Here are my observations and opinions from my selected news of the day.

A COLLYER FOLLOW-UP – In my December 22, 2019 “Special: Taking pleasure in seeing FISA fraud uncovered,” I wrote of presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer’s failure to recognize Rep. Devin Nunes’s letters requesting her to look into the FBI’s fraudulent abuse of the FISA process.

Once DOJ IG Michael Horowitz’s report was released, she could no longer ignore the issue.  She instructed the FBI review all FISA applications for “errors,” and report back to her by January 10, 2020.

Now, I have learned that she has ordered the FB I to identify all cases handled by the former agency lawyer, identified as Kevin Clinesmith, who allegedly altered a CIA e-mail that could have cleared Carter Page.  Collyer ordered the review on December 5, 2019, several days before Horowitz’s report was released.

Clinesmith was one of the FBI’s top lawyers on Crossfire Hurricane before it was turned over to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, according to Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller.

Clinesmith surfaced as a Deep Stater in an earlier IG report and was identified as the author of a November 21, 2016 message to a colleague, “Viva le (sic) Resistance!”

“Now that we know FBI agents deceived the Court to get warrants to spy on Trump campaign aide Page, the big question is ”Was this the exception, or the rule?” wonders Stefani Reynolds in the N.Y. Post, who asks, “has the bureau taken to regularly lying in its 1,500 requests a year for FISA wiretaps, or did higher-ups opt to go rogue in this particular case?”

You may recall that I quoted Andrew McCabe placing the blame on “low level” employees in the agency.

CATCHING MY EYE in the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal was a near full-page feature entitled, “American Liberty Depends on the ‘Deep State,’ written by Professor Francis Fukuyama a senior fellow at Stanford University.

He began with the recognition of conservatives railing against the growth of the “administrative state,” referring to it as “a mass of faceless and unaccountable  bureaucrats allegedly holding tyrannical power over ordinary citizens.”  So far, so good.

However, with the election of Donald Trump, he writes of sharper attacks on what has become known as the “Deep State,” who he refers to as “unelected officials who are supposedly partisan Democrats ready to do anything to undermine the Trump presidency.”

Certainly, Fukuyama is aware that more than 75 percent of civil servants are known contributors to the Democrat candidates, yet he uses the word, supposedly.

He appropriately states that the “American constitutional government depends on the existence of a professional, expert, nonpartisan civil service,” and allowed that the civil servants who testified in the House’s impeachment hearings were “top career diplomats” and National Security Council “experts,” all partisan contributors to Hillary Clinton.

Fukuyama has also conveniently forgotten that hundreds of State Department bureaucrats signed-up for Trump resistance training in 2017.

The origins of the Deep State can be traced back to the Pendleton Act in 1883, which established the Civil Service Commission, but it wasn’t until World War I that a majority of federal workers were appointed under a merit-based system.

Two big time progressives, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, known as the Godfather of liberalism, believed that modern government was highly complex and required officials with education, expertise and a dedication to public service, Fukuyama notes.

That may well be true for agencies like NASA, NOAA and the CDCP, but we have learned that a number of departments have become “weaponized” to support the left, evidenced by the recent IRS scandal and the current scandals within our law enforcement agencies, the DOJ and FBI, and presumably the CIA.

The FBI admitted that it did not brief candidate Trump about Russian meddling as it should have.  And recall Sen. Chuck Schumer’s comment, “You take on the intelligence community – they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

Join me in a laugh over the feature’s subhead, “Professional bureaucrats devoted to the public interest, not to a political boss, are crucial to fighting corruption and upholding the rule of law.”

I’VE BEEN TELLING YOU that Democrats and their media friends are out to discourage you and your support of President Trump.  They called you “deplorable” and insulted you as smelly customers of Walmart. Now, the House has voted to impeach your president with the hope that it will turn you against him in 2020.

Reminiscent of the World War II poster of Uncle Sam pointing his finger saying “I Want You,” President Trump’s campaign has produced a poster of him with the headline, “In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you.  I’m just in the way.”

“DEMOCRACY IS SIMPLE, at least in theory,” writes Jon Gabriel, of Ricochet.com, “Voters make a selection and the losing side concedes, adjusts their message and tries hard to win the next time.”

Gabriel writes about the effort to undermine Trump from the time he descended the golden escalator to announce his candidacy and tells of leaving the GOP, while accepting the results of the election, while hoping for the best.  “This is a democracy and that’s who the American people chose,” he recalled.

“When elected officials and the Beltway bureaucracy joined the ‘resistance,’ it became far more disturbing … Democrats demanded impeachment even before Trump took office and the FBI lied to the FISA court to gain a surveillance warrant of a Trump confidant,” Gabriel noted.

“A wiser opposition would have tweaked their messaging so they could win the next big election fair and square.  Instead, they insulted the swing voters they needed to broaden their already large coalitions.”

Gabriel, who intertwined his comments on Trump with the Brexit vote and Boris Johnson’s big win in the UK, concluded with the comment that “Boris’ huge victory is a bad omen for Democrats in 2020.”

May God continue to bless the United States of America.