McCain aide spread dossier around DC after Trump won the election
This was after the election. McCain, who is now dead and will not be missed, was a fool and a traitor to his party, his country, and the Constitution he swore to defend.
Of course they didn't care. They were all equally biased, and they knew what they were there to do: keep the heat on Trump and sweep SpyGate under the rug.
This lawsuit pretty much blatantly violates the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms act. It's being reinstated now because the Left sees this as their last chance to get some anti-gun rulings through the court. Right now, Roberts is seen as right-leaning but wobbly on ... well, pretty much everything. There's still a chance of a 4-4 tie with Roberts as the remaining swing vote. But if Ginsburg takes her lace collar to her final destination in the next two years, Trump will probably get to appoint her replacement. If the left wants a chance at anti-gun rulings, it's now, or wait until Trump is out.
In case you've forgotten how much bullshit this lawsuit has, the Newtown killer murdered his mother in her bed to obtain the guns he used.
Aside from his apparent opposition to Islam and general racism (neither of which are limited to the right), his views are left-wing: environmentalist, anti-individualist, anti-capitalist. He opposes immigration due to the environmental impact.
That's not to say the left is to blame for his actions. Only individuals are responsible for their actions. But it would be equally wrong to blame the right for his actions -- by, for example, passing gun control laws.
Florida legislation to give drivers' licenses to illegal aliens
What do you do when you sign up for a drivers' license?
By federal law, you are offered the chance to register to vote. Most people probably just say yes. There's no citizenship check or proof required. Probably there will be rules that illegal aliens shouldn't register to vote that way. But they will be ignored. "Mistakes" will be made. They already are made, often, in states like California that offer similar benefits to their population of illegals. And once registered, voter ID laws won't matter; the illegal aliens will have the ID needed to vote, and they'll be on the list.
Hopefully they won't pass. But if they do -- that would quite likely forever tip Florida into the Democrats column for presidential races, which would make it almost impossible for Republicans to win as the current political landscape looks. And if you look at many of the other states that were once purple or battleground states, as soon as the Democrats won a majority, they almost immediately passed laws changing the voting rules. Oregon, Washington (state), Colorado... they put in vote by mail right away. California expanded their "vote harvesting" rules and got rid of some of the very few Republican representatives that state sent to Congress.
They are not even a little shy about solidifying a win by changing the rules to suit them and enable fraud.
Remember, Mueller was originally given the mandate to continue the FBI's existing counterintelligence investigation into Russian collusion -- effectively, investigating Trump and everyone around him during the campaign. He was also given a secret mandate later on. What that second mandate covers is an interesting question.
There are, I think, two possibilities. It could be either or both.
One possibility is obstruction of justice. This would have to be kept secret from Trump because Trump would be the target of the investigation at that point. It might include other administration figures (AG Sessions for example). There are significant questions as to whether such an investigation against the president is legal, but the existence of an investigation is hard for a judge to oversee.
The other possibility is that Rosenstein told Mueller to investigation the allegations in the dossier and prove or disprove them if he could do so. This is sort of implied by the first part of Mueller authority (the part we know about), but may have been made more explicit in the second. This would be redacted because it would be embarrassing as all hell for the FBI to admit to, given the origins of the dossier, but has the significant advantage of providing political cover for the FBI if he succeeds. They can say "Look, we were right to use the dossier, Mueller proved it true," even if Mueller found no actual collusion.
So if Mueller can make people in the dossier appear dirty enough, people might overlook the fact that they started an investigation on unverified and false information. And that's pretty much exactly what Mueller has been busy doing. He went after Cohen and Manafort, both figures from the dossier, and he dirtied them up with stuff they did not related to Trump (plus that campaign-finance thing that's BS).
So what happened is pretty clear. Mueller started the investigation into collusion and determined fairly enough on -- certainly no later than when he had to fire Strzok and Page -- that there was no there there. Even those two knew there was nothing to the collusion narrative from the beginning, as did the rest of the original DOJ/FBI team that transferred to Mueller. As soon as he found that out, he went to Rosenstein and said "Look, we have a problem. This was fake all along. Your guys knew it, I know it, now you know it. I can't cover for you with nothing. You've got to give me more." So Rosenstein added the extra redacted things to Mueller's mandate -- either obstruction, to threaten Trump with, or investigating the people in the dossier more broadly to provide political cover for the FBI looking into them inappropriately, or both.
And now, as Obama's favorite preacher Jeremiah Wright once said, the FBI's chickens... have come home... to ROOST!
Honestly, I was thinking similar thoughts. Brexit, the Yellow Jackets in France, the Tea Party and the Trump in the US... political elites all over the world are being told it's not working, pay attention to the people's actual needs and wants rather than increasingly insane games of competitive virtue signaling, and generally the elites are not listening.
Well, if the so-called elites will not listen, and will not cede power willingly to those who will... then power will be taken from them, and that rarely ends well.
Those who claim to be smart enough to rule us should be smart enough to see when it is time to step down and get the hell out of the way to rule another day.
When the legal outcome conflicts with the moral outcome
I've seen similar analogies before. In today's society, the smart thing to do is protect yourself and yours; unless you are a police officer with a certain amount of professional immunity, you're better off not acting until your own life or that of your family is at risk.
But ... people don't like that. That doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel moral. It discourages morally correct action, which is to save that life if you can. And the idea that saving that life -- assuming you read the situation accurately -- will cost you $50,000 or more just for society to agree that you did the right thing is seen as both immoral and (unless you have explicitly thought about it ahead of time) unpredictable.
It's an imperfection in our legal system that the heroic course of action can be very costly. But perhaps that's why we call them heroes.
The Democrats plan to save social security: illegal aliens
Or, they could go home, and pay their own taxes to their own country and experience their own country's glorious retirement system.
The fact is, our social security system is a Ponzi scheme that will inevitably collapse as the population base needed to support ever-growing elderly retirees simply is not there. The Democrat plan to solve this is to import millions of new Democrat voters from third-world nations, convince them to vote for Democrats with identity politics, and try not to mention that becoming legal citizens also means paying taxes like legal citizens and being subject to laws like legal citizens.
In all honesty, that also appears to be the Republican plan, at least for the Establishment types. Except that they plan to lie to the people about it.
Fiscal responsibility does not seem to be an option.
Christopher Steele's reputation not as good as advertised
Bold was me. It's likely Steele didn't write all of the dossier.
But it seems that the quality -- or rather, the lack thereof -- of his work was well known within the intelligence community even before Mueller's report was delivered to AG Barr.
I don't much care about bump stocks, but the precedent of allowing government agencies to change the letter of the law by simple dictat is not one we can let pass lightly. I'm glad there are people fighting this and I wish them luck.
It's a district court, meaning appeals are inevitable. But the ruling is narrow and based on sound Constitutional law, particularly as it is focused on possession in the home and the impossibility of compliance with the plain language of the law (eg, everyone in the home would need to have a FOID and have it on their person literally at all times).
I think the smart play by the antis would be to not appeal this. They might -- might! -- win one level up at the Illinois Supreme Court. But if this gets to the national Supreme Court, it tracks so closely to Heller that I have to image the statute is doomed -- and that would put at risk similar statutes in other states.
But, of course, they already have.
We're likely to find out what our new Justices think of the 2nd Amendment sooner rather than later.
Fake News Russian Collusion out, real Ukrainian collusion in
To be fair, the Ukrainian collusion part is still alleged. But there's tape, a court ruling, an active criminal investigation, and contacts with the Obama administration via the US embassy in the Ukraine.
Combine this story with Devin Nunes announcing he is suing twitter about shadowbanning and coordinated harassment campaigns, and you start to see what looks like a planned counteroffensive.