"The odds favor the possibility that Obama was the king of dirty tricks. Consider that Evelyn Farkas, a former Obama defense official whose portfolio included Russia, said in a March 2 interview that was little noticed until last week that she had urged the Obama White House and congressional Dems to gather information about Trump and protect it from the new administration.

"'If they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff's dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence,' Farkas told MSNBC. 'So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more.'

"She added: 'We have good intelligence on Russia ... That's why you have the leaking. People are worried.'

"Farkas later tried to walk back her claims, but too late. Her next speech should be to a federal grand jury."

"The late terrorist Yasser Arafat (1929-2004) was famous for saying one thing to American media and the opposite to Palestinian audiences. To U.S. presidents and chief diplomatic correspondents he would profess his desire for peace and for a two-state solution, while to Arabs and Muslims he would impugn Jews, hint at Israel's abolition, and incite and pay for anti-Semitic violence. His problem was that, like most liars, he was eventually found out. President George W. Bush saw through Arafat's skein of deception and disengaged the self-defeating 'peace process' that he had manipulated to his advantage for decades. By the time of Arafat's death, it was clear that any practical improvement in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship would have to bypass the Palestinian autocrat. He just couldn't be trusted.

"It is by this standard that I hereby judge Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to be the Yasser Arafat of the Democratic Party. Schumer is so practiced at saying one thing to Democratic elites and another to the Democratic base that it is easy to fall for his charade. But neither Arafat nor Schumer should fool you. Schumer is a hypocrite and a liar and out for no one but himself. And it is for these reasons that his threat to filibuster Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch should be viewed with incredulity. ...

"Conniving, spineless, duplicitous, misleading, double-crossing -- Chuck Schumer is a fitting exemplar for the modern Democratic Party. All he needs is the keffiyeh."

Read entire article here

"Although Trump is the least ideological president in memory, the love-hate reaction he engenders reinforces the polarization Barack Obama left behind. While votes from members of Dem-leaning unions helped Trump win key states, pols like Schumer have concluded that their hard-left donors and activists want confrontation, not cooperation.

"That means no bipartisanship in the short run, and a likely filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Trump's plan to tackle tax reform also will be a single-party effort, with Dems already cranking out their usual talking points about giveaways to the rich and corporate welfare.

"The forecast, then, is for more dreariness bordering on hopelessness -- with one potential bright spot. The only way forward is for Trump to unite the Republican Party.

"If he can do that, Dems will be forced to engage in substantive negotiations because the alternative is exclusive Republican rule on every piece of legislation. In effect, GOP unity could force Dems to the table for at least a semblance of bipartisanship that would be good for the country."

"The Obama administration encouraged sanctuary cities, and President Trump is right to push in the opposite direction. The more than 300 sanctuary jurisdictions across the country release thousands of illegal immigrants subject to deportation back onto the streets every year, at a risk to public safety. Recall that the illegal immigrant who killed Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco in 2015 had seven felony convictions and had been deported five times previously; at the time of the killing, he was facing a sixth deportation order. Even as Democrats at all levels of government declare their support for deporting known criminals, sanctuary-city policies keep those individuals out of the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ...

"The Justice Department plans to award about $4.1 billion in grants in the current fiscal year, according to Sessions. In places like New York City and Los Angeles, some of that grant money goes toward valuable services, so Democrats are balking at what one California state senator is calling 'blackmail.' But there'€™s no blackmail here. Every jurisdiction can benefit from the Justice Department's largesse, provided they do what they should have been doing all along: enforce the law."

"The real scandal is probably not going to be Trump's contacts with Russians. More likely, it will be the rogue work of a politically driven group of intelligence officers, embedded within the bureaucracy, who, either in freelancing mode, or in Henry II-Thomas Becket fashion ('Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?') with Obama-administration officials, began monitoring Team Trump -- either directly or more likely through the excuse of inadvertently chancing upon conversations while monitoring supposedly suspicious foreign communications."

Read entire article here

"There are a lot of people who want to conveniently lay the blame for this stunning failure on recalcitrant members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. If only these conservative hardliners were willing to give way, we'd be on the road to repeal, defenders of leadership would like to have us believe. This is convenient, both because there are always people in Washington eager to take aim at conservative purists, and also because it has the makings of a great ironic hot take for journalists: 'How conservatives saved Obamacare.' ...

"In this case, the hardliners were playing a productive role by pointing out the real policy consequences of the piecemeal approach being pursued by the House leadership. Though we'll never know for sure how the numbers might have looked if a vote had taken place, it's clear that many centrist members of the Republican caucus were also prepared to vote this bill down. House conservatives, if they could be blamed for anything, it's for having the audacity to urge leadership to actually honor seven years of pledges to voters to repeal Obamacare. If anybody was moving the goal posts, it wasn't Freedom Caucusers, it was those who were trying to sell a bill that kept much of Obamacare's regulatory architecture in place as a free market repeal and replace plan."

"Republican congressional investigators expect a potential 'smoking gun' establishing that the Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team, and possibly the president-elect himself, will be produced to the House Intelligence Committee this week, a source told Fox News. ...

"The intelligence is said to leave no doubt the Obama administration, in its closing days, was using the cover of legitimate surveillance on foreign targets to spy on President-elect Trump, according to sources. ...

"The FBI hasn't been responsive to the House Intelligence Committee's request for documents, but the National Security Agency is expected to produce documents to the committee by Friday. The NSA document production is expected to produce more intelligence than Nunes has so far seen or described -- including what one source described as a potential 'smoking gun' establishing the spying.

"Some time will be needed to properly assess the materials, with the likely result being that congressional investigators and attorneys won't have a solid handle on the contents of the documents -- and their implications -- until next week."

"Intelligence agencies cannot share details about American citizens with no foreign intelligence value. If [House Intelligence Committee Chairman David] Nunes is right, how were these procedures not broken? If a Bush-era intelligence agency had engaged in 'incidental collection' of Barack Obama's phone calls in 2008, and then disseminated that information, the Earth would have stopped in its orbit. (Sen. Rand Paul claims Obama's phone calls were intercepted 1,227 times and then masked. Being caught up in surveillance doesn't necessarily mean you're guilty of anything.) Now, because the person involved is named Donald Trump, journalists sprinted to the nearest media platform to push back against the story. ...

"Journalists, many of whom take every conspiracy about Russia and Trump seriously, have no reason to dismiss the potential abuses of the NSA. Even if intel agencies failed to minimize frivolous information, it is still an abuse. Nunes, as far as I know, has not made any bizarre allegations in the past. It's not implausible that information legally obtained about Trump was subsequently abused by a government agency. In fact, Democrats have been warning us for years that something like this would happen."

"So here we are with gallons of ink, forests of trees and gigabytes of pixels being spent on one single tweet where Mr. Trump regurgitated press accounts reporting that the Obama administration used electronic surveillance to investigate Mr. Trump's campaign.

"That claim is incontrovertibly accurate. The hardest and clearest evidence of this is that Mr. Trump's national security adviser and former campaign operative Mike Flynn was fired over lying about leaked transcripts of 'wiretapped' phone calls between him and the Russian ambassador.

"No one can dispute that intelligence officials inside the Obama administration used electronic surveillance to spy on the Trump campaign. All anybody can quibble about -- and quibble they have -- is the exact wording Mr. Trump used in his 140-characters-or-less message."

Read entire article here

"Judge Gorsuch's opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee was a model of gratitude and grace. ...

"It was the end of his testimony, however, that was most powerful. Reflecting on a tombstone of a colonial-era lawyer and judge, a man named Increase Sumner, Judge Gorsuch quoted his epitaph:

'As a lawyer, he was faithful and able. As a judge, patient, impartial, and decisive. In private life he was affectionate and mild. In public life he was dignified and firm. Party feuds were allayed by the correctness of his conduct. Calumny was silenced by the weight of his virtues, and rancor softened by the amenity of his manners.'

"Gorsuch says those words guide him, serving for him as a 'daily reminder of the law's integrity, that a useful life can be led in its service, of the hard work it takes, and an encouragement to good habits when I fail and when I falter.' The evidence that he lives those values is found in the bipartisan acclaim for his courtesy and integrity. At today's hearing, Americans saw a humble public servant, and in these troubled times, a little humility is exactly what America needs to see."