Monday roundup

My latest at Medium is up. It's entitled "This Moment Is Worse and Here's Why."

NYT / Survey Monkey poll shows increasing support for the recently passed tax-reform law.


The Freedom-Haters cave, ending the shutdown. Brit Hume's tweet succinctly tells the story:

I doubted it was possible, but Dems have actually lost a shutdown fight. Schumer has agreed to end the filibuster in exchange for practically nothing. Make no mistake: Schumer & Dems caved. What a political fiasco.

It's easy to succumb to scandal overload, given the nature of Beltway life, but what Strzok and Page were cooking up - and I mean beyond the boudoir - gives us a glimpse into how infected with political agenda the FBI and DoJ had become:

From Johnson’s letter:

The loss of records from this period is concerning because it is apparent from other records that Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page communicated frequently about the investigation. In February 2016, Ms. Page texted Mr. Strzok that then-candidate Trump “simply can not [Sic] be president.” On May 4, 2016–after then-Director Comey began drafting his July 5 statement
clearing Secretary Clinton–Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok communicated about “pressure” building to finish the investigation following candidate Trump’s likely nomination:

Ms. Page: And holy shit Cruz just dropped out of the race. It’s going to be a Clinton Trump race. Unbelievable.

Mr. Strzok: What?!?!??

Ms. Page: You heard it right my friend.

Mr. Strzok: I saw trump [sic] won, fgured it would be a bit

Mr. Strzok: Now the pressure really starts to finish MYE.

Ms. Page: It sure does. We need to talk about follow up call tomorrow. We still never have.

The reference to the MYE by Mr. Strzok refers to the “midyear exam,” the case name for the Clinton investigation.

This is sort of a strange statement if one doesn’t assume there was a “stop Trump” movement of some type, formal or informal, within the FBI. The implication of the statement is that they would have taken their good old time finishing the investigation if Ted Cruz had stayed in the race, that is a decision that would have hurt Clinton. That they felt pressure to wind up the Clinton investigation deserves some serious exploration.

James Comey concealed the extent of Hillary’s Stupidity from the public. 

In addition, Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page discussed the drafting of Director Comey’s July 5 statement exonerating Secretary Clinton. On June 30, 2016, FBI personnel circulated a draft of Director Comey’s statement that noted that Secretary Clinton had emailed with President Obama from the private server while abroad in the “territory of sophisticated adversaries.” The passage read:

We also assess that Secretary Clinton?s use of a personal email domain was both known by a large number of people and readily apparent. She also used her personal email extensively while outside the United States, including from the territory of sophisticated adversaries. That use included an email exchange with the President while Secretary Clinton was on the territory of such an adversary. Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton?s personal email account.

The same afternoon, after FBI officials edited the draft to replace “the President” with “another senior government official,” Mr. Strzok sent a text message to Ms. Page notifying her of the
change. The exchange read:

Mr. Strzok: K. Rybicki just sent another version.

Ms. Page: Bill just popped his head in, hopefully to talk to him. [Note: I believe Bill is Bill Priestap, FBI director for counterintelligence and Strzok’s boss.]

Mr. Strzok: Hope so. Just left Bill. Talked about the speech, the [redacted] stuff relating to the case, and what I told you about earlier.

Mr. Strzok: He changed President to “another senior government official”

Director Comey’s statement as ultimately delivered on July 5 omitted a reference to either President Obama or “another senior government official.”

This would have had a significant impact on the Clinton campaign. The central theme of her spinmeisters was that none of the emails she sent was particularly important. It is kind of hard to argue this when the recipient is the president. The fact that Comey obscured this fact is nothing more than a lie by omission.

Loretta Lynch knew a week before Comey’s announcement and a day before Hillary Clinton was interviewed that Hillary Clinton would be cleared.

On July 1, 2016–the same day as Attorney General Lynch’s announcement, but before the FBI had interviewed Secretary Clinton and before Director Comey had announced his recommendation–Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok exchanged the following messages:

Mr. Strzok: Holy cow. . . .nyt breaking Apuzzo, [sic] will accept whatever rec D and career prosecutors make. No political appointee input.

Mr. Strzok: Timing not great, but whatever. Wonder if that’s why the no coordination language added.

Ms. Page: No way. This is a purposeful leak following the airplane snafu.

Mr. Strzok: Timing looks like hell. Will appear to be choreographed. All major news networks literally leading with “AG to accept FBI D’s recommendation.”

Ms. Page: Yeah, that is awful timing. Nothing we can do about it.

Mr. Strzok: What I meant was, did DOJ tell us yesterday they were doing this, so added that language.

Mr. Strzok: Yep. I told Bill the same thing. Delaying just makes it worse.

Ms. Page: And yes. I think we had some warning of it. I know they sent some statement to rybicki, be he called andy. [Note: rybicki is FBI chief of staff Jim Rybicki and andy is, of course, deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe.]

Ms. Page: And yeah, it’s a real profile in couragw [sic], since she knows no charges will be brought.

The fact that Comey had made a decision to clear Clinton months in advance was known. The fact that DOJ knew and seemingly inserted “not coordinated” into the statement. Though the fact that DOJ knew of the results and provided input into Comey’s memo seems a helluva lot like coordination.

More evidence that the fiction that the global climate is in some kind of trouble is just that:

A new study published in the prestigious journal Nature finds that all those global warming doomsday scenarios aren't credible. Not that you would ever know based on how little coverage this study is getting.

The study, published on Thursday, finds that if CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global temperatures would climb at most by 3.4 degrees Celsius. That's far below what the UN has been saying for decades, namely that temperatures would rise as much as 4.5 degrees, and possibly up to 6 degrees.

Basically, the scientists involved in the Nature study found that the planet is less sensitive to changes in CO2 levels than had been previously believed. That means projected temperature increases are too high.

Of course this is just one study, but it supports the contention climate skeptics have been making for years — that the computer models used to predict future warming were exaggerating the impact of CO2, evidenced in part by the fact that the planet hasn't been warming as much as those models say it should.

Why is this important? Because all those horror stories told over the past decades are based on predictions of  temperature increases that are much higher than 3.4 degrees. 

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, one of the world's premier medical journals, has written an  edtorial there extolling Karl Marx's vision as an antidote to what he thinks ails twenty-first-century medicine ("privatized health economies," "the power of conservative professional elites," "global health's neoimperialistic tendencies," "product-driven definitions of disease"), and British physician Theodore Dalrymple, writing at Law & Liberty, bracingly smacks down both the worth of Marx's contribution to the understanding of anything, and the lineup of Horton's straw-man problems.

Ethan Renoe's current piece at The Stream lives up to its upside-the-head title, "The Dumbing Down of Christianity."

The other day I was (surprise, surprise) in a coffee shop in the mountains, seated near the counter. A guy in his early 20’s walked in wearing a TOOL shirt and a long ponytail. I could overhear his conversation as he approached the barista and they began chatting. Somehow it came up that she attends a Christian university and he clearly didn’t approve.

“Do they incorporate religion into all the classes there?” he asked. “Even the science classes? How does that work?”

She valiantly began explaining how they pray before every class and teach from a Christian worldview, but it soon became evident that she was being crushed in this conversation. He was well schooled in the writings of Dawkins, Hitchens and Nye and began doling out the punishment.

I use the word punishment because this poor barista has herself been punished by a church system which, for the past 200 years, has begun discarding intelligence within the church in favor of emotion, conversion experiences and passion. Ask most American Christians today any question deeper than “Does God love everyone?” and you’re bound to get some sort of response suggesting that that sort of discourse should be reserved for theological universities.

Turkey has invaded Syria in order to go after US-backed Kurdish forces.