Politics

We hear lots of chatter about the possible appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate how the Obama administration may have abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Yet little has been said about the secret court system itself and how easy it is for corrupt government officials to spy on Americans. A court system which works on closed proceedings, classified decisions and only a government attorney present, is ripe for just the sort of misuse that’s alleged to have occurred in the Russia investigation.

Harold Wilson was right that ‘a week is a long time in politics.’ But, hey, watching the president in Grand Rapids the other night, and taking a gander at some recent polls, I am willing to ascend pretty high up the old backyard oak, shimmy along a well placed branch and say, with confidence if not quite certainty, that Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election, and win handily. But, but The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chris Matthews, James Comey, John Brennan, Cher, CNN, those pathetic females on The View, college professors across the country, George Conway, Maxine Waters, Mad Max Boot, Twitter-addled Bill Kristol and writers for his novelty web site The Bulsomething all tell me that’s impossible. A formidable phalanx of contrary opinion.

I am a big critic of President Donald Trump. Really, a big one. I think Trump has done more to divide America than any president in my lifetime. His Twitter feed is a constant stream of invective against his enemies, real and imagined. He seems to find fissure points within our culture and seize upon them in order to polarize the country for political gain. His rhetoric against illegal Hispanic immigrants is toxic, if not sometimes outright racist. He has attempted to undermine our institutions, most clearly with his attacks on the press as the enemy of the people. He seems more happy rhetorically kicking our allies in Canada and Germany than our adversaries in North Korea and China. He is quite obviously a pathological liar.

His fans are relieved. He’s getting off scot-free. I’m referring of course to Jussie Smollett, the Empire actor whose charges were dropped today in Chicago. It’s a good week if you’re in the crosshairs of the law — unless, of course, you’re Michael Avenatti, the quondam lawyer for Stormy Daniels who got busted, if that’s the appropriate word, for trying to shake down Nike for a cool $25 million. In Greek, Nike means ‘victory’ but Avenatti looks to be going down to a nasty defeat. The slick talking lawyer had delusions of grandeur all along, reckoning first that he could bring down Trump with a lawsuit, then viewing himself as presidential timber. He’s the one that got felled by law enforcement.

Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller concluded his investigation by exonerating President Trump of collusion with Russian forces during the 2016 election. Investigating that supposed collusion is the reason he was appointed and his final report declared that he and his team could find no evidence to support the allegation. But for more than two years, the nation has been torn apart by the claims made Democrats and their operatives in the media. They were sure – sure! – that President Trump would be forced from office in disgrace. The conspiracy theorists seethed with fundamentalist conviction, confident that Robert Mueller would lead them to the promised land. Nonetheless, many are sticking to their story. There may be no evidence, but they just know it in their bones!

According to Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller investigation: Russia did try to interfere in the election, hacked the Democrats’ emails, and released materials through WikiLeaks No coordination or collusion between Trump campaign and Russians Mueller offers no conclusion about obstruction of justice Barr concludes that no charges of obstruction are warranted under DOJ rules because there was no underlying crime to obstruct Full transparency of Mueller report conflicts with rules of rules of federal criminal procedure, which make Grand Jury proceedings secret Here are the essential quotes from Barr’s letter.

Well, I am going to miss the full-bore SWAT-team raids at dawn against aging political factota like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. It was really very courteous of CNN to have been parked outside the homes of those hapless victims so that television audiences all across the country could all be edified by these exhibitions of the coercive arm of state power in action. Mr Mueller could just have had one of his 17 Obama-and-Hillary supporting prosecutors ring up the latest mark and ask him to pop down to headquarters. But that would not have been as dramatic, as expensive, or as cruel. All good things come to an end, however, and yesterday, after 674 days, the investigation of Special Counsel Robert S.

After aeons trapped in a Beckettian nightmare, Robert Mueller’s report is finally on the Attorney General’s desk. Intriguingly, he waited for the markets to close before doing so, like a true capitalist. So, Cockburn off by a mere two weeks. But what of the indictments? As Bloomberg’s report indicates: ‘Mueller’s decision to issue a final report indicates that he chose not to indict other major figures in his investigation, including members of Trump’s family and the president. However, if he secured any indictments under seal, they could be handed off to other elements of the Justice Department.

The fight between George Conway and Donald Trump is getting nutty. ‘You. Are. Nuts.’, Conway tweeted this morning about the commander-in-chief who also happens to be the employer of his wife, Kellyanne, Trump’s unflinching defender. Earlier this morning, the president tweeted, ‘George Conway, often referred to as Mr Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!’ https://twitter.com/gtconway3d/status/1108341534137692160 If anything, Conway should feel flattered.

Long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang isn’t afraid to take a position on, well, anything. Browse through his campaign website, and you’ll see not just that he believes in universal basic income – the policy proposal for which he’s best known – but also that he wants to mandate the payment of NCAA athletes, to crack down on spam phone calls, and to secure $6 billion to revitalize dying shopping malls. Many of his policy positions are tied to causes with little prominence in the mainstream but a devoted following on the internet, like his recent stance against childhood circumcision, the domain of an online community that refer to themselves as ‘intactivists.

Presidential politics is all about excitement. So maybe it should worry the Democrats that their most exciting 2020 presidential prospects, according to pretty much all early polls, are two white guys pushing 80. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton genuinely excited a Democratic base that wanted to elect the first woman president. Eight years before that, Barack Obama surpassed even Hillary as a source of enthusiasm among Democratic voters. And now? Kamala Harris has been in the race for nearly two months without polling close to Bernie Sanders, who in turn trails only the yet-to-declare Joe Biden. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Beto O’Rourke have been well behind Harris, and the rest of the field is negligible.

Melania wore white today for St. Patrick’s Day services, but her husband was not in a peaceful mood. He came out swinging today against the shade of John McCain. Already peeved by a rerun of Saturday Night Live that portrayed him with disapprobation, Trump unloaded on his longtime nemesis in no uncertain terms. McCain may have died in August 2018, but to Trump his example apparently remains a living rebuke. So he had to disparage him. McCain’s marks at the Naval Academy were so lousy that he was ‘last in his class,’ according to Trump on — what else? — Twitter.

I had lunch yesterday with a friend from London who brought grim tidings from Albion. Like me, he is an advocate of national sovereignty. He thinks the people of the United Kingdom ought to be allowed to govern themselves. So he, again like me, is an advocate for Brexit. He had no idea what was going to happen with Brexit. Yesterday was a busy day. I also chatted with friends about the crisis at our southern border. All honest people acknowledge that there is a crisis, that thousands upon thousands of people, most without English and without skills, are pouring over the border.

The normally sober Associated Press is reporting the Senate’s vote to overturn Trump’s declaration of emergency in the southern border as ‘a stunning rebuke’ and ‘a remarkable break between Trump and Senate Republicans.’ But it isn’t. The 12 Senate Republicans who joined forces with every Democrat in the vote to annul Trump’s declaration did so for predictable ideological reasons. Libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Pat Toomey voted to overturn the emergency on ‘constitutionalist’ grounds, seeing the National Emergencies Act of 1976 as constitutionally dubious or worse and rejecting the mechanism by which it allows the president to appropriate funds.