The month isn't over.
Meanwhile, did Comey and Mueller railroad Flynn by concealing exculpatory evidence? Judges do not like that, even in plea bargains.
Oh, look: Emails show Clinton ties to Russian oligarch under investigation. So the investigation isn't over.
Well, if you'd prefer, I saw an article about the British Succession a couple of days ago.
Most of that meddling was done through social media (hundreds of low-grade AI robo-trolls) and paid ad campaigns. I'll dig up the reports if you like.
The claim that the media are on Trump's side is risible.
Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon (who, in spite of his Academy Award nominations, is NOT--and, I predict, will not be--involved in any sex scandals) sums things up:
The relationships between top Democrats and the Russians are half a degree short of incest. Meanwhile, Trump bombs Russian installations in Syria.
From RealClearInvestigations:
“Brennan made it very clear that he was a supporter of candidate Clinton, hoping he would be rewarded with being kept on in her administration.” (Brennan is a liberal Democrat. In fact, at the height of the Cold War in 1976, he voted for a Communist Party candidate for president.)
What’s more, his former deputy at the CIA, Mike Morell, who formed a consulting firm with longtime Clinton aide and campaign adviser Philippe Reines, even came out in early August 2016 and publicly endorsed her in the New York Times, while claiming Trump was an “unwitting agent” of Moscow.
Let's see how things are going:
For law enforcement, Congress and even journalists, exposing misdeeds is like peeling an onion. Each layer you remove gets you closer to the truth.
So it is with the scandalous behavior of the FBI during its probe into whether President Trump’s campaign conspired with Russia in 2016. One layer at a time, we’re learning how flawed and dirty that probe was.
A top layer involves the texts between FBI lawyer Lisa Page and her married lover, Peter Strzok, the lead agent on the Hillary Clinton e-mail probe. They casually mention an “insurance policy” in the event Trump won the election and a plan for Strzok to go easy on Clinton because she probably would be their next boss.
Those exchanges, seen in the light of subsequent events, lead to a reasonable conclusion that the fix was in among then-Director James Comey’s team to hurt Trump and help Clinton.
Another layer involves the declassified House memo, which indicates the FBI and Justice Department depended heavily on the unverified Russian dossier about Trump to get a warrant to spy on Carter Page, an American citizen and briefly a Trump adviser.
The House memo also reveals that Comey and others withheld from the secret surveillance court key partisan facts that would have cast doubt on the dossier. Officials never revealed to the judges that the document was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee or that Christopher Steele, the former British spy who compiled the dossier, said he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected.”
For Clinton, creating a cloud over Trump’s presidency and helping to put the nation through continuing turmoil is a victory of sorts. America is fortunate it’s her only victory.
A third layer of the onion involves the revelations in the letter GOP Sens. Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham wrote to the Justice Department. They urge a criminal investigation into whether Steele lied to the FBI about how much and when he fed the dossier to the anti-Trump media.
The letter is compelling in showing that Steele said one thing under oath to a British court and something different to the FBI. The contradictions matter because the agency relied on Steele’s credibility in both the FISA applications and its actual investigation. Strangely, even after it fired him for breaking its rule forbidding media contact, the FBI continued to praise his credibility in court.
If that were all the senators’ letter accomplished, it would be enough. But it does much more.
It also reveals that two former journalists linked to Clinton, separately identified as the odious Sidney Blumenthal and a man named Cody Shearer, created and gave a State Department official additional unverified allegations against Trump.
The official passed those documents to Steele, who passed them to the FBI, which reportedly saw them as further evidence that Trump worked with Russians. But as Grassley, head of the Judiciary Committee, and Graham write, “It is troubling enough that the Clinton Campaign funded Mr. Steele’s work, but that these Clinton associates were contemporaneously feeding Mr. Steele allegations raises additional concerns about his credibility.”
The State Department official involved in the episode, Jonathan Winer, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post Friday in which he confessed to the senators’ chronology while offering a benign description of his motives. Winer also admitted he shared all the unverified allegations from the Clinton hitmen with other State Department officials.
There are many more layers of the onion to peel, but here’s where we are now: It increasingly appears that the Clinton machine was the secret, original source of virtually all the allegations about Trump and Russia that led to the FBI investigation.
In addition, the campaign and its associates, including Steele, were behind the explosion of anonymously sourced media reports during the fall of 2016 about that investigation.
Thus, the Democratic nominee paid for and created allegations against her Republican opponent, gave them to law enforcement, then tipped friendly media to the investigation. And it is almost certain FBI agents supporting Clinton were among the anonymous sources.
In fact, the Clinton connections are so fundamental that there probably would not have been an FBI investigation without her involvement.
That makes hers a brazen work of political genius — and perhaps the dirtiest dirty trick ever played in presidential history. Following her manipulation of the party operation to thwart Bernie Sanders in the primary, Clinton is revealed as relentlessly ruthless in her quest to be president.
The only thing that went wrong is that she lost the election. And based on what we know now, her claims about Trump were false.
Of the charges against four men brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, none involves helping Russia interfere with the election.
And neither the FBI nor Mueller has vouched for the truthfulness of the Blumenthal and Shearer claims or the Steele dossier. Instead, the dossier faces defamation lawsuits in the US and England from several people named in it.
In fairness, one person besides Steele has been cited as justification for the FBI probe. George Papadopoulos, a bit but ambitious player in the Trump orbit, met with a professor in Europe early in 2016 who told him the Kremlin had Clinton’s private e-mails.
In May 2016, Papadopoulos told the story to an Australian diplomat and two months later, in July, the Australian government alerted the FBI.
However, a full timeline convincingly points to Steele as the initial spark. He was hired by a Clinton contractor in June of 2016, and filed his first allegations against Trump on June 20. Two weeks later, on July 5, he met with an FBI agent in London, The Washington Post reported, and filed three more allegations that month, including one about Carter Page.
At any rate, it is certain that Steele and other Clinton operators provided all the allegations about Trump himself that the FBI started with and that Mueller inherited.
For Clinton, creating a cloud over Trump’s presidency and helping to put the nation through continuing turmoil is a victory of sorts. America is fortunate it’s her only victory.
From Michael Goodwin.
Meanwhile, what 'tricks' are Trump using to interfere with the investigation? As far as I can see, he and Sessions are sitting back and letting it happen. Are you saying he's playing rope-a-dope?
So far Mueller has come up empty except for except for charging someone based on criminalizing faulty memory--the same thing they got Conrad Black on. But Mueller hiimself has come under doubt.. He'll walk away--if he walks away--with his reputation badly soiled. Meanwhile, FEC charges for the HRC campaign--if not for herself--grow more plausible.
http://rasmussenreports.com/public_cont … presidency
Gonna get worse. Gonna get a lot worse--if any revelation could be worse than the cancerous corruption being exposed.
But if you don't, why not?
There's the forgotten and embarassing verse:
I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burning rows of steel:
As ye deal with my contemners so with you my grace shall deal.
Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel ...
You could also work with "He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat."
Oh, and learning the terminology of English Grammar gives you words to express your thoughts on the subject.
Both are important. The reader says he likes the car. The writer tells you how to make the ride smooth and the engine strong and quiet ... or melodious.
A reviewer should take into account the audience, the milieau, and the characters. If you run all dialogue through the same edit-filters as the marrative, all characters will have the same voice. If you 'perfect' the narrative, you will lose all markers of time amd place.
CJD amd I have had a few discussions about that.
I was suggesting you look to the text of the Dies Irea. But that's a good title.
=Foretold=
Also look up the text of the Dies Irea. And see https://youtu.be/dLgvKwOYniY .
"For the end of the world was long ago, ..." ---GKC, -The Ballad of the White Horse-
Yeah. Polyphony is hard, unless you are named Bach.
The term is 'printed circuit board', or PC board.
9V batteries are used because each transistor requires a drop of about 2/3 of a volt to operate (depending on the actual current, and the kind of current the transistor is designed for). But they can't supply a lot of current--not for long. Transistor radios typically used 16 or 32 ohm speakers instead of 8 ohms, and sometimes used transformers to make better use of the loudspeakers. And you want it to work until the battery voltage is about 30% below nominal. (Most of the useful life of a carbon-zinc or alkaline battery is between 75% and 85% of nominal.)
Hiss, gain < 1 ... transistor misconnection, transistor fried from overheating while soldering, bias resistor network wildly wrong, electrolytic coupling capacitors connected backwards .... or extraordinary electromagnetic noise in the vicinity?
(Modern radios that don't need to drive big speakers can operate on 4.5v (nominal) or less because they use mosfets instead of bipolar junction transistors. When designed device by device on an integrated circuit, you don't have the same minimum voltage drop in the controlled current, but usually a greater minimum drop in the controlling current. If the device uses junction FETs the drop may be lower; I haven't worked with them.)
To remember History, turn it back into Story.
"To write good history is the noblest work of Man." ---John Dickson Carr
Unless you're Bob Carver, the way to build a stereo amplifier is to put two copies of a mono amp together in the same package and use dual-ganged volume and tone controls. Oh, and don't forget the balance. Of course, if it's just a power amp, you don't need those controls.
What you built was a noisy attenuator.
What kind of noise? Hiss? Buzz? Squealing? Motorboating? Did both channels have the same problem? Were you powering it off batteries? AC? A lab supply? (Power supplies are a noise source.) About what year did the plans date from? (Tells me which generation of trnsistors you were using. Oh, wait--were you using vacuum tubes?)
Nobody has Radio Snack anymore. Sad. So sad.
Rule 5, and I'm trying to figure out how to heat sink the voltage output transistors. If I can, I can relax my voltage limit, and maybe boost the current drive available and relax the single-section current drive as well, keeping the overall power limt on the sumix sections together.
To help with testing, I'm making a six-switch panel. I'm looking at the loads to use. I'll probably include incandescent bulbs fir their nonlinear voltage-current chararacteristic.
Kenny's not an onion. More like a parsnip, I think.
I keep making things to do, and slogging slowly through rhem. I thought I had ordered some wire three weeks ago, but it appears I didn't, so I just ordered it. Grrrr.
One of the things I've been burning time on is Jordan Peterson's =12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos=. It's a big book and you think he's meandering, but when he's encircled his target and makes the attack, it can take your breath away.
His observations on evil and existential virtue, and their link to the meaning of life, should be red meat to writers. There's a 20 minute video taken from a Q&A session on Ricochet that took my breath away. I'll post a link later, especially for Amy and Norm.
I also have an idea for changes to Merran's first evening at Harsan's, before Momma leaves. I want to write it up and post it as a short, but it involves a story to be told, and I need to figure out how ro make ir short. I think it will muddy the water's of Melayne's relationship with her daughter.
Yes, most of the articles come to my attention off instapundit, which has a staff of contributors. Glenn Harlan Reynolds is better described as libertarian than conservative, though the various editors are more conservative. Oh, and he's a professor of law.
It's a little hard to be sure of the paragraph breaks when the text is interrupted by pictures. Here's the quote: "California has the nation's highest percentage of impoverished residents when factoring in cost of living. One in three welfare recipients in the U.S. lives in the state. One in four California residents was not born in the United States."
If you're tired of instapundit, how about ricochet.com? https://ricochet.com/491590/trump-growth-machine/
https://townhall.com/columnists/victord … 6?amp=true See especially the end of the twelfth paragraph.
California's wealth/poverty ratio: I haven't run across the article with the claim. But see this one: https://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgo … 5?amp=true
According to the standard poverty measure, Mississippi ranks first in the nation with a rate of 20.8 percent. California ranks 16th. The Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure" places California first in the nation with a poverty rate of 20.4, and Mississippi falls to fifth.
To be clear, California spends an enormous amount of money fighting poverty. The problem, as Kerry Jackson explains in the winter issue of City Journal, is that California remains stuck in the past. While the rest of the country embraced welfare reforms that emphasized work, California's bloated and heavily unionized welfare bureaucracies -- with nearly 900,000 state and municipal employees -- clung to the old model of relying on policies that encourage dependency, not self-sufficiency.
A cynical interpretation holds that this is a feature, not a bug. Just as California's prison guard unions have fought reforms that might reduce the prison population -- fewer prisoners, fewer prison guard jobs -- California's poverty bureaucrats have a similar incentive. "In order to keep growing its budget, and hence its power, a welfare bureaucracy has an incentive to expand its 'customer' base -- to ensure that the welfare rolls remain full and, ideally, growing," Jackson writes.
In my experience, a cynic is an optimist by nature and a realist by sad experience. I'm told that this is a cynical definition. I think it a realistic one.
Cui bono? The word 'underserved' from the mouths of bureaucrats is a flamimg red flag.
As far as studies in the fall: the only ones that matter are those that lead individuals to decide that Trump's policies--GOP policies similar to Reagan's--are providing better lives.
Oh, thanks to increases in the GDP over the past few months, our GDP to national debt ratio has gotten a tick better. (I'll find the reference if you want.)
Oh, did you read? =Mother Jones='s David Corn is facing some pretty stiff sexual charges of his own.
