Holder, Obama's Wing Man

https://www.politico.com/blogs/politico44/2013/04/eric-holder-im-still-the-presidents-wingman-160861

Our national memory is just another aspect of partisanship.

So Holder was PROUD to be "Obama's Wingman"  ...

"I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, there’s still work to be done. I’m still the President’s wing-man, so I’m there with my boy. So we’ll see," Holder said in an interview on the Tom Joyner radio show.

Obviously, his "standards" are a bit flexible. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eric-holder-william-barr-is-unfit-to-be-attorney-general/2019/12/11/99882092-1c55-11ea-87f7-f2e91143c60d_story.html

The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department.

So why have I lost all faith in the swamp? ... and of course the media and the elite for which it "serves" (up for the slaughter).

1800, 1860, 2020 -- The Importance of Honoring Elections

This disaster was 220 years in the making.

An excellent Podcast that covers both sides of this issue.

The election of 1800 was the first time in world history that power was passed PEACEFULLY between competing democratically elected political parties with the "losers" accepting the results. It was VERY close ... Jefferson and Madison tied in the Electoral College. (the scare quotes mean that when democracy works, everyone is really a winner in the slightly longer term)

In 1860 the LOSERS did not accept the results and it resulted in the Civil War. (no scare quotes ... everyone really lost, to the tune of 600-750K lives)

Right now we have a "Cold Civil War" that has been going on since "Watergate". Politics is "war by other means" -- but in order for it to stay "other means", the results of elections must be accepted.

The precedent now firmly established by the Democrats is that when a Republican gets elected president and the Congress goes Democrat, the Republican will almost certainly be impeached in the House unless he governs as a Democrat (RINO). This didn't happen overnight -- from Watergate on, the Republican Party never figured out that the Democratic Party / Deep State / MSM / etc was at war. Trump figured it out.

It has been totally obvious if one looked behind the MSM curtain -- Iran Contra, Bork, Tower, Thomas, letting Bill Clinton (and the whole Clinton Crime Family) slide, not accepting the results of the 2000 election (much less questionable than 1960), etc ...

We are now essentially converted to a Parliamentary system -- the Democrats broke the country by war in 1860, they have broken it by politics in 2020.

This time it is the purest of partisan politics -- they know impeachment won't pass in the Senate, and likely will not even get a majority, but they have been playing the long game since the beginning. Their base demanded that the election not be honored, so that is how they have have proceeded. They have always wanted "pure democracy", and realize (and applaud) that will quickly become centralized totalitarian rule by "experts" (Socialism). They are much more honest about that today at least.

We all get tired of the old "this election is the most important in your lifetime" and sadly, like the next breath of a person at death's door, it just gets truer and truer. Since Roe, Obergfell, etc. we now only await a SCOTUS "progressive" majority to lose the Electoral College, and then most likely be forced to solve our differences in the sad manner of 1860.

America was always an experiment -- nobody else had a Republic like we were handed by the founders. Keeping a Republic requires an educated public that understands what it means and pays attention. If the 2020 election is a landslide for Republicans followed by Ginsberg being replaced, and the SCOTUS finally acting to reign in the Deep State, we might actually get some real progress on returning to being America vs BOistan.

If it is close, we "muddle on", if God forbid, it is a big win for the Ds, then I hope and pray  it is fairly civil Red/Blue divorce vs an actual shooting war.

Fracking Deep State, Russian Meddling

The 'deep state' is real. But are its leaks against Trump justified? | Jack Goldsmith | Opinion | The Guardian:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/anti-fracking-groups-russia-secret-funding-protects-kremlin-interests/

The top link is a Guardian article that is so even handed that it almost fails to say anything -- it does realize the obvious, a) There is and has been a Deep State for a long time b). Trump is fighting back against them. Beyond that, it assumes that the Russian connection with Trump MIGHT be legit, however is concerned by the following ...

The comparison is plausible in light of the extensive efforts soon after the election to encourage the bureaucracy, including the intelligence bureaucracy, to resist the Trump administration, and the evidence that there was in some agencies such resistance.
But while Hoover did many awful things in quiet, neither during his reign nor at any other time in American history have we seen such a profusion of sensitive leaks from the deep state with such an overtly political aim to bring down senior leadership.

 Ok, so we know the obvious -- the Deep State is made up of a bunch of Democrats who don't like Trump, so they are working like crazy in the open to discredit him.

The PROBLEM from my POV is WHY would the Russians have wanted Trump in the White House? The second link tells us another obvious point -- Russia is a huge energy producer and they HATE competition! They have been working around the globe for a LONG time to prevent the use of fracking ... spending millions (likely hundreds of millions) to do what they can to prevent the use of this technique which lowers the price of energy, which is BAD for Russia!

According to the reports, entities connected to the Russian government are using a shell company registered in Bermuda, Klein Ltd. (Klein), to funnel tens of millions of dollars to a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) private foundation, the Sea Change Foundation (Sea Change). This money appears to move in the form of anonymous donations. Sea Change then passes the money originating in Russia to various U.S. 501(c)(3) organizations such as the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, and others. These funds are dispersed as grants that will be used to execute a political agenda driven by Russian entities. The purpose of this circuitous exchange of foreign funds is to shield the source of the money.

Russia has been working through organizations to help elect DEMOCRATS for a long time because DEMOCRATS tend to oppose anything that allows the US to produce any energy. It's a "win/win" ... prevent the US from competing with Russia, AND weaken the ability of the US to operate militarily (solar powered fighter planes and aircraft carriers are a LONG way off).

Super bonus! Pay 10's of millions of dollars directly to the Clinton Crime Family to lock up 20% of the N American urainium reserves!

I'm fully willing to assume that the Russians are incompetent as well, however they are REALLY incompetent if they are paying 10's of millions of dollars both DIRECTLY to the Clinton Crime Family, AND to organizations that oppose fracking, and THEN, turning around and deciding that they want to "rig the election" to get PRO fracking Trump elected. Seriously?

The Deep State Tolls For YOU

https://spectator.org/adam-schiff-has-jumped-the-shark/

The fact that the Deep State can monitor ANYTHING as long as it relates to taking down someone not kneeling to their dictats is well established all the way back to LBJ and before. The extra concerning thing is that they are proud and open about it now!

Cross them and anything from your phone, financial, Netflix, internet, or probably medical records becomes public knowledge!

Attorney/Client Privilege? Only if you bow to the state!

Innocent Until Proven Guilty? Nope ... GUILTY unless you are PROVEN innocent for anyone not in good standing with Deep State!

Clairemont, "The Threat To Liberty

The Threat to Liberty:

This column from Claremont Review of Books is a gem, and oh so applicable to our current situation. The gigantic federal bureaucracy has struck back since Trump took office. A little over a month ago, documents "hacked" from Hillary's private server or Podesta's email account "secured" with the password "PASSWORD", were worthy of risking an international incident with Russia.

Now,  we see that every phone call between Trump or his staffers and anyone else is being tapped by the security apparatus and whatever allusions, innuendo, or potentially juicy tidbits can be lifted out of context can be widely shared with pure joy by the very same people who blanched in horror at anything at all coming out from the Hillary camp.

The administrative empire has managed to tack the scalp of Michael Flynn to it's digital wiretapping trophy case. The linked column gives some introduction to the powers and intent of the Administrative State as a law unto itself. Here we have a good introduction of how President Wilson thought of power, and thus why he started our nation on the road to being ruled by unelected "experts".

Wilson thought the conditions of modern times demanded that government power be unified rather than fragmented and checked. His great confidence in the wisdom of science and benevolence of expert administrators led him to the view that the founders’ worries about concentrated power were obsolete. He exhibited the combination of love for power and unbounded paternalism that is the hallmark of the administrative state today. He wrote in Congressional Government that “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive,” and on another occasion that “If I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance.”

One must remember the times that Wilson lived in. The feeling was that we were living in a completely clockwork universe. "Free Will" was an illusion -- if one could work out all the proper equations, EVERYTHING could be understood and "controlled" by "the experts" (apparently it didn't occur to them that if everything was predetermined anyway, this all seemed a fools errand ... but the power mad tend to only think to a level that justifies their power). Wilson and many of his lefty contemporaries were also in favor of eugenics, and why not? ... science was the new god and explained EVERYTHING. To let the "inferior" breed was criminal ... best let the "experts" sort it out!

The Administrative State was and is the mechanism of extra-constitutional power where "elite experts" centralize power and make "better decisions" using knowledge and processes completely beyond the abilities of the masses.

A chief feature of the administrative state is its relentless centralization, but with a reciprocal effect: its mandates, regulations, distorting funding mechanisms, and elitist professionalism have corrupted our political culture all the way back down to local government. It is the chief reason why Americans increasingly have contempt for government.

It is all the "alphabet agencies" ostensibly under the control of the chief executive (president), but feeling totally OK with tapping the phones of him and his staff and leaking results, or in the case of the EPA, refusing to even fill out a survey.

... the most potent part of Progressivism, and its chief legacy for today, was its theoretical attack on the American Founding. Progressivism reduced to the proposition that the principles of the founding were wrong for the 20th century, and needed to be discarded. The swirling currents of Darwinism, Hegelian historicism, and scientific hubris all combined, in the summation of Harvey Mansfield, Jr., to make Wilson “the most powerful intellect in the movement” and “the first American president to criticize the Constitution.”

The progressive oath should replace "we hold these truths to be self-evident" with "we hold these truths to be false".

Wilson laid out his criticism of the separation of powers in his book Constitutional Government in the United States, in which he argued in favor of a “Darwinian” Constitution. Government, he argued, is not a machine, but a living, organic thing. And “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and survive….  

His great confidence in the wisdom of science and benevolence of expert administrators led him to the view that the founders’ worries about concentrated power were obsolete. He exhibited the combination of love for power and unbounded paternalism that is the hallmark of the administrative state today. He wrote in Congressional Government that “I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive,” and on another occasion that “If I saw my way to it as a practical politician, I should be willing to go farther and superintend every man’s use of his chance.”

The main reason Progressives like Wilson no longer shared the older liberal suspicion of government power was the new view that politics and administration could be neatly and cleanly separated, with administration entrusted to scientifically trained and disinterested experts, who by their very expertise should be insulated from political pressure.

The fact is, then, that there is a large part of administration which is unconnected with politics, which should therefore be relieved very largely, if not altogether, from the control of political bodies. It is unconnected with politics because it embraces fields of semi-scientific, quasi-judicial and quasi-business or commercial activity—work which has little if any influence on the expression of the true state will. For the most advantageous discharge of this branch of the function of administration there should be organized a force of government agents absolutely free from the influence of politics. Such a force should be free from the influence of politics because of the fact that their mission is the exercise of foresight and discretion, the pursuit of truth, the gathering of information, the maintenance of a strictly impartial attitude toward the individuals with whom they have dealings, and the provision of the most efficient possible administrative organization. The position assigned to such officers should be the same as that which has been by universal consent assigned to judges. Their work is no more political in character than is that of judges.

Writing in the Harvard Law Review in the early 1990s, Gary Lawson of Boston University School of Law put the proposition with admirable directness and concision:

“The modern administrative state is not merely unconstitutional; it is anti-constitutional. The Constitution was designed specifically to prevent the emergence of the kinds of institutions that characterize the modern administrative state.” And he says “the destruction of this principle of separation of powers is perhaps the crowning jewel of the modern administrative revolution.”

That bureaucratic government is the partisan instrument of the Democratic Party is the most obvious yet least remarked upon trait of our time (though this lack of public identification can be taken as additional evidence of the incompetence of the Republican Party).

The entire article is well worth the time!