When and Why Did the FBI Start Investigating Candidate Trump?

Until this month, the official story was that the FBI began their investigation of the Trump campaign in the Fall of 2016 after John McCain turned over the Steele Dossier to them. That timeline changed considerably with the revelation of Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Now it's being alleged that the FBI started investigating the Trump campaign much earlier.

Under the new timeline, Trump was under pressure from the Washington Post's endorsement panel to name some foreign policy advisors. The seasoned professionals were boycotting Trump so he had to settle for 3rd string back-benchers - people who had done business overseas. That set off alarms because at least two of these advisors "had ties with Russia".

Personally, I think it went back even further. Fairly early in 2016, Vladimir Putin was asked about Trump and said that he was clever (later translations say that he may only have called Trump colorful). Reporters demanded that Trump repudiate Putin, something that Trump's ego was not going to allow. Instead Trump accepted the compliment and said a couple of complimentary things about Putin. The pundits went crazy insisting that this somehow proved that Trump was Putin's puppet and that Trump was planning on overthrowing the US government and installing himself as an authoritarian leader.

Keep in mind that no one batted an eye when SoS Clinton met with Russia to reset relations or when POTUS Obama did his own reset. Or when Obama premised flexibility after the next election to the Russian ambassador over a hot mic Or when Obama made fun of Romney for calling Russia our biggest geo-political rival.

It's been pretty well established that the FBI and Justice Department were being run by Obama loyalists. I'm guessing that they were among those never-Trumpers who believed that Trump was colluding with Putin and looking for any excuse to open an investigation. Then Trump added some people with "ties to the Kremlin" to his advisors. Russia is pay-to-play. Anyone doing business there has ties with the Kremlin and these advisors had done nothing illegal. But that's all the excuse the FBI needed.

The New York Times article that broke the store about Operation Crossfire Hurricane admitted that the FBI considered quietly meeting with the Trump campaign. They decided against it. Why? Because they wanted to catch the Trump campaign doing something with the Russians.

In a Sunday morning news show, Comey claimed that it was all about Russia but why have FBI informants meet with the Trump campaign if things were as innocent as Comey claimed (and remember that Comey lied under oath to Congress about wiretapping so he is not a reliable source).

I think that rather than the FBI investigating the Russians and their connections with Trump, they were investigating Trump and his connections with Russia. The focus of the investigation was not Russia, it was Trump.

And that's why it's a scandal.

Trump and North Korea

Earlier this week North Korea reacted to statements by Vice President Pence about pursuing a Libyan model for denuclearization and to joint military maneuvers with South Korea. They threatened to break off talks and to respond with force.

On Thursday, President Trump made his own response by cancelling the summit and reminding that we can also use force.

Naturally the pundits went crazy. In the Washington Post's afternoon email summary, there was an editorial plus columns by five columnists on what a poor negotiator Trump is. By the end of the day, North Korea released a statement that they are still willing to talk.

The irony here is that most of these same pundits had been worried that Trump was too caught up with the idea of winning a Nobel Prize and wanted the summit too much. They insisted that North Korea's Kim would be able to take advantage of Trump.

Trump came to office with the reputation of being a master negotiator and he is showing it here. He's proving that he's willing to walk away from a bad deal, or from someone who is unwilling to deal. That's important with North Korea. They've gotten the better of the US in previous negotiations.

It's also not as unusual as the pundits claim. Reagan walked away from a deal with the USSR only to have them restart negotiations. During negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the head of the PLO, Yasser Arafat constantly walked out, forcing Secretary of State Madeline Albright to run after him in high heels.

It's a nice change from President Obama's approach to Iran. It was obvious from the start that he wanted a deal more than they did and they used that to negotiate a bad deal.

In reality, the biggest obstacle to an agreement with North Korea is the actions of President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton. They are also the reason that mentions of Libya set off warnings from North Korea.

During the George W. Bush administration and after the overthrow of Iraq, Libya voluntarily gave up its nuclear program in exchange for promises of normalized relations.

That lasted until the next American administration and the Arab Spring. A group of Islamists associated with the Arab Brotherhood met with Hillary Clinton and convinced her that they could be trusted to run Libya. She in turn convinced Obama and the US joined the effort to overthrow the Libyan government.

Pundits have complained that Trump announcing the Iran agreement will hurt negotiations with North Korea but Libya is a much bigger issue. We are reapplying sanctions on Iran because they are not in compliance with the agreement.

But we overthrew Libya after they gave up their nuclear program. The reason we gave, that we were protecting women and children refugees, was a lie. We were protecting Islamic rebels. But we'd almost certainly left Libya alone if they were nuclear-armed.

So now Trump has to convince Kim that he will be safe from the US, even after the next change of administrations. That's going to be far more difficult than it would have been if we'd stayed out of Libya. But I do think that the Trump administration is the best equipped for the job in a generation.

Who Moved?

A recent article in the Washington Post examines how whites have left the Democratic Party in favor of the Republicans. It attributes a lot of this movement to polarization within the parties. Southern conservatives used to be welcome in the Democratic party but these days they align with the Republicans. The same is true in reverse with Northern intellectuals who have left the Republicans to become Democrats. All of this is well and good, but I take issue with one phrase, "As most whites shift rightward, they perceive the Democratic Party to be shifting leftward".

I'm continually amazed that anyone can fail to see how far the Democratic Party has moved in the last decade. Here are some examples:

• In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were both against gay marriage.
• Both candidates were for a moderate rise in the minimum wage.
• Clinton was running as a return to her husband's administration and policies.
• Obama made fun of Clinton's health care plan because it included an individual mandate.

How have things changed since then?

• No one who is against gay marriage is allowed in the Democratic Party.
• There is a vocal wing in the party for raising the minimum wage to $15/hour - more than doubling it.
• in 2016 Bernie Sanders was mainly running against the major achievements of Bill Clinton
• ObamaCare had an individual mandate.
• There is a vocal wing in the party that is for Medicare for all and free collage
• A socialist made a strong challenge to Hillary Clinton. Granted he calls himself a "democratic socialist" but he also took his honeymoon in Soviet Moscow
• A number of honest-to-god Marxists won primaries
• A majority of Democrats distrust capitalism and would prefer socialism
  

Serious, socialists and Marxists are now accepted in the Democratic Party and people are still saying that the shift is only perceived?

The Cynical Reason the Santa Fe Shooting Won't Get as Much Press as the Stoneman Dougals Shooting

On May 18th, a student in Santa Fe, Texas killed 10 students and injured another 10. This was the deadliest school shooting since the Valentine's day shooting at Stoneman Douglas, Florida. The Stoneman Douglas shooting led to nationwide school walkouts and a massive protest in Washington DC. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that none of that will happen with the Santa Fe shooting.

My reasoning is that the Stoneman Douglas shooting was politically beneficial to the Democrats and the gun control crowd (which has a huge overlap). The gun used in the Florida shooting was an "assault weapon" and some of the survivors from the shooting immediately blamed Republicans and the NRA for not banning that class of gun. This was magical thinking - the insistence that the shooting would not have happened if only the shooter had been denied a particular class of weapon.

Democrats and anti-gun activists rallied in the hope that this tragedy would add to the predicted "blue wave". The NRA was condemned as a near-terrorist organization and Democrats began running on an anti-gun platform for the first time in a generation.

But the Texas shooter changed all that. he used a shotgun and a 38-special revolver. None of the "common sense gun control" provisions being demanded would have touched these weapons. An old-fashioned six-shooter does not have a high-capacity magazine. I haven't heard any details about the shotgun but they seldom hold more than five or six shots.

These are weapons that date back to the 19th century. All of the arguments about military-style weapons being too dangerous for civilians evaporate when presented with this shooting. The only argument left is a total ban on all guns. That moves well beyond what's reasonable.

A second reason that we will not see a repeat of the activism from the Florida shooting is the counter-protest. The NRA got a huge membership and fund-raising bonus from all of the anti-NRA activism. This is important because gun owners are more motivated to vote on a single issue than non-gun owners. Having someone propose taking your property away is a concrete action. Wanting to take away someone else's property is abstract. Concrete beats abstract in the polls. This will be even more urgent if Democrats propose going after revolvers and shotguns.

So, there will be no mass nationwide demonstrations, no marches on Washington, no student activists.

A few thoughts about the shootings in general. In Texas, things worked as they should - the shooter was stopped by the school safety officer. There was no indication that the police were cowering outside the school until the shooting ended.

In both cased plus Sandy Hook, the shooters got their weapons through their parents. The Florida shooter's mother bought him his AR-15 and at least one pistol because he was on the school shooting team. The Santa Fe and Sandy Hook shooters took their parents' guns. People were referring to the Bushmaster rifle the Sandy Hook shooter used as the "mass murderer's weapon of choice" but it wasn't. It was the gun his mother used for target practice. The lesson here is that when a parent owns weapons then provisions need to be made to keep those weapons out of the hands of disturbed teenagers.

The Santa Fe shooter was apparently emulating the Columbine killers. He wore a black trench coat and had some bombs. Initial reports are that the bombs were dummies but that still shows the futility of trusting in gun control to stop school killings. Disturbed teems will find a way.  Note: Columbine was supposed to be a bombing. The killers started shooting after their bomb failed to explode. And they were not wearing black trench coats during the shooting. They weren't even part of the "Trench Coat Mafia".

Questions for Comey

I doubt that I'll ever get to ask former FBI Directory Comey any questions but there are a few I'd love to ask:

1) You said that you announced that the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server was reopened because you feared that it would cast aspersions on her presidency if people found out after the election that an active investigation had been kept secret. You believed the polls showing that Clinton was going to win and worried that the news would affect the legitimacy of her presidency.

However, informing President-elect Trump about the Pee Tape provided a "news hook" and allowed the media to report on the Steele Dossier. This undercut the legitimacy of Trump's presidency. If you were dispassionately serving the office of the President then why didn't you find some way to brief Trump on the dossier without undercutting his legitimacy? Or were you hoping to undercut him?

2) You said that you didn't want the FBI to investigate the Pee Tape because you didn't want it to go on record that the President was being investigated. However, the press was reporting that the President was being investigated for collusion with Russia. One of the reasons that the President fired you was that you refused to publicly state that the President was not under investigation.

Given that you were willing to let the press claim that the President was under investigation when he was not, why were you so worried about the harm it would do him if an actual investigation was opened? If it is harmful to the country for people to hear that the President is under investigation then why didn't you shoot down the various rumors? And if it is alright then why not open an investigation as the President asked you to do several times?

3) Given that the FBI was using the Steele Dossier to spy on the President Elect's staff, why were you so uninterested in the origins of the information? To this day you seem to be surprisingly ignorant about who paid for what. Specifically, Republicans paid Fusion for opposition research but Steele was not involved until the Clinton campaign was paying the bills.

4) As soon as you met Donald Trump for the first time you decided that you needed to memorialize all meetings with him. What was the reason for this? Your first meeting was when you briefed him on the Pee Tape. You say that he praised you earlier and asked you to stay on and that he seemed shocked by the tape. Outside of passing judgement on the state of his marriage, what happened that made you decide to memorialize this meeting? Or are you rationalizing partisan dislike for the President-Elect? Had you already judged him based on campaign material and the Access Hollywood tape?

The Democrat's Bad Week

Last week was terrible for the Democrats but I'm not sure they recognize it.

At the beginning of the year the generic Democrat had a huge advantage over a generic Republican. That's shrunk. While the Democrats are still ahead, it's only by a half point more than the margin of error. The expected Blue Wave looks more like a blue ripple.

A new book about the Clinton campaign is about to come out and the excerpts reflect terribly on the Democratic standard bearer. It seems that Hillary is a bit of a sexist herself, ignoring the 18 women in the press corps to call on the guy from Fox in the back. Worse, some of her trusted staffers were known for being touchy-feely with the women in the press corps. So Hillary is a hypocrite, insisting that such behavior disqualified Trump from the presidency while allowing it to go on under her nose. She also said what many outsiders, including me, observed - that Hillary's only vision for the presidency was herself in it.

The Democratic Party filed a lawsuit against President Trump, Wikileaks, the Russians and possibly a few others claiming damages by Trump's collusion with the Russians to deliver emails to Wikileaks. The fact that they aren't waiting for the independent council's report shows that they lost hope of anything coming from it. It's unlikely that this suit will get anywhere and, it would be in the Democrats best interests if it was thrown out quickly. If it's allowed to progress, the Republicans will be able to demand access to the DNC's hacked server to verify if it really was hacked by the Russians. The Democrats will be forced to explain, under oath, why they didn't allow the FBI to examine the server. There's also an unconfirmed report from Wikileaks that the emails were given to them by a Democrat. That's not something that they want repeated since it ruins the whole collusion narrative.

Then there's Comey, Comey, Comey. The ex-FBI boss gave an interview to former Clinton-spokesman George Stephanopoulos, his book finally came out, and his leaked memos were released to the public. Combining all of this we found out that his private briefing with President-elect Trump was only about the pee tape and skipped all the other allegations in the Steele Dossier, that this provided the news hook that the networks needed to report on the dossier and that when President Trump said that he needed loyalty, he was probably, indirectly asking if Comey had been leaking information to make Trump look bad. We also find that he did not feel the need to memorialize any previous conversations with other people, not even the one where Attorney General Lynch told him that the Clinton emails were a "matter" instead of an "investigation". A year ago Comey was being presented as the last honest man who was going to tear down Trump. Now he comes across as petty and possibly duplicitous.

The More Comey Talks, the Less I Like Him

Former head of the FBI, James Comey is on a publicity tour to promote his new book. Between interviews and previews from the book, I have a better feel for the man than previously. And what I'm hearing isn't good.

It's obvious that Comey thinks very highly of President Obama and very poorly of President Trump. His wife and daughters marched in the pussy-hat protest the day after Trump's inauguration. Comey also felt very guilty about his role in the defeat of Obama's chosen successor, Hillary Clinton. His various actions seem a lot more understandable if you assume that he saw his duty as clearing the way for a Clinton presidency.

The Clinton email investigation certainly looks like it was designed to clear Clinton rather than actually investigate her. That explains the lack of a grand jury and the generous granting of immunity. He's tried to shift the blame to his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, but she's pushing back. He was also surrounded by people who were pro-Hillary/anti-Trump. Andrew McCabe, his second-in-command was married to someone who received substantial contributions from Clinton-affiliates when she ran for office. A memo exonerating Clinton was begun months before the investigation concluded. None of these are the actions of an impartial seeker-of-truth.

What about the last-minute opening and closing of the email investigation? Comey now says that he was sure that Clinton was going to win and was trying to protect her. He claims that it would have undercut her presidency if he hadn't announced the investigation. This seems odd. The matter sat on his desk for a month before he approved acting on it.

I suspect that the impetus here was lower-placed agents who threatened to go public if he continued to sit on the new batch of emails. He was saving Clinton from that. That's what Comey was alluding to but couldn't come out and explain.

He had already done the same thing earlier, after Loretta Lynch had a private meeting with Bill Clinton. If Lynch had announced that there was no reason to charge Clinton after that meeting it would have looked like she'd been bought off somehow. So Comey took matters into his own hands.

So, after doing all he could to help Hillary Clinton from her self-inflicted damage, Comey ended up reporting to President Trump after all.

From Comey's recent statement, he despises Trump and has all along. He liked heading the FBI so he went along with Trump, more or less, but he treated his new boss with suspicion.

Before the inauguration Comey informed Trump about the Steele Dossier but failed to mention that it was opposition research that had been shopped to the FBI and news organizations. He also failed to mention that information from that had been used to monitor the Trump campaign (or maybe he did reveal that since Trump complained about his people being wiretapped).

Trump invited Comey to a private dinner and asked for his loyalty. At least that's how Comey described it. Trump may have used slightly different words. Comey describes this as if he was being asked into the Mafia. But, at the time, the news was full of government employees vowing to be part of the Resistance and to fight Trump. It seems perfectly reasonable for the president to ask the head of the FBI if he was to be trusted or if he was part of the Resistance?

And let's not be under any illusions. Comey was part of the Resistance. From the beginning he began writing detailed memos about his meetings with Trump so that he could use them later. He also continued investigations of "Russian collusion". His department kept leaking details. When asked by the White House in general or Trump specifically, Comey and the FBI insisted that Trump was not being investigated but they refused to say this in public. The reason was that it would set a bad precedent to confirm or deny an investigation. Never mind that the rumors were crippling the president, if the FBI set a precedent by shooting down a rumor then they'd constantly have to shoot down rumors.

Then there was Flynn. Trump used the phrase "I hope you can see your way clear to clearing him." Comey insisted that was a direct order phrased as a polite request. Somehow I "polite requests" and "subtle" are not words normally used to describe President Trump.

In his book, Comey describes his dinner with Trump. Trump marvels at the hand-lettered menus. Comey takes this to mean that Trump didn't realize the White House had a calligrapher and is amazed by the concept. More likely Trump is used to someone printing out menus on a PC and is surprised that someone takes the time to do it by hand. This is typical of Comey's attitude about Trump - always take the least charitable option.

After he was fired, Comey decided to get revenge. He gave his memos, which were both government property and classified, to a friend to leak to the press in the hopes of triggering a special council. He currently claims that he doesn't want to see Trump impeached - because he wants him voted out of office. Neither is likely.

In all of this, Comey has shown himself to be petty and driven by revenge while trying to present himself as a model of virtue.

The Delusions of Children

David Hogg, one of the students who was in the high school during the Valentine's Day shooting, has made a number of public statements. Most of his assertions are misguided or misinformed.

He seems to spend very little time blaming that actual shooter, Nikolas Cruz, not does he spend any time condemning the various officials who were given notice that Cruz was disturbed and possibly planning a school shooting but who did nothing. Neither does Hogg spend any time condemning the police who stayed outside the building until the shooting ended. These are all appropriate targets of Hogg's rage and changes in the policies that they followed might prevent future shootings.

Hogg's main target is the AR-15-style rifle that Cruz used. There is nothing magical about these guns. Yes, they are more powerful than a pistol but they are less powerful than a hunting gun or than military weapons used prior to Viet Nam. During the 1960s, the military decided that most combat was done at fairly close range and that a lighter weapon was sufficient. The idea that these are somehow more powerful than other civilian weapons and therefor to dangerous for civilians to posses is misinformed.

It should also be pointed out that Cruz did not used high-capacity magazines. He carried a backpack full of 10-round magazines and reloaded as needed. This is typical of mass shootings. Many guns can be reloaded quickly. Even the lowly revolver has speed-loaders available and can be reloaded within a few seconds.

Very few mass shootings are performed with AR-15s. Most are done with a pistol or a pistol in combination with a rifle or shotgun.

Something that was unusual about this shooting is how it ended. Cruz only carried the one gun. He shot at people until it jammed then he dropped it and slipped out with the students. If he had carried pistols then the shooting might have gone on longer.

So, eliminating the AR-15 would not have stopped the shooting and might have made it worse.

Also, classmate have said that Cruz showed them his AR-15 and pistols two years ago. He would have been 17 then so an adult (probably his mother) bought them for him. Raising the age would not have helped.

Hogg totally misunderstands how politicians and the NRA work. He has accused Senators Rubio and McCain of having blood on their hands for accepting money from the NRA. He even had a price tag on his microphone during his speech at the March for Our Lives event. This represented the amount the NRA has given Marco Rubio divided by the number of students in Florida. This came out to $1.05. Hogg meant to show how little value Rubio put on a student's life but it actually shows how small the NRA contributions were.

In Hogg's mind, Congress should do the right thing and pass what he sees as common sense gun laws. What stops them is the NRA which buy them off. Without NRA money, Congress would quickly pass gun legislation.

While it's true that the NRA donates millions to candidates, the amounts spent are not all that high. The figures that Hogg used say that Rubio received around $1 million since he first ran in 2010 and the NRA has spent around $2.3 million attacking Rubio's opponents in that time. That would account for two elections plus Rubio's presidential campaign. Rubio raised over $25 million on his 2016 Senate campaign alone so the NRA money only amounted to 2% of the money he raised. That rises to 6% if you count the money spent to defeat anti-gun opponents.

The NRA's real strength is not in the amounts it spends on candidates. It is in the NRA's ability to mobilize voters. They score candidates' records and publicize the score. Candidates who they rate highly are given money. Even without the NRA contributions, these candidates are still pro-gun. 30% of Americans own guns and a large percentage of them consider a candidate's stance on guns when voting.

In the 1990s, Democrats controlled Congress and passed some anti-gun legislation. Many of the moderate Democrats who voted for this lost the next election. This was widely attributed to moderate, gun-owning swing voters. Similarly, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the 2000 Presidential election because he couldn't carry his home state of Tennessee. This was also attributed to his role in passing the gun legislation.

In other words, politicians are pro-gun because their constituency is pro-gun. The NRA is just a proxy for the gun owners.

But Hogg is too young to understand that well-meaning people can have different opinions about complex subjects and the assault-weapon ban in the 1990s expired before he was born.

Put it all together and you have a young man who is very vocal about his beliefs but very misinformed about the causes he is championing.

Why the assault Weapon Ban Won't Happen

After the school shooting on Valentine's Day, there was a big push for "common sense" gun control. It was led by students from the school where the happened. The students, particularly David Hogg, were articulate and very vocal about assigning blame. They did not seem to blame the actual shooter. Instead they blamed the NRA for opposing bans against the type of gun used and they blamed any politicians who accept money from the NRA. Hogg has specifically called out various people for "having blood on their hands".

For the first month after the shooting there was strong pressure to ban "assault weapons". But I think that the wave has crested.

The capstone was supposed to be the "March For Our Lives" in DC. This was going to be the biggest demonstration in history. Or at least recent history. Organizers promised at least 600,000 people and claimed that 800,000 actually showed up. It was bigger than President Trump's inauguration.

Except it wasn't. The crowd was actually more like 200,000. This was still an impressive number but nowhere near what was (over)promised.

The march was supposed to be non-partisan but it was very obvious that it was an anti-Republican event.

The march was supposed to be for "common sense gun measures" but in the aftermath, it has been swamped with calls to repeal the 2nd Amendment. While there was a chance of banning certain classes of weapons, there is no chance of repealing the 2nd Amendment and calls to do so are alienating people who might otherwise be convinced that AR-15s are bad.

David Hogg has lost focus. He was effective as the front-man for a movement but recently he got into a fight with talk show host Laura Ingram. Now he's trying to get her fired by calling for a boycott by her sponsors. He even listed officers and contact information for Arby's. While the left would love to see Ingram off the air, it's a major distraction from Hogg's message on gun control.

Of course, this was never about making children safer. There's nothing magic about the AR-15 and similar. Getting rid of them will not stop school shootings. The idea was to set the precedent then move on to stricter gun controls after the next shooting. But they got greedy.

David Hogg will probably soon find out that he has reached the limits of his fame. He was only useful while focusing on gun control and Republicans.

In the meantime, the NRA is pushing back. Membership and donations are soaring. And politicians are being reminded that it's not the NRA's money that gives them so much power, it's all of the gun owners who vote.

New You Can't Trust

The headlines on March 21 told about how President Trump's security advisors had written "DO NOT CONGRATULATE PUTIN" across the top of his briefing but that the President congratulated Putin anyway. He was also instructed to admonish Putin about the poisoning of a Russian living in England.

The fact that Trump ignored this advice was painted as more evidence that Trump is soft on Putin and possibly owes his position to the Russian. When Trump fired his national security advisor a few days later, it was speculated that it was because the NSA had condemned Russia.

Things look very different a week later. While it is seldom mentioned, Trump's new pick for NSA, John Bolton, takes a harder line on Russia and it's clients (particularly Iran).

Trump also shut down a Russian embassy and expelled 60 diplomats.

What's more, we now know that the phone call between Trump and Putin was more than a simple congratulations. During the election campaign Putin had shown footage of a new missile system that can evade US anti-missile technology. The footage showed the missile striking Florida, about where Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort is. Trump pushed back against this cautioning, "If you want a new arms race, I'll give you one. And I'll win."

None of this sounds like the actions of someone who is soft on Putin or who Putin can blackmail.

We don't know if the original leak included the nature of the entire phone call or only the factoid that Trump ignored the "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" with the implication that Trump was encouraging Putin. Certainly the person who did the original leak knew the full contents of the call. So either important details were withheld by the leaker or by the press. Either way it was fake news - news that put an entirely different spin on the call than what actually occurred.

There are also reports that the only reason that Trump refuses to take a harder line on Putin is that he doesn't want to give the press the satisfaction of seeing him reverse a stance.

Regardless, this is just one more example of news that you can't trust.

Analytics and the Russians

Hard on the heals of the revelation that the Trump campaign used an analytics company to target ads on Facebook, Hillary Clinton suggested that the Trump campaign shared that information with the Russians.

The real question is how did the Russians know how to target their messages so precisely to undecided voters in Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania – that is really the nub of the question. 

"So if they were getting advice from say Cambridge Analytica, or someone else, about 'OK here are the 12 voters in this town in Wisconsin – that's whose Facebook pages you need to be on to send these messages' that indeed would be very disturbing.

Let's ignore the findings of the Congressional investigation that showed that the Russian ad buys that were geographically targeted were mainly bought in 2015, well before the general election. That still leaves some big questions:

1) How is it that the Russians can spend a couple million and swing the election? Between them, the two campaigns spent over two billion dollars. How could the Russian ads possibly be so much more effective than the ones the campaigns were saturating the airwaves with?

2) The Obama campaign was a pioneer in the use of social media analytics and the Trump campaign made good use of it. Are we seriously supposed to believe that the Clinton campaign didn't use these tools, too? Come on! Hillary is asking us to believe that her campaign passed on using a major new tool.

Hillary needs to accept that she lost the election after running a bad campaign. And the press needs to stop feeding her fantasies.

Hillary's Excuses

While in India, Hillary Clinton explained her 2016 loss to Donald Trump as coming from the backward, sexist, racist part of the country.

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn't show you is that I won the places that own two thirds of America's Gross Domestic product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don't like black people getting rights, you don't like women getting jobs, you don't want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

She also said that she lost white women because of men.

We do not do well with white men and we don't do well with married, white women. And part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.

What to make of this, besides too much chardonnay?

First, it's likely that Hillary has been saying this in private for some time and it became so natural to her that she slipped and said it in public. It's happened before. When she made her Basked of Deplorables speech in 2016, sources admitted that she'd been saying that for some time but only in private fund-raisers, not in public.

Does Hillary actually believe that the majority of white women in this country are so cowed that they vote, in private, as they've been instructed by bosses and sons? This seems a little delusional but, yes, she probably believes this.

This is really part of a trend among the Democrats that goes back to the 2004 book, What's the Matter With Kansas? This book held that the Democrats' policies were best for the people of Kansas but, because of Republican distractions, they were enticed to vote against their own best interests. In other words, Democrats didn't need to change their policies, they just needed to package them better.

Hillary's take of that in 2016 was that half (or more) of Trump's supporters were never going to vote for her because they were terrible, terrible people. Now she's refined that. She was obviously the best candidate and it was the duty of women to vote for her but all of those men wouldn't let them. This lets Hillary off the hook. She doesn't have to face that she was a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign with no real message. It wasn't her fault, it was those deplorables.

The only real question is how much of the Democratic party shares that viewpoint?

The Blue Wave?

The president's party nearly always loses seats in Congress on mid-term elections so the Democrats can count on picking up some seats this year. In addition, they've won a number of special elections. In addition, Democrats are counting on President Trump dragging down the Republican party and turning a the election into a wave one where the Democrats take both houses with a commanding majority.

I've written about this before but it's time for an update.

First, the idea that Trump will drag down the Republican Party isn't new. Two years ago Trump was the Democrats preferred candidate because they expected him to drag down his party then. Granted the Republicans saw some small losses but there was no wave. Trump is unlikely to deliver Congress a wave election this time, either.

 Early polling looked promising. Trump was at a historic low and generic Democrats were way ahead of generic Republicans. That lead has collapsed. Trump is doing much better (or was before a pair of post-shooting polls came out). Worse, the generic Democrat is barely ahead of the generic Republican. Democrats usually poll better than they do in elections so that might put generic Republicans in the lead.

I've pointed out before that the Senate is going to be very difficult for the Democrats. They are defending a lot of seats, ten of them in states that Trump carried and they last ran with Obama at the top of the ticket so they will be running without his coattails to help them.

The biggest problem that the Democrats have is one of their own making: they hate Trump and everything he stands for and can't understand anyone thinking otherwise. They are still in their bubble so they have no idea of the national mood. They have convinced themselves that there is no need to appeal to moderate voters. They are sure that the key to victory is to move even further left.

The Democrats opposed the tax cuts, lying about who would be affected. As people found that they are benefiting from the tax cuts, they have become more popular. That will hurt Democrats who plan on running against the tax cuts.

The Democrats were also running to defend the "Dreamers". This is risky. They forced a government shutdown then caved on it after only one weekday. Most likely they realized that this was not a major issue for voters. President Obama's DACA program is being fought over in the courts with there being some question about the current president being able to rescind his predecessor's executive order. This will probably end up being heard by the Supreme Court and that drains the issue of all urgency.

The Russian probe has failed to produce anything and will probably continue to disappoint.

After the Valentines Day shootings, Democrats are hoping to ride a wave of outrage over "common sense gun control". They let loose the first volley, tweeting that "blood is on the Republicans' hands" as soon as the massacre happened. This may or may not help them. The election is a long ways away and it's hard to keep up the level of outrage needed to motivate voters that long. This is even more true of the #MeToo movement.

The #MeToo movement has other problems. It assumes that most women have been harassed and is trying to harness their outrage but, outside of the bubble, this may not be a big issue. That's a problem with the bubble, it makes it hard to know what resonates with people outside of it.

The gun control issue may end up hurting them in the long-run. There are lots of single-issue gun rights voters and they are most common in the red states that the Democrats can't afford to lose. They also have long memories.

The last time the Democrats took Congress they made a point of recruiting moderate candidates, the Blue Dog Democrats. That's not happening this time. The party has adopted a rigid set of litmus tests and no one is immune from them. To most of the country, Dianne Feinstein is far-left but the party refused to endorse her because she's not far enough left. The democrats run a real risk of moving so far to the left that they lose seats instead of gaining them.

They have also become anti-religion and anti-free speech along with anti-gun. Evangelicals and Catholics voted for Trump out of self-preservation. The Democrats are making no moves whatsoever to reach out to these voters.

A booming economy will hurt the Democrats in general although it does allow them to use wedge issues that seem irrelevant during economic troubles. Korea is the only real foreign issue right now. As long as it continues to simmer it will not effect the election but actual hostilities might be an issue.

The Democrats' biggest problem is themselves. They are assuming that Trump will do all of the hard work for them and that all they have to do is sit back and be elected, no matter the candidate. They still have a good chance at some gains but they are taking them for granted.

Blood Libels and the Attack on Guns

Immediately after the shooting in Florida on Valentine's Day, the left began flooding social media with the message that the Republicans had blood on their hands for not passing "common sense gun control" that would have stopped the shooting. This was before any details had come out about the shooting.

Even now that some details have been released, there is no real examination of the various proposals to see if they would have made a difference. The Washington Post's fact checker looked into a dozen shootings since Sandy Hook and agreed that none of the "common sense proposals" would have stopped them.

One proposal that I keep hearing is raising the age for buying AR-15-style guns to 21 or higher. This is based on the fact that Cruz, the Florida shooter, is 19 and, reportedly, bought several AR-15s in the last year. There have even been several false claims that it's easier to buy a gun than cough syrup. But no one seems to be really looking at the facts. They are pushing an anti-gun narrative and hoping that no one stops to examine the facts.

Here's an inconvenient fact: Cruz is 19 but he was showing people an AR-15 and pistols that he owned in 2016. So he owned guns before he was 18. Most likely his parents bought them for him. So much for raising the age for buying these rifles.

People keep focusing on the AR-15 as if keeping Cruz from owning would have prevented the tragedy. But he also owned pistols. The Virginia Tech shooter only used pistols and he killed 32 (plus himself) and shot another 17. In close quarters, a pistol is as deadly as a rifle and easier to aim. Pistols are also much lighter. Depending on configurations, Cruz could have carried 2-5 pistols for the same weight as an AR-15. The point is that we have no idea if the body count would have been lower or higher if Cruz had been denied the use of an AR-15.

What is not being discussed is how to close the loopholes that Cruz fell through. He was well known to the police. Neighbors said that the police visited him around every other week. He exhibited numerous classic signs of a sociopath including violent behavior and abusing animals. It's possible that he was given a pass because of a Florida program to avoid incarcerating minorities (his adopted name, "Cruz" is enough to qualify him for that).

But the Democrats don't want to talk about real solutions that might have stopped this shooting. They want outrage that will lead to anti-gun legislation and give them an issue in November.

Note: Yes, the term "blood libel" usually refers to the claim that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood in Passover rites but the term also means a false claim that someone's blood is on someone's hands.

The Best and Worst Presidents of My Lifetime

It's President's Day which originally was Washington's Birthday but then they combined Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays into a single holiday and moved it to Monday. Anyway, it's an excuse to name the best and worst presidents of my lifetime. I'm only including them because I don't have personal experience with any others and it still covers a 60+ year spread.

I'm not going to include Trump. He's only 13 months into his presidency. I'm going to skip Ford for the same reason. He wasn't in long and didn't have much impact. I'm including JFK because he completed most of his term and did have an impact.

First off, the best president is Reagan. There were problems during his administration, mainly Iran/Contra, where he openly defied Congress. There were some other mistakes but he changed the course of politics. It shows how influential he was that Barack Obama was openly musing about being a similarly transformative president in 2008. When Reagan came to office in 1981 the country was a mess. We were in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression (in some ways it was worse than the Great Recession). The Soviet Union was expanding and the military contracting. People didn't feel very good about America. Reagan kicked off the longest peacetime economic expansion in history, put in place policies that ended the Soviet Union and left America feeling good about itself again.

So, onto the worst.

Eisenhower was competent. JFK is a mixed bag. He gave us the space program. He didn't advance civil rights as far as he could have and he got us into Viet Nam, although in a limited way.

LBJ's administration is even more mixed. Where JFK dipped his toe into Viet Nam, LBJ jumped in with both feet. He gave us Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security. All of those programs are popular but none of them are sustainable in the long-term. The most important civil rights advances came during his administration and he was more supportive of them than he is given credit for.

Nixon's a very special case. He continued LBJ's expansion of government with such things as the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Humanities. He expanded Viet Nam before getting us out. He opened relations with China. He was reelected in a landslide, winning 49 states. But he managed to get himself impeached and he always was hated by a significant portion of the population. He also oversaw the beginnings of the economic problems that dominated the 1970s.

Ford replaced Nixon and Carter replaced Ford, coming in with overwhelming approval ratings. He was not up to the job. Inflation soared, unemployment remained too high and eventually the economy crashed hard. He continued Ford's "detente" with the USSR which led to Soviet expansion. The friendly Shaw of Iran was overthrown and Carter helped place a constitutionally elected government in place only to see it overthrown and a theocracy set up in its place which is still a problem. After that, "students" with the support of the government overran the American embassy and took the staff hostage for months. The only good thing to come out of the Carter administration was the Camp David Accords which Carter facilitated between Israel and Egypt.

I've already ranked Reagan as best, so skipping on to Bush 41...

It's not unusual for a sitting vice president to run and finish in a close race. Bush won in a landslide. He was a competent president but seemed out of touch and a minor recession was enough for him to lose reelection.

We saw mild but steady growth under Clinton punctuated by the tech bubble. Near the end of his term, Clinton rated himself as a solid B president and was hoping to raise his score with a diplomatic victory like the Camp David Accords. This eluded him so he remains a B.

Bush 43 is another mixed bag. The economy did fairly well under him and he was far more moderate than he's given credit for being. 9/11 was not his fault but his response to it was questionable. There's no question that we needed to overthrow Afghanistan in order to break up al Qaeda. Similarly, we'd never actually ended hostilities with Iraq before Bush toppled the country. In both cases, his administration discovered that it's far easier to overthrow a government than it is to set up a stable replacement. If he'd taken the route that Obama did in Libya and left the two countries alone then both would probably be failed states and humanitarian disasters but Bush would be held in higher esteem. Similarly, if Bush had had a 3rd term then he might have managed to clean up his messes. He managed to turn Iraq around and stabilize it by the end of his presidency. While Obama takes credit for saving the economy, the crisis actually came during Bush's last months and he stabilized it before leaving office.

On to Obama. He took office during the worst downturn since Reagan, possibly since FDR. While he didn't mess up the recovery, he didn't help it, either. We had the slowest post recession growth since FDR, probably for the same reasons - expanding government. The stimulus package didn't stimulate. Obamacare was unpopular and had to be propped up by (unconstitutional) executive orders. Obama was handed a stable Iraq and managed to mess it up by pulling all of our troops out and not taking ISIS seriously. Obama was determined to sign a treaty with Iran and allowed the Syrian civil war to grow into a humanitarian crisis rather than offend Iran. He mocked Romney for calling Russia our most important geopolitical rival. He called his Korean policy "strategic patients" but it really amounted to kicking the can down the road. He was part of the overthrow or Libya and allowed it to sink into a failed state humanitarian crisis. The rule of law saw severe hits as his administration expanded executive and administrative reach. After saying dozens of times that he didn't have the power to allow "dreamers" to stay, he did it anyway. Title IX was similarly stretched to the breaking point. The public had been polarizing for years but this accelerated under Obama. We have the most turbulent times since the 1960s but no war and no civil rights movement to explain it. People are just polarized and angry and the Obama administration fed this. The IRS was weaponized under Obama, delaying applications for groups they disapproved of for years while approving favorable groups in a few weeks. The Justice Department may well have been politicized, too, as information is leaked out about the handling of confidential messages on Hillary Clinton's private email server.

So, who's the worst of this bunch? The finalists are Clinton and Obama. Both left the country worse off than when they took office. Carter was at a loss on how to handle the sky-high inflation. Obama never figured out why the economy was growing less than 2% when it should have been growing more than 3%. Carter was at a loss to stop the spread of communism in South America. Under Obama, we saw more than half of the youth decide that communism is better than capitalism.

For now I'll name Obama as the worst president. Carter was out of his depth but Obama was actively trying to undermine his government and country.

Mass Shootings and Magical Thinking

Like clockwork, a shooting happens and there's a demand to ban "military grade" assault weapons. If only these guns weren't available, then no one would ever be harmed again.

This is magical thinking. It assumes that inanimate objects somehow entice people to violence and that they would be peaceful without these totems at hand. Let's look at some facts.

First, all of these mass killings are really copy cat crimes stemming from Columbine. We had occasional mass murders before that but it's become increasingly common since Columbine. With each killing there is days of news coverage. This convinces unhappy individuals that they can go out in a blaze of glory.

Second, the use of guns and specifically assault weapons is accidental but feeds into the copycat nature of these acts.

The Columbine killers did not plan on shooting their way into the school then killing each other. Their plan was much, much worse. They planted a bomb based on a propane tank in the lunch room. It was timed to go off when the lunch room had the most people in it and there was a good chance that it would have also killed the people in the library above the cafeteria. The guns and pipe bombs were for killing the people who survived the bomb. When the bomb failed, they entered the school, shooting people along the way and tried to detonate the bomb by hand. When that failed, they killed each other. If they had succeeded then we'd be having school bombings instead of shootings.

The so-called assault weapon was banned for a while but the ban was allowed to expire because this class of gun is almost never used in crimes. Assault weapons are a subset of rifles and more people are killed with knives than with all rifles put together.

The assault weapon was another accident. This one came from Sandy Hook. The killer there wasn't able to buy guns but his mother was an avid shooter. He killed her then used her gun to massacre children in a school. Before that, most mass shootings were with pistols. A pistol is a better weapon for this. It is easier to conceal, you can easily carry more than one, and they are easier to aim in close quarters. But the Sandy Hook shooter used a Bushmaster AK-47 and the news reported it as the gun of choice for mass murderers.

Note - the Las Vegas shooter was an unusual one. He was shooting into a crowd from a building. The bump stock he used would be worthless in any other situation.

So, disturbed people do copy cat crimes using copycat methods. But there's any number of ways for an evil person to kill people. Bombs are fairly easy to make. Simply setting fires can be deadly. Attacks in Europe have shown that a large truck can be more deadly than a gun.

So far, the mass killers have been copying each other instead of copying terrorists but there's no guarantee that will continue. In the meantime, blaming the gun instead of the person behind it is an exercise in futility.

It Happened Again (and they reacted according to script)

On Valentine's Day, a shooter killed 17 people in a Florida school. I really wish the response from the Left didn't come across as: "Thank heavens we have a new issue! DACA wasn't working for us any more."

The initial reaction was "Republicans have blood on their hands." Why? At the point they said that they had no idea of any of the "common sense gun control" measures they want to pass would have made a difference. Yes, the shooter used an AR-15-style rifle but there's nothing magic about them. At short range, pistols might have been more deadly.

It was widely spread that this was the 28th school shooting this year. Bernie Sanders, who is trying to establish a record on gun control after Hillary painted him as pro-gun, tweeted the figure. It came from Anytown USA and is therefore suspect. While most people think that a "school shooting" means students shot or killed, Anytown counts any time a gun is discharged in a school or a school event. Most of the "shootings" on Anytown's list were harmless.

There was also a rush to assign the blame to outside influences. Social media claimed that the shooter had Antifa and ISIS messages. A news service reported that he'd tried to join a white supremacist group without verifying the person making the claim (he lied).

I've already seen charts showing a correlation between mass shootings and availability of guns. These appear to show a cause and effect but they leave out a few important details. Americans have always been heavily armed but mass shootings are a fairly recent phenomena and the murder rate has been dropping even as the number of guns expands. My guess is that the copy-cat factor is the biggest reason for all of the mass shooting.

There is also a general mockery of anyone who used the phrase "thoughts and prayers" without proposing some action, no matter how irrelevant. This is disgusting opportunism.

The Left needs to stop pointing fingers at the right and look at its own sins. Their response to a tragedy shouldn't be opportunism.

The Problem With Fake News

A few weeks ago the Republican Party ran a list of the ten worst examples of fake news for 2017 (one of these was actually an election night tweet from 2016). The Washington Post fact checkers promptly gave this list a Pinocchio rating on the bases that 7 of the 10 had issued corrections or apologized. Sorry, WaPo but it doesn't work that way. While it's true that the news media makes mistakes all the time and issues corrections later, that is not an excuse for these. None of these represented breaking news like a fire or shooting. They were all events that happened some time before the story broke but were released before all the facts were known. There is no good reason to release stories like this (there is a bad reason: stories that embarrass President Trump sell papers/increase rating and the various media are afraid of being scooped). There are several problems with running a story then issuing a correction or retracting the story later.

The biggest problem is that the corrections are never given as much play as the original story. Sometimes they correction is tacked onto the end of the story. Other times the story is quietly withdrawn without notice. Corrections are never given the same sensational headlines. Worse, many people hear about these stories from other sources than the original. I first heard the story that candidate Trump had ordered Michael Flynn to meet with the Russians through Facebook. I never saw anyone sharing the retraction that it was president-elect Trump who ordered the meeting and it was about sanctions against Israel, not about winning the election. The Trump-haters who gleefully share anything that looks bad for the President never bother to share the retractions or corrections (assuming they even hear about them).

A second problem is that all of these stories create false memories. Even if people see the corrections later they are still likely to remember that there had been some scandal involving the President and Russia (or whatever the story was). The stead drumbeat of Trump/Russia stories gives the impression that there is something to them. A reasonable person would assume that this constant barrage of stories is a "where there's smoke there's fire" situation. To date, there are no credible stories about Russian collusion.but a recent poll indicated that half the country believes that such an event took place.

What else can you call it when the news media has convinced half of the public that something happened with no proof? It's Fake News.

And no, the President calling out the media on the false reporting they do does not make him an autocrat.

Thoughts About the Shutdown

The shutdown lasted less than 72 hours and ended with the Democrats failing to get anything new (they already had a vague promise for a future vote on a DACA bill before the shutdown. What happened?

Democratic messaging was, at best, confused. They tried to blame President Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown but at the same time they made it clear that it was all about DACA. They must have been counting on a sympathetic press to give them cover but between social media and their own mixed messages, that wasn't possible.

The Republicans shut the government down a couple of times under Clinton and once under Obama. Each time the president came out the winner. The Republican shutdowns were over budget and debt issues which are much more closely tied to spending than amnesty for illegal immigrants and they still lost. Why did the Democrats think it would be any different this time? Sympathetic press?

The Democrats looked at the wrong poll numbers. While a majority of the country favors helping DACA recipients (I think it's around 80%), it is pretty low on their priorities (One poll put it at number 16). The shutdown meant that things that had a higher priority were stopped in favor of a lower-priority issue. This hurt the Democrats. Also, the issue was hurting them in red states that they need to win to take the Senate. The Democrats made the same mistake about the shut-down that they made in 2016 about the election: they spent too much time looking at national averages and not enough time looking at state-by-state breakdowns. California, all by itself, is big enough to shift the national polls but elections are held on a state-by-state basis.

The shutdowns under Clinton were fairly painless leading to a lot of jokes about not needing the government anyway. The shutdown under Obama was brutal. Rather than just closing government offices, any land owned by the government was closed. An example is the Colonial Parkway in Virginia which connects Jamestown, Williamsburg and Yorktown. This is just a road. It doesn't need any federal employees for people to use it but the blocked it off anyway.. In fact, in some cases the government more money to stay closed than they saved by not being open because of guards and barricades. The shutdown under Trump looked like it would revert to the more gentile style with as many parks and other facilities as possible staying open. It's unclear how much of this was at the direction of Trump officials and how much was federal employees trying to help Obama and hurt Trump. Probably it was a combination of both.

Pundits who claim that the Democrats ended the shutdown because they still believe in civility are fooling themselves. The left lost interest in civility a decade or more ago. The shutdown was all about playing to the base and aking a show of standing up to Trump.

While the Republicans have agreed on some sort of replacement for DACA, there are major differences to be settled. The biggest one is who will be covered? Will it be the 800,000 or so enrolled in DACA, the 3,000,000+ who came here at a young age (often alone as a teenage), or will it be limited to the original "Dreamers" who have gone to college or been in the military? Working these out under the artificial urgency of a shutdown is a poor way to run the government.

Why the Government Shut Down

The Democrats shut the government down just in time for the anniversary of Trump's inauguration. They are trying to blame the Republicans because the Republicans control both houses but it takes 60 votes in the Senate for a spending bill and the Republicans only have 51. So, out of 49 Democrats, there are not nine who will vote for keeping the government open.

They are doing this for two reasons. The first is theatrics. They are using this to claim that the Republicans can't govern and that Trump is unstable.

The second reason is complicated. Officially it's because they are pushing for a DACA bill. The Republicans already offered a package deal - DACA in exchange for eliminating chain migration and the green card lottery and for some money for the wall. The Democrats countered with DACA but no change to chain migration and a revision to the green card lottery that would have half the drawings from "under represented countries". I'm assuming that last part provoced Trump's "S-hole country" complaint. There was also a pittance for repairs to the current border fence but no wall.

The part about chain migration is really important. The Democrats' plan would allow the DACA recipients to sponsor their relatives. Remember that the whole DACA problem was caused by illegal immigrants who brought their kids. The Democrats would reward them for doing this by letting them get citizenship through their kids. Remember the idea of "anchor babies"? This is worse.

The news talks about 800,000 "dreamers" being affected by DACA but add in chain migration and the number jumps significantly. We're talking about an eventual amnesty and citizenship for up to 10,000,000 people.

And most of them will vote Democrat.

That's why this is so important to the Dems.