-time, non-violent offender.  To give context to how truly evil this request was, John Nolte reminds us of James A. Wolfe:
Wolfe is the scumbag who completely betrayed his trust as the head of security for the Senate intelligence committee by leaking to the media (including a New York Times reporter he was allegedly banging) — all in an effort to damage Trump. While under investigation for leaking government secrets, he lied on three occasions to the FBI (a crime), eventually pleaded guilty to one count, and was sentenced to just two months.
Two months!
Eight weeks!
Fine.
I'm fine with that. Like Stone, he certainly deserves to spend some time in prison, and anything up to a year seems reasonable. Nevertheless, there is just no question what Wolfe did is much worse than what Stone's been found guilty of.
Meanwhile, Obama-ites have walked away free despite acts such as violating national security and deleting 33,000 emails, wiretapping an opponent's presidential campaign, lying to Congress, forging FISA warrants, etc.  What the Mueller gang was demanding the judge do to Stone was political thuggery of the worst sort, and Barr's DOJ was right to step in.  (The only question was why the DOJ waited as long as it did.)

Naturally, the left went insane with rage that Trump and the DOJ would try to correct a manifest case of prosecutorial overreach.  Indeed, they went so mad with rage that Tomeka Hart wrote a Facebook post challenging Trump and the DOJ.

Who is Tomeka Hart?  She is one of the jurors who helped convict Roger Stone.  Hart explained that Trump's interference was so egregious that she could no longer keep quiet:
"I have kept my silence for months. Initially, it was for my safety. Then, I decided to remain silent out of fear of politicizing the matter," Hart wrote on Facebook, adding: "But I can't keep quiet any longer."
Hart would have done her cause better to keep quiet.  By identifying herself, she revealed just how corrupt the Mueller posse really was, for Hart was the last person who should have been on a politically charged jury.

First, Hart was a former Democrat congressional candidate, although party affiliation alone should not be enough to boot a potential juror from a trial.  Second, and significantly, Hart hated Trump, his politics, and his associates:
Here are some of her Tweets about Trump and those close to Trump
But how did she get on a jury involving Trump's longtime close friend?
How did a federal court judge ever allow a far left wing activist to sit on a case where a close Trump associate faced trial?
(Hart is trying to hide the evidence, she's started to delete her social media posts.)

Roger Stone was tried in a kangaroo court, one in which the prosecutors, and possibly the judge, colluded to ensure a guilty judgment against him.  This is a disgrace and antithetical to everything America stands for.

It's becoming clear that the entire Mueller investigation was corrupt.  Mueller knew by the second day that the Trump campaign had not colluded with Russia and that everything in the Steele dossier was bull fecal matter.  Instead of announcing that truth, Mueller's team embarked upon a two-year odyssey of destroying people close to Trump by catching them on process crimes.  The message was clear: work with Trump, and not only will you retire from Washington in disgrace, but you will also lose everything: career, money, and even your liberty.

It's well past time to call all of these people — including Mueller himself — to account, not with police action and kangaroo trials, but with justice properly administered and impartially carried out.

NYT: Durham digging into CIA officials’ motives for Russia-collusion analysis

 
 Article by Ed Morrissey in "HotAir":

Just how much can we actually glean about an investigation from a limited subset of questions being asked, leaked by those who are annoyed at answering them? That question hangs over a New York Times report about the ongoing probe helmed by John Durham over the potential politicization of intelligence during the 2016 Russian interference operation. Last night’s analysis that Durham seemingly intends to target high-ranking intelligence officials for manipulating information and protecting other sources depends on an assumption that we have the full set of questions — and comprehend all the motives for asking them:

Trump administration officials investigating the government’s response to Russia’s election interference in 2016 appear to be hunting for a basis to accuse Obama-era intelligence officials of hiding evidence or manipulating analysis about Moscow’s covert operation, according to people familiar with aspects of the inquiry.

Which “people” would that be? The people running the inquiry, or the potential subjects and targets of the probe? Needless to say, that matters as to whether we get a complete picture of what Durham is doing, or whether we’re just getting a preview of the defense case down the road.

Since his election, President Trump has attacked the intelligence agencies that concluded that Russia secretly tried to help him win, fostering a narrative that they sought to delegitimize his victory. He has long promoted the investigation by John H. Durham, the prosecutor examining their actions, as a potential pathway to proving that a deep-state cabal conspired against him.
Questions asked by Mr. Durham, who was assigned by Attorney General William P. Barr to scrutinize the early actions of law enforcement and intelligence officials struggling to understand the scope of Russia’s scheme, suggest that Mr. Durham may have come to view with suspicion several clashes between analysts at different intelligence agencies over who could see each other’s highly sensitive secrets, the people said.
Mr. Durham appears to be pursuing a theory that the C.I.A., under its former director John O. Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia or was trying to get to a particular result — and was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture lest they interfere with that goal, the people said.

This uses a fallacy that we often see when analyzing Supreme Court hearings. Questions asked do not necessarily equate to conclusions drawn. In fact, sometimes questions get asked to preclude the conclusions that they imply. A proper investigation asks lots of questions in multiple directions with plenty of overlap, in order to get to the truth. That will make people uncomfortable, to be sure, but a criminal investigation isn’t supposed to make people comfortable. It’s supposed to make them uncomfortable, off-balance, and for those who have something to hide, afraid.

If the leaks coming out of the intel community over Durham’s investigation are an indication, it looks like he’s succeeding. That doesn’t mean he’ll find anything criminal took place, but it does mean that Durham appears to be conducted a broad and comprehensive investigation that will settle that question once and for all. The NYT includes this as a hint of Durham’s success in this regard:

The Durham investigation has rattled current and former intelligence officers. Little precedent exists for a criminal prosecutor to review the analytic judgment-making process of intelligence agencies, said Michael Morrell, a former acting C.I.A. director who left the government in 2013.
“This whole thing is so abnormal,” Mr. Morrell said.

So was taking an oppo-research effort and turning it into a counter-intelligence operation, and then turning that into a criminal investigation. That was the problem from the start of Operation Crossfire Hurricane. In order to get to the bottom of those decisions, Durham has to walk backwards through all those decisions to determine whether laws were broken and intelligence politicized to interfere with an election.

We won’t know what Durham’s really thinking, or what he’s finding, until he closes out his investigation. What we should know is that we can’t characterize it by assuming we’re getting the whole truth from leaks coming from the people Durham’s investigating.

https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/02/14/nyt-durham-digging-cia-officials-motives-russia-collusion-analysis/ 

Biologists propose radical concept that there are only two genders/sexes

 
 Article by Jazz Shaw in "HotAir":

I know a couple of people who are going to be in trouble with the Woke Science Community. Colin M. Wright, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State, and Emma N. Hilton, a developmental biologist at the University of Manchester, have collaborated on an article published in the Wall Street Journal this week. They put forth the revolutionary and highly controversial theory that human beings are born as one of two distinct sexes, male and female. And no amount of philosophical meandering is going to change the incontrovertible medical fact that sex is binary and does not exist on some sort of “spectrum.” 
 
First, they deal with the argument that because roughly 0.02% of the population is born intersex – having some combination of genetic anomalies resulting in the formation of both male and female sexual characteristics – this means that there is at least a “third gender.” (All emphasis added.)

The argument is that because some people are intersex—they have developmental conditions resulting in ambiguous sex characteristics—the categories male and female exist on a “spectrum,” and are therefore no more than “social constructs.” If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favor of a new bespoke “gender identity.”
To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.

After patiently explaining that human beings produce two primary types of sex cells (sperm and eggs), the authors move on to the more vague, ambiguous arguments which seek to claim that “gender identity” is somehow unlinked from biological reality.

Denying the reality of biological sex and supplanting it with subjective “gender identity” is not merely an eccentric academic theory. It raises serious human-rights concerns for vulnerable groups including women, homosexuals and children.
Women have fought hard for sex-based legal protections. Female-only spaces are necessary due to the pervasive threat of male violence and sexual assault. Separate sporting categories are also necessary to ensure that women and girls don’t have to face competitors who have acquired the irreversible performance-enhancing effects conferred by male puberty. The different reproductive roles of males and females require laws to safeguard women from discrimination in the workplace and elsewhere. The falsehood that sex is rooted in subjective identity instead of objective biology renders all these sex-based rights impossible to enforce.

The authors describe in brutal detail how the current claptrap about “gender identity” that’s been making the rounds actually serves to undermine the rights and safety of women, children, gays, and lesbians. Much of this is material we’ve covered here at length in the past, but it’s simply refreshing to see some much-needed pushback coming from the science community. Far too many doctors and medical professional associations have begun caving to woke social pressure and stopped treating gender dysphoria as a mental illness, which it is. These same groups have also largely ignored the rapid rise of so-called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” for what it is: the result of social and media pressure that’s producing harmful distortions in the perceptions and behavior of far too many children. 

This article should be printed out and tucked in the pockets of several families in Connecticut who have now gone to court in an effort to prevent “transgender girls” from competing in girls’ high school sports in that state. This is a real-world example of one of the negative effects of all of this transgender fetishism described by the professors in this article.

Will this produce any positive results in the broader debate? I’m not getting my hopes up. The vast majority of the media will continue parroting whatever the woke brigades want them to say, all while remaining deeply in denial of both science and reality. But this ship can’t be allowed to go down without a fight.

https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2020/02/14/biologists-propose-radical-concept-two-genders-sexes/ 

Durham Investigation Must Be Wrapping Up Because Barr Has Become Enemy Number One


 Durham Investigation Must Be Wrapping Up Because Barr Has Become Enemy Number One
 Article by Sarah Lee in "RedState":

To hear the media tell it, Attorney General William Barr and his boss, President Donald Trump, are on the verge of breaking up. Or maybe Barr is acting as the president’s lapdog. It changes depending on the outlet and the hour.

But one thing seems almost certain: U.S. Attorney John Durham is wrapping up his investigation into the origins of the Russia collusion probe because the same narrative machine that kicked in to give us impeachment has now demanded that Barr testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee in March. And he’s agreed.
It stems from the absurd sentencing recommendation from some federal prosecutors in the case of Trump associate Roger Stone. They wanted the man locked up for almost a decade. Barr, recognizing that the appropriate sentence carried far fewer years, sent a request softening the recommendation, a decision he has said he made without consulting the president and before the president took to Twitter to thank Barr for handling what Trump saw as a continuation of the witch hunt against his administration and her associates.

That last part led to Barr’s frustration in an interview, admonishing that any public discussion of cases before the DOJ — from the White House OR THE MEDIA — makes it difficult for him to do his job. Now, of course, the House Democrats believe he’s “interfered” in Stone’s case on behalf of the president he just gently admonished and have demanded he testify before them.

This is likely to be a good thing because the story of exactly what Durham has been searching for — twisted and confusing though the reporting is — just broke in the New York Times (hint: part of it seems to be about whether or not then-CIA head Brennan was sharing information appropriately across intelligence agencies). And Barr can surely talk about that in late March during his testimony.

As an addendum: four of the federal prosecutors who had originally recommended Stone’s near-decade in jail for lying to Congress and witness tampering immediately quit their positions when Barr sent his revised recommendation.

There’s more here than there seems. And the impending release of the Durham investigation is quietly framing the drama.

https://www.redstate.com/slee/2020/02/14/durham-investigation-must-be-wrapping-up-because-barr-has-become-enemy-number-one/ 

Democrats Are Dying From Exposure

by Ron Ross for The American Spectator 


Democrats
Are Dying
From Exposure


The Democrat Party has turned hard left.
By doing so, the party has unintentionally exposed itself.


Ambiguity and obfuscation are the Democrats’ stock in trade. They distort words, and they abuse the English language. They use words and phrases that sound good but are impossible to define — for example, environmental justice, intergenerational justice, climate change, and sustainability.

Such deception is crucial for the party’s survival. But the deception has become harder to sustain.

More than anyone else, Donald Trump is responsible for exposing the Democrats. They detest him and his achievements so much that their judgment has been annihilated. With new clarity, their reactions say far more about themselves than him. He is causing them to take leave of their sanity.

They hate Trump so much that they can’t celebrate his accomplishments. They even demeaned the killing of an evil and savage terrorist, Qassem Soleimani. But their insane hatred has put them in a bind.

Donald Trump has set up camp inside their brains. They should not have let him do that. They will live to regret it.

The phrase “driven to distraction” applies to what’s happening to the Democrats. “Distraction” is defined variously as lack of concentration, confusion, extreme mental or emotional disturbance, frenzy, and madness.

Donald Trump distracts the Democrats from concealing what they are. That makes him a threat to everything they hold dear. His spirit alone scares the hell out of them. He’s the greatest menace they have ever faced.

One revealing jolt to what’s left of the Democrats’ masquerade occurred at the recent Golden Globe awards ceremonies. The emcee, comedian Ricky Gervais, told the attendees, in no uncertain terms, what an out-of-touch, self-important bunch of phonies they all are. He told them, “You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”

Gervais was only stating the obvious. It was an “emperor’s new clothes” moment if there ever was one.

Gervais’s observations were both brilliant and simple. They were so obviously true they were impossible to deny. He let the puffed-up Hollywood elites have it right between the eyes. Someone suggested recently that it may be comedians who rescue our culture.

Trump Derangement Syndrome has ensnared the Democrats. Even their misbegotten impeachment fiasco has morphed into one big exposé of themselves. All such frantic attempts to drive Donald Trump from office have only made him more popular. They are making fools of themselves, for all the world to see.

Who, upon seeing the Democrats clearly for what they are, can still support them?



Weekend Open Thread






We're going to keep it simple this week folks. Why? Because we've got a band, and we've got cymbals in the band. But you say, "That sounds ridiculous." I concur. But we also have skyscraper, and it sings a pretty tune 'cause every band needs skyscraper too. After all, what is a band without skyscraper? "Utter nonsense! What does this have to do with keeping things simple in this week's Weekend Open Thread?" you say. To that I say, this is Simple:



A simple version of Simple.



A completely not simple version of Simple. It's worth a listen for our patient listeners out there.



y'all know what's up
memes, gifs, music, pics, random thoughts ...
post 'em if you got 'em


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President Donald J. MacGuffin




His wild persona is a device that baits enemies

and clears space for his agenda.

Is he a disease or a cure? Like him or hate him, there’s tons of spilled ink trying to assess President Trump’s governing style. To me, the key to understanding Trumpism is remembering why he was elected.

What do I mean? Voters chose Donald Trump as an antidote to the growing inflammation caused by the (OK, deep breath . . .) prosperity-crushing, speech-inhibiting, nanny state-building, carbon-obsessing, patriarchy-bashing, implicit bias-accusing, tokey-wokey, globalist, swamp-creature governing class—all perfectly embodied by the Democrats’ 2016 nominee. On taking office, Mr. Trump proceeded to hire smart people and create a massive diversion (tweets, border walls, tariffs) as a smokescreen to let them implement an agenda of tax cuts, deregulation and originalist judges.

Those reforms have left the market free to do its magic and got the economy grooving like it’s 1999. The daily Trump hurricane—like the commotion over the Chiefs from Kansas—makes the media focus on the all-powerful wizard while ignoring the policy makers behind the curtain.

Alfred Hitchcock called this kind of distraction a “MacGuffin”—something that moves the plot along and provides motivation for the characters, but is itself unimportant, insignificant or irrelevant. It can be a kind of sleight of hand, a distraction, and Mr. Trump uses his own public persona as a MacGuffin in precisely that way. The mobs decked in “Resist” jewelry fall for it every time.

For example, Sen. Bernie Sanders used his remarks during the Senate impeachment trial to point out that the media had documented some 16,200 alleged lies by President Trump. The MacGuffin worked! Mr. Sanders and his peers are focused on the president’s words, while most voters see the real plot unfolding in America—millions of jobs and rising wages.

The president’s success comes from his ability to shrug off critics. My son went to college in the early days of the social justice power grab. He recalls heated discussions in which someone would interrupt him to say, “Sorry, but you don’t get a say—you have white privilege.” My son would shoot right back: “Yeah, I don’t believe in that,” and resume his argument. That’s what Mr. Trump does. Rather than cower at the criticism he faces from the mobs, he probably smirks and thinks to himself, “Yeah, I don’t believe in that” and tweets away.

That’s the only reaction that can withstand today’s far left, which has become increasingly self-righteous. The very word “woke” asserts a kind of rebornness—as if those on their side have awakened and become holier than thou. It’s religion on the cheap. The movement takes “diversity” to mean people who see the world exactly as they do, only with different surface characteristics: race, class and gender identity. There’s no room for diversity of expression, let alone diversity of thought. (I’ve confirmed this at Silicon Valley cocktail parties.)

Mr. Trump was elected as an antibody against this swampy disease. He’s the antidote to the snake bite of correctness. He’s a white (privileged?) blood cell fighting the coronavirus of the culture.

I spent the 1980s in New York and got familiar with his annoyingness before much of the country did. But I’ve learned to appreciate Mr. Trump’s theater of chaos and Hitchcockian plot device, which help him get things done. Like what? Well, he’s moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem, installed competent originalist Supreme Court justices who don’t see penumbras and emanations whenever they want, sent Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani to the terrorist netherworld, and don’t forget that he got those UCLA basketball players out of Chinese prison. I’m still waiting on a real free-trade agreement.

To say the least, full freedom of expression has yet to be restored. But the engines of progress are running high and are set to continue—no matter how many speeches Nancy Pelosi tears up.

The president’s staff behind the curtain have engineered boom times, despite grounded Boeing 737s and the self-inflicted harm of tariffs. A deregulatory bonanza and corporate tax cuts have unleashed the economic beast. Unemployment is hitting 50-year lows and record lows for minority groups. The Dow Jones and Nasdaq are near record highs. Do you even know what’s happening at the Education, Energy, Agriculture or Commerce Departments? Me neither, but every so often one hears snippets of the reforms taking place behind the flashpots of Trumpiness.

President Trump’s potential opponents running in the Democratic primaries claim he is the disease and they are the cure. They’re missing the ways his MacGuffin game plan is working. The socialist wing wants to raise taxes and give stuff away, which would derail the economy and whack the 96.4% of labor-market participants who already have jobs. Tough sledding. As Yogi Berra might say, this election “ain’t over ’til it’s over.” But as long as the economy hums along—coronavirus notwithstanding—there’s a good chance voters will give the antibody more time to cure the country’s actual disease.

Mike Bloomberg Could Pull It Off

 
 Article by Peggy Noonan in "The Wall Street Journal":

You have to start here: We are immersed in a freakish and confounding political era. Anything can happen. Surprise is built in. Guy on a lark takes an escalator ride down to a rally and the system is changed forever. “Expect the unexpected.”

That is the context. Within it, consider this: We are misreading Mike Bloomberg’s race for the Democratic presidential nomination. The headline right now is not “Billionaire Tries to Buy Party,” and not “Former Republican Struggles With Stop-and-Frisk History.” The headline is: “He Could Do This. Uphill, but He Could Win.”

Take Mike Bloomberg seriously.

Bernie Sanders is the front-runner. He’s a real power with a real base. He finished first or second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire, and if his margins were down a win is a win.

But his nomination would split the party. Too many Democrats want a new and deeper liberalism but not socialism. They don’t want a revolution, they want a nicer country. The suburban women everyone is supposedly fighting for? When that affluent liberal mother in Summit, N.J., finds out socialism isn’t just progressive social policy, she’s going to find herself saying a sentence she never thought she’d say: “We worked hard for this, you know.” Bernie Sanders has the power to turn her into Barbara Bush. 

Only a fool would say America will never go socialist. America could turn on a dime in a time of widespread want or unease. But it’s unlikely to become socialist in an era of full employment, rising wages and a stock-market boom. Democrats know this.

Joe Biden isn’t the answer. The whole point of his campaign was that he can beat Donald Trump. He can’t beat Pete Buttigieg. He’s never been good at running for president; in three tries he hasn’t won a primary. Under pressure he renounced the lifetime stands that had made him Moderate Joe. And people age at different speeds. Mr. Biden is not a young 77.

It won’t work. At some point he will drop out. An energized Amy Klobuchar and a focused Pete Buttigieg will fight long and hard as they can, but they’re not likely to go the distance.

Which leaves you thinking about Mr. Bloomberg. What’s there? It’s not too soon, three months in, to call his campaign clever and capable. If he got the nomination Democrats would likely suffer a peeling off of the progressive left. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Bernie Bros would walk out. But it wouldn’t break the party, not quite, not yet.

There’s the money, Bloomberg’s solid rocket booster. People say he could spend $1 billion, maybe $2 billion. He’d spend more if he has to. In for a penny, in for a pound. He didn’t enter this to preserve his fortune.

His social media is witty, weird, dryly subversive. That would mean little except for what it implies, that the people hired to do it are allowed to be creative and daring. The campaign is not playing tight but loose, which you do only when you’re confident.

His strengths: resources, relationships and a real biography. For 12 years he was mayor of New York. He governed the ungovernable city that is a microcosm of the world. It is noted that as mayor he was a Republican. No one in New York thought he was a Republican, he was a Democrat who could get only the Republican nomination. After he won he treated Republicans collegially and with respect, which wasn’t hard as a New York Republican is essentially a Democrat with boundaries.

Before that he invented a business product that first seemed useful, then necessary. He created a company that became a huge national brand. He is one of the world’s great philanthropists.

He is what Mr. Trump claimed to be and probably wishes he were. And he isn’t afraid of the president. Whatever he says, Mr. Trump, who respects money more than anything, would be afraid of him.

When Mr. Biden leaves the race, where will his supporters—many of whom feel increasingly outside the party they grew up in—go? Quite possibly Bloomberg.

This week’s Quinnipiac poll suggests that may be right. In past polling, self-described moderate Democrats and Democratic leaners backed Mr. Biden “by a wide margin.” In this poll they still gave Mr. Biden 22%. But Mr. Bloomberg was next, with 21%.

Among all Democrats and leaners, Mr. Biden is in second place and leads the former mayor 17% to 15%. Only two weeks ago Mr. Bloomberg was at 8%. He nearly doubled his support, quietly, while everyone was looking at Iowa and New Hampshire.

After Mr. Biden got drubbed, political experts on TV kept saying black voters, long assumed to be his impermeable base, are in fact “fiercely practical” and “strategic” in their political decisions. To me this sounded like code for “they’re breaking off Biden” and “they’ll shock you by considering Bloomberg.”

This week a 2015 video went viral of Mr. Bloomberg speaking, in blunt terms even for him, of his support of stop and frisk, which he has now disavowed. It was assumed to be deeply damaging with black voters. But denunciation from black leaders was almost uniformly muted. There was talk of reflecting on mistakes, how it’s good to admit them, and those who do deserve forgiveness. You picked up an air of, “I will lambast him in a perfunctory manner but I won’t enjoy it because really, he’s been a friend.”

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And he has. The black pastors of New York, who lived through those days with him and a decision they disagreed with, seem to like him a lot. He’s been making friends for a long time. His philanthropies have been generous for a long time. And this is not only local—watch for the Pastor Effect down South, where there will be a big push. This is what they’ll say: Mike has been a friend. He worked well and closely with us. And he stayed close—when he left office six years ago he didn’t turn his back.

Mr. Bloomberg is being endorsed by mayors and members of Congress. Endorsements don’t mean much unless the candidate has muscle behind it, an organization or a machine. Mayors do. A lot of them know him from the yearly national meeting of mayors put on by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
His challenges? Elitist, billionaire, charmless. “He’s not one of us.” “Hide your soda, the nanny is coming.”

He has to perform in debates, where he’ll be the target of the other candidates’ focused and sincere resentment. With the press suddenly noticing him he can’t totally tank on Super Tuesday. (We’ll start writing our “Bloomberg Mirage” stories.)

But he’s got a big army that can grow and advance as opportunity presents. If the race goes a long time he can last a long time.

I have known him more than a decade and consider myself a friend, an admiring one. We’ve sparred a bit on national issues; we don’t share the same stands, or even worldview. But this isn’t written out of affection or regard. It’s what I think I’m seeing.

Take Mr. Bloomberg seriously. Uphill, but he could pull this off.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-bloomberg-could-pull-it-off-11581638248