"Here Come 4 More Years Of Trump As Democrats Will Be Utterly Sidelined Trying To Impeach Him"

Blain: "Here Come 4 More Years Of Trump As Democrats Will Be Utterly Sidelined Trying To Impeach Him"

by Tyler Durden

Thu, 05/30/2019 - 06:53

Blain's Morning Porridge, submitted by Bill Blain

“Boring, boring… but 4:1?”

There is a pall hanging over North London this morning we shall not dwell upon.
Instead, let’s be gloomy about markets and prospects instead. With much of Europe out on holiday – which means the weekend has effectively started - stocks continue to wobble to the China trade war beat. We have the added spice of Europe being unable to coordinate any particular response to renewed US trade threats. US numbers look likely to be weaker – which will no doubt please stock markets on the basis lower for longer rates mean buy more stocks.. Oh dear – I suspect they are fooling themselves.

Listening between the lines, Special Counsel Robert Mueller pretty much as said Trump should go to jail when his presidency is over, but the Democrats will now be utterly sidelined trying to impeach him instead of coordinating proper policies on care, education, health and planning how to unseat him. Nothing is likely to change. 4 more years…. Here it comes.
Back here in Blighty, I’m getting more and more depressed about the prospects for the UK. Boris being sued for lying while in public office? Heaven forbid! The courts will be jammed with politicians for eternity. Please put me on the jury!!!
Up in the Northlands, Wee Nicola Krankie has confidently laid out her plans for Neferendum No 2 (or is it 3?) on Scottish Independence. She is a gallus, naughty wee minx; stirring up the pot just as we looked for it to settle. She is not daft. Her plan plays straight into a UK general election – we can guess what she is willing to promise Corbyn in return for his support for a second Scottish Vote. Labour could well lose a general election, but with the Calendonian hordes/MPs on his side, he could still end up in No 10! Wouldn’t that be worthy of a film – blue-arsed Scots descend on Westminster en-masse to demand they can leave.
As I’ve said many times, you really cant make this up..
Of course, all the daily stuff is just noise. More nonsense for us to cut through and wonder what it actually means. The bottom line – and sorry if it sound like I’ve said this before – is that only 3 things actually matter Long Term.
1. Trade War is becoming a Cold War.
The escalating China/US conflict has enormous implications for global trade and is likely to scale back global growth significantly. It could change utterly the current Tech supply chains, concentrate demand on compliant products and lead to a massive realignment of trade flows.
Some say the world will coalesce around 3 groups: the US and Allies, China and its Asia Co-prosperity sphere, and non-aligned including Europe. I suspect it's more likely to be a US Pacific Rim anchored on Japan and Korea, with an aligned Europe. The economic efforts will be to undo Chinese debt diplomacy in Africa and Middle East, and determined efforts by both sides to woo India and SE Asia. Its going to be fascinating. Tough for economies like Australia that need China to maintain their current growth, but it’s the opportunity for pivot. That’s what happens to supply chains.
There have been a number of articles quoting “Thucydides Trap” – but I have to credit a risk manager at L&G for pointing it out to me 2 years ago. The trap it refers to the Spartans deciding the only way to constrain Athens growing power was to take them out – leading to years of Greek unpleasantness. A Harvard professor dug back into the histories and came out with 16 other classic situations where a long established incumbent power faces an emerging power. He concluded there is a 75% likelihood of war (hot or cold). It looks like the US vs China will be example 17.
2. Monetary Distortion
The key issue since the post Global Financial Crisis has been monetary distortion – the effects of QE, artificially low interest rates, and subsequent impact on prices and price inflation across all financial assets. The unintended consequences of QE have still not been addressed, and Central Banks look trapped in low inflation/low rate impotence. They are struggling to put any momentum into economies like Japan and Europe. Where do we go from here? Modern Monetary Theory looks to be a convenient log to cling to, but I reckon we ought to check it isn’t just a resting crocodile!
3. Climate Change and the Environment
I was having an “argument” with an old chum about climate warming yesterday. I came up with the easy simile we are like the Frogs in the Pan of Water. The smarter frogs, the scientists, are warning the water is getting warming because their instruments show it to be so. But the Big Orange Frog says he can’t feel any change, so there is nothing to worry about and don’t change anything.
But climate change, and its effects on markets are real. We know fuel prices will be impacted by new rules governing carbon scrubbers and clean fuels at sea. We are seeing the price of Carbon offset go through the roof in economies with governments are enacting carbon taxes to clean the environment. We are going to see the costs of waste treatment to clean the oceans escalate dramatically.
There was a great line in an article I was reading in Forbes on Climate Change Investments- “Carbon will be treated as a costly waste product that needs to be captured and stored.” Its just one of may opportunities..
The challenge for the whole investment community is to strip out the current political noise, and focus on how the world changes and what investment opportunities it throws up as a result of a 1) Global Trade Cold War, 2) Ongoing Financial Asset Distortion and the 3) Long Term Implications of Climate Change and protecting the Environment. Easy, eh?
Out of time.. and time to save the world.

Joe DiGenova blows the lid off the real scandal: The Russia hoax was a cover-up effort for Obama's political spying since 2012

Joe DiGenova blows the lid off the real scandal: The Russia hoax was a cover-up effort for Obama's political spying since 2012

By Thomas Lifson

 

Hold on to your hats.  At last, we are on the verge of getting to the bottom of the weaponization of the nation's top law enforcement and spy agencies to spy on political opponents, and it is far bigger than obtaining bogus FISA Court warrants to spy on Carter Page.  Barack Obama's minions have been spying on his political opponents since before his 2012 re-election, and the entire Russiagate hoax was an effort to cover up that ongoing spying.
As I have stated before, the best sources for understanding the unfolding of the biggest political scandal in American history are D.C. super-lawyers Joe DiGenova and Victoria Toensing, who have an unmatched track record in explaining the events we see in the media and predicting the forthcoming revelations.  I am not in communication with them, but it does appear they have superb sources — which would not be surprising, given their long history as key conservative players at the highest level of the D.C. legal and political circles.
Yesterday, Joe DiGenova made his customary Monday-morning guest appearance on WMAL radio's Mornings on the Mall radio show.  (WMAL is the premier conservative talk station in D.C.).  The 15-minute segment is jam-packed with must-listen insights.  In addition to his revelations about the true nature of the Russiagate hoax, there is another quiet bombshell he dropped — see the end of this blog post for the tantalizing perspective he revealed.  You can listen on the YouTube version here.

The basic story is that Admiral Mike Rogers, who was head of the NSA in the spring of 2016, discovered that the NSA's comprehensive database collecting all electronic communications in the United States was being searched by unauthorized FBI "contractors" and moved to cut off that access.  He also visited Donald Trump, after which Trump moved his campaign HQ out of Trump Tower.  Trump's much derided claim that his campaign was "wiretapped" likely also was the result of gaining this insight from Admiral Rogers.
The subsequent launch of Crossfire Hurricane and the effort to obtain FISA warrants were not to initiate spying on the Trump campaign, but rather to provide legal grounding for the spying efforts on political opponents that had been underway for years.
Sundance at Conservative Treehouse picked up on the DiGenova interview and in his inimitable fashion lays out the background story from evidence already on the public record, here, complete with many hyperlinks to sources.  It is a long and complex post, but some of the key conclusions.

Tens of thousands of searches [of the NSA database] over four years (since 2012), and 85% of them are illegal. The results were extracted for?…. (snip)
OK, that’s the stunning scale; but who was involved?
Private contractors with access to “raw FISA information that went well beyond what was necessary to respond to FBI’s requests”
And as noted, the contractor access was finally halted on April 18th, 2016.
[Coincidentally (or not), the wife of Fusion-GPS founder Glenn Simpson, Mary Jacoby, goes to the White House the next day on April 19th, 2016.]
None of this is conspiracy theory.
All of this is laid out inside this 99-page opinion from FISC Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer who also noted that none of this FISA abuse was accidental in a footnote on page 87: “deliberate decisionmaking“: (snip)

Summary of this aspect: The FISA court identified and quantified tens-of-thousands of search queries of the NSA/FBI database using the FISA-702(16)(17) system. The database was repeatedly used by persons with contractor access; who unlawfully searched and extracted the raw results without redacting the information; and shared it with an unknown number of entities.
The outlined process certainly points toward a political spying, surveillance, and file-building operation; and we are not the only one to think that’s what this system is being used for. (snip)
There is little doubt the FISA-702(16)(17) database system was used by Obama-era officials, from 2012 through April 2016, as a way to spy on their political opposition. Quite simply there is no other intellectually honest explanation for the scale and volume of database abuse that was taking place. (snip)
Everything after March 9th, 2016, was done to cover up the weaponization of the FISA database. [Explained Here] Spygate, Russia-Gate, the Steele Dossier, and even the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (drawn from the dossier and signed by the above) were needed to create a cover-story and protect themselves from discovery of this four year weaponization, political surveillance and unlawful spying. Even the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel makes sense; he was FBI Director when this began. (snip)
Political spying 1.0 was actually the weaponization of the IRS. This is where the term “Secret Research Project” originated as a description from the Obama team. It involved the U.S. Department of Justice under Eric Holder and the FBI under Robert Mueller. It never made sense why Eric Holder requested over 1 million tax records via CD ROM, until overlaying the timeline of the FISA abuse:
The IRS sent the FBI “21 disks constituting a 1.1 million page database of information from 501(c)(4) tax exempt organizations, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The transaction occurred in October 2010 (link)
Why disks? Why send a stack of DISKS to the DOJ and FBI when there’s a pre-existing financial crimes unit within the IRS. All of the evidence within this sketchy operation came directly to the surface in early spring 2012.
The IRS scandal was never really about the IRS, it was always about the DOJ asking the IRS for the database of information. That is why it was transparently a conflict when the same DOJ was tasked with investigating the DOJ/IRS scandal. Additionally, Obama sent his chief-of-staff Jack Lew to become Treasury Secretary; effectively placing an ally to oversee/cover-up any issues. As Treasury Secretary Lew did just that. (snip)
Fusion GPS was not hired in April 2016 to research Donald Trump. As shown in the evidence provided by the FISC, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The Obama administration already knew everything about the Trump campaign, and were monitoring everything by exploiting the FISA database. (snip)
However, after the NSA alerts in/around March 9th, 2016, and particularly after the April 18th shutdown of contractor access, the Obama intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to create a legal albeit ex post facto justification for the pre-existing surveillance and spy operations. Fusion GPS gave them that justification in the Steele Dossier.
That’s why the FBI small group, which later transitioned into the Mueller team, are so strongly committed to and defending the formation of the Steele Dossier and its dubious content. The Steele Dossier contains the cover-story and justification for the pre-existing surveillance operation. (snip)
Fusion GPS was not hired to research Trump, the intelligence community was already doing surveillance and spy operations. The intelligence community needed Fusion GPS to give them a plausible justification for already existing surveillance and spy operations.
Fusion-GPS gave them the justification they needed for a FISA warrant with the Steele Dossier. Ultimately that’s why the Steele Dossier is so important; without it, the DOJ and FBI are naked with their FISA-702 abuse….

Joe DiGenova dropped one other bombshell that remains to be explored: that he believes that the NSA database contains the 30,000 emails that Hillary Clinton deleted from her server, and that the two U.S. attorneys tasked with investigating the scandals will access those emails in the course of their investigations.  Recall that U.S. attorney for Utah John Huber is investigating the handling of the dropped prosecution of her violations of national security law with her home-brew server and possible crimes related to the Clinton Foundation, including, presumably, the Uranium One acquisition of U.S. uranium reserves by Russian interests and the massive donations to the Clinton Foundation.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/joe_digenova_blows_the_lid_off_the_emrealem_scandal_the_russia_hoax_was_a_coverup_effort_for_obamas_political_spying_since_2012.html#ixzz5pWrQwQbz
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NOAA: Previous Methane Studies Overestimated U.S. Oil and Natural Gas Emissions

May 16, 2019

Not only have there been no large increases in U.S. methane emissions over the last decade, but previous studies have significantly overestimated these emissions from U.S. oil and natural gas production, according to a new peer-reviewed study from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As CIRES research scientist and study lead author Xin Lan told E&E News:

“We analyzed a decade’s worth of data and while we do find some increase in methane downwind of oil and gas activity, we do not find a statistically significant trend in the U.S. for total methane emissions.”

The study, which was conducted by researchers at NOAA’s Boulder, Colo., office in collaboration with the University of Colorado and published in Geophysical Research Letters, analyzed atmospheric methane (CH4) measurements from 20 North American sites that included both airplane and surface samples found in the NOAA Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network (GGGRN) from 2006 to 2015. The researchers determined:

“Our estimated increases in North American ONG CH4 emissions (on average ~ 3.4 ± 1.4 % yr-1 for 2006-2015, ±σ) are much smaller than estimates from some previous studies and below our detection threshold for total emissions increases at the east coast sites that are sensitive to U.S. outflows. We also find an increasing trend in ethane/methane emission ratios which has resulted in major overestimation of oil and gas emissions trends in some previous studies.” (emphasis added)

Methane Emissions Below Detection Levels
From 2006 to 2015 U.S. natural gas production increased significantly from about 18.5 trillion cubic feet (tcf) to nearly 26.6 tcf. Despite a roughly 46 percent increase in production, the NOAA study finds that there was “no increase of total [U.S.] methane emissions” and only a “modest increase in oil and gas methane emissions” that is “much lower than some previous studies suggest.”
In fact, as E&E News reported,

“Recent studies showing increases of methane emissions from oil and gas production have overestimated their volume by as much as 10 times, according to the research.” (emphasis added)

According to the study, a major flaw in the previous estimations – that has fueled an assumption that the “significant” increase in global methane emissions after 2006 was caused by U.S. oil and natural gas operations – is that these studies relied on ethane measurements to estimate methane. From E&E News:

“Instead, according to Lan and other researchers, the spike in methane is more likely to have been caused by natural emissions whose sources can include the digestive tracts of cows, rotting vegetable matter and the activities of termites.”

Previous Methane Studies Flawed
One such ethane study that this latest NOAA and CU study specifically mentions was conducted by University of Colorado Associate Professor Detlev Helmig. In his previous research, Helmig was attempting to pair ethane (another gas that can be emitted during oil and natural gas production) with methane. His 2016 study claimed that ethane emissions had risen dramatically. Notably, the conclusion of his own work undermined his original thesis by stating that it is also released naturally via seepage of fossil fuel deposits, volcanic activity and wildfires, as well as biomass burning.
And as the NOAA study explains, the inconsistencies of using ethane as an estimate of methane emissions go even deeper because the ratio isn’t always the same depending on where in the United States the production is taking place and the time measurements are taken:

“Although [ethane] are appropriate indicative tracers for [oil and natural gas] emissions, [oil and natural gas methane] trends cannot be accurately estimated from [ethane]. Thus any conclusion of a large fossil CH4 increase in the past decade from studies that have used the constant ER assumption is unreliable.” (emphasis added)

As Lan told E&E News,

“What this means is if you want to track methane, you have to measure methane.”

Helmig also more recently attempted to connect ethane and methane emissions with increased ground-level ozone, despite publicly-available data showing that oil and gas production is not a significant contributor to ozone levels.
But that and other data didn’t stop Helmig from blaming ozone levels on oil and gas production. As EID reported at the time, Helmig still suggested that his team’s finding that methane and ethane emissions have increased 4.2 percent annually since 2009 is contributing to spikes in ground-level ozone. In absence of significant real-world evidence, the researchers made this determination by using an atmospheric chemical transport model to forecast significant increases in ground-level ozone throughout the U.S.
It is telling that Helmig presented this research alongside groups like New Yorkers Against Fracking and Physicians for Social Responsibility during a “Keep It In the Ground” February medical symposium in Colorado.
U.S. Methane Emissions Intensity Declining
While the NOAA study only analyzed data through 2015, a recent EID analysis of publicly available federal data demonstrates that U.S. oil and natural gas methane emissions have declined – both in intensity and total emissions – through 2017 in America’s largest producing basins.
The analysis found that methane emissions from onshore U.S. oil and natural gas production fell 24 percent, while oil and natural gas production rose 65 percent and 19 percent, respectively, from 2011 to 2017, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Information Administration.
The Permian Basin – the largest oil producing region in the world – saw a 57 percent reduction in methane emissions intensity (emissions per unit of production) as production increased 125 percent from 2011 to 2017. Annual methane emissions from Permian production fell from 4.8 million metric tons (MMT) to 4.6 MMT from 2011 to 2017.
And the Appalachian Basin – America’s largest natural gas producing region and the world’s third largest – experienced a 379 percent increase in production and 82 percent decrease in methane emissions intensity during the same time period. Methane emissions from production in the basin fell from 5.3 MMT to 4.7 MMT.

Conclusion
This latest study from NOAA provides important context as various states like New Mexico, Colorado and Pennsylvania are evaluating methane emissions trends and regulations. Studies such as the ones highlighted by NOAA that have overestimated emissions have also been tools to bolster Democratic presidential hopefuls to campaign on platforms that call for total or partial bans on oil and gas development and for new legislative initiatives to introduce duplicative federal regulations on an industry that is already reducing emissions.

With Abortion and Socialism, Democrats Are Peddling Slavery Again

With Abortion and Socialism, Democrats Are Peddling Slavery Again

By Trevor Thomas

In 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president, the newly-formed Republican Party controlled the U.S. House, Senate, and presidency. As was the case with most every state in what would become the Confederacy, my home state of Georgia cited slavery, Tepublicans, and the election of Lincoln as its reasons for seceding:

A brief history of the rise, progress, and policy of anti-slavery and the political organization into whose hands the administration of the federal government has been committed [the Republicans] will fully justify the pronounced verdict of the people of Georgia [who voted to secede]. The party of Lincoln, called the Republican Party under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party. . . . The prohibition of slavery in the territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by its leaders and applauded by its followers. . . . [T]he abolitionists and their allies in the northern states have been engaged in constant efforts to subvert our institutions.

The Confederate States of America was formed at the Montgomery Convention in February 1861. For the southern states—and anyone else in the world paying attention—the agenda of the newly formed (and electorally victorious) Republican Party agenda was clear. Every party platform since the creation of the Republican Party had forcefully denounced slavery. After the infamous Dred Scott ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857, the subsequent Republican platform strongly condemned the ruling and reaffirmed the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories. On the other hand, the corresponding Democrat platforms praised the Dred Scott ruling and condemned all efforts to end slavery in the U.S.
With its recent unashamed embrace of socialism—they used to avoid such talk—along with its decades-long devotion to killing children in the womb, the modern Democrat Party is again aligning itself with ideologies and institutions that have little to no regard for vast swaths of humanity. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, socialism—the economic system of communist countries—and abortion are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of millions of human beings.
As Breitbart reported late last year, with nearly 42 million killed in their mothers’ wombs, abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2018. Since the infamous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, the abortion holocaust has claimed the lives of over 60 million American children. Given such horrific numbers, with unborn children being the most innocent and helpless among us, and given that a mother’s womb should be one of the safest places in the universe, the plight of the unborn is the greatest civil rights battle of all time.
Yet the modern Democrat Party has never been more hostile to unborn children. As soon as they took control of the U.S. House this year, sex-worshipping democrats wasted little time in revealing their wicked and perverse priorities. In an attempt to end the partial government shutdown, Democrats’ initial legislative funding proposal sent to the Republican-controlled Senate repealed the pro-life “Mexico-City policy” and provided $37.5 million for the pro-abortion United Nations Population Fund.
Days later, Democrats in New York stood and cheered after Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo signed into law legislation that allows for the killing of children in the womb right up to the moment of birth. In other words, the culture and ideology that gave us the gruesome Kermit Gosnell passed legislation that will only create more infanticidal fools.
Not to be outdone in their efforts to kill the most innocent and helpless among us, soon after the New York infanticide bill was signed into law, Virginia Democrats proposed their version of an after-birth abortion bill. Distracting from his blackface scandal, Virginia’s governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, infamously defended the legislation. Republican senator Ben Sasse put it well when he noted,

In just a few years pro-abortion zealots went from ‘safe, legal, and rare’ to ‘keep the newborns comfortable while the doctor debates infanticide.’

That Democrats are now debating infanticide shouldn’t be very surprising, as no less than Barack Obama himself helped push them along this evil path. Hoping to follow Mr. Obama as the next Democrat president, virtually every Democratic candidate for U.S. president supports what could only be described as infanticide. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, was exactly right when she asked and answered:

“How can the ‘Dream’ survive if we murder the children? Every aborted baby is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate.”

As the Nazis did with the Jews, and as pro-slavery Americans did with black Africans, modern abortion apologists have dehumanized those they find undesirable or those whose lives they want complete control over. On Fox News’ The Story, author and commentator Rachel Campos-Duffy compared abortion to slavery:

Our country has been divided since [1973] when Roe vs. Wade was passed, and I believe that in my lifetime, the only way this is going to be resolved is Roe v. Wade [being] overturned. It’s going to go back to the states because this issue is as fundamental as an issue was back in the middle of the 1800s called slavery. This is an issue about who gets to decide who is human enough so they can do whatever they want with that person, or the person they’re saying is not a person. This is such a fundamental human rights issue. 

Like abortion, socialism is a “fundamental human rights issue.” In the last 125 years, only socialism rivals abortion in the slaughter of human beings, and like abortion, socialism is a form of slavery. In 1884, in his seminal work The Man Versus the State, philosopher and political theorist Herbert Spencer warned of “The Coming Slavery.” He wrote:

All socialism involves slavery…The degree of his slavery varies according to the ratio between that which he is forced to yield up and that which he is allowed to retain; and it matters not whether his master is a single person or a society. If, without option, he has to labour for the society, and receives from the general stock such portion as the society awards him, he becomes a slave to the society. Socialistic arrangements necessitate an enslavement of this kind…There seems no getting people to accept the truth…that the welfare of a society and the justice of its arrangements are at bottom dependent on the characters of its members; and that improvement in neither can take place without that improvement in character which results from carrying on peaceful industry under the restraints imposed by an orderly social life. The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into. There is no political alchemy by which you can get golden conduct out of leaden instincts. [Emphasis mine.]

One hundred and thirty-five years ago, Spencer—one of the most widely read philosophers of his time and “the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century”—warned the world of what socialists would bring and who was “diligently preparing the way for them.”
Nevertheless, thanks mostly to socialist regimes, the twentieth century was the world’s bloodiest. From China’s Zedong and the Soviet Union’s Stalin to Cuba’s Castro, the twentieth century is littered with godless socialists who attempted to enslave and murder their way to Utopia. Tens of millions died in the forced-labor camps that socialism requires. Tens of millions more died in the poverty and starvation that socialism inevitably produces.
Many leading Democrats today unashamedly embrace socialism, including some running for president. Those Democrats who have yet to stoop to praising socialism openly have many policy proposals that are indistinguishable from what one would find in a socialist state. Yet modern American Democrats insist their version of state control of most every facet of our lives will be different.
Tragically, as has been the case with abortion, many Americans seem to have bought into the Democrats’ socialist propaganda. According to a recent Gallup poll, a growing number of Americans have embraced at least some form of socialism. This is mostly due to the increasing number of Democrats who view socialism favorably. As the same Gallup poll also notes, since 2010, a majority of Democrats have had a favorable view of socialism. A similar Gallup poll last year revealed that a significantly larger number of Democrats (57% to 47%) now prefer (“have a positive view of”) socialism over capitalism.
All the information we now have at our fingertips—including the nasty scenes from Venezuela—and it seems the lure of spending other people’s money—like the lure of (supposed) sex without consequences—still proves too much for too many. It took a civil war to rid the U.S. of the institution of slavery. Let us hope and pray that, in spite of what some are forecasting, it doesn’t get to that with abortion or socialism.

Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/with_abortion_and_socialism_democrats_are_peddling_slavery_again.html#ixzz5pWmMyseU
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Fear Theocracy? Bad News: All Politics Is Theocratic

Fear Theocracy? Bad News: All Politics Is Theocratic

By Brett Graham Fawcett

Has anyone coined a term to describe the irrational fear of the government imposing laws based on religion?  If not, I humbly suggest "theocraphobia."
In the United States, Alabama's ban of abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected has resulted in a widespread rash of theocraphobia.  It has crept into Canada, which seems especially vulnerable to it in the wake of the election of Jason Kenney and the United Conservative Party in Alberta.
The comparisons to the Puritan tyranny of The Handmaid's Tale (based on the novel by wealthy white Canadian feminist Margaret Atwood) predictably rolled in, and the accusations that women are in danger from regressive religiously inspired legislation are likely going to be with us for a long time.  The image Handmaid evokes gives us an indication of what theocracy means to these people: regressive, irrational laws that restrict people's freedom based not on any public interest, but on personal religious beliefs that should remain private.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez summarized this in a tweet accusing pro-life Republicans of secretly wanting to turn America into "a creepy theological order led by a mad king."
The mistake of those panicked commentators isn't that they think the ban on abortion is a theocratic move.  That's more or less true.  What they've missed, though, is that all politics is theological, including theirs.
The debate between pro-lifers and pro-choicers (and among different pro-choicers) has to do with when a fetus becomes a baby with moral rights.  In other words, when does a bundle of cells become a person?
How you answer this depends on how you define human nature.  This is a philosophical question — one of the oldest ones — relating to that branch of philosophy dealing with ultimate reality, metaphysics.  It also touches on ethics, the philosophical project dedicated to answering the question: what are human persons supposed to do?
In other words, despite philosophy's reputation for abstraction and irrelevance, we find that all political beliefs are really philosophical beliefs.
The problem, as the great medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas pointed out, is that philosophy, like mathematics, can only reason from premises; it can't provide or prove those premises.
For example, if you think humans have dignity and worth because of their rationality, you can deduce a lot of irrefutable consequences from that.  But what if someone picks a different premise to start from — for example, that no human being has any moral worth?  You can justify ruthless totalitarianism from that premise.  (It's been done before.)  Can you refute that premise from philosophy itself?  No, it seems that you can't.
Thus, we see the brick wall into which the abortion debate collides: there's no agreement on the fundamental metaphysics of what makes a human being a person.  Worse still, if there's no way to get at whether these premises are true or false, we're in danger of falling into a nihilism, where we can't be sure of anything.
So if philosophy cannot prove its own premises, then where do these premises, and their authority, come from?
You could answer this sociologically: our assumptions are shaped by cultures, which develop historically.  But culture, we should remember, is etymologically linked to cult.  The real answer is that these premises ultimately come from religion.
Defining "religion" has always been a slippery task, but what all religions have in common is that they all make claims and assertions about ultimate reality and about morality.  They tell stories about us — "metanarratives," as the postmodernists call them — that supply the premises that philosophy works from. The famous medieval axiom that "philosophy is the handmaiden of theology" was fundamentally correct.
Thus, controversially but irresistibly, all political beliefs are philosophical beliefs, and all philosophical beliefs are theological beliefs.
In many cases, a religion's entire purpose is to provide an ethical code for a society, a general cosmology, and a network of communal rituals to observe.  This was what Confucianism was for China, and what Shintoism was for Japan, for many centuries.  In the West, meanwhile, each country has its own variant of Enlightenment liberalism supplemented with various national myths and holidays (holy days), which perform exactly the same sociological function of providing a universe of moral premises.  (Note the quasi-scriptural status of constitutions and charters.)
This goes all the way back to the ancient world.  The Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, is not just a theogony and cosmogony justifying the Babylonian religion.  It is also a political manifesto justifying the Babylonian empire.  In it, Marduk, the chief god of Babylon, creates the world by destroying a chaos monster, ripping her in two to make the earth and the sky.  He subdues the gods of the other nations, kills a rival god, and out of his blood creates humanity so the gods can have slaves.
This is not just an origin story for the cosmos.  It is also about the metaphysics of society.  The ultimate truth is chaos; humans are by nature dangerous and rebellious; the only way to impose order is through violent suppression.  Thus, you have the political philosophy that rationalized the oppressive Chaldean regime, a philosophy that was actually theology.
Compare this to the Genesis account of creation, where humans are molded by hand from dust, not blood.  The world is created in a systematic week-long conflict-free sequence.  Adam and Eve are not enemies of God; they are made in His image.  They are not slaves; they are given dominion.  The picture of the world, and of society, is an orderly cosmos governed by humans with a divinely imbued dignity.  It is clear how liberalism, with its idea of human rights, developed from this, and it should not surprise us that much of Locke's Two Treatises on Government is taken up with interpreting the opening chapters of Genesis.
Liberalism is just one of many premises taken for granted in politics today that began as an explicitly theological concept.  Abortion, as we have said, is about personhood.  But the modern concept of "person" was invented by Christian theologians to explain the mysteries of the Trinity (one God, three persons) and the Incarnation (one person, two natures). The pro-choicers are reasoning from a theological concept, albeit with their own spin on it.
Other examples are just as ironic: the main argument for gay "marriage" — that two consenting people in love should be allowed to choose each other — is taken from the Christian theology of the sacrament of Matrimony, which was utterly different from the norm in the ancient world, where consent had nothing to do with marriage.  How often do we hear talk about being on "the right side of history," as though history were the tribunal of what is right and just — an idea we get from Hegel, whose system is essentially a Prussian translation of the medieval heresy of the Franciscan fanatic Joachim of Fiore?  Even religious tolerance, which the theocraphobes so highly value, is not a religiously neutral idea.  Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration justifies tolerance by quoting the Bible's commandment to love our enemies.
All of these are governing political assumptions that are actually theological concepts.  Friedrich Nietzsche, who described himself as a "genealogist," was infamously frustrated with the modern world for not recognizing that all its moral and philosophical systems were essentially theological in origin.  For Nietzsche, this was the reason we should do away with them.  Should we?
While popular media like Handmaid's Tale and The Crucible may have conditioned us to think of theological states only as oppressive and backward, remember that figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Tommy Douglas were pastors who saw their politics as the implementation of their religious beliefs.  No less a figure than the Hindu activist Gandhi (deeply influenced as he was by Tolstoy's vision of Christian nonviolence) would have had no problem with "I don't accept a politics without religion.  Polity is a servant of religion."
Ocasio-Cortez herself wrote an article for the Jesuit magazine America justifying her prison reform proposals with reference to her Catholic faith, and in a tweet, she invited GOP lawmakers to support her proposed ban on high credit card rates for low-income users because of the Bible's prohibition of usury.  It was meant to expose right-wing hypocrisy, but it equally revealed her own inconsistency when it comes to religiously inspired legislation.  Every politician with a moral cause he cares deeply about is reasoning from a premise that comes from a worldview deeper than politics or philosophy.  Every righteous politician is a religious crusader.
If we don't recognize this, there are others who do.  The chief Nazi jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote texts on political theology that bluntly recognized that all political concepts are just secularized concepts, and, in his Hobbesian vision, the State had assumed the role of God.  In the Third Reich, we see the consequences of that political theology.  It takes us back to the calamity of the Enuma Elish.  If we want an alternative order, we need an alternative theology.
We can still disagree and reject each other's theological premises.  But, as a culture, we should shove aside our Atwoodian paranoia, confront our theocraphobia head on, and candidly admit that we're all theocrats of one sort or another.  Our conversations over health care, the economy, and other clearly religious issues would be much more healthy, honest, and productive if we did.

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How Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity Was Proven Correct a Century Ago This Week

How Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity Was Proven Correct a Century Ago This Week

By Salim Mansur

Some six months after the Great War of 1914-18 ended, Arthur Eddington travelled at the head of a team on a scientific expedition to the island of Principe off the coast of Equatorial Guinea in West Africa. He headed one of the two teams of astronomers assigned by a Joint Permanent Eclipse Committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain to observe and record photographically the full solar eclipse scheduled to take place on May 29, 1919.
At the time under Portuguese rule, Principe was selected as one of the two sites – the other was Sobral in the Brazilian Nordeste – from where the total solar eclipse and its full effect could be best observed. The expedition was proposed by Eddington, a rising star among British astronomers, to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity published in the middle of the Great War.
Eddington’s expedition to Principe a century ago tested and confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity as the single most outstanding scientific achievement in history by one individual.  For more than two centuries Newton’s theory of gravitation, of space and time and motion, had stood as the definitive theory in explaining the mechanics of the universe, and had marked a paradigmatic shift in thinking that characterized the birth of the modern world as Newtonian.
Einstein’s theory when confirmed signified a revolution of even greater magnitude in scientific thinking than what Newton wrought with the publication of his Principia in 1687.
In 1916, Einstein published “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” in the journal Annalen der Physik. Eddington was one of the very few individuals who grasped the implication of Einstein’s theory and was selected by Frank Dyson, the head of the Royal Astronomical Association, to witness and record the full solar eclipse of May 1919 from the island of Principe.
The testable proposition in Einstein’s general relativity was that light, like any material object, was bent when passing through the gravitational field of a massive body such as the sun. For verification of this conjecture, Einstein proposed that photographs taken of stars bordering the sun during a full solar eclipse be compared with those same stars made at another time.
Eddington’s mission was to photograph the cluster of stars, known as the Hyades, on a clear night without any obstruction, and then to photograph the same cluster during the total solar eclipse when the sun was fully covered by the moon. The resulting comparison of the two sets of photographs at two different times would either disprove or confirm Einstein’s proposition. And since Einstein staked his entire theory of general relativity on such a test, the results from Eddington’s mission came to be hugely anticipated by the scientific community worldwide.
At the moment of the total solar eclipse of May 29, 1919, the Hyades would be situated behind the darkened sun providing the right moment for photographs to measure the light deflection, if any, from the stars when compared with photographs of the same stars taken on a clear night.
The weather on the day of the eclipse was poor. It rained during much of the morning, but the sky cleared just ahead of the eclipse. By early afternoon the sky was clear enough and the solar eclipse fully visible for photographs to be taken with the Hyades situated in the background of the sun.
Eddington confided in his diary, “We took sixteen photographs. They are all good of the sun, showing a very remarkable prominence; but the cloud has interfered with the star images. The last six photographs show a few images which I hope will give us what we need.”
The expedition that had headed to Sobral, Brazil, observed the solar eclipse in a perfectly clear sky.  But the equatorial heat on the site where the photographs were taken warped the equipment, and this resulted in rendering useless the measurements on the photographic plates of the eclipse.
It was left to Eddington’s mission to develop the photographs and provide the measurements of the deflection of starlight, if any, from the Hyades passing through the gravitational field of the sun. On November 6, 1919 at the joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain, Eddington presented the results of his expedition. The photographs confirmed that the deflection of the starlight in the gravitational field of the sun measured in the average 1.64 seconds.
The measurement, according to what the accuracy of the instruments allowed, was almost equal to that predicted by Einstein.
The story goes, as told by Einstein’s biographer, Ronald W. Clark, that Einstein had remained unusually calm and confident through the entire saga of the Eddington mission to Principe and the announcement of the results. Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, one of Einstein’s students, recalled the moment when he handed her a telegram from Eddington. She wrote:

“It was Eddington’s cable with the results of measurement of the eclipse expedition. When I was giving expression to my joy that the results coincided with his calculations, he said, quite unmoved, ‘But I knew that the theory is correct,’ and when I asked, what if there had been no confirmation of his prediction, he countered: ‘Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord -- the theory is correct.”

Einstein’s theory is correct, and more. Pedro G. Ferreira, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford in his book The Perfect Theory (2014), which he has described as the biography of general relativity, writes, “For almost a century, it has been considered by many to be the perfect theory, a source of profound admiration to anyone who has had the privilege of coming across it.”

Einstein during a lecture in Vienna, 1921

Photograph by Ferdinand Schmutzer, restored by Adam Cuerden

In the century since Einstein published his theory, and Eddington tested and confirmed it, the theory of general relativity has provided us with the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of the nearly 14 billion year history of the universe. Only over the past decade, scientists have learned new astounding facts; for instance, that only 4 percent of the universe is made of known forms of matter and energy of which we humans are an insignificantly tiny part, and the rest is the mysterious “dark matter,” and the even more mysterious “dark energy.”
Here we might also note, in the field of epistemology Einstein’s theory of general relativity as the “perfect theory” and Eddington’s verifiability test, have become the gold standard of what Karl Popper termed “conjectures and refutations” as the basis of advancement in our knowledge of the universe and its working. How do we know what is scientifically true, and Popper indicated “by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability” (italics given).
This is why in the shadow of the perfect theory, all the accompanying hoopla surrounding the theory of man-made global warming or climate change in our time fails to meet the criterion of testability, such as Eddington’s expedition put to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity and, hence, the so-called science of man-made global warming might well be described as voodoo-science.

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Fixing Income Inequality

Fixing Income Inequality

By Jeffrey Folks

In a recent op-ed in Barron's (April 18, 2019), Professor Michael Pettis of Peking University points out the dangers of income inequality, comparing our situation today with that of the late 1920s.  This comparison is commonplace among progressives, who seem to think that the mere mention of "late 1920s" is enough to stampede the public into demanding progressive government interventions.  In this case, it amounts to extortion: share the wealth, or we'll have another Great Depression.  But if you share the wealth, both poor and rich will thrive.  "The benefits would eventually trickle up — even to the rich," Pettis writes.
Who could argue against making everyone rich?  The problem is how to do it.
Pettis claims that "if income were more widely distributed, the U.S. economy would grow faster" due to increased spending and demand.  But neither Pettis, with his demand-side economics, nor many of the other advocates of income equality specify just how income is to be "more widely distributed."  (Give Elizabeth Warren credit on this point: by her own admission, her solution is not at all different from Lenin's: steal it.)
Before getting to the solution, let's consider why income inequality has been rising, as it most certainly was under Obama-Biden.  It rose because of the increasing gap between skilled workers and those who fail to obtain an education and skills.  Progressives like to pretend "the system" is unfair to low-income workers.  In reality, a high school dropout who doesn't work hard is probably overpaid at $8 an hour.  By contrast, a brilliant entrepreneur like Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, deserves every bit of what he has earned.  He has created a company that provides useful products for hundreds of millions of businesses and individuals.
Simply put, the high level of income inequality today is the result of cynicism on the part of those who have no intention of working hard either in school or on the work site — and cynicism on the part of politicians who encourage such thinking.  There are more slackers today because many believe that if they band together, government will take care of them.  Those who feed them with illusions of universal basic income are promoting failure.  Does Bernie really believe that those who have worked so hard to succeed want to spend the rest of their lives subsidizing parasites?
Given the failure of so many to obtain education and skills, income inequality is inevitable.  This is particularly the case in a global job market.  If a young person in Chicago cares only about partying through his twenties, there are plenty of young men and women in India and Vietnam who are willing to take his place in the job market, and they will.
In The Expertise Economy, Kelly Palmer and David Blake studied various approaches to improving worker skills around the world.  Palmer reports that the most effective of these, Singapore's SkillsFuture, is a partnership of private businesses and government offering training opportunities for every citizen "through workshops, work-study programs, and massive open online courses."
To be successful, these programs require initiative on the part of participants.  That initiative is not widespread in America, and progressive promises of "Free Everything" only make things worse.  It's clear that Democrat presidential candidates would rather keep workers on the government reservation rather than see them succeed in the private sector.  It's not just that liberals aren't good at job training: they don't want to be.
Job Corps is an example of just how bad government job-training programs can be.  Created 55 years ago as part of LBJ's Great Society, Job Corps has continued ever since, receiving billions in taxpayer funding and, according to GAO annual reports, offering little in return.  At an annual cost of about $45,000 per student, Job Corps turns out graduates — the minority who graduate — whose long-term earnings are not at all different from those of others from the same background.
And Job Corps is just one of 45 different federal job training programs.  Critics have long suspected that young people would get better training at Burger King.        
Responsibility is definitely not what progressives have in mind.  They wish to increase the dependence of young people on government — by forgiving student debt (much of it incurred by students taking six or more years to complete a degree, if they ever do complete it) and by offering free health care, free housing, free food, and a guaranteed income for life.
That broad safety net in itself would not reduce income inequality; it would increase it, since it would encourage even more young people to ignore the consequences of failure.  If workers refuse to take responsibility for their own skills and work, the only way for government to bring about income equality is to redistribute large amounts of income.  That is exactly what progressives have in mind, though like Bernie they disguise their intentions by pretending they will tax only "the rich."  Sanders would lower the death tax exemption to $3.5 million, thus destroying millions of small family businesses and family farms.
There is a solution to income inequality, but it is not income redistribution.  The solution is for young people to be told they must work hard to achieve a more equal income.  Pretending government can ensure income equality by "more widely distributing" income is not merely a lie — it is complicity in spoiling the chances of millions of young people just starting out in life.
There are hopeful signs that many Americans are starting to realize this.  The Labor Participation Rate, which fell steadily under Obama and Biden, has been rising since Donald Trump was elected, as workers of all ages enter or re-enter the labor force.  Also, consumer income expectations are now at their highest level in the last 15 years, according to the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment.  Maybe workers are starting to get the message, despite all that Bernie and his pals can do to discourage them.

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When Conservative SCOTUS Justices Are Liberal and Vice Versa

When Conservative SCOTUS Justices Are Liberal and Vice Versa

By Steven Kessler

On Monday, May 20, the Supreme Court decided in favor of an American Indian man, Clayvin Herrera, in Herrera v. Wyoming.  Essentially, Herrera was found guilty of off-season hunting at Bighorn National Forest.  Herrera believed he had the right to hunt there, citing the Treaty of Ft. Laramie.  The treaty states that the Native Americans can "hunt on the unoccupied lands of the United States so long as game may be found thereon, and as long as peace subsists among the Whites and Indians on the borders of the hunting districts."
The lower courts in Wyoming convicted Clayvin Herrera, a Crow tribal member, for violating state hunting laws, notwithstanding the promise in an 1868 federal treaty that the tribe and its members preserved the right to hunt on "unoccupied" land.  The lower courts did not accept the validity of the treaty.  However, the Supreme Court overturned the lower courts, siding with Herrera and recognized the authority of the treaty despite the passage of 150 years since its signing.
The Supreme Court is currently composed of a conservative majority: five conservative judges sitting with four liberal colleagues.  The liberals, Sotomayor, Kagan, Ginsburg, and Breyer, all voted in favor of Herrera.  Four of the conservatives, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Alito, and Thomas, voted against Herrera.  Neil Gorsuch was the lone conservative siding with Herrera, his vote being the decisive one.
Interestingly, the Court's ruling in favor of Herrera with all the liberal judges favoring the plaintiff and all but one conservative against him seems to position the ruling in favor of Herrera as a liberal one.  CNN.com's headline for the case read, "Gorsuch sides with liberals as Supreme Court rules in favor of Native American rights in Wyoming hunting case."  From this headline, the reader can interpret the issue as a classic liberal versus conservative argument, like those surrounding abortion and immigration.
Yet the issue of honoring the treaty authored over 150 years ago should be a no-brainer for the conservatives.  To the conservative, the dead and the unborn are as much a part of civilization as the living, therefore they have all the same rights and considerations as we, in the present, do.
G.K. Chesterton called this concept "the democracy of the dead."  Chesterton defined this term in the following way:

Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

Every conservative should have honored the treaty because even though those who authored and signed it are long dead, they are still nonetheless with us here in the present.  We must honor the treaty and treat those who signed it as though they were with us now.  Violating the treaty would actively and legitimately wrong real human beings.
We, in the present, have obligations to both the dead and the unborn.  When we no longer see the dead among the living, we fail to see our obligations to them.  Read Sir Roger Scruton's interpretation of this chain of causality:

The dead and the unborn are as much members of society as the living.  To dishonour the dead is to reject the relation on which society is built — the relation of obligation between generations.  Those who have lost respect for their dead have ceased to be trustees of their inheritance.  Inevitably, therefore, they lose the sense of obligation to the unborn.  The web of obligations shrinks to the present tense.

It was through Thomas Paine's work, The rights of Man, that the dead lost their seat at the table in the present era.  Among Paine's musings, he advocated for the emancipation of the individual from the oppressive ties of tradition, specifically the notion that the dead have any authority over the living:

I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.

Paine wanted the present generation to live freely, unencumbered by the fetters of the past.
The "Mr. Burke" Paine referred to was none other than Edmund Burke, the first conservative.  Specifically, Paine referred to a passage from Edmund Burke's brilliant and enduring work, "Reflections on the revolution in France":

Society is indeed a contract. ... It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature.  It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.  As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

We are not born free and independent, but rather are born into a context built for us by our ancestors. This context is maintained by the complicated web of duties to piety and posterity.
The democracy of the dead is a deeply and profoundly conservative concept, yet most of the conservative judges sided against Herrera.  Additionally, the liberal judges all found Herrera's position favorable, essentially making his position appear as a liberal stance.  This is what made this case so peculiar.
While there are other factors in the decisions of the Supreme Court and the decisions at the lower levels, the essence of the case is predicated on the treaty of Ft. Laramie, signed 1868.  Those who signed the treaty, while no longer living, are still nonetheless present with us.  To dishonor the treaty because the deceased are below the ground is not at all different from abrogating the terms of a contract between the living.

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Robert Mueller is a Sleazy, Shameful, Partisan Hack

Robert Mueller is a Sleazy, Shameful, Partisan Hack

By Patricia McCarthy

Robert Mueller should have been disbarred decades ago, along with his enforcer Andrew Weismann; that is how egregious his record of malfeasance is, all matters of public record.  
What he did Wednesday morning was his final IED tossed at the President to placate his Democrat overlords who desperately want to impeach Trump.  But for what?  Mueller gave no list of felonies in his report nor did he detail any crimes of which Trump is even amorphously guilty.

This entire enterprise, the fabricated notion that Trump and/or persons within his campaign colluded with Russians to cheat his way to the presidency was illegitimate from the outset.  It did not happen.  Not even a very expensive team of Trump-haters could find their way to naming anyone on the Trump side guilty of anything illegal having to do with the election.  And we can be certain that if they could have bent and twisted any relationship, any meeting, any friendship, any past association to find Trump guilty of anything, this band of malefactors would have run with it.  They found nothing but gossip and innuendo, rather like a clique of mean girls in middle school. 
Volume two of Mueller's report was entirely unnecessary but for this gang of thugs' need to vent and hopefully give the Democrats something with which to move ahead with impeachment.  
True to form, the dim bulb Democrats are such legal ignoramuses they have continued to insist the report found Trump guilty of all manner of crimes even though it did not.  We can be sure that if they had discovered anything useful, they would have used it and recommended charges.  But they did not.  
So on Wednesday morning, a shaky and seemingly anxious Mueller went before the cameras to say the opposite of what he had told AG Barr, that it was only the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) guidelines that prevented him for exonerating the President.  Barr has testified that on at least two occasions, Mueller told him those guidelines had nothing to do with his final report.  There were others present when he said this to Barr.
So, who had the gun to Mueller's jowly head?  (He resembles the canine Mastiff.) He has most likely been on the outs with the DC social establishment who were enraged by his report.  They had universally assumed it was their ticket to unseating the man.  So shocked by Mueller's findings, the ruling elites of the beltway have probably exorcised Mueller from their midst.  
Who made him embarrass himself by offering the Democrats a new path to impeachment?  Who has something on Bob Mueller?  He's weathered criminal accusations before and retained his positions when he should have been permanently kicked out of the legal profession never to practice law again. He should never have been assigned as a special counsel to investigate President Trump, especially when everyone knew by then that it was the Clinton campaign that had commissioned and paid for the fake dossier and that none of the principals involved were Russian.  They were paid operatives of the FBI, DOJ and CIA.   
Just who among the Trump trolls got the camera-shy Mueller to belittle himself Wednesday morning?  James Comey?  John Brennan?  Does someone in power have something on Mueller?  Wouldn't we all like to know.  The man seemed at the end of his rope.  Maybe it was all about fund-raising.  If so, how cheap is that?
Much has been written already about the sheer pettiness of what Mueller did and said on Wednesday morning.  Many actual legal scholars have commented; Alan Dershowitz, Sean Davis, the guys at Powerline and of course Mark Levin.  Given their analyses, it is safe to say that Mueller stepped in a tar pit that may well fossilize this pathetic man.   He has sacrificed his entire career on the altar of the unscrupulous politics of the Democrats, who refuse still to accept the results of the 2016 election.  
I hope that they will suffer the consequences of their own bitterness.  It is likely that the several investigations into the origins of the collusion fakery will come to light.  Much of the truth has been part of the public realm for well over a year.  It is time for it to be forced upon the resistant media outlets who have bent over backwards to conceal it.  Chances are that CNN and MSNBC will shutter their operations rather than tell the truth of this coup attempt that is reminiscent of the 1964 film Seven Days in May.   
Many people have suggested for many months now that the counterfeit dossier that was used to jumpstart the investigation of Trump was devised to conceal the years of spying, egregious surveillance, begun under Obama, in fact ordered by Obama perhaps as early as 2012.  
Remember when Maxine Waters bragged about Obama's database; "He has  everything on everyone"?  We now know Samantha Power unmasked hundreds of people in her apparent drive to sabotage Israel and help the Palestinians.  Since Obama took office, the Democrat party has been transformed into a criminal enterprise, police-state in nature.   Obama's spies assumed they would never be exposed, that their pulling the strings of government would be their unimpeded mission in perpetuity, passed on only to their chosen successors.  
But exposed they have been and now they are desperate to change the narrative.  Maybe that was Mueller's goal Wednesday morning, an attempt to derail the declassification of documents that are sure to embarrass if not prove criminal acts by many denizens of the deep state. 
Clearly Mueller hopes to avoid any appearances before any congressional committees.  He appeared to be downright terrified of such a fate.  Why did he do it? He offered nothing new but the lie about the OLC being the reason he could not indict.   Not true.  If he had found anything, he would have used it.  And as Scott Adams asked on Twitter, what is the difference between these two statements: "If we had confidence that the president did not commit a crime, we would have said so." or "If we had confidence the president committed a crime, we would have said so." Are they equal?  Indeed they are.  
So, what did Mueller hope to achieve?  He did energize the legally illiterate, Trump-hating left and their candidates for the presidency but other than that, all he did was demean himself and his ridiculous report.  If he had been interested in the truth and the burnishing his legacy, he would have brought to light the falsity of the dossier and its provenance but he did not.  May we never see his kind again, the kind that abuses their positions of power for the indiscriminate destruction of innocents.

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