American Thinker

Samuel Blumenfeld concluded that "K-12 education is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom," which tends to confirm my less dramatic formulation that K-12 education is a swamp of fog and deception. Our self-appointed experts have to be dishonest. How else can they keep their cons and sophistries going?

Read the whole thing.

Red State

FBI Director Chris Wray announced Tuesday that his chief of staff, James Rybicki, is leaving the bureau.

Rybicki, who served in the same position under former FBI Director James Comey, had come under scrutiny from Republicans in recent months about his role in the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Federal law enforcement sources told Fox News that Rybicki was not fired. His departure, they said, has “been in the works for awhile.”

He was recently pointed out as being involved in the whole Trump-Clinton fiasco, although it wasn't clear exactly how he was involved.

I think it's now clear that he knows how he was involved, and is choosing to resign before we find out the details.

Judicial Watch

Court documents recently filed by the government further rock the credibility of Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller because they show that as FBI Director Mueller he worked to cover up the connection between a Florida Saudi family and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The documents reveal that Mueller was likely involved in publicly releasing deceptive official agency statements about a secret investigation of the Saudis, who lived in Sarasota, with ties to the hijackers. A Florida journalism nonprofit uncovered the existence of the secret FBI investigation that was also kept from Congress.

Why on earth would any American, much less a top law enforcement official, want to cover up a family with credible links to the 9-11 attacks?

This is likely why everyone in the Deep State lauded Mueller; they know he can be trusted to cover up anything no matter how awful. And it seems he did exactly that.

Ron Johnson thinks he has one. A "secret society" meeting off-site sounds a lot more serious than "Dumbledore's Army". Remember, these people are talking about a coup.

Johnson also points out that Strzok doubted "there was any big there there" despite his anti-Trump bias. A lawyer would call that an admission against interest.

Campus Reform

A former St. Catherine University student is accused of attempting to burn down the school in retaliation for U.S. policy in the Middle East.

According to The Star Tribune, 19 year-old Tnuza Hassan allegedly set eight fires in seven buildings on campus last week, later telling authorities that her intention was to “burn [the school] to the ground” and to “hurt people.”

No, not everyone from muslim nations is going to try to burn down their school here in the US. But they're a lot more likely to try it than people from other regions, and even more so when compared to US citizens.

I've been generally discounting the various text messages and emails coming out of the FBI and Meuller's investigation referencing a "secret society" as being, basically, jokes. People treading just a little bit over the political line because they know the person they are talking to feels the same way. Like in the case of Lois Lerner's messages about Republicans, it shows animus but doesn't prove wrongdoing. And it's hard to take any group of government officials referring to themselves as "Dumbledore's Army" seriously.

Turns out I was hasty.

The "secret society" started right before the gap in their message history begins. That gap in their message history starts immediately after Mueller is appointed special counsel. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence.

And they met face to face off-site as a group.

They had something to hide. They had opportunity to conspire and expressed the desire to do so. They did in fact meet. That sounds like a real conspiracy to me.

Free Beacon

The State Department announced a new $600,000 taxpayer-funded study that suggests "ideals of masculinity" in Kenya are contributing to terrorism.

Yeah, let's not write any more of those checks, mmkay?

Daily Caller

Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, connects the dots on former Obama administration Justice Department and FBI officials who may have “violated the law, perhaps committed crimes” to politicize law enforcement and surveillance against political opponents.

There was nothing new for me here, but if you haven't been paying attention, this half-hour of video will get you back up to date.

The Hill

FBI Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign after Attorney General Jeff Sessions pressured him to remove Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Axios reported Monday.

Wray reportedly told Sessions that he would resign if McCabe was removed from his post, explosive allegations that will only increase attention on President Trump's interactions with the Justice Department.

Is Wray a swamp creature? He's certainly protecting one.

The Hill

Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew well in advance of FBI Director James Comey's 2016 press conference that he would recommend against charging Hillary Clinton, according to information turned over to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Friday.

The revelation was included in 384 pages of text messages exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and it significantly diminishes the credibility of Lynch's earlier commitment to accept Comey's recommendation — a commitment she made under the pretense that the two were not coordinating with each other.

And it gets worse. Comey and Lynch reportedly knew that Clinton would never face charges even before the FBI conducted its three-hour interview with Clinton, which was supposedly meant to gather more information into her mishandling of classified information.

Of course they were coordinating. You think Hillary would go anywhere near an FBI interview where the outcome wasn't preordained in her favor? That's exactly what was discussed at that tarmac meeting. Bill Clinton got assurances from AG Lynch that his wife, Hillary Clinton, would be interviewed as a mere formality and no charges would result. No charges on the email, no charges for lying to the FBI during the interview like Michael Flynn.

Clayton Cramer citing Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times reports California will now automatically register those who renew their driver's licenses for voting. California already gives licenses to illegals.

If illegal aliens didn't vote already, Democrats wouldn't be so focused on catering to them. Mostly, I think, they vote in areas like California that are already heavily controlled by Democrats. But that vote allows the Democrats to maintain a lock on those areas once they achieve the policy changes that permit illegal aliens to vote. Taking California as an example, within living memory it was a winnable state for Republicans. Now, the Democrats have supermajorities.

Campus Reform

Washington State University pays “Peer Educators” $11/hour to host social justice workshops, but so far Halloween costumes seem to be the only target.

These Social Justice Peer Educators (SJPEs) were slated to work roughly ten hours per week facilitating workshops on social justice topics such as “Redefining Masculinity” and “Microaggressions 101,” according to the initial job description.

This is naked political indoctrination.

By some strange coincidence, the missing months of text message records are some of the most important months for understanding the Trump-Russia investigation.

So remember: those 10,000+ text messages between Strzok and Page that included the "insurance policy" against a Trump win and god only knows what else? Those are the ones they thought we should be allowed to have. The missing messages -- between Dec 14th 2016 and May 17th 2017 -- must be much, much worse.

Funny how government agencies have their records go missing whenever this sort of investigation pops up. I remember when Lois Lerner destroyed her hard drives, laptops, and cell phones. And of course there's Hillary, who wiped her server with a cloth soaked in Bleachbit.

UPDATE: Sessions announces DOJ will probe missing messages. Isn't this exactly the sort of thing that needs a special counsel to investigate independently? Remember, DOJ is just as corrupt as the FBI...

Instapundit

Male Megyn Kelly staffer fired after reporting ‘toxic and demeaning’ work culture. “Kevin Bleyer was fired as a writer from ‘Megyn Kelly Today’ this week after complaining that Kelly’s two top execs, Jackie Levin and Christine Cataldi, were bullying lower level members of staff. He was fired even though Kelly has made fighting abuse her personal crusade. Plus, in the wake of Matt Lauer’s firing, NBC ordered all staff to report workplace bad behavior, supposedly without fear or reprisal.”

So women can report being sexually harassed even if the harassment was failing to pick up on their non-verbal cues about being uncomfortable while getting naked and exchanging oral sex in a stranger's apartment... but if a man reports feeling uncomfortable, he's fired?

In an uncharacteristic moment of stupidity, Rick Moran wrote:

Rick Moran at PJMedia

It certainly is a novel approach, but probably doomed to fail. The problem has been the Supreme Court, which has ruled several times that state and local governments are not required to assist ICE in enforcing immigration law.

If that's true, why do state and local government assist the government in enforcing drug laws or gun laws?

Maybe he forgot that states don't all assist the federal government with enforcement of drug laws. See Colorado, among others, which has legalized "medical marijuana".

Insofar as states assist with gun law enforcement, it's because:
1) the federal government conditions such assistance on various funds, ie, the states get paid.
2) the "gun laws" being enforced are generally accepted as having a close relationship to crimes of violence, ie, the states want to cooperate.

And of course many of them don't -- see the various situations where states were found not to be reporting psychiatric confinements or disqualifying crimes to the NICS database.

"Sanctuary" states are a problem, but I'm not entirely sure it's a problem best solved by forcing states to cooperate. Cutting off federal funds if they don't seems workable. Arresting governors or mayors does not.

That said, there's not cooperating and then there's active resistance, as well as laws against harboring fugitives. If state law enforcement is told to interfere with or resist federal law enforcement, we have a name for that.

We call it Civil War.

This is uncomfortably close.

Washington Times

Senators voted Thursday to approve a six-year renewal of the government’s chief foreign spying program, delivering a win to security hawks who got most of what they wanted in the deal.

The bill, which now heads to President Trump for his signature, extends Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which empowers the government to collect phone calls, emails and other communications of foreign targets overseas.

If the law can't be reformed under these conditions, just following an election where the party in power spied on the opposition and the opposition won anyway, are there any conditions at all under which the law could be reformed?

Perhaps if we elected a Congress with nothing blackmailable in the NSA database.

Daily Caller

House investigators concluded that Democratic IT aides made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks, according to a presentation summarizing the findings of a four-month internal probe.

Their behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and they continued even after orders to stop, the briefing materials allege. There are indications that numerous members’ data may have been secretly residing not on their designated servers, but instead aggregated onto one server, according to the briefing and other sources. Authorities said that the entire server was then physically stolen.

This looks like a classic intelligence operation, one that penetrated to the highest levels of the Democratic party (at least in Congress) under Obama's administration. How much blackmail material did they manage to exfiltrate on representatives still in Congress? How much national security information?

This has been a slowly ticking scandal for over a year now. It's not a political disagreement or a particularly politicized scandal; the victims are Democrats, but other than that there's no political element that I can see.

When Obama was in power, there was significant incentive to cover this up and pretend it was ordinary crime. Under Trump, there's no such incentive, so why is it still flying under the radar?

Perhaps the FBI are diligently following leads and doing their counterintelligence task correctly for once. I hope so. But I'm not confident.

Breitbart

The U.S. launched a formal investigation this summer into allegations that China facilitates the theft of U.S. technology and intellectual property, in some cases forcing U.S. companies into delivering technology into Chinese hands as a cost of doing business. Under U.S. trade law, the administration can impose retalitory tarrifs and other trade sanctions against China if it concludes China is engaged in wrongdoing. Earlier reports from the U.S. government found China to be the worst infringer of intellectual property rights in the world.

I'm not sure that a fine is the right response. The right response is probably just not giving them our intellectual property to steal. But doing something about the issue is a good place to start.

Daily Mail

An illegal immigrant laughed as he admitted to killing two Sacramento-area police officers and pledged to do it again, in a series of chilling courtroom outbursts on Tuesday.

Luis Bracamontes, 37, is standing trial at Sacramento Superior Court for the 2014 murders of Sacramento Sheriff’s Deputy Danny Oliver and Placer Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Davis Jr.

'I wish I could have killed more of those motherf***ers,' Bracamontes said, before Judge Steve White, according to the Sacramento Bee.

'I will break out soon, and I will kill more, kill whoever gets in front of me.'

Why should we give him amnesty?

The FBI seems to think so. This is the same person who ran his own "intelligence" operation that surfaced in the Benghazi emails.

Sara Carter

A review of a classified document outlining what is described as extensive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse was made available to all House members Thursday and the revelations could lead to the removal of senior officials in the FBI and Department of Justice, several sources with knowledge of the document stated. These sources say the report is “explosive,” stating they would not be surprised if it leads to the end of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel investigation into President Trump and his associates.

The gist of the report will probably start to leak Friday evening, the traditional dumping ground for things the government or media want to cover up. Given that they've been leaking battlespace preparation for this for weeks, I wouldn't be surprised if people do lose their jobs over it. For people working in government, that's usually enough to prevent criminal charges.

The public needs to know the whole truth. Release the whole thing. And let's keep our copies around as reminders for when FISA next comes up for renewal.

Power Line

There you have it: James Comey’s announcement that he was reopening the Hillary email investigation–an investigation in which he eventually whitewashed Mrs. Clinton, notwithstanding unequivocal evidence of crimes on her part–triggered a response. Hillary, or the DNC, ordered Simpson and Steele to promote to the press their quarter-baked dossier of fabrication and speculation, in an effort to counterbalance Comey’s reopening of the email investigation. That pretty much tells you all you need to know.

He doesn't say it outright, but he strongly implies it. Note that Comey's announcement that he was reopening the email investigation after discovering more emails (on Weiner's computer, if I recall correctly) is followed up rapidly by another announcement that nothing was found -- far too quickly to be real -- and by Fusion's attempt to push the dossier to the media.

American Thinker

We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third-world immigration by the hundred million with chain migration. They tell us we must end America as a white, Western, Judeo-Christian, capitalist nation – to prove we are not racist. I don't need to prove a thing. Leftists want open borders because they resent whites, resent Western achievements, and hate America. They want to destroy America as we know it.

As President Trump asked, why would we do that?

We have the right to choose what kind of country to live in. I was happy to donate a year of my life as a young woman to help the poor Senegalese. I am not willing to donate my country.

People who grew up in huts woven from grasses, with no running water, no toilets, no concept of sanitation, no education, not even the ability to read and write in their own language never mind in english, will not do well in modern society. They simply will not. Their environment has not prepared them for it.

And yes, while we can afford to import and support some of those who are born in poverty and squalor to the United States for the rest of their natural lives, it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the people still living in that poverty and squalor.

How much more effective would it be to spend the same resources on educating a few of the local workers on plumbing and sanitation? A shovel, a toilet, and some pipe could go a very long way.

And lets not lose sight of the fact that some of those we import under present rules want to destroy America as we know it quite literally.

Lifezette

Three out of every four people convicted of terrorism-related charges in the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., were born in foreign countries, according to a report released Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security and Justice Department.

The report details 549 convictions, including 402 who were foreigners, between Sept. 11, 2001, and the end of 2016. That comes to 73 percent — and does not include the convictions of U.S.-born children of immigrants.

Since roughly 1965, the United States has had immigration policies contrary to our national interest. Those policies chose people from poor nations (or no nations at all) essentially at random. Sometimes literally at random. They could bring their family members over -- or anyone they claimed was a family member, or a spouse. We offered citizenship to anyone who could sneak over the border and have a baby here. (Sure, it took 18 years to do it that way, but it worked). We took in refugees. We gave "temporary" protected status to people who were here illegally when their home nations were hit by natural disasters, and prolonged that status for almost two decades. When foreign governments warned us that people we had accepted as our new proto-citizens were terrorists, we ignored the warning, and people died.

It's time we adjusted our immigration criteria to emphasize people who can, will, and want to assimilate into our society and become Americans. And at the same time, we need to increase our border security to ensure that the only people getting into the country are those we allow in.

There's room for some back and forth on some issues. Technical workers on H1B visas need to be limited to people with truly unique skills, not people who will serve as a cheap source of indentured labor, but the program doesn't have to end completely. It just has to be changed to ensure American jobs go to Americans first. The wall doesn't have to be a sea-to-shining-sea thing of concrete. We can do what makes sense for the terrain and will effectively block illegal crossers. But the status quo has been so harmful, for so long, that we cannot compromise on further amnesties. It will be hard enough to assimilate those already here legally.

Furthermore, we have already been sold the "amnesty now, border security later" deal twice at least. Even Reagan got taken in by it. He thought the other side would deal honestly; they didn't, and the border security never materialized. Bush the Younger got authorization for a border fence, but no funding to actually build it. Trump needs to demand actual border security measures, actually funded, actually implemented, actually proven effective. Only then can the question of what to do with the people already here be considered properly, with at least some measure of the trust necessary to make a deal reestablished.

I'm tempted to suggest dealing with the question of those already here by simply electrifying the fence using green power from big, beautiful windmills. Now that would be a powerful compromise!.

Daily Wire

"The lawyer for Las Vegas Metro Police, Nicholas Crosby, later admitted something that was a bombshell revelation: other suspects are under investigation. Criminal charges may be filed in the coming weeks in the investigation into the Las Vegas massacre, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

This may make more sense of the strange email exchanges and burner cell phones.