The Consensus Echo Chamber Take On Trump Firing Comey Is All Wrong

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Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The unanimous very smart person take on Trump’s firing of James Comey is that it’s a political disaster which will lead to total ruin and possibly his impeachment.

I disagree.

The key factor that will determine how this ultimately turns out hinges largely on whether or not there was actual coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to sway the election through hacking or other nefarious means. Personally, I don’t think there was, which is why I don’t expect Donald Trump to be removed from office. The consensus view right now is that Trump’s firing of Comey offers further circumstantial evidence that he’s trying to cover up coordination with Russia in order to end the ongoing investigation. This is certainly a possibility to consider, but it’s definitely not the only possibility, nor is it the most likely explanation.

First, the optics. The timing of this move looks unquestionably bad, particularly if a story published in today’s New York Times is correct. It reports:

WASHINGTON — Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in money and personnel for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to three congressional officials who were briefed on his request.

 

Mr. Comey asked for the resources last week from Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of Mr. Comey this week, the officials said.

 

Mr. Comey then briefed members of Congress on the meeting in recent days, telling them about his meeting with Mr. Rosenstein, who is the most senior law enforcement official supervising the Russia investigation. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from that inquiry because of his close ties to the Trump campaign and his undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador.

 

The timing of Mr. Comey’s request is not clear-cut evidence that his firing was related to the Russia investigation. But it is certain to fuel bipartisan criticism that President Trump appeared to be meddling in an investigation that had the potential to damage his presidency.

If this is accurate, I think it’d be impossible for any honest person to determine that the above played no role in Trump’s firing of Comey. The next conclusion is that this means Trump is afraid of the ongoing Russia investigation — where there’s smoke there’s fire, right?

While that could be the case, there are other explanations. First, Trump simply may have been sick and tired of Comey, just as most Americans, including myself, are sick and tired of him. Comey isn’t the most popular guy out there. Indeed, high profile Democrats have been incessantly complaining about him, with Hillary Clinton once again publicly blaming him for her election loss as recently as last week. Trump may genuinely think Comey is incompetent (after all he didn’t even look at the hacked DNC servers but let discredited private company CrowdStrike do the work), and Comey’s recent request to expand the Russia investigation may have further called his judgment into question in the eyes of Trump.

This doesn’t mean Trump is guilty of coordination with Russia. For example, let’s assume for a moment that there was no coordination with Russia to sway the election. If that’s right, Trump and his team could quite legitimately view Comey’s insistence on more funding for the investigation look like incompetence or a personal vendetta. This would frustrate anyone, and it would especially irritate a person accustomed to firing whoever he wants, whenever he wants (after all, he had a show where he became famous for saying “You’re Fired”). As such, the overwhelming impulse for a guy like Trump is to fire Comey irrespective of whether or not there was any Russia conspiracy. This doesn’t make it the right thing to do, but it also doesn’t mean he’s in cahoots with Russia. It could simply be that an impulsive guy who’s accustomed to firing people at will decided to fire a guy who was increasingly getting on his nerves.

Given what we know about Trump’s personality, I think his choice to fire Comey is consistent with both the scenario where he is guilty of Russia coordination, and one where he isn’t. The consensus narrative which claims Trump firing Comey is proof of his guilt and merely an attempt to cover up a Russia conspiracy, is an emotionally driven and hastily determined conclusion.

To summarize, Trump’s dismissal of Comey looks bad, but it doesn’t mean he’s hiding anything. To me, it looks like a typical Trumpian move whether or not there’s any shadiness with Russia going on. Let’s now move on the the next part of the post: How does this play out politically in the near-term, and how will it affect his chances for reelection in 2020?

While Trump often doesn’t seem to understand this, his true power comes from his base. By base, I don’t mean the tens of millions of people who voted for him, rather, I’m referring his hardcore fans who voted for him largely to disrupt the status quo. I’m referring to the dedicated MAGA people who had never really participated in politics before, but became energized by Trump. These people are the key to winning reelection in 2020.

Despite all the noise made by D.C. “Never Trump” think tankers and pundits, they proved themselves to be irrelevant in 2016, as Trump won despite their vitriol. Trump’s base got him elected and Trump’s base will determine his prospects in 2020. Your average Republican doesn’t really matter. The average GOP voter would vote for a fire hydrant before Hillary Clinton, and these people aren’t going to vote Democratic or stay home in 2020 because Trump fired James Comey. In contrast, if Trump sufficiently pisses off the base, he’s finished.

Trump’s base is absolutely giddy about the firing of James Comey, and that’s a win for Trump in my opinion. Trump’s base accurately sees the entire Department of Justice (which includes the FBI) as a total joke. An institution that primarily exists to protect elitist criminals. Considering the inability of the DOJ/FBI to jail a single bank executive for the financial crimes committed last decade, this view is entirely appropriate.

James Comey has been a big part of this racket, so there’s no love lost for him. Comey’s termination is being cheered by Trump’s base, unlike his very unpopulist and oligarch-coddling moves up until this point, such as surrounding himself with Goldman Sachs bankers. If anything, this energizes a base that had become increasingly concerned about the neocon war mongers and financial crooks running rampant throughout his administration. This move plays perfectly into Trump’s base and will be seen as Trump taking it to the deep state.

Unfortunately, Trump’s not really taking on any deep state, as was fully demonstrated earlier today when he was seen in the Oval Office with one of the deep state’s most notorious war criminals.

Pool brought into the Oval. It's Trump and ... Kissinger. pic.twitter.com/1F1CPO4kQw

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) May 10, 2017

While I find the above far more offensive than the dismissal of James Comey, the hyperventilation emanating from the corporate media, Democrats and Never Trumpers actually gives Trump more cover to be an even more egregious pawn of the deep state and Wall Street. That’s because the firing of Comey gives him unwarranted street cred amongst the base, and the more the corporate media parrots squawk, the more the base will love it.

Which brings me to the final and most important part of this piece. The entire Comey firing saga could go in several directions, but an increasingly likely outcome is the one I don’t see being discussed anywhere. First we need to ask ourselves, what’s likely to happen next? Calls for a special prosecutor and independent investigation into Trump-Russia collusion are likely to get louder and louder. Given the timing of the firing, I support this and I think there’s a good chance it’ll happen. I hope it does happen, as we really do need to put an end to all the speculation and hysteria one way or the other, once and for all. But here’s where it gets really interesting…

If Trump really did coordinate with the Russian government to affect the U.S. election and indisputable evidence emerges, it will be an enormous scandal and he will likely be removed from office. Personally, I don’t think such evidence exists because I don’t think such collusion happened, but I support an independent investigation. On the other hand, what might happen if Trump didn’t collude with Russia?

Here’s where Trump legitimately has a chance to destroy the Democratic Party once and for all. The Democrats have already been putting all their eggs in the Russia conspiracy theory basket, and this focus on Russia as opposed to jobs, healthcare, student loans, debt slavery etc., has made the American public think the Democratic Party is more out of touch than both Trump and the GOP. Given that’s where things stand today, imagine what’ll happen to the party and its leaders if they start spending 100% of their time pursuing this lead and then nothing comes up? What then?

I’ll tell you what happens. The Democratic Party, as useless as it is today, will completely evaporate as a serious political opposition force in America. This is because it appears all of its handful of 2020 hopefuls seem to be completely hyperventilating and losing their minds about Comey’s dismissal and asserting that it represents proof Trump colluded with Russia.

Imagine if Trump is cleared by an independent investigation? These Dems will look like complete imbeciles with horrible judgement who wasted the nation’s time while tens of millions of Americans struggled to make ends meet. This will destroy the party and lead to an easy Trump win in 2020. This is a potentially lethal trap for Democrats and they seem to be falling for it in unison.

And give me a break on all of this sudden placing of the FBI up on a pedestal. As I remarked to Eric Holder last night on Twitter:

 

To conclude, I think the “expert” pundit take on the Comey affair is completely wrong and missing the bigger picture. Most commentators are merely following their own biases and coming to conclusions based largely on emotions. I’m no fan of Trump and I think he’ll merely prove to be a useful tool of the deep state and Wall Street dressed in populist language. I don’t come to the conclusion in today’s post based on my desire for it to happen. In fact, what I’d really like to see is real and thoughtful opposition to his authoritarian nature and Wall Street ass-kissing, but we know we won’t be getting that from the Dems. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly likely the entire party may end up falling on the sword that is the Russia conspiracy theory.

As always, time will tell.

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The Conviction of an Activist for Laughing Portends Repression of Protest Under Trump

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  Women affiliated with CODEPINK protest during a confirmation hearing for Sen. Jeff Sessions, on Capitol Hill in New York, January 10, 2017. Desiree Fairooz, at center behind sign, is now on trial for giggling when a senator praised Sessions record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (Photo: Al Drago / The New […]

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Medical studies are almost always bogus | New York Post

Medical studies are almost always bogus | New York Post: "Luckily, there is a growing group of people working to expose the ugly side of how research is done. One of them is Stanford professor John Ioannidis, considered one of the heroes of the reproducibility movement. He’s written extensively on the topic, including a scathing paper titled “Why Most Published Scientific Research Findings Are False.”

He’s found, for example, out of tens of thousands of papers touting discoveries of specific genes linked to everything from depression to obesity, only 1.2 percent had truly positive results. Meanwhile, Dr. Ioannidis followed 49 studies that had been cited at least a thousand times — of which seven had been “flatly contradicted” by further research. This included one that claimed estrogen and progestin benefited women after hysterectomies “when in fact the drug combination increased the risk of heart disease and breast cancer.”"



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When the feds won’t give up information the public owns

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There’s no better example of our broken system than the partial Freedom of Information (FOI) response I just got. It’s from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding an Obamacare FOI request I made several years ago when I was at CBS News and investigating the failed launch and serious security risks surrounding the Affordable Care Act national website. A couple of points:

In 2013, I asked for simple public information regarding the website, but the government improperly refused to provide it.

I filed a FOI request, which requires the government to process and provide the material within about 20 days.

The government didn’t provide any of the material in the lawful time frame, which, unfortunately, is currently the typical response from federal agencies in response to FOI requests.

I eventually filed a FOI lawsuit with the help of Judicial Watch.

The government spent your tax dollars defending the lawsuit. It has no incentive to provide the material because drawing out the case and withholding the public information costs us money, but doesn’t cost them money and the desired obfuscation is achieved (at our expense).

The court and HHS agreed I was entitled to the public information all along, but there was no punishment for those who had withheld it.

HHS said there were tens of thousands of pages of responsive documents, that it was too many for them to process on a timely basis, and that it would require massive resources.

I offered to drop the entire lawsuit if HHS would simply agree to one on camera interview so that I could ask questions I posed in 2013 that officials wouldn’t answer. They declined.

They would rather spent their time and taxpayer money processing the tens of thousands of pages of documents.

The court allowed the government to propose a “rolling production schedule” of the documents, producing them periodically over time instead of all at once.

The schedule that HHS proposed meant I would get the final documents in approximately 2029.

(A reminder: I needed the material for reporting I was doing in 2013.)

That would be a 16 year response time for information that was legally due in about 20 days back in 2013.

I argued that was unreasonable.

District Judge Tanya Chutkan agreed, replying:

I’ve done my share of document reviewing in my life. I could do 500 pages in an afternoon. So I don’t understand this. And the plaintiff is right. This is like a 14-year schedule [from the time of the lawsuit]. This is unacceptable. So you need to tell me exactly what’s involved so I can assess this production rate of 500 pages every two months, because that’s not going to fly. –U.S. District Judge Tana Chutkan in Attkisson v. HHS, July 10, 2015

HHS eventually agreed to a speedier schedule that will still take years.

When I received the first batch of documents from HHS under its “rolling production” schedule, I saw that they were heavily, improperly redacted.

I wanted to challenge the redactions, as FOI law entitles me to do, but I was told I had to wait until the production was complete.

I again offered to withdraw the lawsuit and save the government much time and taxpayer money, if an HHS official would do an interview. They declined.

I recently received my latest batch of documents. You can view them here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8X8v8xLHYcXM1hFYjBXVS1vVzA/view

Obamacare is all but dead — and will likely be long gone when I receive the entire batch of documents the government is required to produce. For a story I was working on in 2013.

Preorder my new book “The Smear” today. 

 

 

 

 

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GAO: Biggest Fiscal Threat to U.S. Is Interest on Treasury Debt – Not Social Welfare Programs

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by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, Wall Street On Parade:

On Wednesday, the General Accountability Office (GAO), the bipartisan congressional watchdog, released an in-depth report on the U.S. government’s challenging fiscal outlook. Despite its surprising revelations, the study received little to no coverage by major media outlets.

While most Americans have been led by political rhetoric to believe that government programs like Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest threats to the future U.S. fiscal picture, the GAO study found the following:

“While health care spending is a key programmatic and policy driver of the long-term outlook on the spending side of the budget, eventually, spending on net interest becomes the largest category of spending in both the 2016 Financial Report’s long-term fiscal projections and GAO’s simulations.”

The GAO cited a simulation that showed net interest payments on U.S. debt increasing “from $248 billion in fiscal year 2016 to $1.4 trillion in fiscal year 2045 in 2016 dollars.”

Another measurement of government debt is its percentage ratio to Gross Domestic Product – a means of evaluating how much of a drag it’s inflicting on the overall economy. The GAO study found the following:

“Debt held by the public rose as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), from 74 percent at the end of fiscal year 2015 to 77 percent at the end of fiscal year 2016. This compares to an average of 44 percent of GDP since 1946.”

The report further noted that both the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and GAO’s own projections indicate that the federal government’s current fiscal path is unsustainable and policy changes must occur.

Key concerns raised by these findings include the fact that federal resources that could be deployed into key priorities like rebuilding the nation’s roads and bridges are being diverted to interest on debt.

Another concern expressed by the GAO is the upward rise in interest rates. While the GAO does not directly mention the Federal Reserve’s recent rate hikes, it does note the following:

Read More @ Wallstreetonparade.com

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Julian Assange just destroyed the FBI, CIA and fake news in an epic tweetstorm

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Arguably, he’s the world’s most wanted man. Hated by governments, loved by the common man, Julian Assange seems determined not to go down without a fight. He’s been falsely accused of date rape, espionage, and subverting foreign governments, including the United States.However, if you ask him, he’ll tell you he’s a journalist who believes governments should be held accountable for their actions. And in his latest Twitter rant, you’ll see why. He takes on ...

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American Democracy: A Dead Man Walking

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Trump’s “sell-out,” as it is called, coming on top of Obama’s eight-year “sell-out,” is instructive. We have now had a Democratic president who sold out the people who elected him and a Republican president who has done the same thing. This is a very interesting point, the meaning of which most people miss.

(Article by Paul Craig Roberts republished from PaulCraigRoberts.org)

But not Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. At the Valdai discussion club, Putin summed up Western democracy:

In the West, voters cannot change policies through elections, because the ruling elites control whoever is elected. Elections give the appearance of democracy, but voting does not change the policies that favor war and the elites. Therefore, the will of the people is impotent.

People are experiencing that they and their votes have no influence on the conduct of affairs of the country. This makes them afraid, frustrated, and angry, a combination of emotions that is dangerous to the ruling elite, who in response organize the powers of the state against the people, while urging them with propaganda to support more wars.

Obama promised to get out of Afghanistan or Iraq or perhaps it was both. He promised to reverse the police state created by the George W. Bush regime. He promised to focus American resources on American domestic problems, such as health care.

But what did he do? He expanded the wars and launched new ones, destroyed Libya and attempted to destroy Syria, but was stopped by British non-participation and Russian objection. Obama overthrew democratic governments in Honduras and Ukraine. He expanded the police state. He began the demonization of Russia and Putin. He betrayed the American people again by allowing the private insurance industry to write his health care plan known as Obamacare. The private interests wrote a plan that diverts public monies from health care to their profits.

All of this is forgotten when the ruling elites and the presstitutes that serve only them refocused the demonization on Trump. Suddenly, it was the president-elect of the United States who was the main danger to the US and the American people. Trump was a Russian agent. He had conspired with Putin to steal the US election from Hillary Clinton and make the White House a partner of Putin’s alleged reconstruction of the Soviet Empire.

The nonsense was hot and furious, and it was effective. Trump succumbed to pressure and sacrificed his National Security Advisor, who was supportive of Trump’s promise to normalize relations with Russia. Trump replaced him with a Russophobic idiot who apparently cannot wait to see mushroom clouds over cities all over the Western world.

Why did two presidents in succession completely sell out the people who voted for them?

The answer is that presidents are not as powerful as the interest groups who make the decisions.

Trump was going to get us out of Syria, so he committed an unambiguous war crime by gratuitously attacking Syria with Tomahawk missiles.

Trump was going to normalize relations with Russia, so his Secretary of State announces that US economic sanctions will stay on Russia until Russia hands over to Ukraine the Russian Crimean naval base on the Black Sea.

It is impossible to normalize relations when the cost to the other party of the normalization is national suicide.

Despite Trump’s complete surrender to the powers that be, today (May 2) on NPR I heard raw propaganda dressed up as “expert opinion” that Trump is biased against the media, when what all of us have seen is massive media bias against Trump, including the program to which I was listening.

For example, NPR had accumulated “experts” who said that Trump had slandered Obama by accusing him of intercepting his communications. NPR said nothing about the Obama regime’s charge that Trump conspired with Putin to steal the election from Hillary Clinton.

If anything was slander, this was, but all the talk was about how Obama could sue Trump.

But, of course, both are public figures, and neither can sue the other.

I wonder why NPR’s “expert” didn’t get around to this point.

Why is the ruling oligarchy still using its presstitutes to campaign against a president who has surrendered to them?

Perhaps the answer is that the real powers that be are going to make an example out of Trump so that never again does a person running for elected office make a populist appeal to the electorate.

Read more at: PaulCraigRoberts.org

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How the Russia Spin Got So Much Torque

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A new book about Hillary Clinton’s last campaign for president — Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign by journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes — has gotten a lot of publicity since it appeared two weeks ago. But major media have ignored a revealing passage near the end of the book. Soon after Clinton’s defeat, […]

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It’s Not Free Speech if You Don’t Have a License

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from The Daily Bell:

Should free speech cover criticizing the government? That is kind of the whole point, right?

An Oregon man is suing Portland for violating his first amendment right to free speech after he was fined $500 for calculating how long yellow lights stay yellow and then speaking publicly about it.

Free speech? No. The city considers making and disseminating calculations about public works “engineering without a license.”

The lawsuit states:

This is a civil-rights lawsuit to vindicate the right of Plaintiff Mats Järlström to talk and write freely without fear of government punishment. Järlström wants to write and speak publicly about a matter of local, state, and nationwide concern: the safety and fairness of traffic lights and traffic-light cameras. Specifically, Järlström wishes to communicate about the mathematics behind traffic-light timing. If he does so in Oregon, however, he will be exposed to government investigation and punishment for engaging in the unlicensed “practice of engineering.” In fact, between February 2015 and January 2017, Järlström was investigated and fined for “critiquing” the standard formula for calculating traffic-light timing and for sharing his ideas with “members of the public.” Under Oregon’s Professional Engineer Registration Act (Act), Or. Rev. Stat. §§ 672.002 et seq., only state-licensed professional engineers are entitled to speak publicly on these sorts of topics. For everyone else—in the words of the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying (Board)—sharing “reports, commentary, and testimony” on technical subjects is “clearly not protected speech.”

…But speech like Järlström’s is exactly what the First Amendment’s Speech and Petition Clauses exist to protect.

Obviously, the city is just trying to silence and intimidate him so they can keep making money off of red light cameras. His point was that the yellow lights were too short to properly allow motorists to stop.

By the government’s definition of free speech, you basically are not allowed to criticize or even petition the government at all.

What if this same standard was applied elsewhere in government?

We could easily get to a point where any speech about government actions is not protected unless you are an expert in the field–the government, of course, deciding who qualifies as an expert.

Should accountants be the only ones allowed to publicly advocate a tax policy?  Perhaps only licensed law enforcement could criticize the police. And surely if you are not a legislator, the intricacies of bills and laws are off limits to discuss.

What an open and public dialogue that would promote!

And as for the issue of traffic light cameras issuing tickets, that in itself should never have been permitted. The government takes a picture of a car and accuses the owner of a crime, regardless of who was driving the vehicle. And then, you must either pay the fine or prove yourself innocent! So much for due process. So much for the government having to prove you committed a crime. Innocent until proven guilty? What an inconvenience for a government!

Read More @ TheDailyBell.com

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Texas School Triples Recess Time, Cures Attention Deficit Disorder!

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If you had not noticed, our public school system has almost entirely deleted recess and turned PE into a military boot camp.

One school in Texas uncovered one of the remaining people in the world with common sense, put recess back, and made an AMAZING discovery!

It worked! Kids started having better attention spans, were better behaved in the classroom, and were learning more!

As I have been SCREAMING this for years, it comes no surprise to me. I knew this already. It is the administrators of our public schools who are yet clueless on this issue.

According to Today: 

“…the Eagle Mountain Elementary in Fort Worth, Texas, has been giving kindergarten and first-grade students two 15-minute recess breaks every morning and two 15-minute breaks every afternoon to go play outside. At first teachers were worried about losing the classroom time and being able to cover all the material they needed with what was left, but now that the experiment has been going on for about five months, teachers say the kids are actually learning more because they’re better able to focus in class and pay attention without fidgeting.”

The key to the success of the program is ‘unstructured play’ four times a day to break up the physical and mental monotony of the classroom, allowing developing minds and bodies to constructively use their energies, so that their may be more effectively applied in learning.

While administrators in schools trying the program initially thought it would negatively affect testing results, the results have proven that the opposite is in fact true, which is in line with how the American Academy of Pediatrics sees playtime.

The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees, calling recess:

“…a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development.” Studies show it offers important cognitive, social, emotional, and physical benefits, yet many schools are cutting down on breaks to squeeze in more lessons, which may be counterproductive, it warns.”

Medicating restless children for them to better fit in to a dumbed down education system is a grave mistake, criminal even. Programs like these desperately need to be implemented nation wide.

Dr. Debbie Rhea, creator and director of the Liink Program said:

“You start putting 15 minutes of what I call ‘reboot’ into these kids every so often and… it gives the platform for them to be able to function at their best level.”

Check out this video for more!

Our public schools are FAILING!!!!! Liberal idiots have taken over the asylum and test scores are at historic lows.

They spend more time trying to usurp parental sovereignty and teaching their own brand of societal norms than they do reading, writing and ‘rithmatic!

They pilfer through lunches and teach sex and Islam.

Our schools spend all their time teaching to the test.

In the process, good old fashioned breaks have been flushed down the toilet.

Since World War II, inflation-adjusted spending per student in American public schools has increased by 663 percent. Spend more money… spend more money!

Yet kids still are not learning.

One fourth of our school kids graduate High School barely able to read.

It is a MESS! At least one school seems to be getting the big picture.

It is insanity folks, and lack of recess is just an example. Who in their right mind started this nonsense of removing recess? A BUNCH OF MORONS… that is who!

The post Texas School Triples Recess Time, Cures Attention Deficit Disorder! appeared first on I Have The Truth.

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