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October 2017

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Math is Racist and Perpetuates White Privilege, Professor Says Algebra + Geometry + Pi = White Supremacy

By on October 26th, 2017

Forget everything you’ve ever learned about math, because you’ve been taught a racist system that has perpetuated white supremacy for millennia.

According to University of Illinois Professor Rochelle Gutierrez, math is political and very problematic because of white privilege:

“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White.”

“Curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans,” the professor says.

Gutierrez argues that too much emphasis is placed on math in our economy and that too many white professors teach the subject and receive the majority of grants, above “social studies or English” professors. She defines that as “unearned privilege.”

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asks:

“If one is not viewed as mathematical, there will always be a sense of inferiority that can be summoned… [minorities] have experienced microaggressions from participating in math classrooms… [and are] judged by whether they can reason abstractly.”

“Things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively,” Professor Gutierrez said objectively.

Her teaching philosophy centers around the Spanish phrase, political conocimiento, which means, “political knowledge for teaching.” By employing that, two plus two doesn’t have to mean four anymore. It can mean whatever you want it to be, as long as it’s not offensive to others.

Class doomed dismissed.

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A UK Police Department Propagandizes for Islam When crime climbs beyond control, don’t fight it – whitewash it! October 26, 2017 Bruce Bawer

By on October 26th, 2017

Lincolnshire is a largely rural, even isolated county at the far eastern end of the British Midlands. It is heavily Conservative and voted “Leave” in last year’s EU referendum by a margin of almost two to one. Its largest city, Lincoln, has a population of 120, 000, roughly equivalent to that of Fargo and less than half that of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Yet even in this quiet corner of the U.K., Islam is a headline story. After Drummer Lee Rigby was butchered by terrorists on a busy London street in May 2013, a Lincolnshire man was arrested and another was given a warning by county police. For aiding or supporting the killers? No. For mentioning online that the killers were Muslims. A summer 2014 entry on the blog of a prominent British Muslim records her presence at an Islamic Society of Britain-sponsored festival, “Living Islam,” at which “Lincolnshire Police had a tent and were face painting kids.” And in 2015, Lincolnshire Police warned the families of British soldiers to “stop sharing their personal details online” after one soldier’s wife received a death threat from a Muslim. Did the police make any effort to track down the source of the threat? If so, I can find no record of it online.

Now the Lincolnshire Police have produced a thirteen-minute video as part of “Hate Crime Awareness week.” It is directed at the county’s children, which presumably means that copies will be, or have been, distributed to schools so that teachers can screen it for their pupils and lead discussions afterwards.

Unsurprisingly, the video – described as the “brainchild” of constable Glenn Palmer – is pure propaganda. At the beginning, we see the following words onscreen: “British Muslims. How are they portrayed? Terrorists? Jihadis? Islamic State? Maybe the following people will give you a different perspective.” We’re then introduced to a series of people who have obviously been selected to represent the very best of the British Muslim community: a soldier, a police officer, a doctor, a Member of Parliament, the head of Bradford’s Muslim Women’s Council, and (not least) one Asim Hafiz, OBE, the first imam to serve as a Muslim chaplain in the British Armed Forces.

It’s the usual drill: terrorists, we’re told, “do not represent the views of normal Muslims.” The doctor (a woman in hijab) asserts that it was the compassionate principles of Islam that motivated her to be a doctor. And of course somebody reminds us that “we are stronger together.”

The Muslim who probably gets the most screen time is a leader of a Muslim aid organization called Al Imdaad. We hear a great deal from this fellow about how much good his group does. What he doesn’t mention is something Robert Spencer pointed out the other day in response to this video: Al Imdaad, based in South Africa, has Hamas fingerprints all over it. As Samuel Westrop reported three years ago, an Al Imdaad trustee named Qari Ziyaad Patel “has written and sung a nasheed [Islamic song] in praise of the Taliban.” In 2012-13, wrote Westrop, “Al-Imdaad’s British branch raised over £400,000 for the IHH, a Turkish charity widely accused of funding terrorism and that publicly supports Hamas. Al-Imdaad UK has also given over £50,000 (over $80,000) to the Zamzam Foundation, a Somali charity run by the Saudi-funded Somali Muslim Brotherhood.”

The Lincolnshire Police video doesn’t mention any of that, naturally. In its pretty, sanitized portrait of British Islam, there are no terrorists, no friends of terrorists, no supporters of terrorists, nobody who ever so much s met a terrorist. These Muslims are all do-gooders. They would all have us believe that they love Britain with all their hearts and that they thoroughly condemn acts of terror committed in the name of their religion.

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How Obama Used Hillary’s Dossier to Spy on Trump The conspiracy that led from the Hillary campaign to eavesdropping on Trump officials. Daniel Greenfield

By on October 26th, 2017

How do you legally spy on your political opponents?

At some point in time that question was asked in the White House, at the DNC or in the hotel suites where Hillary and her staff were staying during her speaking tours. It wasn’t exactly asked that way.

But it was asked. And now we know more of the answer.

What Hillary and Obama did wasn’t Watergate. That was amateur hour. Its sophistication is a tribute to the left’s deep knowledge and control of the workings of Washington, D.C. The men and women who planned this and carried it out understood not only government, but had an intimate familiarity with the loopholes in the laws and the networks of contacts that could realize their highly illegal plans.

The eavesdropping on Trump officials carried the ‘fingerprints’ of an administration that bypassed Congress to fund left-wing groups by blackmailing banks into huge settlements paid out to political allies in a billion dollar slush fund and sent pallets of foreign currency to Iran on unmarked planes. A complete lack of ethical norms was combined with the careful use of legal loopholes to protect the actions of the perpetrators even while they were engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

The revolutionary cell is embedded into left-wing organizing. These cells combined into networks across government, the media and the non-profit sector to pursue a collective agenda. The latest revelations about the Trump dossier give us greater insight into how Obama and Hillary’s people conspired to legally eavesdrop on political opponents by breaking up that eavesdropping into a series of legal actions carried out across different cells.

The road that led to Susan Rice and Samantha Power ‘unmasking’ Trump officials began with the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funding a dossier pushing Trump-Russia conspiracies. The dossier was sourced through Fusion GPS which is notorious for handfeeding material to reporters.

The Clinton campaign was seeing to it that whatever Fusion GPS produced would make its way into media stories without having Hillary’s fingerprints on it. Indeed the only reason we learned that Hillary and the DNC were ultimately behind the dossier was a congressional subpoena that risked exposing other Fusion GPS clients.

But the second reason was far more devious and devastating.

Fusion GPS’ man for the job was Christopher Steele. The former British intelligence figure had connections with FBI people. Hillary Clinton wasn’t just doing “opposition research” as her former press secretary has claimed. The best way to do opposition research in an American election doesn’t involve hiring a Brit in London with contacts in Russian intelligence and the FBI.

That is however the best way to independently produce information that can be injected into an intelligence investigation. (It’s also, perhaps not coincidentally, a great way for the Russians to inject their own material into a presidential election without getting their fingerprints on it.)

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EDUCATION, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tony Thomas The School of Pro-Islamic Studies

By on October 26th, 2017

Created in academia’s Left bubble, a Deakin University study of Muslims in the West makes 18 references to “Islamophobia”. Phobias are unreal fears; fear of Muslim terror is perfectly rational, given thirty Islamic attacks killed 157 people in the last week of June alone.

Just about every Australian university now has its Islamic studies centre, relentlessly spreading the word that Muslims are the nicest people around.[1] If a minority of them aren’t so nice (suicide blasts, beheadings) it’s of course the West’s fault for being mean to Muslims historically or in failing to throw enough welfare at Muslim arrivals. Griffith University even sports a centre educating journalists on how to do Islam-friendly reporting of gory Allahu-Akbar events.[2] Sydney University’s law school has a course, “Muslim Minorities and the Law”, using a textbook authored by the lecturers and calling for elements of sharia law to be recognised in the mainstream legal system—including polygamy and a lower age of consent.

Victoria’s Deakin University is another case in point. On June 22 it put out a 140-page study, Islamic Religiosity and Challenge of Political Engagement and National Belonging in Multicultural Western Cities. As heading of the press release explained, “Muslim faith not at odds with Western beliefs, Deakin study shows”. [3] It elaborated:

Public debate that paints a negative picture of Muslims and Islamic religiosity is at odds with the peace-driven lens through which much of [my emphasis] the Muslim communities view their faith … The findings challenge the dominant public commentary that portrays Islamic beliefs as a potential security problem at odds with Western norms of democracy, secularism, liberty and individual rights.

Those hundreds of bollards now protecting Melbourne and Sydney pedestrian-ways must be to thwart homicidal Buddhists.

The study found that Islamism wasn’t at odds with “Western norms of democracy, secularism, liberty and individual rights”. The study leader, Professor Fethi Mansouri, who also holds the UNESCO Chair on Cultural Diversity and Social Justice, wants his study to promote “solidarity and understanding not fear and loathing”.

His team set out to discover if Muslims’ warmth towards their host community was enhanced by their public practice of Muslim faith rituals. The surveys covered “a broad cross-section of practising Muslims in the West”, namely in Melbourne, Detroit, Lyon, Grenoble and, to a minor extent, Paris.

“Muslims in the West” is a bit of a stretch. The study involved only 384 Muslims in a three-country survey and interviews, including 237 who took a questionnaire online or face-to-face. When the US Pew Research Group surveyed global Muslim opinion between 2008 and 2012, it did 38,000 face-to-face interviews in eighty languages.

Mansouri says Muslims in the West want to be “good citizens and be just, open and caring people”, demonstrating a need to “reshape public discourse and policy attitudes towards Muslim communities”. His study “enables a better understanding between the West and Islam that could alleviate tensions and prevent outbreaks of violence by Muslim youth who feel disenfranchised by a dominant majority culture”. But why don’t alienated Hindu and Aboriginal youth also go on murderous rampages?

Other jarring notes in the Mansouri symphony include:

# Those coming to Australia from a Muslim-majority nation “often produced one of three responses: assimilation, incorporation or extremism”. Mansouri doesn’t define what he means by “extremism”—conceivably just intense religiosity—but the term is now the official euphemism for violent Islamism.

# “Official discourses predominantly emphasise dominant images of radicalisation among youth that places all young Muslims under scrutiny. This has the effect of producing anger and outrage, which are expressed in different ways in the cities that were the focus of this project.”

# 8 to 10 per cent of the Muslim respondents in Melbourne, Detroit and three French cities said they followed sharia exclusively rather than national legal codes. Some respondents conceded that their sharia observances involved practices “often thought to be incompatible with domestic laws”. But really, some Melbourne Muslims said, such sharia codes were essential in “promoting ethical behaviour as well as virtuous and participatory citizenship”.

The study was silent on which aspects of sharia don’t fit Western laws. At the mildest end, I could nominate female subservience and polygamy. The least Western aspects of sharia and its prescribed punishments might include honour killings, hand-loppings and stonings of rape victims.[4]

The Deakin study raises questions about its methodology. First, for the five cities, the team mustered under 100 questionnaire replies each in Melbourne and France, and forty-eight in Detroit. These included online responses, which are generally considered lower-grade material.

Second, the team did four focus groups in Melbourne of half a dozen clients each. These people were selected for Deakin by Muslim organisations.[5] In Grenoble they did one focus group of six clients and in Detroit, none.

Third, in the five cities, the team did a total of 115 interviews, or about thirty to fifty per country. The authors can at best only describe the interviews as “semi-structured” and claim they provide “rich qualitative data” (no detail on interview questions was appendixed). As icing on the cake, the team noted “ethnographic” inputs, namely “participant observation, visual methodologies” and “photo-elicitation techniques”, whatever that means.

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The Russia Dossier Story: A Perfect Storm of Clinton Deception, Media Irresponsibility, and Democratic Moral Blindness A bombshell Washington Post story reveals Hillary’s campaign and the DNC were behind the dossier, after all. By David French

By on October 26th, 2017

Remember that infamous Russian “dossier,” the unverified document that BuzzFeed unceremoniously dumped into the public square earlier this year? You might recall it as making a series of incredibly salacious and completely unproven accusations against the sitting president of the United States. Well, it turns out that it was a piece of partisan opposition research, bought and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, both of which then denied having anything to do with it after the fact.

Last night the Washington Post reported that the Clinton campaign and the DNC used a lawyer named Marc Elias to retain the oppo-research firm Fusion GPS to conduct research on the Trump campaign (the firm had previously worked on behalf of a still-unidentified Republican to investigate Trump). Fusion GPS then hired a former intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, who conducted an investigation and authored the dossier. According to the Post, the Clinton campaign and the DNC used the law firm to pay Fusion GPS right until the end of October 2016.

As my colleague Andrew McCarthy notes, it’s a clever arrangement. The use of the law firm adds a layer of deniability, and when controversy arises, Fusion GPS is able to appeal to attorney-client privilege to shield itself from scrutiny.

It would be easy, at this point, to start to wander down the rabbit hole, to wonder how much of the so-called “Russia controversy” is based on the Clinton campaign’s opposition research, but let’s not speculate. The truth will emerge. Instead, let’s do something else: Let’s consider how the Russian-dossier story has thus far represented a perfect storm of classic Clintonism, media irresponsibility, and Democratic moral blindness.

First, the Clintonism. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman responded to the Post story with a perfect tweet:

Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year https://t.co/vXKRV1wRJc
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) October 24, 2017

“Sanctimonious lying” is Clintonworld’s M.O. From Bill to Hillary to key members of her team, they lie constantly, repetitively, and with style, and the lies often conceal no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle politics designed to win races and destroy political opponents.

The lies here are important. It’s one thing to review a dossier compiled by a “former intelligence agent” and consider its contents as the product of an objective process. It’s another thing entirely to review that same work as the direct product of an opposing campaign’s opposition research. The goal of an opposition researcher is to collect everything and share everything with the client. A proper intelligence analysis, however, involves separating truth from fiction and provable claims from unverifiable allegations.

Those who pitched the Russian dossier treated it not as opposition research but rather as a form of intelligence report. It had distinctive formatting. It used terms of art. It looked like a government document. How many people did it fool?

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Shouldn’t we teach math based solely on the standard of what is important for students to learn in order to succeed? By Katherine Timpf —

By on October 26th, 2017

A math-education professor at the University of Illinois wrote about some of the more racist aspects of math in a new anthology for teachers, arguing that “mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.”

“Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Rochelle Gutierrez wrote, according to an article in Campus Reform.

Confused? Think that math is just math? Well, you’re wrong; math might as well be called “white math,” because as Gutierrez explained, “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.”

As further evidence of her argument, Gutierrez added that more white than nonwhite people are math professors and that math professors often benefit from “unearned privilege” — getting more grants and more respect than other professors — just because they are math professors and not professors in another academic field.

“Are we really that smart just because we do mathematics?” she asked.

Now, whenever I see stories like this, I just have to ask one question: What, exactly is Gutierrez proposing that we do? Because other than her statement that “things cannot be known objectively; they must be known subjectively” — apparently, a suggestion that additional focus, respect, and grants should be given to nonmathematical fields — I’m not really seeing one.

This is particularly true when it comes to her statement that math curricula “emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi” makes math seem too Greek and European. To me, it seems like the decision about what to teach in mathematics should be based solely on the standard of what will be most important for students to learn in order to succeed.

There’s one thing about Gutierrez’s work, however, that I can totally get down with: the idea that math-y type people shouldn’t automatically be seen as being smarter than non-math-y type people. After all, I was an English major; I still add and subtract using my fingers, but that doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t think I’m a genius.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Islamic State and the Limitations of Cruelty The fate of ISIS reminds us that those who pose as superhuman savages often cannot stand up to payback by their outraged victims. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on October 26th, 2017

The Islamic State just lost its capital at Raqqa, and with it the last of the terrorist group’s fantasies of establishing a Middle East caliphate.

In recent years, ISIS has horrified global audiences with video clips of unspeakable atrocities. What sort of humans could behead, incinerate, drown, torture, and blow up innocent civilians, mock and record such horror, and then narrate their macabre videos for a world audience?

How could such pre-modern psychopaths ever be defeated, given that in a matter of months ISIS had managed to overrun vast swathes of Iraq and Syria?

The zealotry of the Islamic State in celebrating the unthinkable added to its cult of invincibility. Young would-be jihadists from the Western world flocked to the group’s Middle East compounds, eager to engage in viciousness as if it were the latest video game.

Dejected Middle Eastern armies seemed to have no answer for the medieval violence of ISIS. Impotent Western leaders either ignored or denied the group’s homicidal appeal. Indeed, in 2014, pessimistic analysts were predicting that ISIS might soon carve out enough oil-rich parts of Iraq and Syria to spread its barbarism throughout region.

But recently, the entire Islamic State project began going up in smoke almost as abruptly as it was born. It turned out that squadrons of American bombers were not impressed by ISIS threats and bombed to smithereens its command centers and headquarters.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis relaxed the rules of U.S. engagement and made it a veritable open season on Islamic State jihadists, while American forces trained entire new cadres of anti-ISIS fighters. Specialized drones and GPS-guided Western munitions made it almost impossible for ISIS leaders to escape constant attack.

Their past horrors had earned Islamic State jihadists only ill will. Tens of thousands of Iraqi and Syrian victims volunteered to fight ISIS with a ferocity that they had rarely exhibited in the past.

The net result is now mass ISIS surrenders. Half-starved jihadists in rags and in tears beg their captors for forgiveness — and not to show them the same savagery that had so often fueled ISIS slaughtering.

The fate of ISIS reminds us that throughout history those who posed as superhuman savages, without any limitations to their cruelty, were often bullies who could not stand up to the determined payback of their finally aroused and outraged victims.

After 9/11, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden frightened Westerners with his tough talk about the “strong horse” of radical Islam, for whose brutality and cruelty a supposedly weak and decadent West had no antidote. But after years of the U.S. and its allies whittling away al-Qaeda from Afghanistan to Iraq, and bombing its ringleaders wherever they appeared, bin Laden was killed in a dingy Pakistan compound.

In the early 1940s, the most feared killers in the world were Nazi kingpin Heinrich Himmler’s SS elite. The SS claimed they were the new racial supermen, overseeing extermination camps and spearheading the German army by executing prisoners and civilians alike.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

We Need an Investigation of the Entire Justice Department Now By Roger L Simon

By on October 26th, 2017

Bravo, Charles Grassley! The Iowa senator has turned into something of an aging Mr. Smith taking on corruption in the Obama administration (and its Justice Department) and calling for a special investigator for the metastasizing Uranium One Scandal. But is it enough?

As has been reported, this 2010 deal was made despite a hitherto unknown FBI investigation that exposed bribery, kickbacks, etc. on the part of the Russian company involved. The pact resulted in 20% of U.S. uranium in Putin’s hands (some of whic, in lethal yellow cake form, has already disappeared into the ether) and millions of dollars in the Clinton Foundation’s coffers, basically at the same time.

Or should we now call this the Podesta, Podesta & Manafort Scandal, because an ongoing and related report on Tucker Carlson’s cable show is unmasking a series of connections that make the most paranoid conspiracy theorist seem rational?

A thus-far-reliable source who used to be involved with Clinton allies John and Tony Podesta told Tucker Carlson that press reports appearing to implicate President Trump in Russian collusion are exaggerated.

The source, who Carlson said he would not yet name, said he worked for the brothers’ Podesta Group and was privy to some information from Robert Mueller’s special investigation.

While media reports describe former “Black, Manafort & Stone” principal Paul Manafort as Trump’s main tie to the investigation, the source said it is Manafort’s role as a liaison between Russia and the Podesta Group that is drawing the scrutiny….

Manafort was, at the time, representing Russian business and political interests during the Obama era.

The source said the Podesta Group was in regular contact with Manafort while Hillary Clinton was America’s chief diplomat….

According to Carlson, “Manafort was clear that Russia wanted to cultivate ties to Hillary” because she appeared to be the presumptive 45th president.

In other words, as the French say, it’s the world upside down. Russia? Trump? Oh, sorry, no, it’s the Brothers Podesta and, through them, Hillary. Meanwhile, over at the also related (phony) Trump Dossier Scandal:

In the midst of a court case that threatened to reveal the dossier’s funding, it emerged Tuesday night that political consulting firm Fusion GPS was retained last year by Marc E. Elias, an attorney representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. The firm then hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele to write the dossier that contained unverified and lurid allegations about Trump and his team’s ties to Moscow.

In the latest news, it appears Elias’ firm was being used as a cut-out to avoid campaign disclosure laws in the promulgation of Fusion’s garbage. Possible criminal liability looms. It’s “unclear” whether Mrs. Clinton herself knew about this utterly disgusting behavior in her name, though loyalist Brian Fallon hinted as much on cable news Wednesday.

More disturbingly, indications are that the FBI itself relied on this execrable pack of nauseating lies to jump-start the Trump-Russia collusion investigation. They may even have made additional payments to Fusion GPS themselves. [bold decidedly mine]

Holy Toledo! Has the FBI turned into CNN? Or are they just dumber than the proverbial stones?

Speaking of which, we also have the unanswered questions about Deborah Wasserman Schultz and her Pakistani computer expert who had access to the data of dozens of congressional Democrats, not to mention the unsolved mystery of the murder of Seth Rich and the hacking of the DNC server. The FBI and the DOJ have told us next to nothing about either. In general, we learn more from Julian Assange, like him or not. CONTINUE AT SITE

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

The New Terrorist-Industrial Complex By E. Jeffrey Ludwig

By on October 26th, 2017

The administration of Pres. Donald Trump is considering whether to disallow the sale of Boeing passenger planes to Iran. This hideous addendum to the horrendous P5+1 deal with Iran, where the U.S. was the most important signatory, was another one of Pres. Barack Obama’s expressions of “goodwill” to the murderous, anti-American regime of crackpot ayatollahs. Jonathan S. Tobin, writing at the time of the transaction with Boeing, tells us, “Not only has Boeing gotten into bed with terrorists, the same can be said of those who are counting on all the new business ties changing the nature of a terrorist regime.”

Presumably, having a big business deal with a terrorist nation (Iran is still on the U.S. State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism) does not, per the American left, make us complicit with terrorism; rather, it is a way of ameliorating “tensions” and “strains.” Nonetheless, the American left is still fond of quoting Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address caution that the U.S. constitutional republic faces threats from the “military-industrial complex.” In light of this precedent, perhaps we may consider the “Boeing exception” as ushering in a new age: that of the terrorist-industrial complex.

This shift, whereby global business interests, the government of the United States, and our P+5 partners all collude with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, is ominous for Europe and the U.S., as well as for the stability of the Middle East. And the implications extend even farther than that. This deal portends a great shift in the moral-ethical climate of the entire planet. The entire power elite of the world is hereby going beyond mere greedy excess or dealing first and foremost in terms of expediency.

The deal with Boeing is the essence of the yetzer hara (bad tendency of mind or spirit) that Solomon Schechter wrote about in a couple of wonderful books. The deal and its “exceptions” reek of the moral poison that comes from violating the Commandments “Thou shall not bear false witness” and “Thou shall not covet.” It also reflects a failure to follow a New Testament teaching wholly consistent with the Hebrew Scriptures: “You cannot love both God and mammon.” Please be forewarned: God will not be mocked.

Who says humans are basically good? It is a fiction. Were we good, there would be no need for the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). There would be no need for a Christ. The prophets and the forefathers would have no relevance. There would be no need for prayer, study, tzedakah (charity), mitzvoth (good deeds), blessings. There would be no need for repentance (tshuva). There would be no need for grace and mercy. There would be no need for atonement, for the Cross. Anything honorable and worthy is honorable and worthy only in contrast with what is not honorable and worthy. If expedience were the standard, then there would be no room for the moral, honorable, or worthy.

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When Scandals Collide By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on October 26th, 2017

As Rich noted last night, we have learned finally, courtesy of the Washington Post, that Fusion GPS, the research firm that produced the notorious “Trump Dossier,” was funded by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Of course, the Clinton campaign and the DNC always want layers of deniability and obfuscation – and let’s note that it has served them well – so they hire lawyers to do the icky stuff rather than doing it directly. Then, when the you-know-what hits the fan, outfits like Fusion GPS try to claim that they can’t share critical information with investigators because of (among other things) attorney-client confidentiality concerns.

Here, the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained the law firm of Perkins Coie; in turn, one of its partners, Marc E. Elias, retained Fusion GPS. We don’t know how much Fusion GPS was paid, but the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid $9.1 million to Perkins Coie during the 2016 campaign (i.e., between mid-2015 and late 2016).

A friend draws my attention to an intriguing coincidence.

In its capacity as attorney for the DNC, Perkins Coie – through another of its partners, Michael Sussman – is also the law firm that retained CrowdStrike, the cyber security outfit, upon learning in April 2016 that the DNC’s servers had been hacked.

Interesting: Despite the patent importance of the physical server system to the FBI and Intelligence-Community investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the Bureau never examined the DNC servers. Evidently, the DNC declined to cooperate to that degree, and the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue a subpoena to demand that the servers be turned over (just like the Obama Justice Department decided not to issue subpoenas to demand the surrender of critical physical evidence in the Clinton e-mails investigation).

Instead, the conclusion that Russia is responsible for the invasion of the DNC servers rests on the forensic analysis conducted by CrowdStrike. Rather than do its own investigation, the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s lawyers.

The most significant pressing question about the so-called Trump Dossier is whether it was used by the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to get a warrant from the FISA court to conduct national-security surveillance on people connected to the Trump campaign. As I have previously pointed out, this would not be as scandalous as it sounds if (a) the Justice Department had a good faith basis to believe the people the Bureau wanted to surveil were acting as agents of Russia, and (b) the FBI first corroborated whatever information it took from the dossier before presenting it to the FISA court.

But it certainly is interesting that we are once again, in a case involving alleged Russian espionage, reviewing a situation in which the FBI relied on a contractor retained by the DNC’s and the Clinton campaign’s lawyers at Perkins Coie.

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