The Spooks Attack

A house divided cannot stand. Jesus provided that sage observation when he spoke of the impossibility and the stupidness of the Pharisaical contention that he was exorcising the possessed and healing the infirm and sick on behalf of the Devil.

Former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn resigned less than a month into President Donald Trump’s administration. He resigned, not because of the leaks of his conversations with Russian diplomats nor anything he said to them, but because he did not provide a full or accurate account of his conversations to Vice-President Mike Pence, who went on national television to defend him.

For that, Flynn deserved to resign. My hope is that he will return to a place in the Trump Administration down the road. He is a quality military and intelligence professional who can still serve his country.

The country is not served, however, by the leaks the spooks in the NSA and elsewhere are deliberately spilling to reporters, leaks of the work by the administration’s top intelligence and military and cabinet officials, of even the president and his private conversations. The leaks are deliberate lawbreaking by the people who resent President Trump’s critique of their poor work the last 16 years. More importantly, they are leaks by the new Devil in town, the Devil who spews the anti-American ideology of globalism, elitism, political correctness, and privacy deprivation permanently staked out among the establishments of the Left and the Right.

For simplicity, I will refer to them as the globalists, but know that what I mean are the anti-American ideologues of globalism, elitism, PC, and privacy deprivation. Their house is undivided by minor differences in Left and Right.

On the other hand, they have divided our American house, and they are hellbent on continuing to divide it and every other house in the world until they have cut off and crushed the opposition to their goals: a global, two-class system dominated by the elites, an undiluted diversity that becomes a uni-versity and an undiluted multicultural muck whose only feature is its complete lack of distinction, an underclass the elites stimulate and control for their benefit, disallowing thoughts outside of their notions of political and social correctness, an underclass completely naked to their proddings.

It’s a horrifying thought, but it is time for Americans to consider whether they own their country or not, whether the Constitution means anything or not, because the globalists have no intention of adhering to it. None. The Constitution stands in their way.

My sense is our country is divided beyond repair. Americanism and globalism cannot coexist. Globalism, especially under the former president, represents a ceding of all we have held dear to the perversions of diversity and multiculturalism. If I were to visit Korea, I would want to experience the Korean culture. If I were to visit Morocco, I would want to experience the Moroccan culture, etc. I don’t want either of them coming here and changing our American culture. I love our English heritage, I cherish it, even though I am half Hispanic and Catholic, and I want that White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture to continue, not get lost in some amorphous muck.

So this is where we are: the globalists within the intelligence community, the lovers of Clinton and Islamic terror and greedy mega-corporations and media who lie to the American public, especially the self-hating white people among them, betraying the president and his officials for their political agenda.

The FBI should find and root out every single one of those soulless, traitorous bastards and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law. They act as if the voters made a mistake, and they want to correct that mistake, just like the folks in 1984. These are dark, ominous days, and in the darkness the political spooks and bureaucrats have found a way to begin their coup d’etat.

The globalists aren’t going to stop. We must stop them. Keep the faith, my fellow citizens, in God, in your neighbor, and in your American way!

The Unbalanced Ninth Circuit Court and the Road to Dystopia

Americans continue to wait for a decision from a three judge panel of the U.S. 9^th Circuit Court of Appeal on President Trump’s anti-terrorism travel ban. The panel heard arguments Monday after a federal district court judge stayed the ban.

The president’s ban is designed to provide more protection for Americans from terrorist attacks by preventing individuals or classes of individuals entry into the United States from seven countries that have served as notorious breeding grounds for terrorists and their murderous, destructive acts.

Those countries are Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen.

While some in the media have tried to paint the president as violating the checks and balances of the Constitution for criticizing the district judge who stayed his executive order that contained the ban, other members of the media have begun to zero in on the 9th Circuit’s trespass onto the executive branch.

Here’s what even The New York Times wrote about Judge Michelle Friedland, who appears to think she should decide whether there is enough reason to institute a ban.

“Judge Friedland, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, did not seem persuaded that immediate suspension of travel from the seven countries was necessary.

“‘Has the government pointed to any evidence connecting these countries with terrorism?’” she asked [Department of Justice attorney] Mr. Flentje.

Here is what Mr. Flentje should have said: “It’s none of your damn business. That’s the Constitutional mandate of the executive branch and the statutory authority bestowed on the president by Congressional legislation. You may agree or disagree with the bar we’ve set, or agree or disagree with the conditions and dangers from those countries as we see them, but you have no business directing, and no power to alter, policy because you don’t like it.”

Actually, Mr. Flentje did rebuff her, but not as forcefully.

Friedland’s questions demonstrate two things. First, she wants to unveil the administration’s policy reasoning so it can be attacked. To be sure, both the president and the Congress should explain their policies and their reasoning and the facts behind them. Friedland is not looking for understanding, however; she is looking for targets her thinkalikes can attack and obstruct. That motivation of hers is strictly political, not forensic.

Second, Friedland suggests that courts do, or should have, the authority to negate a policy of the executive branch, not as a matter of law or Constitution, but as a kind of second-guessing review board to contain or uproot policies they opine are not warranted or are not in conformance with their ideology.

The state of Washington’s case generates laughter among anyone who takes law seriously. The state said companies headquartered there, like Microsoft, are negatively affected in their employment practices. In other words, the ban could hinder Microsoft from hiring foreigners, because they don’t want to hire Americans. Not only is that stance anti-American, it defies logic. There are about 7.5 billion people on our planet, and because you cannot hire someone from those terrorist breeding grounds, 7.27 billion people isn’t a big enough employee pool from which to pick?

The attorney representing Washington state spluttered about religious discrimination. Unfortunately for Muslims, the violence woven intrinsically into their tenets and scriptures bloodies and defames their religion. If I were Muslim, I would not want to have to make the argument that I am being discriminated against because my faith tells me and other adherents that I have to kill all the people who don’t accept my faith.

It’s not discrimination against Islam; it’s discrimination against terrorism, unless Islam and terrorism are the same thing.

What’s happened is that a sick, self-hating ideology has overrun our schools and our society and our politics from one end of the spectrum, the end commonly called liberal, and produced intellectual usurpers like Friedland, Gates, and Google, etc., who reject all that made us what we were, our religious, cultural, and political heritage. It’s not true liberalism; it’s a deviant extremism that wants to empty our citizens of their self-respect and replace it with a docile acceptance of whatever the social engineers want to implant in our brains.

In their view, what’s right is wrong; what’s wrong is right. Protecting the lives of American citizens is wrong if it upsets foreigners who don’t belong here in the first place or some concept of “open borders”.

This new social engineering is creating two classes: the elite establishment and its privileged managers and media minions, and everyone else. The establishment is hellbent on acquiring and keeping a share of our minds, and exerting an ever stronger psychological and actual influence over us. There is a reason for the quiet raping of our privacy of which we have been much too docile in our acceptance.

Right now, private and state Internet companies, communication companies, electronic devices companies, media companies, and content-providing companies are listening in on you and watching you. Siri and Alexa may be listening even when you are not talking to them. Your computer camera, phone camera, television, microphone recorder on any of those, can – at least potentially, if not yet actually – pick up and transmit what you are saying and doing. It’s the same with the cloud and any Internet based security system with cameras that you use.

They are getting to know you, whether you want them to or not.

Beware the hook: “a more personalized experience.” It’s a gross lie. They are getting to know you, quietly and intimately, so that they can shape the way you think, guide your behavior.

Beware. It’s just a little now. It will be much, much more later.

Beware!

I know I have mixed in a lot here that is disparate, and that I began with a current event and moved swiftly, and perhaps for some, too far away into the realm of what it is a part of and where it is going. I believe it is something to consider. Things just aren’t right any more. An ugliness is slowly emerging.

Shameless John McCain

Americans elected Donald Trump their president last November. Not John McCain. Not squeaky Lindsey Graham.

Arizonans elected McCain to represent their interests in the senate. I don’t know why. However, that should constrain McCain from his hyperbolic antics and speech-making. It doesn’t. McCain believes he has some kind of mandate to thwart the reasons Americans elected Trump: to stem the flow of illegal immigration; to stem the flow of Muslim terrorists into the United States; to win the war on terror against ISIL; to help create millions of more jobs by relocating factories back to the U.S. or by helping to build new ones here; to take care of our vets; to repeal and replace Obamacare; to lower taxes; to rebuild and strengthen our military; to help restore law and order nationwide.

McCain isn’t a maverick; he’s a deep-rooted, toxic weed hellbent on strengthening the establishment and weakening Americans and our Constitution. I’d call him a shameless political whore, but that would be incorrect; McCain is a stout narcissist who only finds a worthy cause when he looks into a mirror.

The Arizona senator’s power grab will impede the will of American voters, but my recommendation is that President Trump smack down him and establishment sock puppet Lindsey Graham as quickly as possible, relegating them to meaninglessness. They do not speak for Republicans any more. They do not speak for conservatives. They do not speak for Constitutionalists. They do not speak for Americans.

McCain and Graham speak only for themselves and their cherished establishment, and stridently so, and it’s time to begin to nullify them. McCain’s resume is littered with failure. Was McCain able to win the presidency in 2008? No. Loser. Was he able to enact serious, significant campaign reform? No. Loser. Did he strengthen the U.S. Military his last eight years in the senate? No. Loser. Did he enact or enforce legislation to protect Americans from terrorism? No. Loser. Did he help to balance the budget at all? No. Loser. Did he stop the national debt from increasing by trillions of dollars the last eight years? No. Loser. Did he cut taxes for the middle class? No. Loser. Did he stop the enactment of Obamacare? No. Loser. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, did he prevent huge cost overruns on the F-22 and the F-35 programs, among others? No. Loser. Did he save or create jobs? No. Loser.

Why would such a loser want to pick a fight with a winner like Trump? Call it political penis envy. Old man McCain wants to call the shots, but he’s worried because someone with real success credentials has been voted onto the scene and placed into his sandbox, and McCain will be damned – let’s hope not – if he is going to let someone else call the shots, even though he laid down for Obama all these years.

If you want to accomplish something, don’t bring John McCain and whiny sock puppet Lindsey Graham along. Don’t even try. They won’t cooperate unless they can plunge their mouth-holes into the special interest trough and gobble away like a couple of porkers!

Let McCain try to thwart Trump. Mr. President, we elected you and your ideas and your plans, not loser McCain’s. If he won’t help, cast him aside and work with other, smarter people who want to make this country safe, who stand for America First and not for globalism, who place the interests of American citizens and their culture and their Constitution first and not the interests of illegal aliens and refugee terrorists and strange, violent religious beliefs.

I am so sick of the moralizing social engineers in this country, the people like McCain and Obama who think they get to decide how Americans are going to be shaped and dictated to and who spit on the elections results, our American election results! Get out and go somewhere else!

More Media Lies

Take a look at these quick examples of media dishonesty, all of which I found at MSN.com.

First a headline from a story printed in the liberal London-based English daily The Guardian: “Four more journalists get felony charges after covering inauguration unrest.” Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Do you see the assumptions made by the newspaper? Who confirmed that the men arrested were journalists? We don’t want to make any post hoc guesses, but the headline suggests the men were arrested because they were covering unrest at the inauguration. How does the newspaper know one way or another? Maybe they were; maybe they weren’t.

In the story, the writer(s) replace the word “journalists” with “media workers”, a seemingly broader, less specific term than the one used in the headline. Further into the story, at least two of the “journalists” are also called “activists”. Can one be an activist and a journalist?

And then what kind of journalists are the folks arrested? One is called a maker of documentaries, another a “live-streamer”, another a “photojournalist”, and yet another a “freelance journalist”. One begins to sense that at least some of the men may not be journalists at all or that some may, in fact, have participated in the unrest. The story, which can be found here – http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/four-more-journalists-get-felony-charges-after-covering-inauguration-unrest/ar-AAmbHUN?li=BBnb7Kz – does not mention the arrest reports until the end. Those reports state that windows were broken, fires lit, and vehicles damaged.

Second, here’s another headline from a reliable liar, The New York Times: “Trump Won’t Back Down From His Voting Fraud Lie. Here Are The Facts.”

Inside the story, The NYT reports that no evidence has been presented to buttress President Trump’s contention that three to five million illegal immigrants or noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election and gave Mrs. Hillary Clinton a hollow raw vote victory. That’s fair and that’s fine. However, that does not make President Trump’s contention a lie; unfounded, yes, a lie, no. But then President Trump has stung The NYT so often by pointing out their prevarications that the newspapers wants to settle the score rather than to report factually.

Third, The New York Times published a story about an executive order Trump will sign that curtails immigration and build the wall along the U.S. Border with Mexico. The NYT article did not mention that a second reason to build the wall was to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. Below lies the link:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-expected-to-order-mexican-border-wall/ar-AAmcGyu

The NYT promotes an unfounded statement and one lie in this story. The first is that “the Obama administration had already instituted strict screening procedures for Syrian refugees that were designed to weed out anyone who posed a danger.” In some of the secret emails released by Wikileaks, Mrs. Clinton herself bemoaned the inadequacy of our vetting measures. Beyond that, who determined that Obama instituted “strict screening procedures”? How did the newspaper determine whether a screening procedure was “strict” or not? The reader has no basis on which to accept The NYT’s assertion.

Secondly, The NYT then prints a quote which is patently incorrect, if not a lie, when compared to the reporting in other parts of the story. The NYT quoted immigration advocate and activist Marielena Hincapie saying in response to President Trump’s actions, “To think that Trump’s first 100 days are going to be marked by this very shameful shutting of our doors to everybody who is seeking refuge in this country is very concerning.”

Yet the doors are NOT being shut to everybody. Numbers will be reduced, both of legal and illegal immigrants, and refugees from Muslim or terror-prone countries will be banned, at least temporarily. However, some legal immigrants will be allowed. Why did The NYT print the falsehood that the door was being shut to everybody!? Why didn’t they challenge Ms. Hincapie on her statement?

Hacking the Russian Hack Story

• Problems with the Press Accounts of the Intel ‘Report’
• Tangible Media and Intel Animus toward President-Elect Trump
• If the Russians Hacked the DNC, Could It Have Been for Bernie?

Like an arrogant rhinoceros waving its wand and puckering its starfish to piss and crap all over the jungle, the media continues to spew and drop faux and fraudulent news and statements and headlines about soon-to-be President Donald Trump and his administration, angling their themes to paint him with dark or doubtful stains.

The dishonest media isn’t alone. At least some of the heads of our American intelligence agencies, and their minions, have compromised the integrity of the agencies they run, polluting the operations with a thoroughly toxic left-wing, selfishly anti-democratic, anti-transition, and anti-collegial spirit. Amid this boiling toxicity, these heads have cooked up intel reports and summaries to damage the president, his cabinet and staff, his program, and our country.

That’s the way establishments are: see things our way and do them our way… or else.

One more day!

I cannot wait until Mr. Trump’s intel, military, and justice (as well as all the others: Go Wilbur Ross!) heads take command on Jan. 20 and CLEAN house of all the lying bastards who have polluted our intelligence and our intelligence agencies with their Buzzfeed mentalities.

Let’s tackle – again – the 35-page report presented by overall intelligence chief James Clapper to the president-elect, the president, and a few members of Congress. We know only what the unclassified version says, not the classified, so we are missing valuable pieces to the puzzle that could confirm what the intelligence agencies allegedly surmised or could disconfirm or cast doubt on those impressions.

In essence, Clapper’s report alleged that Russia conducted a cyber attack on servers run by the Democratic National Committee and used the information they gleaned to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump get elected.

Is that true? Let’s examine the story as it appeared in The New York Times online edition on or about Jan. 7. Adam Goldman, Matthew Rosenberg, and Matt Apuzzo authored the piece.

What The NYT gives us first is:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation’s top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday [Jan. 6] to Trump.”

That’s the lead paragraph in the story. Make a note that The NYT labeled the report “extraordinary”. Two paragraphs later, The NYT adds:

“Soon after leaving the meeting, intelligence officials released the declassified, damning report (emphasis mine) that described the sophisticated cybercampaign as part of a continuing Russian effort to weaken the United States government and its democratic institutions.”

That’s heavy stuff. The report is damning, presumably for Mr. Trump, and Russia seeks to weaken our federal government and our democratic institutions.

The problem is twofold: 1. how is Trump damned by the report? The Russians have been interfering with our government for decades, and we have been interfering with theirs and with many other governments for decades. Trump isn’t damned by the report; the intelligence and defense communities are damned by the report for failing to adequately deal with any cyber threat from a foreign power! Why were the Russians able to catch them napping?

Second, the Democratic National Committee that was hacked is NOT a democratic institution. Political parties come and go, evolve and morph and become totally different over the course of years. No particular party is an institution. The Democrat Party did not even exist at the dawn of our republic. The DNC is part of the current political fabric, but it’s not one of our democratic institutions.

Now consider the following two points which The NYT buried deeply in its article. The first occurs around paragraph 27, at which the article stated:

“Yet the attacks [by Russia], the report said, began long before anyone could have known that Mr. Trump, considered a dark horse, would win the Republican nomination. It said the attacks began as early as 2015… .”

The article adds that the Russians maintained a presence on the DNC server for another 11 months, perhaps even after the private firm Crowdstrike thought it had them booted off.

Two final points to note: First, the DNC denied the FBI permission to look at its servers. This point does not appear in The NYT article but has been reported extensively elsewhere. It isn’t clear whether the DNC allowed any other federal agencies access, but isn’t it suspicious the DNC denied the FBI access when Democrats were complaining about an illegal hack?

Second, the evolution of Russian purposes reported by The NYT doesn’t add up. Overly eager to lay blame on Mr. Trump, the intel heads and the paper admit the Russians began to hack the DNC server in the summer of 2015, when Trump was one of 17 Republican presidential candidates, and the Brits first alerted American intel ops about the DNC hack in the autumn of 2015, but the CIA and other agencies are just writing a report about it now. Why didn’t they do something then!?

So the Russian purpose for the hack was, and always has been, to hurt Hillary Clinton. This stands as a vital point, because it would not have made any difference who the Republican nominee was. The Russians did not know who it would be.

Trump was part of a large pack of candidates in the running at the end of 2015, with commentators and pundits repeatedly saying he had hit a ceiling and would never win the Republican nomination. Five of the 17 Republican candidates dropped out of the presidential race just before the Iowa caucuses; still, Trump lost the Iowa caucuses on February 1, 2016. Although Trump picked up steam afterward, he also hit a rough stretch punctuated by a stinging defeat in Wisconsin on April 5. It could not have been clear to the Russians he enjoyed any significant chance to win his party’s nomination until he took every delegate in the May 3, 2016, Indiana primary.

Even then, with talk bubbling about a contested convention, the Russian mindset about Trump’s chances likely exhibited a similarity to that of Julian Assange and other foreign onlookers (Assange’s quote is from website ZeroHedge):

“My analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that? Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment. Banks, intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the journalists themselves.”

By the time Mr. Trump won Indiana, the alleged Russian hack of the DNC server was almost over.

The Russians must have figured, as did every political pundit in this country, that Mr. Trump would never defeat Mrs. Clinton. If they did plan and execute the DNC hack to release Democrats’ own secret, damaging information, they wanted to undermine her presidency, as the NYT story and other stories have reported. They may have chuckled that collaterally, at some point, they were “helping” Trump, but NO ONE outside of his supporters thought he had any chance of winning against Hillary Clinton.

In fact, what the media are deliberately NOT writing and talking about is the possibility that Russia, if it hacked the DNC, intended its damage to Mrs. Clinton’s already eroded reputation to help Bernie Sanders. Mr. Sanders is the socialist candidate who had visited Russia years before when it was communist and whose policy proposals most reflected the way Mr. Putin wields centralized power in Russia.

The hypocrisy of it all is that American intel agencies spy on their fellow citizens, the citizens whose privacy and dignity they are sworn to uphold and respect. Even as Clapper excoriates Russia, his agencies gobble up every minute detail about Americans and their lives, analyze it, and store it forever in case it is needed. They intrude into Americans’ computers, tablets, phones, GPSes, TVs, microphones, and every communication. In cahoots with big business, they have become the all-seeing eye!

It is so wrong and so unconstitutional.

So stop your calumny of Mr. Trump, intel agencies. Do what you are supposed to do: obey your commander-in-chief and the will of the American people. Collect accurate intelligence and present it without passion or prejudice. Keep your mouths shut on domestic political issues. Don’t talk and write about hacks after they have happened; stop them from happening!

Beware the Email War – Not!

The war to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency escalated Wednesday when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) asked America’s director of national intelligence whether the alleged Russian hacks of some members of the Democrat National Committee constituted “an act of war.”

James Clapper, appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, declined to make that call, saying it was beyond the purview of the intelligence community. Clapper did stand by a previously published assessment that the Russians butted into American politics when they hacked those emails, which were published during the presidential campaign by Wikileaks. Clapper continued to argue that Russia butted in to help elect Trump or to help defeat Clinton.

President-Elect Trump is scheduled to meet with key members of the intelligence community Friday. He has maintained it is impossible to know for certain who hacked the Democrats, and he has cited Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s contention that his organization did not receive the emails from the Russians or any “state party” as evidence against a Russian hack.

This particular line of attack on Trump’s presidency aims to portray him as a democracy destroyer who wanted the Russian hack to negate the real wishes of voters, which would have been to elect Hillary Clinton.

However, the intelligence community has admitted that no voting machines nor any vote tallies were hacked or manipulated by the Russians, and various news outlets have reported that the intelligence community remains uncertain about what impact the hacks and publishing of the Democrat emails had on the election outcome, if any.

Hacking itself is illegal, although it is generally acknowledged that competing or enemy countries routinely attempt to hack each other, sometimes succeeding.

The question for American citizens is what to make of this story. McCain’s hyperbolic question to Clapper, was the hack “an act of war”, shows itself as little more than inglorious grandstanding and a desperate effort to make a mountain out of a mole hill.

Why? Because McCain already knew the answer to the question, which was the negative, and which rendered the question as not worthy of being asked. How do we know? Because if McCain believed the alleged Russian hack constituted an act of war, he could have moved for a declaration of war or an authorization of war in the Senate. Has he ever done that? Absolutely not!

In fact, McCain’s sly attempt to disingenuously shift the onus of determination to the national intelligence director scammed American citizens. It was theater. McCain is the lawmaker and the putative statesman. A declaration or authorization for war, or the grounds that merit such, is his and his fellow lawmaker’s call, and the president’s; it isn’t the call of a subordinate who reports to lawmakers and to the president! The intelligence community provides the data to help decision-makers decide. The president and our lawmakers analyze, make sense of, evaluate, and render judgment.

So when Clapper told McCain that calling the alleged Russian hack “an act of war” was not his to make, he meant that in just the way I have described, which is quite telling. Will McCain seek a declaration or authorization for war? Nah! No one is going to war over a few pinched Democrat emails, emails the media should have pursued and published but which they did not.

Those emails had information which every voter had a right to know. They detailed the Democrats true intentions, their condescension toward and condemnation of various ethnic, racial, and religious groups not in agreement with them, and their deliberate hypocrisy in showing voters a faux political persona while sharing their real persona secretly to the wealthy insiders who owned them.

So McCain can stand on top of the tallest soap box he can find and shout at the top of his lungs, as can Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff and a whole host of others who want to make hay out of the alleged Russian hack. We’re not going to war because pinching a few Democrat emails isn’t worth it.

But think of the hypocrisy, my fellow citizens! Our government is spying on us. It listens and watches and reads everything. It intercepts and catalogs every phone call, email, text message, etc., and stores them for future reference (think of Person of Interest). And the big corporations are doing the same thing!

As a citizen, I am not going to rally around a cry of wolf toward Russia when our own government and our own businesses betray our ideals of privacy and respect in the name of “security” and “a more personalized experience”.

Yes, I want to win the cyber war, which has been going on for some time and with worse incidents than the hack of Democrat emails. Let’s keep everything in perspective, however, and let’s keep our intelligence agencies honest and honoring of our tradition of maximum individual liberty.

Now, if only we could keep the media honest… .

So, McCain, stop trying to hinder the changes and improvements Trump will make. Stop trying to incapacitate your president and force him to accept only your agenda, which Americans do NOT want. You better get on the train and help Trump make America great again, and that includes a wall along the border.

Throw the Russian Hack Story in the Trash

The media will not let go of the story about the hacked emails of Democratic Party leaders and operatives. They and the political establishment continue to assert that Russia hacked the emails and likely used them to favor Trump’s election or to defeat Hillary Clinton’s.

The media effort seeks to brand the hack as an “election hack”, an equivocal term that many media readers/viewers/listeners mistake to mean that election machines or vote tallies were tampered with, an intentional manipulation of perception that is patently false.

The media cites a “report” by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. However, that report essentially provides no details to the press, naturally, to preserve security, choosing out of necessity to offer a summary of conclusions. Omitted are the details of what those agencies discovered, how their information was obtained, and how it was analyzed and interpreted to point the finger at Russia.

What and how much the president and president-elect have been told remains a secret. Perhaps we’ll learn more when the intelligence community briefs Donald Trump on Friday.

The president-elect Trump has disputed the intelligence findings, citing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has said on multiple occasions that Wikileaks did not receive the hacked Democrat emails from Russia or from any “state party”.

In the analyses of what the intelligence community has reported, commentators have stated that the intelligence agencies made their conclusion in part based on certain digital “signatures” hackers use to gain access to computer users.

What I have not seen asked or answered is whether such signatures can be found out and duplicated by other hackers who want the trail to lead to another person or group besides themselves.

On the other hand, if Wikileaks did not receive the data from the Russians, it must be asked whether it was possible for a third party to deliver the data to Wikileaks after receiving it from the Russians and whether that happened.

The problem with the story is the political grandstanding it has created by both Democrat and Republican establishment politicians. All those officeholders want voters to think the election was hacked, that America’s security was breached, and that Americans and their democracy were endangered. They do so for individual and collective motivations, all unpleasantly selfish.

Whether you agree with or like Mr. Trump or not, his campaign and election smashed the iron grip the establishment and its media purveyors held on electioneering and American life. Campaigns of both parties had fallen always within a certain range of mutual acceptability, and the process was monolithicized to prevent outsiders from gaining sway and the American public from being heard, respected, and obeyed.

Instead, the establishment members transmogrified the elections of our democratic republic into their personal power scheme, where the issues they cared about were nurtured and nourished and the common American was manipulated or ignored. Americans had to adapt to the political establishment rather than the political establishment adapting to Americans. The result was massive disappointment, economic and cultural neglect, the diminishment of the desired quality of life, and the marginalization of the American public at large.

That establishment and media effort continues, and the alleged Russian hack is one of its cornerstones. Trump is bad, and by extension his nominees and his policy proposals are bad, because he is the reason democracy is in danger, they have said or implied. He’s a dirty cheat who did anything to get elected, and he suborned the Russian hack when he asked for their cyber help to expose Hillary Clinton’s dirty secrets, dishonesty, and hypocrisy.

That is how threatened the political establishment and the media are. Don’t believe them. They are the liars and cheats, and if Trump is the same, at least he is lying and cheating for us. They seek only their own benefit and ours collaterally, just enough to keep us quiet.

I believe Trump believes in Americans and America first. I have no reason to think otherwise, but those whose iron grip on power he has loosened have reason to want you and me to think otherwise: so they can steal back what they lost even though it wasn’t theirs to begin with!

Don’t fall for it.

The second problem with the story is that it undermines America’s response to the Russians if, in fact, they did hack a private organization. As a citizen, I don’t need a lot of fanfare and hyperbolic, faux congressional questioning and a huge, 500-page report no one will read. I want our intelligence agencies to quietly and patiently strike back at the right time, improving our security and breaking through theirs, which is what they have been doing (hopefully) all along.

We expect our enemies and competitors to spy on us, just as we are spying on them. For the grandstanders to act like the hack of Democrat emails was something shocking and dangerous to democracy is to diminish the significance of what a truly detrimental hack would be: on actual voting machines and vote tallies; on our power grid, knocking out electricity to whole swaths of the country in the dead of winter; on our nuclear and conventional arsenals, turning a simulation or a war game into an actual attack; on our nuclear power plants; on our banking, robbing people and businesses of their identities and their finances; on our air traffic and maritime and railroad and ground traffic controls and signals, to name just a few. Those could result in catastrophe: loss of life and destruction or disappearance of property on a massive scale.

The political establishment and the media want to direct your attention to fake news and to redirect your attention away from what is vital and critical: hackers threaten their machinations and help to upend their grip on power. Hacked emails reveal how they genuinely think and feel, the private persona that contradicts the phony public persona they portray to common Americans, like you and me. I don’t care what their political stripes are: they are liars and cheats hellbent on hoodwinking the American public and preserving their power.

What is the first thing the GOP tried to do when the 115^th Congress opened? Shut down the independent ethics counsel! How rotten was that? How impudent and imprudent was that? We have so many things to make right and to do to make this country great again, and the first thing the GOP house members try to do is rid themselves of the agency that investigates congressional misdeeds!

Do not be misled. Toss the Russian hack story where it belongs: File 13. Be watchful. Work to keep our republican democracy alive and healthy. Stay free and independent, my friends!

How Voters May Want to Assess the Reported Russian Hack

Here’s how voters may want to assess the reported Russian hack:

1. What is being reported:

a. the Russians hacked both Democrat and Republican servers and/or computers.

b. the Russians only released what they found out about the Democrats b/c they wanted Hillary Clinton to fail and Trump to be elected.

c. Trump “knew before election day” the Russians had hacked the servers but no date specified.

d. The GOP knew it had been hacked by Russians.

e. CIA releases “report” to confirm those claims as “high confidence” and follows with assertion they know Putin was directly involved.

f. Election outcome not affected (even president says so) but electoral process meddled with.

g. Calls for investigations and response.

Whether you are glad Trump got elected or upset that Hillary did not win, I don’t think any of us wants election meddling by a foreign power. However, we also do not want a few individuals and groups – an oligarchical establishment – to wield the excessive power they do to hack and hijack our elections either.

Yet the 2016 presidential primary and general election campaigns bore testimony to just such excessive power. That America’s plutocrats and politicrats and their organs of disinformation failed demonstrated two things. First, their failure cast light on the hardships and mighty struggle of the common American and his distrust of the way things weren’t working for him, because they weren’t intended to. Second, it cast light on the establishment’s unpreparedness for Trump’s unique candidacy and politicking.

Bet on the establishment to work overtime to figure out that candidacy and that politicking and to adapt to it so they do not experience a second defeat of their purposes.

Voters must ever be vigilant and ever make their will known with zeal and industry. Every side in the establishment is out to mislead you, to lie to you, and even to use the truth against you and for themselves. I have never forgotten a line from The Exorcist in which Father Merrin, the aging, veteran exorcist, tells young Father Karras, who barely believes what is happening, to beware when they are in the room facing evil directly because it is most dangerous when it “mixes truth with the lies.”

How does all this apply to the Russian hack?

Whether you supported Hillary Clinton or not, the truth is the establishment wanted her because Trump threatened their rule and security, even though he himself was a billionaire. The plutocrats and politicrats and their organs of disinformation (nearly every major media outlet) labored exhaustively to laud Clinton and disparage Trump and to shape the way voters thought.

I’m a Cold War Kid, so I hate the Russians. In this context, that term means the old style Russian government, military, intelligence, and media operations in play by Putin, a former KGB agent. I do not mean the Russian people, who are tough and have borne their share of hardship and war. I do not want the Russians to hack servers and computers in our public or private sectors. The United States should respond, quietly, surgically, effectively. Perhaps we already have.

While the Russians acted illegally and for their own purposes, if in fact they performed the hack, American citizens did benefit. We got to see what Clinton, many of her top aides, and other important Democrats genuinely thought about we common Americans and the policies they wanted to put into play and their collusion with the media. I was appalled. I can’t think of enough words to describe the lack of integrity among people who should have borne the highest integrity: hypocrisy, duplicity, prejudice, bias, ill will, and an utter disregard for the truth and the benefit of Americans and our culture.

Now gulp down this dose of Reality: The Russians aren’t the only ones who hack. As citizens, we have been hacked by our own spy agencies and huge, greedy corporations and tech behemoths who believe our personal business is their business and their right. The fingerpointing and cries against the Russians are the highest hypocrisy of the establishment and its lying media disinformers, all which endorse and/or perpetrate spying on the American people.

The Russians have an excuse: they can say they are our enemies or competitors in the global marketplace. But Google, Verizon, Microsoft, the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, Samsung (a Korean company), Facebook, to name a few, are spying on us and collecting and keeping data on us for their own insidious, selfish, greedy purposes, and seeking to control us. They are destroying the fabric of privacy and human decency and of American life. Frankly, their intentions are evil and they act evilly. They are anti-God because they want to become God. They think they need and deserve to know all about everyone. And legislators don’t give a damn because they are bought and paid for. They are traitors. There is no American dream any more, just an American nightmare.

The presidential race of 2016 may be our last or one of our last free elections. We have a far worse problem than the Russians, and it comes from inside the country and our souls. Clinton was not the answer this country needed. Maybe Trump won’t be either. We can only hope in God and band together as common American citizens to secure our future and the future of our posterity as our Forefathers intended.

Like the Visitors in V, The New York Times Wants to Shape Your Mind!

The New York Times posted an article on Donald Trump to its website today, Saturday, Dec. 10, about 1 p.m. It’s headlined “Trump, Mocking Claim That Russia Hacked Election, at Odds with GOP” and is written by David Sanger accompanied with a photo of Trump at a Grand Rapids, Michigan, rally yesterday by Doug Mills.

Below lies the link to the version curated by MSN:

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-mocking-claim-that-russia-hacked-election-at-odds-with-gop/ar-AAloKpW?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

Several problems raise their ugly heads in the headline and the article. First, let me deal with a few points of what I think is reasonable agreement.

I do not want any country to be able to hack our public or private computers or to affect our lives, including our electoral lives. Don’t want anybody messing with my vote!

I doubt President-Elect Trump wants Russian President Vladimir Putin or his intelligence/cyberwarfare agencies to be able to hack the U.S. That would be inconsistent with his message of America First and his desire to win at everything.

Thirdly, at least at this point, the intelligence assessment seems to be, if we can rely on The Times article, that despite the alleged Russian hacks, the electoral process itself, and thus the election, was not tampered with.

The principal claim appears to be that a hack or hacks of the Democratic National Committee emails occurred, the hacker(s) sent many of them to Wikileaks, who in turn released them to the public.

The emails from the DNC that Wikileaks released contained material that cast several Democrats, including their candidate, Hillary Clinton, in a dark light by showing their true, but negative, opinions of several groups, including blacks, Muslims, and Catholics, showing collusion with the press that was cheating, and revealing Clinton’s self-described “private” and “public” selves, as she showed Wall Street high rollers her “private” self in confidence. Think of “private” and “public” selves as two faces.

We don’t know whether the revelations that sprang from the hack(s) changed any votes, and if so, how many. It is reasonable to assume that at least some people changed their votes. Whether the revelations changed the outcome of the election may never be known. Again, if I read The Times correctly, the groups of officials mentioned seem to think not, but they do take the Russian threat seriously.

The flip side to that is the concern I have as a voter about the ability of candidates and their campaigns to utterly lie and deceive us about who they are and what they stand for, and the ability of the press to aid and abet the side of its choosing, as it did raucously for Hillary in this 2016 presidential campaign, chief among them The New York Times.

That conjunction of candidate deception backed by press partiality also destroys the electoral process and our republican democracy. In that light, release of material from the hack(s), while illegal, did help voters. The help was incomplete because no hack(s) of the other party’s computers with subsequent revelations happened.

Reasonably, we must say that with the election over we are facing more imminent dangers to our cybersecurity and national security than the hack of the DNC. As a body of citizens and as freedom-loving individuals, we must improve our cybersecurity all around. However, our country’s defense and intelligence agencies need to focus on the hydra-headed national security threats from despotic nuclear powers, like Russia and Red China, nuclear power aspirants under autocratic or theocratic tyranny, like Iran and North Korea, and maniacal Muslim terrorist organizations, like ISIS, that seek to arm themselves with the deadliest weapons possible to murder civilians and destroy everyday life in the Middle East and in the West.

Trump reflects the desire to make our intelligence agencies the best and to give them the most effective and technologically advanced tools to be the best. He challenges them to be better than they have been.

Most Americans want to win the economic and political wars we fight to sustain our own liberty and to offer it around the world to those who want the same.

With all that said, let’s analyze The Times article. First we have the headline, “Trump, Mocking Claim That Russia Hacked Election, at Odds with GOP”. The first thing to correct The Times on is that no one hacked the “election”. You can’t hack elections. You can hack computers. No election computers were hacked, at least no reports have stated such that I’ve heard. A DNC server or computer was hacked, or perhaps more than one. By Sanger’s own reporting, intelligence agencies did not and still do not think the outcome was affected. So no “election” has been hacked and no one was saying it was for the story.

Second, The Times declares in the headline that Trump is “at odds” with the GOP. Really? Is Trump at odds with the entire GOP, all registered GOP voters, all party and elected officials? If not, do we know what percentage of the GOP with which he is at odds? The Times article mentions two important House Republicans and Senator John McCain, who’s had an acrimonious relationship with Mr. Trump. The two House Republicans want deep investigations and a detailed report into what happened.

The problem for us as voters is that we can only get a sense of the disagreement among Trump, the intelligence agencies, and two members of the House GOP. Getting a grip on what the facts are is more difficult. With cybersecurity, answers may not always be clear. Does the CIA, for example, know that the DNC was hacked (one must keep an open mind – a renegade Dem may have provided the emails or copies thereof to Wikileaks)? If so, does it know who did it? What is the answer to “how” in both cases? Does the CIA offer levels of certainty or probability? If the hackers were Russian, can we tell whether they were government hackers or private hackers?

Sanger writes about the “national security establishment”, but what is that and who belongs to it? How many agencies have examined the hack of the DNC? Is it just the CIA, or did the FBI’s cybersecurity division look at it, or the DIA’s, or the NSA, etc. The Trump transition team members and the many advisors to them have tons of national security experience. Why do they disagree with the vaguely termed “national security establishment”. The Times tried to paint General Mattis as biased because he appeared on Russian television, but that’s flimsy. Mattis wants America and her capabilities to be better than Russia’s. He’s not going to tolerate cybersecurity weakness.

Leaders pick their fights, too, and it may be useless to pick the DNC hack for lengthy and arduous investigation by members of a feckless Congress who have much, much, much work to start and finish. Moreover, better to do it quietly than noisily like The Times and others seem to want. Lots of noise usually means its PR and a tool to achieve something else.

The Times wrote the article to highlight what it claimed was “an extraordinary breach” between Trump and the GOP and between Trump and the “national security establishment”. I’m not sure what’s extraordinary about it. Yet Sanger wrote the article that way, and he wrote it to downplay the obvious “breaches” that have occurred over and over in the past. Sanger’s article mentioned the case of Tunisia and Egypt and the bad estimate the intelligence community gave to Obama. It did not but could have mentioned the shaping of intelligence reports to suit the Obama administration’s tastes. It did not but could have mentioned Benghazi, in which the Obama/Clinton State Department ignored intelligence assessments about the growing danger in that Libyan city. Sanger’s article did mention the situation which gave rise to Trump’s described mockery: the Bush Administration’s contention that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that compelled the U.S. to invade it in 2003.

It’s particularly galling of The Times to write about that botched assessment because the newspaper has lashed former President Bush and his national security team for it.

Consider, too, that The Times downplayed the botched assessment by Bush’s national security team in Sanger’s article (only when Trump played that card, not itself) by stating the existence of a running debate about whether the intel itself was bad or whether it was read “selectively”, whatever that means, to reach a desired conclusion.

Funny, but I remember General Colin Powell going to the United Nations and submitting several photos detailed with lines and with arrows from caption boxes pointing to trucks and buildings, etc. Search for them online. You’ll find one of “Chemical Munitions Stored at Taji”, another titled “Terrorist Poison and Explosives Factory, Khumai”, and another depicting a chemical munitions bunker with a decontamination vehicle alongside it, etc.

It would seem either someone from Bush’s national security team created those exhibits or someone from one of the intelligence agencies did. Either way, would they not be members of “the national security establishment”? Breaches are in the eye of the beholder.

If The Times calls Trump’s statement against the claim of Russian interference mockery, what does it call its own statement about the Bush administration’s conclusions, which the article’s author, Sanger, labeled “the disastrously mistaken assessments of Iraq”.

Further, The Times lets Michael Hayden take a shot at Trump in Sanger’s article, the same Michael Hayden who directed the National Security Agency (NSA) under Bush during the Iraq assessments and who oversaw that agency’s warrantless collection of Americans’ electronic communications. Is he part of our “national security establishment”. If so, I’m fearful of him, not Trump.

What we have to understand as citizens is that the purpose of this New York Times article, as with many of its articles and the articles and reports from other media, is not to provide news or information that voters can use intelligently; rather, it is to hold and continue to emit an unrelenting laser beam of criticism at Trump to foster discord and strife among all voters, to shape the way we perceive and think about events so that we will reach the same conclusion that The Times wants everyone to reach about Trump and his administration.

Sometimes The Times articles will feature truth and sometimes they won’t. It doesn’t make much difference. In the end, the articles are calculated to have an effect on you, the effect The Times wants. The only way to avoid that, if you read them, is to be discerning and discriminating. Ask questions about every statement The Times makes. Compare what it writes internally to itself and externally to previously established facts. Do not assume anything, such as the significance of “the national security establishment”.

Keep in mind, too, that other motivations may be in play. The grandstanding by House Republicans sounds, uh, grand. I sure want my democracy and my electoral process to be left untampered. But is that really on the minds of some House Republicans, or are they jockeying for position and leverage against their party’s president, Trump, so they can limit the enactment of his policy proposals while promoting and enabling their own?

How cute of The Times and Mr. Sanger to use Republicans against themselves. Clever and sophisticated.

Bear in mind, House and Senate Republicans, that many, perhaps a majority, of us, voted you in not because of you, but because we needed you to support Mr. Trump. Fail to do that? Get in his way? Watch how we pull the voting lever down against you. You are a constitutional necessity, but in poll after poll we have judged you virtually worthless and shockingly ineffective compared to even the current president.

You got used to being establishment bootlickers, so don’t puff your chests out because a Republican won the presidency. He didn’t run on your ideology or mandate. He ran on the people’s mandate. So make Mr. Trump’s path smooth, then get the hell out of the way!

 

House Republicans: Include “Buy America” Provision!

Press reports this week in Bloomberg and Salon state that House Republicans stripped a “Buy America” requirement out of their version of an infrastructure bill. The requirement stipulated the bill’s projects use iron and steel mined and produced in the United States; thus, it would greatly benefit American workers and the iron and steel industries.

The version passed by the Senate contained the “Buy America” requirement, so the two chambers will have to hash out a compromise.

The articles from both news outlets failed to explain the motivation for the House Republicans’ move. Both offered no comment from President-Elect Donald Trump nor even a mention they had asked but were not given comment or replied to, though both contained salvos from House Dems about Trump’s alleged silence. That’s deficient news reporting.

That said, I stand with the Dems on this one, as well as with Trump based on the statements he made during his quest for the presidency. I won’t condemn the House Republicans because I do not know yet their motivation. Perhaps they have spotted some hitch or glitch the Senate missed.

Make no mistake, though: I stand with the American worker and with our businesses and with our country. There can be little justification for steel bought from foreign countries, especially those with a track record of undercutting and hurting us: China and Russia. As a taxpayer, I am willing to pay more to keep my neighbors and fellow citizens employed, and the bill could contain a check on price gouging so native mercenary interests cannot plunder taxpayers.

So here’s a salvo across the bow of the House Republicans. I do not stand with you, necessarily, on your ideology or so-called “principles”. I believe in a rational maximum freedom defined by and directed to our common American interest, that which benefits the greatest number of American citizens in the most beneficial ways for the short and long terms.

I do not believe in an ivory tower ideal of maximum freedom of which only the wealthy and privileged and occasional lucky, hardworking peon can take advantage. When political, social, and economic freedom is maximized for all, the wealthy and privileged still enjoy the advantages they bring to the table. Those advantages must not negate the maximum freedom of the common citizen.

If citizens are truly free and fairly treated, as is their God-given right, the market will be free and fair.