On the firing of James Comey

Andrew C. McCarthy: The Bipartisan Case against James Comey  . . . "The memorandum issued by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to explain Comey’s dismissal Tuesday is well crafted and will make it very difficult for Democrats to attack President Trump’s decision. Rosenstein bases the decision not merely on Comey’s much discussed missteps in the Clinton e-mails investigation — viz., usurping the authority of the attorney general to close the case without prosecution; failing to avail himself of the normal procedures for raising concerns about Attorney General Lynch’s conflict of interest. He goes on specifically to rebuke Comey’s “gratuitous” release of “derogatory information about the subject of a declined criminal prosecution.” That “subject,” of course, would be Mrs. Clinton. " . . .   Full article here.

Krauthammer: ‘Highly Implausible’ To Claim Comey Was Fired for How He Handled Clinton Investigation

"On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein’s claim that FBI Director James Comey should be fired due to his mishandling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails is “highly implausible.”

"Krauthammer said, “[A]ccording to the letter by the deputy attorney general, this is about something that occurred on July the 5th. This,  it’s — so we start out with something that is highly implausible. If that was so offensive to the Trump administration, what you would have done is, in the transition, you would have spoken with Comey, and said, we are going to let you go. That’s when a president could very easily make a decision to have a change. That’s not unprecedented. But to fire him summarily with no warning, in the middle of May, because of something that happened in July, is almost inexplicable.”

"He continued, “Do we really believe that Donald Trump, after all these months, decided suddenly he had to fire this guy because he damaged Hillary back in July? Another implausible conjecture.' ”   Ian Hanchett

In Firing Comey, Trump Shows He's Afraid of No One  . . . "World leaders, ever since the days of President Reagan's air traffic controller's debacle have long noted how a U.S. president behaves on domestic mattters as their cue to how to act with the U.S. leadership. Part of holding power is knowing how to use power. Trump knows how to use power and his firing of Comey shows that he is not afraid of powerful people." . . .   Including this guy at the right?  Caricature by Deviant Art


James Comey Didn’t Sink Hillary . . . And even if we concede that Comey’s letter to Congress helped sink Clinton, Clinton deserved that letter and Comey had no choice but to send it."

Volokh Conspiracy: ". . . that’s not why he’s being fired"  . . . "And then he is fired — for the very thing (his mishandling of the Clinton investigation) that had made him so valuable to Trump. It seems awfully neat and tidy. I guess we’ll know more about whether this is actually about Russia when we see who Trump nominates as Comey’s replacement. Stay tuned." 

'Passion of the Christ' Actor Jim Caviezel Sounds Off on Hollywood Blackballing

MRC   "At some point, everyone will have to answer for what they have done.”

Those are the words of actor Jim Caviezel, most famous for his portrayal of Jesus Christ in the 2004 blockbuster “The Passion of the Christ.”

"Caviezel is referring to sinners having to account to God for their actions. To him this includes the Hollywood producers who allegedly shunned Caviezel after he took on the role of Jesus in the film, “The Passion of the Christ.”

" 'The Passion of the Christ,” directed by Mel Gibson, earned $612 million worldwide on a $30 million production budget, making it the highest grossing religious film in history.

"Caviezel made his remarks to Polish journalist and film critic Lukasz Adamski for the website wpolityce.pl.

"An excerpt:

“ 'You will not work here [in Hollywood] anymore.” Mel Gibson told you that when you took up the role in his film. To what extent was he right?

"All of the sudden I stopped being one of five most popular actors in the studio and I haven’t done anything wrong. I just played Jesus. Was I personally touched by this rejection? Well, everyone has their cross to bear. The world changes in the particular direction but after all, I will not be in this world forever. Neither will the producers from Hollywood. At some point, everyone will have to answer for what they have done.

"Where do you think this reaction come from? Are people afraid of such films? Of evocative picture of Jesus on the screen? People really stood for it. Over half a billion dollars income is a great success. There are even reports on conversions after watching the film!" . . .

No shortage of discussion on James Comey

First this, earlier in the day:
James Comey just stepped in it, big time

. . . "The Post's Devlin Barrett has confirmed ProPublica's reporting that Comey misstated key details of an investigation into Hillary Clinton at a hearing last week.

"Specifically at issue are Comey's statements that:

1. Top Clinton aide Huma Abedin “forwarded hundreds and thousands of emails” from Clinton's private email server to her husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, as part of a “regular practice” of forwarding emails for Weiner to print out for Clinton, and …
2. These emails contained classified information.

Followed with this by Jonah Goldberg:

The Comey Firing
. . . "There’s much we don’t know. Much we need to know. Much we may never know. But my initial reactions to the news of the James Comey firings are: 

1) I disagree with many of my friends who say this termination was a long time in coming. I think many of Comey’s decisions are easily criticized. But when you look back at the decisions he made — when he made them — I believe Comey was put in one no-win situation after another, and he made defensible decisions. Hillary Clinton tested the limits of what the system would allow and she put people and institutions in an untenable position. I don’t think Comey should have been fired, but I can see the argument going the other way. 2) That said, I simply don’t buy the case made in the letter from President Trump. I am very skeptical that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was the chief driver of, or lobbyist for, this decision.

" I’m also skeptical that Deputy AG Rod Rosentein — on the job for two weeks — pulled the trigger on the firing of the FBI director." . . .Read more:

This all "terrifies" Hillary's team.

The One walks on flower petals laid by his liberal sycophants.

BARACK Obama will reportedly pocket a staggering £2.5million (€3million) today for delivering a speech to a sold-out audience in Milan as part of his lucrative post-presidential speaking tour.

ACLU lawyer admits Trump travel ban would be constitutional if Hillary had issued it

It was thoughtcrime

Rick Moran  "An ACLU lawyer arguing against the Trump travel ban in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday told a federal judge that the executive order initiating the ban would have been constitutional if a President Hillary Clinton had issued it.

"The lawyer cited Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric as demonstrating "animus" thus delegitimizing the order. The judge was understandably perplexed.

NTK Network:

Jadwat argued that Trump’s campaign animus motivated the order, making it illegitimate. This claim was challenged by the Fourth Circuit’s Judge Paul Niemeyer.

“If a different candidate had won the election and then issued this order, I gather you wouldn’t have any problem with that?” Niemeyer asked.

Jadwat dodged on directly answering the question at first, but Niemeyer persisted, asking the question again.

Jadwat again tried to avoid the question, asking for clarification on the hypothetical, but Niemeyer once again demanded an answer.

“We have a candidate who won the presidency, some candidate other than President Trump won the presidency and then chose to issue this particular order, with whatever counsel he took,” Niemeyer said. “Do I understand that just in that circumstance, the executive order should be honored?”. . . 

 ACLU Makes It Official: The Only Thing Wrong With Trump's Travel Order Is Trump  . . . "It may be absurd, but it is what the Democrats believe. ACLU lawyer Omar Jadwat, arguing today before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, told the court that President Trump’s travel order “could be constitutional” if it had been written by Hillary Clinton. Here is a portion of the audio from today’s hearing:" . . .

ISIS Fighters Tried to Trick U.S-Backed Forces Into Killing Mosul Civilians

Reuters

"Fighters from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) herded a group of civilians into a house in the city of Mosul and locked them inside as Iraqi forces advanced. Moments later, the militants entered through a window, lay low for a few minutes, then fired their weapons.

"The plan was simple. They would draw attention to the house by firing from the windows, then move to an adjacent building through a hole in the wall, in hope of goading coalition jets flying above to strike the house.

"What the militants did not realise was that U.S. advisers partnered with Iraqi troops were watching the whole thing on an aerial drone feed. No air strike was called—and the propaganda coup ISIS would have reaped from the deaths of innocent people was averted." . . .

Air Force Officer Speaks Out for First Time About Downing of Extortion 17 in Afghanistan. . .

"– Obama Has Hell to Pay", the headline also states but when has Obama ever paid a price for his actions?

Harry Hibbs  "A highly decorated retired Air Force officer is breaking her silence about the horrific incident in 2011 that marked the deadliest attack on Navy SEALS in U.S. history.

"This was a sad day for America and we all mourned. Turns out it never had to happen.

"She claims that Obama’s administration covered up what happened to 38 of our warriors in Afghanistan, when a Chinook helicopter crashed and killed 38 fighters. She says had it not been for Obama changing the rules of engagement of our military to protect Muslim terrorists, that our men would still be alive today.

"To give you a full appreciation for the absolute atrocity and borderline treason that went down that fateful day on August 6, 2011 at the hands of Barack Hussein Obama, Retired Air Force Capt. Joni Marquez is telling her story first hand. She and her crew were working the dark morning hours on their AC-130 gunship when they were summoned to conduct a mission she describes “as almost like a 9-1-1 type of a situation.”

"Circa reported:

The gunship was ordered to fly close-in air support above Afghanistan’s dangerous Tangi Valley, in Wardak Province, assisting troops with the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment who were being fired on by eight heavily armed Taliban insurgents.
The Rangers had called in for assault helicopters to engage the enemy hiding among the rocky valley. The air weapons team fired on the Taliban fighters, but not all of the insurgents were killed as originally believed.

. . .  U.S. Central Command’s official investigation concluded that a rocket-launched grenade from a Taliban fighter hit the Chinook and sent the helicopter into a downward spin. The crash killed all 38, including thirty Americans and eight Afghans. Seventeen of the U.S. servicemen were Navy SEALs. Months before, SEALs were made famous for the killing of Osama bin Laden.
. . . 

“ 'If we would’ve been allowed to engage that night, we would’ve taken out those two men immediately,” Marquez said. She believes with her whole heart that had her team been given permission to take out the terrorists, 38 warriors would still be alive today.

“ 'They continued to essentially gain more and more force behind them because they just kept knocking on doors,” she said. “And the two personnel that initially fled ended up becoming a group of 12 people.' ”

Has Hillary ever been the cream of the Democrat crop?

All of Hillary Clinton’s ‘but for’ excuses  . . . "When you lose by 78,000 votes — or less than 1,000 in Florida as Al Gore did — everything is a “but for” cause of defeat, as Ron Klain (who was closely involved in multiple tight, losing campaigns) likes to say. So here goes, one more time:

• But for setting up the home server to begin with;
• But for dribbling out the whole server story with some misstatements;
• But for questions about the Clinton Foundation;
• But for failing to spend enough time courting white working-class voters in the upper Midwest;
• But for not have a well-enough defined message;
• But for stagnant wages and slow growth under President Barack Obama;
• But for demagoguery on trade and immigration;
• But for media obsession with Donald Trump that helped get him the nomination;
• But for a substantial reverse gender gap (i.e., men were averse to voting for her);
• But for Russian bots on social media and the WikiLeaks release of embarrassing emails; and
• But for 78,000 people in three states sitting home on the couch because they were certain she’d win . . .

"Clinton would be president. Most of that she is responsible for; some of it she is not." . . .

Hillary’s election loss excuse means one thing: She’s running in 2020

. . . "With the party demoralized and divided, and holding the fewest number of elected seats in a century, Clinton’s return will likely prolong the misery. While she’s a media magnet, she’s also a political dead end, having lost two presidential runs and ceded the future to the Bernie Sanders socialist wing.

"It’s hard to imagine her as the party’s savior, yet, instead of going away quietly, she’ll be competing with its candidates for money and attention. Anything she gets will come at the expense of new leaders and ideas." . . .

Her Chelseaness: How to Be Entitled and Boring without Really Trying

National Review

. . . "With the exception of a few resentful Twitter pokes at the man responsible for rendering her mom an isolated forest monster — Chappaquatch — instead of the most powerful woman in the history of the planet, everything Chelsea says is pretty much like this. The positions she articulates on progress (pro), climate change (anti), and gauzy, inspirational, make-the-world-a-better-place-for-girls-and-women goodness (super-duper pro) are verbal fentanyl. Everything she says is a platitude wrapped in a cliché washed down with a bromide. She’s the dusty end of the greeting-card section, the lite FM of famous-person chatter, a human press release. In short, Chelsea Clinton is becoming the champion dullard of our time. This didn’t happen by chance: We’re talking about the ever-calculating Clintonworld here. The dullness is a strategy, a demented post-last-ditch effort by the Clinton gals to finally power Hillary into the Oval Office. But I’ll come back to that." . . .

Venezuela: the laboratory of socialism

The Venezuelan Crisis is Due to Economic Ignorance  . . . "As awful as the Venezuelan crisis is, it is not surprising. Indeed, the pattern we see there is a predictable outcome of “populist” policies that ignore the basic laws of economics. The distinguished Austrian school economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) explained decades ago that government intervention into the economy only causes problems, inviting further rounds of destructive intervention. Ultimately, Mises argued, the people must decide if they want to live under the institutions of a market economy or of outright socialism. There is no stable “third way” between capitalism and socialism because interventionism creates unintended consequences that no one likes.

"Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez described himself as a Trotskyist, and while in power he nationalized major companies in key industries and engaged in large-scale wealth redistribution. To “protect” the people from the greed of the capitalists, Chavez’s government imposed price controls on private merchants.

"For a while these policies seemed to work, and Chavez was a hero to many on the left. For example, after his death in early 2013, Salon.com ran an article by David Sirota entitled “Hugo Chavez’s Economic Miracle.” Sirota claimed that “Chavez became the bugaboo of American politics because his full-throated advocacy of socialism and redistributionism… represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics.” Sirota also wrote that “Chavez racked up an economic record that a legacy-obsessed American president could only dream of achieving.' ” . . .

Robert P. Murphy is a research fellow with Independent Institute and research assistant professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University. He is the author of Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action. He will be speaking at SMU in Dallas on May 9 for “Advancing Liberty & Prosperity in a Divided America.”

Healthcare issues: the left has a smaller minority but a bigger megaphone

"And the great enemy of abundance is the bias against profit. There is something deeply rooted in us that instinctively thinks we are being abused if someone else makes a profit on a deal. That is a dumb and primitive way of thinking — our world is full of wonders because it is profitable to invent them, build them, and sell them — but the angel is forever handcuffed to the ape." National Review

Hopefully these will make a better case for ObamaCare repeal than Reince Priebus did for me to Chris Wallace  on Fox News Sunday   


Fact Check: It's a Lie That the GOP Healthcare Bill Abandons People With Pre-Existing Conditions
"As we described yesterday, there are some concerning policy elements of the House-passed American Health Care Act, which the Senate would be wise to explore and rectify over the coming weeks. The bill -- and that's all it is at this point: a work in progress -- repeals and alters significant portions of the Democratic Party's failing experiment in "affordability."  But based on rhetoric from elected Democrats and the Left generally, one might assume that Obamacare was called the "Pre-existing Conditions Coverage Act" (side-stepping the whole "choice and affordability" fairy tale they peddled), and that the Republican bill obliterates those protections. The proposed law would be a "death warrant" for sick women and children, they shriek, casting Obamacare opponents as the moral equivalent of accessories to murder. This is demagogic, hyperbolic, inaccurate nonsense." . . .

Obamacare Architect Blames Trump For Law's Failures  "Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, who once said the “stupidity of the American voter” helped Congress pass the Affordable Care Act, tried to place the blame for the Affordable Care Act’s failures on President Trump Sunday." . . .

Obamacare Architect Gets Called Out for Blaming Law’s Failures on Trump

This next troubles me, not because I disagree with it, but because recalling how my hypochondriac mother impoverished my dad to the point where he could not take care of his own health, even pulling his own decayed teeth because he couldn't afford care. Yet government is inept at handling nearly everything plus their control over my healthcare gives people like Elizabeth Warren, Harry Reid, Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi* control over me and the way I live my life. Perhaps single payer works elsewhere, but I do not trust the character of politicians in this nation managing our lives who are the choice of people that riot in the streets to block dissenting opinions. TD

(*How coincidental; they are all leftist Democrats.)

The ‘Right’ to Health Care  . . . Declaring a right in a scarce good is meaningless. It is a rhetorical gesture without any application to the events and conundrums of the real world. If the Dalai Lama were to lead 10,000 bodhisattvas in meditation, and the subject of that meditation was the human right to health care, it would do less good for the cause of actually providing people with health care than the lowliest temp at Merck does before his second cup of coffee on any given Tuesday morning."  . . . More

Demagoguery: Liberals shamelessly exploit rape victims to attack House health care bill   "The latest version of this dishonest meme is the widespread insistence that the American Health Care Act (AHCA) “makes rape a preexisting condition.”

"The logic behind this claim is tortured." . . .

Obama's syrupy last-ditch bid to save his legacy  . . . "He's even attempted to call Obamacare opponents just personally opposed tohim, not his much-loathed health care program itself (code: racists), as he did last year:

"So why is there still such a fuss?" Obama said. "Well, part of the problem is the fact that a Democratic president named Barack Obama passed the law."

Shame on this man and his sycophants.

Krauthammer: We'll Be In a Single-Payer System In Less Than Seven Years

Townhall

"Republican lawmakers spent the last seven years vowing to repeal and replace Obamacare, and while the House took a first step toward that end Thursday in the narrow passage of the American Health Care Act, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer made an ominous prediction about where health care in this country is heading.

“ 'Historically speaking we are at the midpoint and we had seven years of Obamacare, changing expectations. I would predict that in less than seven years, we will be in a single-payer system,” he told Fox News host Chris Wallace.

"This, he said, is the “great irony”—that despite the electoral losses Democrats faced because of the Affordable Care Act and even though the law has largely failed in practice, Obamacare will still win in the end.

“ 'Obamacare failed at every level politically. … As you say, they lost seats in the House, Senate, governorships. Largely because of Obamacare. It failed on the ground, as was pointed out earlier. The insurers are in a dead spiral. The Obamacare exchanges are collapsing. You've had these exchanges … completely disintegrating. But the irony is in the end, I think Obamacare wins the day because it changed expectations,” he said. “Look at the terms of the debate. Republicans are not arguing the free market anymore. They have sort of accepted the fact that the electorate sees healthcare as not just any commodity. It's not like purchasing a steak or a car. It is something people now have a sense that government ought to guarantee.' " . . .