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.

.

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

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(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:

.

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

(more…)

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…)

The UniParty is sly, I would say professionally and expertly so, and before readers feel the need to point out the obvious – when it comes to legislation, yes, I am professionally cynical.

The reason is simple, having trained ourselves to see when the pea is never under the shell, the legislative conversations that really matter are always behind a Potemkin Village called K-Street.

You have to know the unwritten legislative rules of the UniParty as they have been evidenced for almost 15 years to understand the ruse.

♦ First, the reason a vote, any vote, is “announced”, and just doesn’t take place, is because it provides the controlled opposition time to frame their anti-(fill_in_the-blank) talking points.  This is by design.  When a legislative vote is “announced” it is a dog-whistle call out to the institutional lobbyists that the legislation will be rail-roaded and ultimately fail.

(more…)

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice has reversed her position and is now refusing to testify to a Senate Judiciary Sub-Committee investigating Russia’s interference with the 2016 election.   The key risk to Susan Rice is public discussion and discovery of her requests to unmask names within NSA intelligence and surveillance reports on political opponents.

Against revelations that pointed to Susan Rice as the epicenter of the political surveillance programs, her testimony was a risk to herself, the Obama administration and the entire democrat apparatus.  Her appearance at a Senate Committee where questions would sure to be raised was a significant risk.

The cover for Rice’s retreat from sunlight is brutally obvious.  Kathryn Ruemmler, Rice’s attorney delivers a letter to CNN so the media outlet can push a narrative that Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse -ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee- has told Rice her attendance would not be needed.

“Senator Whitehouse has informed us by letter that he did not agree to Chairman Graham’s invitation to Ambassador Rice, a significant departure from the bipartisan invitations extended to other witnesses,” Ruemmler wrote. “Under these circumstances, Ambassador Rice respectfully declines Senator Graham’s invitation to testify.”

(more…)

Thought Experiment:  Imagine the 2009/2010 Tea Party uprising with an allied President Trump in the White House.  That’s where we are going...

For the past week we’ve been outlining the ROOT ISSUE within the DC swamp: ♦Why congress isn’t providing Trump policy legislation; ♦what impact that is having; and ♦what appears to be surfacing as a solution.

The truthfulness behind any larger discussion is backed-up by research: ♦The history of DC lobbyists admitting they control congress; ♦who created this broken system, and why the larger media avoids discussion of it. [Although Rush Limbaugh did partially report]

When research is on point, and when you find yourself directly over the target, naturally occurring current events become almost eerily predictable.

Within Part II (“the current impact”) we shared:

(more…)

President Trump’s economic and foreign policy agenda is jaw-dropping in scale, scope and consequence.  There are multiple simultaneous aspects to each policy objective; they have been outlined for a long time even before the election victory in November ’16.

If you get too far into the weeds the larger picture can be lost.  CTH objective is to continue pointing focus toward the larger horizon, and then at specific inflection points to dive into the topic and explain how each moment is connected to the larger strategy.

Today is a big news day where action on multiple policy fronts becomes visible.  Here’s an interview with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin which notes some of the critical financial angles to economic policy.

An important reference here is the earlier understanding of how then ‘candidate Trump’ personally put a platform plank of a Modern 21st Century Glass-Stegall banking reform into his economic policy agenda, and why it is important.

.

Here’s the dive:

(more…)