It was a setup all along, likely funded by money Halper was being paid from government sources (to the tune of a million or so according to this whistleblower). We know there were others involved, too, both trying to put the "Russians have dirt on Hillary" idea into the campaign through Popadopolous, and trying to pull the information out again later.
Let me spell it out for you. The numbers in reports like that published by the Department of Education are used to make policy -- gun control, security for schools, funding for things like school resource officers or surveillance systems or even metal detectors. The reports are compiled mostly to support policy initiatives by politicians. The people writing the reports, the people compiling the data, and the people submitting the data all know that.
Of course they skew the results to emphasize their own policy preferences.
Seriously? The judge let them go because the government couldn't meet a deadline in a case where a dozen children were at risk and one of them had already died?
I don't necessarily blame the judge here. If the ten-day rule is a real thing, it's a real thing, and the government should be prepared to meet it.
Clinton campaign implicated in $84 million campaign finance scandal
So far, the FBI and special counsel "scheme team" has shown a demonstrated lack of awareness of what Hillary's campaign has done. They keep charging figures in the Trump orbit with things that Hillary and her campaign is even more vulnerable to. It's time these prosecutions started happening, because the Clintons and Muellers are not going to stop either.
They are confiscating guns and farmland. The latter confiscation is based on race; the targets are white. This is likely to end in genocide, but no one in the media will care, because the victims will be white people.
Some Senators are suggesting they are ok with Trump firing Sessions. This seems to be a necessary step for Trump to take effective control of his own justice department. As far as I can tell, Sessions has done nothing effective. Even the appointment of Huber to prosecute people over SpyGate has produced no results so far.
Lanny Davis retracts claim Trump knew about Russia meeting
He also admits he was CNN's source for that claim, but CNN refuses to retract their story. I think what we are seeing here is not an honest mistake but a clever bit of game-playing by Lanny. He doesn't ask his client if Trump knew about the meeting, but he goes on the air and says -- based on his "instinct" that Trump had to have known. That's taken as him speaking for his client. But he's just speaking about his own opinion, particularly as a cyncial Clinton operative.
So he says this, the story gets out there, CNN refuses to retract, and the public is left with the impression Trump knew despite the complete lack of evidence to that effect.
The impression is why Lanny Davis said what he said. It was not a mistake or an off the cuff remark. It was a cynical exploitation of the fact that the retractions never get the same attention as the original bombshell claim -- especially if they are never formally retracted.
Practically, I'm not sure what the point is. Decriminalizing illegal entry is sort of a Dem wet dream, but in Texas? Are they trying to encourage illegals to vote illegally in the hopes of getting Beto over the last few percent? Are they giving up on his chances of winning and trying to boost fundraising from open borders billionaires?
Given his criminal history, maybe it wasn't the best move for Beto.
China hacked Hillary's private server during her entire time as SecState
Now we know the "foreign, non-Russian" country in previous reports. We also know this was covered up by the investigation into her emails. We also know that we have no idea exactly what was compromised. We've identified some seriously classified information in the emails that have been examined from her server, but the Weiner laptop contains hundreds of thousands that have not been examined. (Remember, Hillary said she provided about 30k and deleted about 30k, and the Weiner laptop has about 600K).
Any serious investigation into this is going to reveal a security disaster of historic proportions.
McCain discontinues medical treatment and then passes away
He chose to discontinue medical treatment, and then passed away. I don't really have anything nice to say about the man. He attacked both the 1st and 2nd amendments with more success than most, and he's repeatedly tried to pass amnesty legislation on immigration. Some have called him a war hero due to the time he spent as a prisoner of war. I don't agree with that. The man served, but broke under torture, and failed to redeem himself in his political career. He deserves the respect all humans are due, and pity for what he was forced to endure, but that is all.
That said, I didn't know him personally, so it all boils down to political disagreements. As far as I know, which is not at all, he was a lovely man in his private life and often stopped to help dogs across the street and play fetch with little old ladies.
The pressure from the financial industry is growing
They have moved from blocking just firearms related transactions to any transaction with groups listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), apparently. The SPLC is a hate group itself and has inspired at least one mass murder. And let's be honest: nobody really wants to be associated with or provide services to the truly evil, but even people with destestable beliefs need to have access to basic services if they are going to live peaceful, non-criminal lives. And surely, however vile their beliefs, we would rather they do that than be forced to make a living through violent crime.
So we have two problems here: the SPLC does not accurately identify people who should be denied financial services and the other basic elements of modern civilization, and even if they did successfully identify such people, we probably don't want to deny them those basic elements of modern civilization lest we force them into actual violence.
People have long speculated that Hillary Clinton has a body count -- people she had killed because they knew too much about her corrupt political and business deals and were about to talk. Generally it's pretty slim evidence, but the pattern of vaguely suspicious deaths starts to add up when you notice a cluster.
Now, Obama might have one too:
I have a firm policy on stuff like this that has the initial appearance of a conspiracy theory. First, I look for positive evidence that something strange was going on. A murder is positive evidence that something happened, so there is reason to look deeper, but it's not positive evidence the man was killed to shut him up. Second, I file it away somewhere even if nothing else turns up immediately. If one person about to testify against Obama (or Clinton, where this particular policy originated) is killed, that's coincidence. Two or three or four, and it starts to look like something more.
I'm not sure what Obama might be hiding about his trip to Pakistan, but if it was worth killing someone over as this theory seems to suggest, it must be pretty bad.
Children are more observant than we think. They know making up something like this will make a big stink and distract from what they were doing that would have gotten them in trouble. But normally, adults know better than to believe the distraction.
Irons in the Fire links to a case where police, chasing someone in order to issue a ticket for not having a forward-facing light on their bicycle, strike the 16-year-old rider with their patrol car. The police spokesperson said "officers are not trained to collide with a suspect", and "the officer driving the car has undergone additional training".
Gosh. Additional training, and the protection of public anonymity.
If that had been a police officer on the bicycle, he could have drawn his weapon, killed the driver, and charged the passenger with attempted murder.
Realistically, they can't hold it against any modern navy including, especially ours... but that assumes someone is willing to get into a shooting war to prove it, and we're not really in a good position to win a land war and change the regime at the moment. Nor is Trump reasonably free to act when the Dems would love something they could use in an impeachment.
If Iran is really willing to go to the mat over this right now, it could get sticky. And the only way we'll find out whether or not they are bluffing is to call the bluff with a carrier battle group.
At moments like these, I understand the call for gun control. I don't agree with it, and I know it won't work. But I understand the emotional urge to do something, anything to stop the apparently senseless violence.
I guess the difference is that I can rationally examine the options and identify what won't work. Trying to ban guns won't work. That genie has left the bottle.
I don't really see other good options. Let ordinary people be armed in public, to harden potential targets on a broad base? Helpful, but not a cure, and mostly after the fact.
The one thing we've seen consistently from most of these events is that law enforcement was flagged multiple times about the killers before they committed their final act of violence. Often they had enough red flags to have someone put under mental health observation or convicted of a crime that would have put them on the prohibited list for firearms purchases. (That won't stop someone who is determined, but if there's due process to get on the list, it might stop some of the killers, or at least slow them down).
I feel like the psychosocial forces that have put us in this position aren't even really visible or comprehensible at our present moment. Like there is a vast collective unconscious that has been for the past two or three decades just boiling over and over with the drive to commit mass murder. We see the water bubble and steam, and occasionally a splash of lava breaks the surface ... but mostly, what lies beneath the water of our consciousness is invisible to us.
Something's happening down there, though. I think it's the same thing that's driving antifa to attack people in the streets, maybe the same thing driving the Black Lives Matter riots to burn down their own communities. Is it agitprop? Do the known political forces pushing antifa and BLM somehow leak into the minds of those somewhat less stable and infect them with similarly murderous but less political fervor? Or sometimes it remains political, as the shooting of Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball practice proves.
I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
The source here claims that a credit report on the girlfriend says she worked for the FBI at one point. What exactly that means -- agent? informant? cafeteria worker? -- is impossible to say without more information. But unless it was an outright lie, or perhaps if the claim was from the distant past, this is a significant black eye for the FBI.
