BATTLESWARM BLOG: After The Memo: What Next? “I have a distinct sense that the worst of this abuse of power scandal hasn’t been uncovered yet.”

With the Clintons it never is, and this time they were abetted by the Obama Administration’s Chicagoland tactics.

MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN: Colts Linebacker Edwin Jackson Killed by Drunk Driver With Deportation Order.

SHOCKED, TOO: German Politicians ‘Alarmed’ at Scale of Anti-Christian Hate Attacks.

Maybe they ought to try not importing so many violence-prone Christian-haters.

CHANGE: Tillerson says U.S. still considering Venezuela oil sale restrictions.

I wouldn’t bother. Why provide Maduro another with another foreign scapegoat when Venezuelan oil production is already cratering (unexpectedly!) under socialism?

BRUCE BAWER: Taking on the MSM in Norway. “Challengers to the Leftist, state-funded media arise.”

THE CRAZY YEARS: Not just boy and girl; more teens identify as transgender.

GORDON CHANG: China Will ‘Pull the Trigger’ in the South China Sea.

“An antagonist who stumbles into the arena of combat is different from one who strides into the arena,” writes Holmes, the first holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. In this regard, Jim, whom I greatly admire and respect, is certainly correct.

China, however, is more than stumbling into the South China Sea. It is using its power to push out others, namely, the United States, which has no South China Sea sovereignty claims, and rival claimants. Beijing may want to “win without fighting” as Holmes suggests, but it cannot win without confronting.

Confrontation, unfortunately, is “inevitable,” as Yu Maochun of the U.S. Naval Academy points out. Beijing is trying to push out its borders and expand control of peripheral waters. “China’s geopolitical and geostrategic priority is to revise or change the existing international order that has been based upon a complex system of rules, laws, and customs that govern various global commons including the South China Sea,” he told The National Interest. “Revisionism brings unavoidable confrontation.”

Moreover, Anders Corr, also in comments to this publication, notes a crucial asymmetry.

“The key point is that China accepts the risk of escalation to a greater extent than does the U.S., because China uses confrontation to alter the status quo in its favor,” Corr, editor of the just-released Great Powers, Grand Strategies: The New Game in the South China Sea, writes.

I can’t think of a rising power in any era of world history which cemented its position without a war.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? On the dossier, did FBI have lower standards than the media?

UGH: Holocaust Denier Running in IL 3 GOP Primary Unopposed. “Arthur Jones says the murder of 6 million Jews is ‘the biggest blackest lie in history’.”

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Landmines left behind by the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign might soon start detonating—on Democrats.

Obama concealed his sharp-edged, Chicago-style machine politics under the rhetorical cover of progressivism. He was protected by a press corps that first enlisted in his administration and then fought to stop Donald Trump. But now that Obama is out of office, his ability to intimidate is much diminished. This past week, a 2005 picture of a beaming Obama next to a bright-eyed Louis Farrakhan surfaced, after having been held back for more than a decade at the behest of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who had been tried for corruption by Obama’s Justice Department after he refused to toe the party line about the “peace-loving” mullahs of Iran, has now seen the charges against him dropped. Z Street, a hawkish nonprofit supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, had been tied up with IRS matters since 2009; it has just been released from its legal chains. Democrats are holding to the line that the prophet of hope and change ran a pure administration, virtually free of scandal. But the memo is probably just the beginning; we’re likely to see many more revelations come out.

Obama isn’t directly mentioned in the memo. But he’s nonetheless implicated through his appointees’ apparent efforts to clear Hillary Clinton in her State Department email scandal while undermining her opponent, Trump, through the veneer of legality provided by FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Security Act) warrants, justified solely by the so-called Steele Dossier. The dossier was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee; it was created by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who despised Trump, and the “research” firm Fusion GPS. The FISA Court, supervised by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, was never told about the unverified dossier’s origins.

I had been assured by the highest authorities that the Obama Administration was amazingly scandal-free.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. SJWs Destroy Everything.

JONATHAN TURLEY: Comey takes page from Trump by turning to Twitter to attack enemies.

Many of us supported the appointment of a special counsel after Trump fired Comey in the midst of Comey’s Russian investigation. Soon after his departure, however, Comey began to take actions that seriously undermined his own position, and his value as a witness to special counsel Robert Mueller. Indeed, the special counsel would now be taking a considerable risk by calling Comey on the stand in any prosecution of the president, but Comey could well end up on the witness list for the defense.

In leaving the FBI, Comey improperly removed memos from the Russian investigation that he wrote concerning meetings with Trump. These memos were clearly FBI material, and some were deemed later to be classified. He had neither the authority to take the memos nor any review that confirmed that they were not classified. Comey then sent some of the memos to a friend to disclose the information to the media. Four of the seven memos that Comey removed are now believed to be classified. He reportedly gave four memos to his friend to leak to the media. Thus, at least one was likely classified.

It was a tragically ironic moment. This was the man who was tasked with finding leakers and became a leaker himself the minute it served his purposes. Moreover, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had called for Comey to be fired for his conduct during the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of private servers for official and classified information. Comey had denounced Clinton’s handling of such material as “extremely careless.” Now, he was sending official and possibly classified material to a friend with the specific purpose of leaking the contents to the media.

Read the whole thing.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Battle of the Memos, Constitutional Crises and Much, Much More. “We were told the release of the memo would spark a constitutional crisis. I agree: it is evident the Democrats and the administrative state are not interested in participating in the American checks and balances system.”

To say the least.

DAVID HARSANYI: FISA Abuse Memo Proves The Need For An Independent Investigation.

I’m not a fan of special investigators, as they’re often imbued with wide-ranging powers they don’t deserve, but there are a number of reasons both sides could support such a move. In the long run, a narrow, independent inquiry into the FBI and potential FISA abuse might even marginally de-politicize the fiasco, by either ferreting out abuse or clearing the FBI’s leadership. As it stands, there’s no way the institution can regain trust with about half the country.

Perhaps it’ll turn out that everything the FBI did was legal and by-the-book. Right now, though, to millions of Americans, it looks a lot like one political party paid for opposition research, then handed that unverified and often sensationalistic “evidence” to an allied administration, which then used it to attain a warrant so it could continue to spy on political opponents (knowing full well it would capture others in the campaign).

If you’re rich enough to cook up a “dossier” and powerful enough to know the right people, you too can have the government spy for you.

It’s good to be the King — or at least, the wannabe-Queen.

FLASHBACK: Chris Cillizza Called Trump ‘Bonkers’ For Saying Clinton And FBI Were Behind Dossier.

Cillizza chastised Trump and his cadre of followers in October of last year for suggesting and supporting the idea that Democrats and elements inside the FBI were involved in funding the dossier. He called them conspiracy theorists at the time.

“He is suggesting that a dossier prepared by a former member of British intelligence has not only been totally discredited … but that it might have been funded by some combination of Russia, the Democratic Party and, wait for it, the FBI!” Cillizza wrote in a missive at the time.

“You can love Donald Trump and still believe that the idea that the Russians, the Democrats and the FBI co-funded a dossier designed to discredit Trump’s 2016 campaign is totally bonkers,” said Cillizza, a former writer with The Washington Post who fashions himself a type of advocacy journalist.

He added: “But, there is no plausible scenario by which what Trump suggested this morning — a wide-scale conspiracy involving three separate actors across federal agencies and continents — actually happened.”

Well, Cillizza says a lot of things, almost always to boost Democrats and/or belittle Republicans.

WOW: With Cairo’s Approval, Israeli Planes Bombing ISIS Targets in Egypt.

I almost lead with “UNTHINKABLE” or “IMPOSSIBLE” except that it actually happened.

CIVIL RIGHTS IN ACTION: Pistol-Packing Passer-By Aids Utah Policeman Being Assaulted.

PROCUREMENT BLUES: US dropped ball on Navy railgun development—now China is picking it up.

For nearly a decade, the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) and various contractors worked to develop a railgun system for US ships. A prototype weapon was built by BAE Systems. Testing at the US Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Virginia was deemed so successful that the Navy was planning to conduct more testing of the gun at sea aboard a Spearhead-class Joint High Speed Vessel (JHSV). The program promised to deliver a gun that could fire projectiles at speeds over Mach 7 with a range exceeding 100 miles. The 23-pound hypervelocity projectile designed for the railgun flying at Mach 7 has 32 megajoules of energy—roughly equivalent to the energy required to accelerate an object weighing 1,000 kilograms (1.1 US tons) to 252 meters per second (566 miles an hour).

But the program has been largely shelved because of the Department of Defense’s ongoing budget problems and the loss of interest at DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office in funding further development. The continued “sequestration” of the DOD’s budget has forced the Navy and ONR to shift development focus away from the long-term goal of the railgun toward the more short-term goal of using the hypervelocity projectile (HPV) the railgun fires within more conventional US Navy gun systems.

China has clearly been watching the US program with interest, and the PLAN reportedly began working on its own electromagnetic gun system about five years ago, according to Dafeng Cao’s ex-PLAN officer source. Now the PLAN is preparing to take its tests to sea, making the 20-year old Haiyang Shan the first ship to ever be armed with a railgun.

If the Chinese beat us with our own orphaned technology it will be because Congress would rather grandstand than perform its primary duty to produce an annual budget.

TIT FOR TAT: Israel Begins Legalizing West Bank Outpost After Settler Killed There

The approval comes less than a month after Rabbi Raziel Shevach, the 35-year-old father of six children, was killed in a drive-by shooting at the outpost junction.

The proposal says the government plans to establish a legal settlement on privately owned Israeli land or state lands, the Times of Israel reported. It calls on the country’s defense minister to order the appropriate government bodies to study the legalities of making the outpost, also known as Havat Gilad, a legal settlement.

Prior to the vote, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision to change the status of the outpost would “facilitate orderly life there.” He said creating a new settlement would “for the murderers – exacting justice. To those who sanctify death, we will sanctify life. This is the essence of the government’s policy.”

Actions like this and taking Jerusalem off the negotiating table might — might — convince the Palestinian leadership that it’s time for honest peace negotiations.

REPORT: Russia Had Help with Election Tampering — from Facebook and Google.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: No, There’s No Racist Conspiracy Against Marvel’s Black Panther Movie.

IT’S ISN’T ALWAYS NICE TO MAKE TWITCHY: Activist Chelsea Handler just slammed the Democrats’ Obamacare vote HARD.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The NFL Is Losing Its Core Audience, a WSJ/NBC News Poll Finds “Just 51% of men aged 18 to 49 say they follow the NFL closely, down from 75% four years ago.”

The poll shows that fans are following the sport less closely, even in key demographics, such as young men, that historically propelled the league’s growth. At the same time, parents increasingly want their children to turn away from football amid growing worry about player safety and the league’s efforts to address it.

The drop in interest spans age groups and the political spectrum—painting the picture of a sport that isn’t just experiencing a momentary dip, but a battle against fundamental questions about football’s future that have been building for years.

At a time like this, the NFL should be doing everything it can think of to strengthen its appeal to core demographics. But that isn’t quite the tack Roger Goodell has taken.

TRUE CRIME: Saudi Arabia orders ‘urgent investigation’ and calls for prosecutions after two people are seen dancing in the street.

The authorities in Saudi Arabia have ordered the arrest of a couple filmed dancing in the street.

In the footage, a man and woman can be seen performing on the street pavement, while by-standers who are gathered around them film them on their phones.

The conservative desert kingdom has strict rules about gender segregation though moves have begun to liberalise laws, including allowing women to drive.

But the videos prompted the governor of Asir province, Prince Faisal bin Khaled, to order a investigation into the video that captured a couple dancing in a street in the city of Abha, in the south-west of the country,Okaz newspaper reported.

Two steps forward, one step back.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER ACRONYM: You Might Be Part of LGBTQQIAAACPPF2K Without Even Knowing It.