Good grief.  NBC’s Chuck Toad spent two-thirds of his interview opportunity with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asking repeated questions about the preferred Democrat narrative known as the ‘Muh Russian conspiracy’.

However, Tillerson did have the opportunity to push back against Senator John McCain’s ridiculous attacks against Secretary T-Rex.   Anyone who watched the T-Rex talk to the State Department on May 3rd can fully understand the context of Tillerson’s outline of distinction between “U.S. policies” and “U.S. Values”.   If you haven’t watched or read the speech you should, SEE HERE.

Senator John McCain was furious that Secretary Tillerson would not accept the McCain/Powers “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine which mandates U.S. foreign policy as interventionist around the globe.  Senator McCain wrote an op-ed opposing Tillerson and demanding that U.S. policy must include creating more wars around the world.

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Here is Secretary Tillerson’s actual words in context, that Senator McCain finds so fundamentally abhorrent:

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President Trump drops another Mother Of All Bombs, this time in a twitter version directly targeted at a corrupted and politicized James Comey Dept. of Justice.

And what’s more stunning in the aftershock is the media’s incapacity to take the new Trump/Comey timeline information and add it to the existing Sally Yates timeline.

Then again, to do so would be to expose another level of FBI/DOJ politicization that remains hidden from public consumption.  Another political operative, Asst. Director of Counter Intelligence, Bill Priestap, who accompanied acting AG Sally Yates to the meeting with White House Counsel Don McGahn, is a Hillary Clinton campaign donor.

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On the heels of the historic meeting between China’s President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Trump in Mar-a-lago, Secretary Ross announced a jaw-dropping schedule for bilateral trade negotiations between the U.S. and China.

Part of that rapid schedule included a plan for a 100-day waypoint outline toward the larger trade issues surrounding the United States and China. Against the pace of historic trade agreements the 100-day schedule was almost unfathomable; yet today Secretary Ross announces the initial waypoints have been successful.

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The Department of Commerce provides the outline of the first-stage, the initial agreement, which includes China opening their market up to U.S. agricultural products including U.S. beef export as well as liquid natural gas, and further agreements on financial services. These are multi-billion market deals.

Here’s the Commerce Dept press release. I’ll try to break it down into understandable lingo at the bottom using the included reference points from the press release:

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All positions have some bearing on the average American; however, some confirmation votes are more directly tied to the well-being of ordinary people than others.  This confirmation will directly and specifically make the lives of middle-class workers, and ordinary American people, improve.

Thank you to those who contacted their Senator and applied the pressure.  There was a great deal of feedback received by the senate in the past 24 hours.  There are those within the swamp lobbying community who are beginning to understand that WE KNOW far more than they ever thought we know.  Change is a direct consequence of that reality.

In a strong showing of bi-partisan support for Trump’s ‘America First’ trade platform the nominee for U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, was confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 82-14.  The U.S. Trade Representative is a critical position ahead of renegotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.

Three Republicans voted NO: ♦Cory Gardner (Colorado), ♦John McCain (Arizona), and ♦Ben Sasse (Nebraska).

For the past 30 years Lighthizer has been a trade lawyer representing American steel companies in their efforts to fight dumping of foreign-made steel below costs and unfair steel subsidies from foreign governments. He has pledged to strengthen enforcement of existing trade deals and to find new legal tools to combat unfair trade practices.

Lighthizer has criticized some Republicans for being too pro-free trade. He told a Senate panel this year that the U.S. should have an “America first trade policy.”  “We can do better in negotiating our trade agreements and stronger in enforcing our trade laws,” he said.

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The economic lobbyist community known as The Big Club is represented most visibly by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Tom Donohue.

Via the Wall Street community, CoC President Donohue pours tens of millions of multinational corporate contributions into DC lobbying efforts to retain control over politicians and legislation that relates to U.S. trade and economic matters.   [FYI Donohue’s Chamber of Commerce lobbying group were the primary architects of the now dispatched TPP trade deal; they actually wrote the U.S. part of the construct.]

Tom Donohue funds a large number of politicians in DC in an effort to control the outcomes of legislation and policies that could become adverse to his multinational interests.  Two of those primary beneficiaries are John McCain and Ben Sasse.

As a consequence it doesn’t come as a surprise to see McCain and Sasse announce their intention to block the confirmation of U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer:

REUTERS – Republican U.S. Senators John McCain and Ben Sasse said on Wednesday they would vote against President Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, because of his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Unfortunately, your confirmation process has failed to reassure us that you understand the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) positive economic benefits to our respective States and the nation as a whole,” McCain and Sasse said in a letter to Lighthizer. (read more)

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and President Trump strongly support Lighthizer for U.S. Trade Rep.   The institutional control agents within K-Street, aka the economic lobbying group, do not.

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Everyone is so caught up with their discussion of President Trump around the firing of FBI Director James Comey that they are completely overlooking the most explosive scandal in the history of congress.

This scandal, if exposed, should remove, or at least censure: Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Richard Burr, Devin Nunes, Adam Schiff and Mark Warner.

The absence of their accountability shows the depth of corruption within Washington DC.

First, understand their job – Each of the aforementioned was/is part of the congressional intelligence oversight called the “Gang of Eight“. The Go8 are exclusively responsible for overseeing all intelligence community activity as it relates to intelligence gathering and corresponding investigations.

In short these eight elected representatives are in charge of all oversight of all U.S. intelligence operations and investigations.  As elected representatives, they represent one of the most important checks within the system of government overseeing non-elected officials. (more…)

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer appears on Lou Dobbs and gives the first set of explanatory points around the President’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey:

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Why is President Trump so confident in this decision? Oh, that’s easy:

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Last month President Trump took a great deal of criticism for calling Turkish President Erdogan and congratulating him on the narrow referendum victory. Many critics of Trump said he was congratulating a dictator, without also recognizing Turkey is a NATO member.

As long as Turkey is allowed to remain in NATO the entire member nation alliance will always be compromised by the self-serving Islamic interests of Erdogan.  The EU and the political left, demand President Trump recognize the value of NATO – and hypocritically denounce Trump for speaking to a NATO nation’s leader.  This is the mindset of the idiots in the EU and their defenders amid the political left.

Today, the Trump administration announces they are arming the Kurdish fighting forces in Northern Syria. President Erdogan hates the Kurds and considers them as adversaries and political opposition to his control over Turkey.

Within the dynamic you can see a multidimensional problem. The Kurds are fighting short-term against ISIS and Bashir Assad in Syria; however, in the larger Kurdish goal they are also attempting to establish their own independent state, Kurdistan.

Erdogan opposes Assad, but Erdogan more strongly opposes the Kurds and any Kurdistan formation efforts because it would destroy his goal of establishing the new Ottoman empire he dreams of leading. (more…)

[ Via White House ] President Donald J. Trump today announced his third wave of Federal judicial appointments. These appointments follow the successful nomination and confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States and the nomination of Judge Amul R. Thapar of Kentucky to serve as a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Specifically, the President today announced his nomination of these individuals to the following Federal judgeships.

♦ If confirmed, Amy Coney Barrett of Indiana will serve as a Circuit Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Amy Coney Barrett currently serves as the Diane and M.O. Miller II Research Professor of Law at the Notre Dame University Law School. Professor Barrett teaches and researches in the areas of federal courts, constitutional law, and statutory interpretation—publishing scholarship in leading legal journals, such as the Columbia, Virginia, and Texas Law Reviews. Before joining the Notre Dame faculty, Professor Barrett clerked for Associate Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court of the United States and for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Following her clerkships, as an associate at Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin in Washington, D.C., she litigated constitutional, criminal, and commercial cases in both trial and appellate courts. Professor Barrett has also served as a visiting associate professor and John M. Olin Fellow in Law at the George Washington University Law School, and as a visiting associate professor of law at the University of Virginia. Professor Barrett received her B.A. in English literature, magna cum laude, from Rhodes College, and her J.D., summa cum laude, from the Notre Dame University Law School, where she served as Executive Editor of the Notre Dame Law Review.

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Actually, seeing this outlined in Reuters is a very good sign of things to come.  The pending NAFTA trade renegotiation between the U.S. (Trump/Ross) and Canada (Trudeau) correctly viewed through the prism of Canadian politics.  This is exactly the correct perspective.

The larger liberal need is for Trudeau to pander to the constituencies of Quebec, even if it means economic disaster and crushing collapse for the entire country of Canada.  This reality is exactly the ideological zero-sum perspective of the liberal mind and worldview.

Complete economic disaster is what Prime Minister Trudeau will do to Canada if he chooses to continue positioning against the U.S. with President Donald J Trump.

VIA REUTERS – Canada escalated a trade dispute with United States by making threats Washington called inappropriate in part because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under pressure to secure support in a key region ahead of the country’s 2019 elections.

Washington last month slapped tariffs on timber imports, prompting Trudeau to say he was considering a ban on exports of U.S. coal through Pacific ports.

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