Here are my observations and opinions of selected news of the day.
THIS MADE MY DAY … Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the arrogant senator from California, who frequently displays an air of superiority while leveling questions from her perch during Senate Judiciary Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence hearings, got her comeuppance. We have learned that a driver who had been employed by her for 20 years was reportedly a spy for the Chinese government. And Feinstein has the gall to ask someone else – ‘when did you know it, and why didn’t you …?’
Information released by the San Francisco Chronicle and Politico indicates that Feinstein fired the individual five years ago after the FBI informed her that he was being charged with espionage.
This embarrassing revelation didn’t alter Feinstein’s holier-than-thou attitude. Perhaps she believed this story would not see daylight.
You will recall that she refused to support the confirmation of Gina Haspel to the position of CIA director, for “very deep concerns” over Haspel’s imagined role in the agency’s interrogation techniques.
When Amy Coney Barrett was facing the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Feinstein attacked Barrett’s Catholic faith saying, “when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you.”
Yet we can look for a smug Feinstein to treat Supreme Court Judge nominee Brett Kavanaugh with her usual arrogance.
I can’t help but see the irony in what’s happening in Washington’s swamp. The Democrats imagine Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, while a number of Democrats permitted a family of highly-paid Pakistani’s to have access to their computers; and now we learn that Feinstein was snookered by a Chinese spy for 20 years
AFL-CIO HEAD Richard Trumka, speaking to a breakfast audience hosted by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington this week, didn’t endorse President Trump in 2020, but he didn’t rule it out either. He said the president “is going in the right direction on trade and (the union) totally supports a rewrite of NAFTA.”
SPEAKING OF UNIONS – There’s a lot of infighting going on between the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) with teachers up in arms over dues that are too high and political activity that is too leftist.
AFT president Randi Weingarten (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)
Internal documents of the NEA, the largest teachers’ union, anticipate that the union will lose 300,000 members, according to the National Review, and things look even bleaker for the AFT where fewer than half of its members are paying full dues.
At the AFT’s biennial convention in Pittsburgh, members unanimously endorsed a plan calling for universal health care (single-payer or Medicare for all), free tuition at all public colleges and universities, full-day free child care, and doubled per pupil spending for low income K-12 districts, all to be fully funded by taxation on the rich.
“We’re becoming more political, not less political,” AFT President Randi Weingarten told reporters. ‘Swing-state Democrats beware,’ was heard among members as they will be calling on candidates to determine their support of union priorities.
NEA FLASHBACK: Posing the question as to why the NEA has been such an effective organization, here was the statement by its retiring general counsel in 2016:
“It is not because of our creative ideas, it is not because of the merit of our position, it is not because we care about children, it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. (It’s) because we have power and we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people* who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year because they believe we are the union that can most effectively represent them; the union that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.” – Bob Chanin
*The NEA website lists its current membership at 3 million. And as noted above, they expect to lose 300,000 members this year.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski (Courtesy American Greatness/Getty Images)
POOR MIKA BRZEZINSKI, the co-host of MSNBC’S “Morning Joe.” She seems to have exhausted her stash of presidential insults, and with nothing happening on the Russian collusion front, nobody’s buying the use of the 25th Amendment, and the president’s approval rating is climbing, she has reverted to President Trump’s mental state.
“She looked into the camera and with all of the gravitas she could muster and claimed Donald Trump ‘is not well,’” wrote Chris Buskirk in American Greatness, “and it got worse from there. The president of the United States is completely unhinged and getting worse by the day.”
She urged viewers to try and find someone who would tell them that Trump’s “mental state has not deteriorated radically over the past few years … watch his interviews and speeches and judge for yourself.”
Referring to Brzezinski’s desperation, Buskirk concluded, “She’s right about one thing: someone’s ‘unhinged’ – but it isn’t Donald Trump.”
(U.S. Air Force photo by A1C Gerald R. Willis)
FOR ANTI-TRUMPERS and military “experts” who are so disturbed by President Trump’s temporary hold on joint military exercises with South Korea, stop and admire the accompanying photograph of two of our B-52H Stratofortress bombers flying over the Pacific in an operation known as Continuous Bomber Presence, a title that should say it all for those doubters who think we’re standing down while Kim Jung Un gets serious about denuclearization.
May God bless the United States of America
