Merkel Effect strikes Senate Intelligence Comittee

By Dan Brooks in War on Terror 1 Comment
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the results of a hoagie-eating contest.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the results of a hoagie-eating contest.

Yesterday, Dianne Feinstein told the Senate that the CIA had hacked into and deleted files from computers the Intelligence Committee used to investigate agency waterboarding and interrogation techniques, calling the spying a “defining moment” in the oversight of American intelligence. It sure felt that way. Back when whistleblower traitor Edward Snowden revealed that the agencies were spying on the American people, Feinstein vigorously defended the secret electronic surveillance as an indispensable tool in the fight against terrorism. Later, when we learned that the NSA and CIA had also spied on foreign heads of state including Angela Merkel, our elected representatives lost their minds—a hypocrisy Snowden identified in Feinstein again yesterday. Call it the Merkel Effect.

Continue reading

Missoula County Attorney enters endgame

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 1 Comment
Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg

Missoula County Attorney Fred Van Valkenburg

Fred Van Valkenburg is back from vacation today, and I do not envy him his voice mailbox. Probably he checked it while he was away. We know he read the paper, because he sent attorney Jim Ghidella an angry email after Ghidella wrote a letter to the editor critical of Van Valkenburg’s fight against the US Department of Justice. For those of you who have not followed this story: in 2012, the DOJ announced that it was investigating the University of Montana, Missoula police, and the county attorney’s office for improper handling of sexual assault cases. The police and UM cooperated, and their investigations are now over. Van Valkenburg, on the other hand, has insisted all along that Justice has no jurisdiction over his office, and recently got $50,000 from the county commission to pursue a declaratory judgment against them. That lawsuit was filed earlier this week—just in time for us to learn about the agreement that Montana’s state attorney general made with the DOJ in 2012 to cooperate with investigators.

Continue reading

41% of Republicans say Benghazi is “biggest political scandal in American history”

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 1 Comment
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK,) who called Benghazi more "egregious" than Watergate

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK,) who called Benghazi more “egregious” than Watergate

I tried to link to a news article about this week’s Congressional hearings regarding the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, but I had a hard time finding an unbiased source. Benghazi appears to be the most important story in the world for the Daily Caller, Fox News and the Washington Times (official motto: Not the Good Washington Paper) and invisible to everyone else. My theory is supported by this poll in which a mere 44% of Americans say they are following the hearings and, in a more complicated way, by this one, in which 41% of Republicans say they consider Benghazi “the biggest scandal in American history.” So suck it, Peggy Eaton Affair.

Continue reading

Is Sheldon Adelson creeped out by Sheldon Adelson?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 1 Comment

See, black people are Ray Charles like this, but white people are Ray Charles like…

One of the many terrible disadvantages rich people face in this country is that we are all so happy to see them denied something they want. Mitt Romney triggered that psychological mechanism every time he mentioned the cars-to-people ratio of his household or owning an Olympic horse, and it cost him an election. Either that or his policies only benefited a small percentage of the electorate at the expense of everyone else—who can say? The point is that class warfare is alive and well in this country, and the pressure of anti-rich person groupthink is so great that even Sheldon Adelson told the Wall Street Journal he regards himself as kind of gross.

Continue reading

Are we glad we caught David Petraeus?

By Dan Brooks in lying 2 Comments

Fox News’s handy flowchart explaining the David Petraeus affair.

Last Saturday, as you know, CIA director and four-star general David Petraeus resigned after an FBI investigation tangentially revealed that he had an affair—a real clusterfudge, it turns out, hereafter to be known as the Petraeus Affair Affair. The inciting incident in his exposure was a complaint from Jill Kelly, who told the FBI that she had received harassing emails from an anonymous source. That source turned out to be Paula Broadwell, Petraeus’s awesome and/or crazy biographer, who resented Kelly’s closeness to Petraeus because she, Broadwell, was doing sex on him. My fellow Americans: you must not do sex on your biographer. It’s like buying stock in your accountant. If Johnson could go 30 years without humping Boswell, you can do it, too.

Continue reading