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MOEISSUESOFTHEDAY.BLOGSPOT.COM
Sun. May 14, 2017
To my Mom  who is with us looking down from above. She put Mother in Mother’s Day. While she left us for her trip to Heaven, we still feel she is here with us.
To my precious Bride, thank you for being a great Mom to our kids. Don’t forget the women who brought you into this world.
We take this moment to express out love and appreciation for those Great women.
Happy Mother’s Day.



One of our Granddaughters Lauren and her husband Yurie have started a bathing suit website. They are both students at UMass Dartmouth.
Lauren is the model featured in most of the swimsuit photos (the young blonde model).
BTW,  Lauren and Youri are high honors students at UMass Dartmouth. Youri is a 4.0 student and Lauren just behind that.
Here is their web site. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

CONTACT

Dartmouth, MA

+213 342 1669
7 Days a week from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm



Charlie Hebdo Splashes the Youthful French PM With his 64-Year-Old Pregnant Wife



A Tale of Two Reactions on the Firing of Jim Comey

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Though the firing of FBI Director James Comey became inevitable last November, the main stream media continues to push the narrative that everything in the Trump universe is connected to his supposed collusion with Russia. In spite of the fact that Democrats like Minority Leader Chuck Schummer were calling for Comey’s removal until just days ago, they now claim his ouster is a “Nixonian” attempt by Trump at coverup.
Hours after firing FBI Director James Comey, President Donald Trump discounted Schumer’s demands for an independent investigation into Russian interference into last year’s presidential election by recalling the senator’s past criticisms of the former bureau head.
“Cryin’ Chuck Schumer stated recently, ‘I do not have confidence in him (James Comey) any longer.’ Then acts so indignant. #draintheswamp,” Trump wrote on Twitter late Tuesday night.
Trump fired Comey late Tuesday, telling him in a brief letter that he could not “effectively lead” the bureau and calling for “new leadership that restores public trust and confidence” in law enforcement. Comey had come under fire for his handling of the Hillary Clinton email probe in 2016.
Most Democrats expressed outrage at the decision, noting that the FBI is investigating whether Trump’s campaign had ties to Russia. Schumer called for a special prosecutor to be appointed to take over the Russia probe. “This is part of a deeply troubling pattern from the Trump administration,” Schumer told reporters.
Senator Bob Casey (Dem-PA) called the move “Nixonian,” and House Judiciary Committee Democrats deemed it a “shocking decision” calling on the Department of Justice and the FBI to preserve all documents relating to the Russia probe.
But Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told FOX news that Democrats have pounced on the timing of Comey’s firing because it opened a door for them to renew their calls for a special prosecutor.
“I think it gave them a chance to get back to something they argued about a month ago and it was losing steam – to have a special prosecutor or have a commission to look into it,” Grassley said. “But there’s committees of Congress, including my own committee, investigating this and it gives them an opportunity to bring those issues up again.”
According to Grassley, the Democrat’s argument is fatally flawed because of their own rabid criticisms of Comey decision to temporarily re-open the investigation into Clinton’s private email server last October. Their argument at that time was that Comey was in effect throwing the election for Clinton and giving it to Trump. “I don’t think they have much credibility,” he said.
Breitbart and even some at progressive leaning POLITICO discount that the firing of Comey was a rush job or came only after his somewhat confusing testimony at recent hearings in Washington.
In retrospect, the firing of James Comey as FBI Director happened about as fast as it was possible to make it go. Here’s the sequence:
Democrats in Congress did their best to delay the appointment of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General. That meant he was not in place until nearly a month after the inauguration.
Once able to move, Sessions proposed Rod Rosenstein for Deputy Attorney General. Given the highly politicized circumstances, neither President Trump nor Sessions could move against Comey directly. Rosenstein, was quickly confirmed 94-6 by the Senate.
In spite of his stellar non-political reputation, Rosenstein’s confirmation had been threatened by Senator Blumenthal the first week of March due to his demand for Sessions to appoint a special prosecutor on the Russia file.
Rosenstein was finally confirmed on Apr 25th after seven weeks of obstruction by Congress. Two weeks after Rosenstein assumed the position of Deputy Attorney General he submitted a request that Comey be fired.
Sessions endorsed and passed the recommendation to Trump which he approved the same day. By Washington standards, there is no way Comey could have been fired any sooner without calling the whole process into question. The handling of Comey was competent, professional, and above-board.
When asked what he thought of media outlets calling James Comey’s firing “Nixonian” and akin to President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” Grassley dismissed the claims. “My message is this – suck it up and move on,” he said.
The release of James Comey is a tale of two reactions: something that was necessary and done about as quickly as possible by the President and a cacophony of howls from a left that will never accept it lost last November.
~ American Liberty Report




Fred Fleitz: Feds Should Investigate Ben Rhodes in Trump Surveillance Scandal

ben rhodes
Fred Fleitz, Senior Vice President for Policy and Programs at the Center for Security Policy, talked
about the Susan Rice “unmasking” scandal with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on
Friday’s Breitbart News Daily.
Fleitz, who has strongly criticized Rice’s story about why she “unmasked” the identities of people connected to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign who were caught in foreign surveillance operations, said there were two ways this surveillance took place.
“One, apparently, were formal FISA requests to have information collected against certain members of the Trump team,” he said. “This has not been confirmed, but it’s been leaked so often to the New York Times and the Washington Post, probably by Obama people, I think that happened.
“The second way was to go through intelligence that was not targeting the Russians or Trump to find references to Trump officials, and have those names unmasked. That way, they could say, ‘Hey, we weren’t targeting the Trump people, we were just going through intelligence that happened to mention them. We wanted to know the context of the report,’” he continued.
“You know, it’s okay for a senior official to ask for the name of a U.S. person to understand an intelligence report. It’s uncommon. I’ve been involved with it, with a senior policymaker. But to ask that the names of the members of a campaign from another party be unmasked – that may not be illegal, but it is highly unethical,” said Fleitz.
“If Rice gave the reason for that unmasking to be something that it really wasn’t, like if she really was doing it for political reasons, she could be in legal jeopardy,” he said.
Kassam asked why the Trump administration has not taken more action on this issue.
“I think they’re trying to work it, but the problem is, first of all Comey wasn’t cooperating. Let’s start there,” Fleitz replied. “I think that Comey has the names of people who were unmasked. He should have been conducting an investigation into this. I don’t know whether he was or he wasn’t, but this should have been at the top of his list.”
“The idea that our intelligence services, that are supposed to protect us from foreign threats, are  being used to conduct political intelligence against the members of another party – that’s something that goes on in police states and banana republics,” he said.
“I think you’re right that the administration should be doing more and more on this. I’m really concerned about these new reports I’m hearing that Senator Rand Paul is saying that he has multiple reports that he and other Republican presidential candidates were also spied upon. Their names were unmasked by the Obama administration. This has to be looked into,” Fleitz urged.
Fleitz said the interest of the media and elected Democrats in stories about politicized intelligence was rather selective.
“When I was chief of staff to Ambassador John Bolton, during his confirmation hearings to be U.N. ambassador, it came out that he asked for the names of ten Americans to be unmasked. I worked with him on that. None of it had anything to do with politics. And the Democrats went crazy. They accused Bolton of violating the privacy of American citizens,” he recalled. “There was recently a Wall Street Journal editorial on this. Ten years later, the Democrats don’t care at all.”
“In Bolton’s case, the Democrats didn’t know the names of these people, and said Bolton was engaged in some type of spying on his political enemies,” he noted. “And then we have General Flynn’s name unmasked. Clearly his name was unmasked for political reasons, and there’s not one Democrat who is concerned in the least,” he said.
Kassam asked who else should be answering questions on the unmasking cases, in addition to Susan Rice.
“There’s this perception in the media that only people at Susan Rice’s level could ask for these unmaskings. That’s not true. Bolton was an undersecretary. There’s a bunch of them in the government. They could have asked for this also,” said Fleitz.
“I don’t know whether Ben Rhodes in the NSC had the authority to request these names to be unmasked, but I suspect they were unmasked for him, if he wasn’t able to have it done himself. I think he’s a political operative who very likely was behind this. I’d like to see him investigated. I think there are senior officials at the CIA with John Brennan who may have been involved. I also think there’s probably senior officials at the State Department who might have been involved,” he said.
Although it was not revealed until January 2017, Ben Rhodes was denied a national security clearance by the FBI during the 2008 Obama transition – the only known member of the 150-strong transition team to experience such a denial. As Fleitz indicated, this would make his direct or tangential involvement in unmasking requests an important subject for investigators.
Fleitz saw the “diversity of opinion in the Republican Party” as a strategic liability in politically turbocharged debates like the unmasking issue, compared to the ideologically monolithic Democrats.
“We have Republicans who speak out when they disagree with the president,” he noted. “There is no diversity of opinion permitted in the Democratic Party. There’s nobody saying that getting rid of Comey was a good idea on the Democratic side. And we know many Democrats wanted Comey out!”
“The same thing on this demasking story – the Democrats are not going to step out of line,” he predicted. “Maybe Senator Joe Manchin. I mean, there’s one or two exceptions, but they’re pretty rare. The Democrats are marching in lockstep to destroy President Trump, and if they don’t, the left-wing activists are going to come after them.”
“I don’t think we’re going to get much help from the Democrats on this,” he concluded.
Fleitz previewed his upcoming Fox News piece about the widely-reported intelligence analysis prepared in January that claimed “not only did the Russians try to intervene in the election, but they did so to help Trump win.”
“Well, Director of National Intelligence Clapper revealed this week this was not the intelligence community’s view, of all 17 agencies,” said Fleitz. “That was known. It was just 3 agencies. We now know the analysts who wrote this were handpicked. How were they handpicked? How did the hyper-partisan director of the CIA, John Brennan, how did he handpick the CIA analysts who wrote this assessment?”
“I don’t think this assessment is accurate. I don’t think the Russians intervened to help Trump. Read my piece at FoxOpinion.com. This has to be added to the investigation of interference in the election – interference by our intelligence agencies.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.


IC: U.S. Likely to See Homegrown Sunni Violent Extremist Attacks ‘With Little or No Warning’

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, May 11, 2017. (Screen Capture)
(CNSNews.com) - In the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community for 2017 that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats delivered to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence today, the IC predicted there will probably be terrorist attacks in the United States conducted by “U.S.-based homegrown violent extremists” whom it called “the most frequent and unpredictable Sunni violent extremist threat to the United States.”
The threat assessment also said “a small number of foreign-based Sunni violent extremist groups will also pose a threat to the US homeland.”
“US-based homegrown violent extremists (HVEs) will remain the most frequent and unpredictable Sunni violent extremist threat to the US homeland,” the threat assessment said in a section entitled “Terrorist Threat to the United States.”
“They will be spurred on by terrorist groups’ public calls to carry out attacks in the West,” said the assessment. “The threat of HVE attacks will persist, and some attacks will probably occur with little or no warning.
“In 2016,” said the assessment, “16 HVEs were arrested, and three died in attacks against civilian soft targets. Those detained were arrested for a variety of reasons, including attempting travel overseas for jihad and plotting attacks in the United States.
“In addition to the HVE threat, a small number of foreign-based Sunni violent extremist groups will also pose a threat to the US homeland and continue publishing multilingual propaganda that calls for attacks against US and Western interests in the US homeland and abroad,” said the assessment.



Bill Clinton’s Past Just Came Back To Haunt The Democrats
The so-called “mainstream” media tried to paint a picture that Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was “Nixonian” and unprecedented.
While that is false, Trump’s actions are comparable to another former President.
And once again, Bill Clinton’s past is coming back to haunt Democrats.
FBI Directors have been fired before.
In fact, the last President to fire a FBI Director was none other than Bill Clinton.

He canned Director William Sessions in July 1993 over ethical concerns.

CNN reports:
“…CLINTON FIRED SESSIONS AFTER THE ISSUANCE OF A REPORT THAT ALLEGED ETHICAL PROBLEMS INCLUDING “EVADING TAXES AND REFUSING TO COOPERATE WITH AN INVESTIGATION OF A HOME MORTGAGE LOAN,” THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTED.
THE FBI DIRECTOR IS APPOINTED BY THE PRESIDENT BY AND WITH THE ADVICE AND CONSENT OF THE SENATE. THE POSITION HAS A FIXED 10-YEAR TERM.
THE REPORT WAS COMPLETED BY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT’S OFFICE OF PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY DURING THE GEORGE H.W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION, JUST BEFORE CLINTON’S INAUGURATION.
CLINTON TOLD REPORTERS THERE HAD BEEN “SERIOUS QUESTIONS” ABOUT SESSIONS’ “CONDUCT AND THE LEADERSHIP.” HE ASKED HIS ATTORNEY GENERAL, JANET RENO, TO REVIEW SESSIONS’ TENURE AND THE SITUATION AT THE FBI.
“SHE HAS REPORTED TO ME IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS THAT HE CAN NO LONGER EFFECTIVELY LEAD THE BUREAU AND LAW ENFORCEMENT COMMUNITY,” CLINTON SAID.”
But the same serious questions about conduct and ability to lead dogged Comey.
Comey attracted the ire of both Democrats and Republicans during the 2016 campaign.
A week before his firing, Trump argued Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton by refusing to recommend criminal charges be brought against her.
Critics also argued that Comey was grandstanding on the Russia investigation to create a situation where Trump couldn’t fire him or else he’d be accused of a cover up.
Writing in The Federalist, Ben Domenech explained that Comey should have been sacked months ago:
“THERE IS A SIMPLE FACT THAT MAKES ANALYSIS OF THE FIRING OF FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY DIFFICULT: HE DESERVED TO BE FIRED. AT ANY POINT OVER THE PAST NINE MONTHS, PROMINENT MEMBERS OF BOTH PARTIES HAVE CONTENDED THAT COMEY HAD TO GO.
IT IS FAR EASIER TO ADVANCE A CONVINCING ARGUMENT THAT COMEY’S BEHAVIOR OVER THAT TIME REPRESENTED THE WRONG COURSE FOR THE FBI DIRECTOR TO TAKE IN EVERY SINGLE INSTANCE, FROM HIS DECISION TO HOLD HIS PRESS CONFERENCE, HIS DECISION NOT TO RECOMMEND INDICTMENT, HIS DECISION TO PUBLICLY CONTINUE TO TALK BOTH ON AND OFF THE RECORD ABOUT THESE MATTERS, HIS DECISION TO PUBLICLY REOPEN THE CASE IN THE MANNER HE DID, HIS DECISION TO RELY UPON A LAUGHABLE DOSSIER CONSTRUCTED BY THE PRESIDENT’S POLITICAL OPPONENTS, AND HIS CONTINUED DECISIONS REGARDING WHAT HE SAYS IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE, AND WHAT HE IMPLIES ABOUT CURRENT INVESTIGATIONS.
THE OVERALL APPEARANCE HE CREATES AS THE HEAD OF THE FBI HAS SEEN AN UTTER COLLAPSE IN THAT TIME FROM THAT OF A RESPECTED INDEPENDENT CAREER OFFICIAL TO SOMEONE WHO IS VIEWED FUNDAMENTALLY AS A POLITICAL ACTOR WHO CARES MORE ABOUT HIS PERSONAL IMAGE THAN THE DEPARTMENT HE LEADS. AT EVERY JUNCTURE, COMEY MIGHT HAVE BEEN BETTER OFF ADOPTING GEORGE COSTANZA’S APPROACH: JUST DO THE OPPOSITE, AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.”
For all the media members climbing up on their high horses and making self-righteous declarations about “constitutional crises” and “the new Watergate”, Trump acted within his authority to fire Director Comey.
And while Sessions had committed ethical violations, whereas Comey continued to step on political minefields, both were ultimately removed because they had lost the confidence of the President – at whose pleasure they serve.
Comey admitted as much in his farewell letter, stating he knew President’s can fire a FBI Director whenever they want to and for whatever reason.
Trump removing Comey because he had lost confidence in his ability to lead the FBI is not unprecedented.
Just ask Bill Clinton.




Exposed! Trump to release Hillary’s concession call

MAY 12, 2017
It’s a moment that will go down in history – and now in a rare release, Americans could have the chance to hear exactly what happened in the tense phone call when failed presidential nominee Hillary Clinton forfeited to President Donald Trump.

Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino announced Tuesday that he plans to release the concession call made after Clinton’s imminent defeat as a celebration of the six-month mark since the election.

He shared a screenshot from the cell phone of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s phone to make the exciting and unexpected announcement.

The image shows a call from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin at 2:30 a.m. the morning of November 9th, after it had become apparent that Trump would win the presidency.

 Follow
Dan Scavino Jr.
Screen shot via @KellyannePolls cell phone- of Huma's call at 2:30amE....6 months ago. I have on video & will share that in the near future.
Conway had revealed details about the concession call following the election, saying she and Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook had discussed how the call would happen the night before. She described the confidence radiating out of the Clinton camp that Hillary would not be the one making the concession call.

“I look down, literally it was like a movie, my phone is ringing and it said ‘Huma Abedin.’ And I said, ‘Hey, Huma. What’s up?’ She said in a talk at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit in Washington D.C. in March.

“And I handed [Mr Trump] the phone. My husband took a screenshot of that, the 2:30 a.m. I handed him the phone and he and Vice President Pence and their wives were there and the rest is history.”

For now. Scavino has suggested that he has video recording of that moment and the one that followed in which President Trump accepted Clinton’s congratulations – video that may soon be made available to Clinton and Trump supporters alike.

Following statements from Clinton blaming her loss on the F.B.I.’s investigation into her emails, Russia, misogyny, and anything but her own misdoings, Conway responded to the Scavino’s tweet with a dig at Clinton’s denial:
Follow
Kellyanne Conway
✔@KellyannePolls
Hey, @DanScavino, has EVERYONE "accepted the election results" yet? https://twitter.com/danscavino/status/861968849712939008 …
While the recording has yet to be released, Republicans everywhere are on the edge of their seats waiting to hear that moment when Hillary Clinton admitted her loss, and congratulated Donald Trump.

-The Horn News editorial team


Report: Hillary Clinton Rallies Donors at Haim Saban’s House in Beverly Hills

Mary Calvert/Reuters
by DANIEL NUSSBAUM

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton attended a dinner at media mogul Haim Saban and wife Cheryl’s Beverly Hills mansion on Thursday night along with several major donors to her 2016 campaign, according to a report.

Sources told Variety that the dinner was meant as a thank-you to 2016 campaign donors and as an introduction to the former candidate’s creation of a new political group called Onward Together, which Clinton is reportedly expected to launch this month.
Saban, the billionaire mogul behind Saban Entertainment, was one of Clinton’s top Hollywood donors during the 2016 campaign, having given more than $12 million to Priorities USA Action, the SuperPAC that had supported her run.
The Sabans hosted Clinton at their Beverly Hills home multiple times during the 2016 campaign, including in August, when the former candidate participated in a question-and-answer session with around 80 guests, with tickets going for a reported $100,000 per couple. That dinner also drew big-money donors like Disney CEO Bob Iger, former DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, Chernin Group founder Peter Chernin, and actors Will Ferrell and Tony Goldwyn.
Thursday night’s dinner was attended by around 40-50 people, sources told Variety. Both Hillary and Bill Clinton are reportedly in Los Angeles to attend the graduation of nephew Zach Rodham from USC.
Politico reported this month that Clinton is expected to launch a new political group, Onward Together (a play on her campaign slogan, Stronger Together), as soon as this month. The group will reportedly fund other organizations and activists working to resist President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.
According to the report, Clinton has been quietly lining up donors and filling out the Board of the new group over the past several weeks.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum


Bangladesh PM: Clinton ‘Personally Pressured’ Her to Aid Foundation Donor Despite Ethics Laws


A foreign government has revealed another one of the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play schemes.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said that Hillary Clinton “personally pressured” her to help a Clinton Foundation donor during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state in 2011, despite it being against ethics laws, Circa reported.
Hasina’s press secretary told Circa that Clinton placed a phone call to her office in March 2011 insisting that 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Muhammed Yunus get his job back as chairman of Grameen Bank, a famous microcredit bank in the country.
Yunus is chairman of the bank’s nonprofit Grameen America, which donated between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Global Initiative, Circa reported.
Yunus also chairs Grameen Research, which donated an estimated $25,000 and $50,000 to CGI.
“Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in March 2011 insisting her not to remove Dr. Muhammad Yunus from the post of Managing Director of Grameen Bank,” Deputy Press Secretary Md Nazrul Islam said.
Islam added that the prime minister told Clinton that the company’s rules and regulations require the chairperson of the bank to be no older than 60, even though Yunus was not removed from his position until he was 70 and he argued with the prime minister over his removal.
The Bangladesh government said that Grameen Bank is a “statutory body of the government” that must follow banking laws and that they told Clinton Yunus collected an illegal salary over the past ten years.
Yunus claims he was removed from his position due to “internal politics” and not because of any wrongdoing.
Grameen Bank was investigated in 2012 by the Bangladesh government for mismanagement of finances.
Yunus told the Independent in 2013 that he feared his ouster would cause the bank to be under too much government control and detract from the bank’s original mission.
“It will be a disaster,” Yunus said. “Everybody in Bangladesh knows that if any business is controlled by the government, it goes down. Now why do they want to do that for the bank?”
The Clinton Foundation has been plagued by many allegations of corruption for its pay-to-play schemes.
Breitbart News Editor-at-Large and Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer first reported these allegations, including the time when senior Clinton Foundation staffers coordinated with State Department officials during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010 to give special treatment to “friends of Bill Clinton.”
Clinton Cash and the New York Times also exposed how then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved a deal with the Russian government that would give them of 20 percent of U.S. uranium while the Clinton Foundation received $145 million in donations from people connected to the sale.
The foundation announced in January that it would lay off 22 staffers as a result of the discontinuation of CGI.

Trump exposes fragile free trade consensus among Republicans

It hasn't been easy for Republican free traders in Congress since Trump became the titular head of the party and then the president. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)It hasn't been easy for Republican free traders in Congress since Trump became the titular head of the party and then the president. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
When Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., came out against Robert Lighthizer's nomination for U.S. trade representative, it was billed as a Republican rebellion against President Trump on trade.
"Beyond your vocal advocacy for protectionist shifts in our trade policies, the administration's ongoing, incoherent, and inconsistent trade message has compounded our concern," the two senators wrote in a letter.
But the rebellion was short-lived. Lighthizer was confirmed by a vote of 82 to 14 Thursday, more than making up for the three Republican defections — Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., joined McCain and Sasse in voting no — with over 30 Democratic supporters.
It hasn't been easy for Republican free traders in Congress since Trump became the titular head of the party and then the president of the United States. They sit politely as Trump denounces the North American Free Trade Agreement, for which 75 percent of congressional Republicans voted in 1993, as a "disaster."
They know Trump won Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin on a "Buy American, Hire American" platform that discarded GOP trade orthodoxy.
Trump has filled key trade-related posts in his administration with relatively protectionist officials, including Lighthizer, economist Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. The administration argues they are making progress opening international markets to American goods through their tough stance, and on Friday, it celebrated China easing the sale of U.S. beef.
"They [Europe, Japan and China] talk free trade, but in fact what they practice is protectionism," Ross complained to the Financial Times last month. "And every time we do anything to defend ourselves, even against the puny obligations that they have, they call that protectionism. It's rubbish."
Polling has shown rank-and-file Republicans become much more skeptical of free trade deals since Trump's rise, while some Democratic voters have moved in the opposite direction. "Democrats are all of the sudden Milton Friedman," said international trade attorney and Cato Institute adjunct scholar Scott Lincicome.
A September survey, for example, found that 85 percent of Republicans labeled free trade a net jobs destroyer while only 54 percent of Democrats said the same. The Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners believed free trade agreements had been good for the United States, while only 36 percent of Republicans agreed — up 7 points from last year but down 20 from 2015.
These big shifts are possible because many voters' trade policy views are loosely held. "Probably 30 percent is adamantly protectionist, 30 percent is adamantly pro-free trade," said Lincicome. "There's a great middle sloshing around depending on the economy, the party in power in the media. The [Republican] rank-and-file are simply parroting what they are hearing from Trump."
In the past, polls often found that voters had more sympathy for trade agreements when their party was in power and less when the opposition is making the deals. This is to a lesser extent true even among party elites.
Eighty-nine percent of congressional Republicans voted to give President George W. Bush fast-track trade negotiating authority in 2001, and 87 percent voted to do the same for President George H.W. Bush ten years earlier. In between, just 68 percent of GOP lawmakers voted to give Democratic President Bill Clinton this authority in 1998.
Republican free traders haven't gone completely silent even under Trump. Alongside Mexico and Canada, they played a role in getting Trump to reconsider a speedy withdrawal from NAFTA, which Sasse panned as a "disastrously bad idea."
"For North Carolina manufacturers and agriculture, the number one industry in our state, we need free trade," Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., proclaimed Friday at a Raleigh event hosted by the conservative Jesse Helms Center.
"There still aren't many Republicans on the Hill who are with Trump on trade," said a GOP congressional aide who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the president.
Even border adjustment, a method of taxing imports that is not explicitly protectionist in its intent, has encountered significant opposition from Republican lawmakers and GOP-friendly business groups. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Fox Business border adjustment would be "very difficult" to pass.
"We have an overtly protectionist president, overtly protectionist Democrats in Congress and quietly pro-trade Republicans in Congress," said Lincicome. That doesn't mean the president will necessarily come to define two parties on trade, however.
Democrats continue to rely heavily on labor unions and environmentalists who are skeptical of free trade. Republicans would have to continue to consolidate the support of the white working class post-Trump to become enduringly protectionist.
"Trump is sui generis, a unique thing," Lincicome said. "If the next Republican candidate shifts back to a pro-trade position, it [the GOP flirtation with trade restrictions] could be all over."
Yet he acknowledged that Trump has shown that the free trade consensus is fragile. "All it took was one really, really loud dude to break it apart," he said.



The Rasmussen Minute: Phony Polls
President Trump raged against the system–aka the swamp–and anyone or anything that stood in his path to the White House in 2016. One of the biggest obstacles Trump overcame during that election was the constant drumbeat of a large majority of major media polls that showed him losing the race from wire to wire.

Now, the same pollsters and pundits who predicted Trump could never win the White House are reporting that his approval rating, so far, is the lowest of any Commander-in-Chief in modern times.

Trump has slammed many of these surveys as being heavily weighted with Democrats and designed to suppress his support. He calls them “Phony Polls.”
Weekend special...

Attention, liberals: Comey deserved to be fired, and the Constitution is just fine


The hyperventilation in Washington is unjustified.

Protesters gather outside the White House, after President Trump fired FBI director James Comey The Washington Post / Getty
The decision of President Donald Trump to fire FBI Director James Comey is generating a fevered, near-maniacal response that is out of proportion to the asserted wrong. There is certainly much grist for the mill, much of it related to the animosity that Trump is said to bear toward Comey, which proves once again that on all matters of state, this president is often his own worst enemy. (I have criticized him in no uncertain terms both before and after the election.) There is of course much to regret in the timing of the decision, and good reason to think it’s a political miscalculation in light of the ferocious response that it has generated.
But political blunders are one thing, and a constitutional crisis is another. Yet in Washington’s fevered environment, Trump’s many critics take evident delight in trying to outdo each other in their denunciations of the president. Thus Vox’s Matthew Yglesias takes the position that although the time for impeachment has not yet arrived, Trump’s decision to fire Comey carries with it (as a headline put it) “a whiff of obstruction of justice,” which is an impeachable offense if proved.
Writing in the New Yorker, Jeffrey Frank argues that Comey’s decision, while not (yet?) an impeachable offense, is “far more problematic and dangerous than the one facing the nation forty-four years ago.” At that time, President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which prompted the resignation of both Elliot Richardson, the attorney general, and William Ruckelshaus, his deputy. Robert Bork was left to discharge that unhappy task, for which he paid a heavy political price 14 years later when he was denied a seat on the Supreme Court.
Not to be outdone, New Yorker columnist John Cassidy treated the firing as “a terrifying attack on the American system of government,” carried out by a man who “acted like a despot” who now has the opportunity to pick his own FBI head, who “will have the authority to close down the investigation.” At the same time, the Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, have insisted in unison on the appointment of a special prosecutor to take over the investigation, even before a permanent FBI director is in place.
There are of course many reasons why one might oppose Trump’s decision to fire Comey, but none of them remotely deserve the hyperbolic responses that Comey’s termination has elicited. There are two sides to every story, and in this case the other side has, at least for the moment, the better of the argument.

Rosenstein’s memo is sound. If anything, it understates the case.

The first point to note is that Comey deserved to be fired, long ago, for the offenses that were set out in the memorandum of May 9, 2017 (subject line: “Restoring Public Confidence in the FBI”), that Rod Rosenstein prepared, which outlined Comey’s breaches of his duties as FBI head. Rosenstein, the newly appointed deputy attorney general, cogently described several significant errors of judgment, mainly having to do with Comey’s public statements about his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
But, if anything, he understated the case against Comey. First, Comey treated the initial investigation of Hillary Clinton back in March 2015 with kid gloves. There were the inexcusable decisions to grant immunities to key Clinton backers without first serving them with a subpoena that would have allowed the FBI to extract a quid pro quo for any immunity that thereafter might be granted. Second, the FBI allowed Clinton’s key aide Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff, to act as her legal counsel, even though she herself was a legitimate target of investigation who could have faced charges. And they did not conduct any of the ambush interviews that are commonly given in cases where criminal prosecution is warranted. The obvious inference is that Comey was kowtowing to his superiors in the Obama White House.
Next, of course, was his public statement on July 5, 2016, in which he gave a thoroughly unsatisfactory explanation as to why he chose not to prosecute Clinton for her use of an unauthorized server that, in a case involving lesser persons, would have resulted in serious criminal charges, wholly without regard as to whether unauthorized persons hacked into the site (which they surely did).
Once Attorney General Loretta Lynch, as Judge Laurence Silberman wrote, “sort of half-recused herself” from the case, any charging decision should have been made by or at the direction of Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general. As Rosenstein rightly said in his memo, no experienced law enforcement figure thought that Comey acted correctly in issuing a public statement that explained his point of view.
Finally, his late October surprise, rightly castigated by none other than the New Yorker’s Cassidy, that he was conducting another investigation of Clinton, one that went nowhere, was likewise a breach of his duties.
The common response to this line of attack is that criticisms of Comey’s conduct in the Clinton investigation had nothing to do with the president’s decision, which was made, we are confidently told (on the basis of no firm evidence), because Comey was hot on the trail of information about possible ties between Trump, his supporters, and the Russians during the campaign. But it is also the case that Comey has made no effort to distance himself from this earlier conduct, and indeed affirmed in his Senate testimony of May 3, 2017, that with respect to his October 28 letter on Clinton, even though the episode had made him “mildly nauseous,” he would do it all over again.
The past events thus are linked closely to the future events. If the mistakes Comey made could have justified his firing in either 2015 or 2016, the passage of time does not cure those improper decisions.

Comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre are overblown

It requires contortions to convert an action that has independent justification into one that prompts talk of obstruction of justice and impeachment. In effect, one difficulty with that extravagant assertion is that it makes Comey de facto immovable from office so long as he continues to conduct this investigation. That cannot be the proper analysis because Comey has many other administrative responsibilities, including maintaining morale inside the office. No one should be able to guarantee his term in office by conducting a nonstop investigation of the president.
In this case, moreover, there has been to date no credible evidence of the improper linkage between team Trump and the Russians. This situation is, to say the least, a far cry from the situation with the Saturday Night Massacre in October 1973 when Cox had properly requested access to the tapes in the president’s possession — tapes that included evidence of Nixon’s deep involvement with the Watergate burglary. Now, that counts as obstruction of justice. In the present case, nothing come close to that unless and until it is established that Trump is in possession of tapes or documents that show a similar level of involvement.
Nor is there anything to the claim that Trump has acted as a despot. Despots remove people in order to take over all the organs of government themselves. Cassidy seems to think the president has it within his power to appoint a successor to Comey entirely on his own, when the position requires confirmation by the Senate.
I am confident that Trump would never nominate, and the Senate would never confirm, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was one possibility floated by CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin in a public broadside against Trump. Nor is there any reason to think firing Comey will stop the investigation in its tracks. It can continue under the control of an interim director and the potential candidates for the office, including current acting director Andrew McCabe, a career official who is well regarded inside the agency. Despots don’t look for career professionals to do their dirty work.

If Congress thinks the FBI is not up to the job, it can conduct its own investigation

Nor is it clear to me that we need to appoint a special prosecutor to deal with this problem. Right now the details on this proposal are hazy at best, but unless there is some new legislation, any such prosecutor would operate inside the Department of Justice, not outside of it. The dangers of a runaway prosecution by an independent prosecutor were vividly pointed out by the late Justice Scalia in his stirring 1988 dissent in Morrison v. Olson. There is no need to revive that sorry chapter in American jurisprudence today.
And the demand for a special prosecutor raises as many questions as it answers. Who should make the appointment? Could it be anyone in the Trump Department of Justice? Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems out, given his decision to stay clear of the Russian investigation. Rosenstein seems compromised because he wrote the memo that led to the firing of Comey. Will it be necessary to come up with some novel procedure to fill the gap, knowing that there is no person on the face of the planet who has the unique blend of talents, independence, stature, and fortitude to taken on so thankless a task?
It could take months for this matter to be sorted out, and it is surely in no one’s interest to delay the investigation until the prosecutor is named and is able to fill all the positions needed to carry out the job. An appointment of this sort ought to await some clear sign that the reconstituted DOJ is utterly unequal to the task — at which point the pressure could again mount. In the meantime, anyone outside the DOJ, including committees in the House and Senate, and any independent newspaper, is entitled to mount their own investigation to see if they come up with something concrete on the supposed Trump-Russian connection.
At present, therefore, the near-hysterical charges against Trump on the underlying claims of impropriety are not supported. Given the mercurial state of affairs, the critics in Washington should hold their fire until they have something more concrete to go on. The great tragedy is that too many voices are so rigidly and irretrievably anti-Trump — so opposed to him on every aspect of domestic policy and foreign policy — that it clouds their judgment.
My view is somewhat different. I think that Trump à la carte is the only way to look at him: horrible on some issues, and sound on others. In this case, it is too soon to reach a definitive verdict, but here is my tentative conclusion about this current controversy: Where there is no smoke, there is no fire. Let the smoke appear, and we can and should reevaluate. But that time has not yet come.
Richard A. Epstein is the Laurence A. Tisch professor of law at NYU School of Law.


G’ day…Ciao…….
Helen and Moe Lauzier


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