NYT

Chechen Authorities Arresting and Killing Gay Men, Russian Opposition Paper Says

Chechnyan official denies, saying no gay men exist in Chechnya

 A spokesman for Chechnya’s leader, Ramzan Kadyrov, denied the report in a statement to Interfax on Saturday, calling the article “absolute lies and disinformation.”  

“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” the spokesman, Alvi Karimov, told the news agency.  

“If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return,” Mr. Karimov said. 

* * *

 In the restive Muslim regions, Mr. Putin has empowered local leaders to press agendas of traditional Muslim values, to co-opt an Islamist underground. The gay pride parade applications became a galvanizing issue.

"In Chechnya, the command was given for a ‘prophylactic sweep’ and it went as far as real murders," Novaya Gazeta reported.

According to the report, the authorities set to finding and arresting closeted gay men, partly by posing as men looking for dates on social networking sites.

“Of course, none of these people in any way demonstrated their sexual orientation publicly — in the Caucasus, this is equal to a death sentence,” the newspaper wrote of those detained in the sweep. 

Link to NYT article

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Hanged This Day

On this day in 1943, Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Boenhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis, only a month before the end of WWII.  Boenhoeffer had opposed Hitler from the time of his ascension to power and, unlike many pastors, had opposed the Nazis’ effort to take over the church.  Although he could have avoided his fate by continuing his visits to either England or America, Boenhoeffer believed he had to return to Germany in order to play a role in the rehabilitation of the church after the war.  A few years after his return, Bonhoeffer was convicted of being part of a conspiracy to kill Hitler.  Although an eyewitness says Boenhoeffer died bravely and quickly, others familiar with Nazi executions of those convicted of treason say it is likely Boenhoeffer was hanged, revived, hanged, and revived over a long period of time to prolong the agony of his death.

Fox Business

Google Pays Female Workers Less Than Male Counterparts, Labor Department Says

The department is suing Google to compel the company to disclose more compensation data for its investigation. At a procedural hearing before a federal administrative law judge in San Francisco on Friday, Labor Department Regional Director Janette Wipper said the agency "found systemic compensation disparities against women pretty much across the entire workforce" at Google, according to the Guardian newspaper, which attended the hearing. 

But so does Pocahontas

pjmedia

CNN Narrative Fail: Syrian Refugee Slams Clinton, Obama; Praises Trump

Obama allowed this to happen and liberals more concerned about sending refugees "hither and thither" rather than keeping them in their own country

"With all due respect, with all due respect," Kassem began. "I didn't see each and every person who was demonstrating after the travel ban... I didn't see you three days ago when people were gassed to death...I didn't see you in 2013 when 1,400 people were gassed to death. I didn't see you raising your voice against President Obama's inaction in Syria that left us refugees," he said, completely deflating her expectations. 

"If you really care about refugees, if you really care about helping us, please -- help us stay here in our country," he continued. "We don't want to come to the United States. We want to stay in our country. We want to stay in our country," he repeated.  "With all due respect, this is hypocrisy. If you really care, if you really care...help us stay in our country. We don't want to become refugees. We want to stay in our country. Help us establish safe zones, he pleaded.

 Trump wants to create safe zones

Law Prof David Bernstein

The post-constitutional world of Judge Richard Posner

Not on Trump's SCOTUS Short List

LaVar Ball on UCLA losing in March Madness: 'You can't win no championship with 3 white guys'

Kaminsky, Dekker, Gasser, Koenig 

Can a white guy say this?

Townhall:

Politico: Trump White House Is Getting Things Ready For A Second SCOTUS Vacancy

Kennedy?

"Trump's strategy is hidden in plain sight."

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell

Did Putin Mastermind Chemical Attack So Trump Could Look Good By Bombing Syria?

Trying to make sense of the senseless

Courtesy of Althouse:

Trump Enforced Obama's Redine and Used Obama's Legal Rationale for Doing So

Writes lawprof Jack Goldsmith in "The Constitutionality of the Syria Strike Through the Eyes of OLC (and the Obama Administration)."

President Obama’s aborted threat to intervene in Syria in 2013 has led many to forgot that the administration believed it had the domestic constitutional authority to intervene without congressional authorization. Even when President Obama announced that he would seek congressional authorization for the strike, he insisted that “I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization.”... As Charlie Savage reported [in the NYT in 2013]:

In recent weeks, administration lawyers decided that it was within Mr. Obama’s constitutional authority to carry out a strike on Syria as well, even without permission from Congress or the Security Council, because of the “important national interests” of limiting regional instability and of enforcing the norm against using chemical weapons, as [Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel,] said.

Link to Althouse 

NYT

Andreea Cristea, Who Fell Into Thames During U.K. Attack, Dies

Her boyfriend was going to propose to her later that day

Credit to Althouse for posting this story

Dilbert Skeptical Assad Responsible for Chemical Attack

But if the rest of the world believes so, the U.S. just got many benefits from its bombing for low cost

Seriously, why would Assad have done this at this time?

Liberal activist Noam Chomsky courtesy of Ann Althouse

The idea of the Russians intervening in the American election "is a joke.  Half the world is cracking up in laughter."

The United States doesn’t just interfere in elections. It overthrows governments it doesn’t like, institutes military dictatorships. Simply in the case of Russia alone—it’s the least of it—the U.S. government, under Clinton, intervened quite blatantly and openly, then tried to conceal it, to get their man Yeltsin in, in all sorts of ways. So, this, as I say, it’s considered—it’s turning the United States, again, into a laughingstock in the world.

Chomsky also criticizes Democrats should welcome Trump's effort to ease tension with Russia. 

And it is a kind of a paradox, I think, that the one issue that seems to inflame the Democratic opposition is the one thing that has some justification and reasonable aspects to it.

Another Ann Althouse Ace

Andrew McCarthy/National Review

Susan Rice’s White House Unmasking: A Watergate-style Scandal

Her interest was not in national security but to advance the political interests of the Democratic party.

The national-security adviser is not an investigator. She is a White House staffer. The president’s staff is a consumer of intelligence, not a generator or collector of it. If Susan Rice was unmasking Americans, it was not to fulfill an intelligence need based on American interests; it was to fulfill a political desire based on Democratic-party interests.

* * *

The second point is that, while not a pillar of rectitude, Ms. Rice is not an idiot. Besides being shrewd, she was a highly involved, highly informed consumer of intelligence, and a key Obama political collaborator. Unlike the casual reader, she would have known who the Trump-team players were without needing to have their identities unmasked. Do you really think her purpose in demanding that names be revealed was to enhance her understanding of intelligence about the activities and intentions of foreign targets? Seriously? I’m betting it was so that others down the dissemination chain could see the names of Trump associates — names the investigating agencies that originally collected the information had determined not to unmask.

* * *

To summarize: At a high level, officials like Susan Rice had names unmasked that would not ordinarily be unmasked. That information was then being pushed widely throughout the intelligence community in unmasked form . . . particularly after Obama, toward the end of his presidency, suddenly — and seemingly apropos of nothing — changed the rules so that all of the intelligence agencies (not just the collecting agencies) could have access to raw intelligence information. 

As we know, the community of intelligence agencies leaks like a sieve, and the more access there is to juicy information, the more leaks there are. Meanwhile, former Obama officials and Clinton-campaign advisers, like Farkas, were pushing to get the information transferred from the intelligence community to members of Congress, geometrically increasing the likelihood of intelligence leaks.

Where are the civil libertarians when their ox isn't being gored?

Watergate on Steroids

The Federalist: The Obama Spying Scandal Started Long Before Trump

Remember the Iran Deal negotiations? In December 2015, The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama administration used the NSA to cast a wide net of surveillance around not just Israeli officials and diplomats, but American lawmakers who were friendly towards Israel as well as Jewish-American groups.

 *  * *

In other words, the Obama White House used Israel as an excuse to collect classified information on its political opponents via the NSA and then leak bits of this information to the news media in an effort to intimidate them.

 * * *

The White House redefined who is an agent of a foreign government in order to justify collecting classified information about American citizens, then used that information to bully them into doing what they wanted — in this case, passing the Iran Deal....

Civil libertarians: crickets

The Federalist: So You Want to Go to War in Syria to Depose Assad.  Here are 14 Questions You Should Answer.

How many U.S. deaths are you willing to accept? Are you prepared to also wage war w/ Russia? What's your endgame?

Ron Paul says the recent incident is a false flag - is he right?

Catherine Herridge: Reports in unmasking controversy were detailed, had info about "everyday lives"

The intelligence reports at the center of the Susan Rice unmasking controversy were detailed, and almost resembled a private investigator’s file, according to a Republican congressman familiar with the documents.

"This is information about their everyday lives," Rep. Peter King of New York, a member of the House Intelligence committee said. "Sort of like in a divorce case where lawyers are hired, investigators are hired just to find out what the other person is doing from morning until night and then you try to piece it together later on.”

Isn't it odd how the Dems have gone quiet about this Russian thing?

Ann Coulter:  The Dems Claim of Russian Intervention is a False Flag to Justify Spying on Trump Team 

Maybe Assange/Wikileaks is right in claiming the leak came from Dems trying to dump Hillary and replace her with Biden

The DNC leaks might have ended up being the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats. What if they had pulled a Torricelli, and forced Hillary to drop out, so they could run Joe Biden instead? Biden is a lot more popular than Hillary! 

Isn’t the more logical leaker someone within the DNC who’d had enough with David Brock and Debbie Wasserman Schultz steering the party into a ditch? The actual leaker probably thought: I’ve got to save the party! She’s going to destroy us! 

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, as well as his associate, former British ambassador Craig Murray, both say that the DNC emails came from a whistleblower within the DNC. Murray has even identified the precise location where a DNC insider passed him the emails — a park near American University. 

 The claim that Russia hacked the DNC’s emails to help Trump is the sort of crackpot theory that can only be concocted after the fact.

Dilbert the Hypnotist Says Susan Rice Lied When She Denied Leaking

We don’t know all the facts yet, but we do know that Trump’s claim of being “wiretapped” by Obama is starting to look dangerously close to something similar to the truth. 

I leaked "nothing" to "nobody" - what??!!

Althouse after reading the front page of WAPO:

"You know, everybody's lying and the news is now about how everybody is lying."

Isn't this fun?

Liar Ben Rhodes Lies About Lying Susan Rice

Funny how the conversation has changed from vigorous denial to vigorous affirmation of Rice's conduct

Because, you know, Hitler

Their lips are moving

Charlie Hurt: The Susan Rice revelation is "jaw-dropping, bombshell information."

What did Obama know and when did he know it?

Did the Obama administration also surveil the Bernie Sanders campaign?

Does this explains the deafening silence from President Obama

All these months, it turns out, it was his right-hand hatchet gal and exposed serial prevaricator Susan Rice who was behind the scenes in his administration working all the levers of the most powerful espionage machine on planet Earth to spy on Mr. Obama’s political enemies.

* * *

What is so astonishing about the revelation that Ms. Rice was the one unmasking Donald Trump and his campaign before, during and after he won the presidency is that it doesn’t get any closer to Barack Obama himself. 

Richard Nixon wishes he could have done this too

NYT Remembers:  50 Years Ago Today Martin Luther King Denounced the Vietnam War in Exceptionally Harsh Terms

But NYT said MLK's claims were "facile" and "slander" as it defended LBJ

58,000 American boys were killed in Vietnam, many of whom were drafted and forced to fight and die.

Thanks to Ann Althouse for the story

Mises Institute: 3 Lessons Learned from Wisconsin's War on Foreign Butter

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

I love butter!

WSJ: Susan Rice Unmasked

Where are the civil libertarians when you need them?

Our source did confirm that Ms. Rice also examined dozens of other intelligence summaries that technically masked Trump official identities but were written in such a way as to make obvious who those officials were. This means that the masking was essentially meaningless. All this is highly unusual—and troubling. Unmasking does occur, but it is typically done by intelligence or law-enforcement officials engaged in antiterror or espionage investigations. Ms. Rice would have had no obvious need to unmask Trump campaign officials other than political curiosity.

We’re told by a source who has seen the unmasked documents that they included political information about the Trump transition team’s meetings and policy intentions. We are also told that none of these documents had anything to do with Russia or the FBI investigation into ties between Russia and the Trump campaign. While we don't know if Ms. Rice requested these dozens of reports, we are told that they were only distributed to a select group of recipients—conveniently including Ms. Rice.

Link below.  Click the X on the subscribe box or access via WSJ Twitter.

Nixon Probably Wishes He Could Have Done This

AIM: Watergate-style Wiretapping Confirmed

A very disturbing report has come out from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Fox News that Hillary Clinton and six top staffers kept their Top Secret and/or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) clearances after she left her Secretary of State position in 2013.  And they also kept their physical access to TS/SCI facilities and databases, which required those TS/SCI clearances, possibly up through the 2016 election and beyond.

***

This raises the ominous possibility that the Obama administration deliberately spread raw wiretap intercepts of Donald Trump phone calls and communications throughout the government in Obama’s twilight days so that Hillary’s people could do the leaking of the intercepts, thus giving Obama officials “plausible deniability.” The Obama people could deny that “they” leaked anything, if it was Hillary people with illegal and potentially criminal SCIF access who may have done the leaking.

Because Hitler

Lincoln Dreams About Being Assassinated

On this night in 1865, Abraham Lincoln dreamt of “the subdued sobs of mourners” and a corpse lying on a catafalque in the White House East Room.  In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard, “Who is dead in the White House?” to which the soldier replied, “the President . . . he was killed by an assassin.” Lincoln woke up at that point.  On April 11, he told Lamon that the dream had “strangely annoyed” him ever since. Ten days after having the dream, Lincoln was shot in the head and killed by John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theater.

MLK Assassinated 4/4/68

On this day in 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot in the head and killed while standing on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.  Just the day before King had given his last sermon saying, “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop . . . And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.”  Two months later Bobby Kennedy would be shot in the head and killed while campaigning for president in Los Angeles.

Elizabeth Warren’s Female Staffers Made 71% of Male Staffers’ Salaries in 2016

Oh well

Susan Rice Ordered Spy Agencies To Produce ‘Detailed Spreadsheets’ Involving Trump

Former President Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice ordered U.S. spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls involving Donald Trump and his aides when he was running for president, according to former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova.

“What was produced by the intelligence community at the request of Ms. Rice were detailed spreadsheets of intercepted phone calls with unmasked Trump associates in perfectly legal conversations with individuals,” diGenova told The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group Monday.

“The overheard conversations involved no illegal activity by anybody of the Trump associates, or anyone they were speaking with,” diGenova said. “In short, the only apparent illegal activity was the unmasking of the people in the calls.”

Then again, Benghazi was caused by a video

Matt Taibbi/Rolling Stone: 

Putin Derangement Syndrome Arrives

Whatever the truth about Trump and Russia, the speculation surrounding it has become a dangerous case of mass hysteria

"If the party's leaders really believe that Russian intervention is anywhere in the top 100 list of reasons why some 155 million eligible voters (out of 231 million) chose not to pull a lever for Hillary Clinton last year, they're farther along down the Purity of Essence nut-hole than Mark Warner."

Taibbi nails it again

Did Obama's National Security Adviser Unmask Trump's National Security Adviser?

Is this the biggest political scandal of our lifetime?

If so, what did Obama know and when did he know it?

"One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration,” Mr. Lake reported."

Eli Lake reports in Bloomberg

Why the Asian century may not arrive in our lifetime

From the economist who in 1981 called the greatest bond rally of our lifetime (which continues some 36 years later)

By my second favorite economist

The Best Elvis Impersonator Ever

Don't Be Cruel

The NYT thinks Judge Gorsuch is a Neanderthal and that's a good thing

He might start the process of undoing the 1930's era SCOTUS New Deal decisions that led to our federal government Leviathan

I've been waiting for this since law school

From the man who reported the unmasking of Gen. Flynn 

WaPo’s Ignatius: Trump’s Wiretapping Claim Has Morphed Into Legitimate Discussion About Surveillance

"What’s happened this month is that what initially seemed a preposterous argument by Donald Trump that he had been wiretapped by President Obama illegally has morphed into an argument about privacy, about proper masking techniques, a very technical legal issue, and it’s now accepted I think as part of the mainstream set of issues that are going to be debated by the two intelligence committees. From Trump’s standpoint that’s a success.”

Will wonders never cease?