A hat tip to Larry, for this new Colter Wall release, Saskatchewan 1881. Thread open.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
The making of elite foxes.
The World Is Being Run By Crazy People
This is how nuts things are now: a senator brushes up on Nabokov and Tolstoy (Tolstoy!) to get pumped to expose Vladimir Putin.
Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn’t know anything about Russia’s biggest company didn’t seem to trouble Americans very much. Here’s the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed Comey:
SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about Gazprom, director?
COMEY: I don’t.
SPEIER: Well, it’s a – it’s an oil company.
(Incidentally, Gazprom – primarily a natural-gas giant – is not really an oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)
As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil. It’s bizarre, to say the least.
Who are these people, and how did they reach the highest levels of government?
It’s Not Wiretapping When The Democrats Do It
Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.
“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.
“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”
Other official sources with direct knowledge and who requested anonymity confirmed to TheDCNF diGenova’s description of surveillance reports Rice ordered one year before the 2016 presidential election.
[…]
Michael Doran, former NSC senior director, told TheDCNF Monday that “somebody blew a hole in the wall between national security secrets and partisan politics.” This “was a stream of information that was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics and the Obama administration found a way to blow a hole in that wall,” he said.
Doran charged that potential serious crimes were undertaken because “this is a leaking of signal intelligence.”
[…]
“We’re looking at a potential constitutional crisis from the standpoint that we used an extremely strong capability that’s supposed to be used to safeguard and protect the country,” he said. “And we used it for political purposes by a sitting President.”
More at Daily Caller. Via Drudge.
I’ll Only Play If I’m Guaranteed To Win
Charles Murray once again encounters the leftist welcome wagon:
Note how these attention-seeking clowns – who break their own assurances, grin at their own lies, and then demand applause – are indulged, effetely and at length, by university staff, as if the venue were a toddlers’ day-care centre. And note that the protestors, who wish to impose themselves on others and inhibit other people’s discussion, refuse to participate in the debate without ultimate veto and Disruptor’s Privilege.
Turtle Swamp
The State Department said on Monday it was ending U.S. funding for the United Nations Population Fund, the international body’s agency focused on family planning as well as maternal and child health in more than 150 countries.
In a letter to U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, the State Department said it was dropping the funding because the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
The cut marks U.S. President Donald Trump’s first move to curtail funding for the United Nations and is likely to raise further questions about how deep those cuts will eventually go throughout the organization, where the United States is the top donor.
Reader Tips
NHL and the Olympics
The NHL is out for 2018.
Good, he says, while donning a flame-retardant suit. Whether professional athletes should be involved in the Olympics (especially hockey players) must rank right up there with abortion as a community dividing discussion.
Bombardier
Okay, maybe paying exorbitant bonuses to management after taking $1.3B in gov’t handouts wasn’t the best of public relations exercises.
In an email from Michael Chong today:*
There are times for government to intervene to protect sectors of our economy, such as when the government rescued our auto manufacturing industry in 2009.
Aerospace technology is another high-tech, R&D intensive sector important to Canada’s national economy.
Uh huh. Tell that to Viking Air of Victoria and Calgary. They’re the ones who rescued the de Haviland Canada type certificates for the DHC-1 to DHC-7 from Bombardier, who got it them from Boeing, who got them from the Gov’t of Canada. They’re actually producing new variants of the venerable DHC-6 (Twin Otter) and an upgrade program for the DHC-2 (Beaver).
Like all gov’t “investment” to “protect sectors of our economy” it is nothing but crony capitalism and vote buying.
The Liberals go shooting, again.
Yippee!
New laws to further restrict law-abiding owners, put in place to address criminals who are ignoring the existing laws in the first place.
Make murder illegal, Mr. Goodale, that would work better, don’t you think?
This will be interesting.
If you report to Parliament people might hear about some of the issues facing our soldiers.
That’s a problem because it makes it much more difficult to bury the bad news.
But Walbourne went so far as to suggest Sajjan is part of the problem.
He said the defence minister’s “nebulous” response to two recent ombudsman’s reports is emblematic of his overall approach to the office.
Over the past six months, Walbourne has called for better support for cadets who are hurt in uniform, and for the military to keep injured personnel in the fold until their veterans’ benefits are lined up.
Via, NewsHubNation
St. Petersburg
What looks like a bomb has gone off in the metro.
You may remember a year ago Kate visited friends in St. Petersburg. It is very “cosmopolitan” like other European cities. I’d not be shocked to learn that it was the Dutch Reformists, again.
Inner Child
O’Leary skips again.
After initially agreeing to attend the Saturday debate in Toronto, he bailed. That would make his attendance record ‘zero’. That should also be the votes he gets.
Blog Notes
For all intents and purposes, it’s spring here.
Yard work, brewing beer, smoking meat.
Go outside, I am. Expect posting like yesterday.
Reader Tips
Visit Ground Zero
How deep Señor Maduro?
It won’t be long now. Socialism always ends in bulldozers and death-squads.
Meanwhile, political prisoners continued to be arrested. In January, Mr. Maduro established a new “anti-coup commando” to round up political dissidents accused of treason. The group has taken aim at members of the opposition, arresting many, including a city councilman from central Venezuela and a deputy lawmaker in the National Assembly.
h/t maz2
The Option Of Weight Loss Was Not Discussed
In the joy-sapping world of Everyday Feminism, where absolutely everything is politicised, and where politicised invariably means oppressive, Caleb Luna ponders the gay hook-up app Grindr, and why he – sorry, they – attracts so little interest.
Turtle Swamp
After years of being shuttled to the back of the proverbial bus, folks in the Jewish community, plus all who value freedom and decency, are breathing sighs of sweet relief. Say what you will about the administration of President Trump, its insiders have the Jewish state’s back.
With Haley’s ascent to the top of this country’s diplomatic heap, high-ranking UN officials and ambassadors are shaking in their Italian loafers.