FBI officials Jim Baker, Lisa Page resign from bureau

Cleaning House.

Two FBI officials who worked closely with embattled former bureau director James Comey have left the agency, Fox News has confirmed.
Jim Baker, a top FBI lawyer who was reassigned in late 2017 after being linked to a journalist who wrote about the so-called "Trump dossier," is reportedly looking to join the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
Lisa Page, whose electronic communications with another FBI employee drew accusations of political bias, "resigned" Friday to "pursue other opportunities," an FBI spokesperson told Fox News.
Comey acknowledged Baker’s departure in a tweet, commending his former colleague’s “integrity” and “commitment to the rule of law.”
Baker had been the subject of a Justice Department investigation on suspicion of leaking classified information about the so-called “Trump dossier” – a document that supposedly contained evidence about the Trump campaign's connection to Russia.
He had been reassigned in December as an adviser to current FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“I love the FBI,” Baker told the New York Times. “I have tremendous respect for the bureau. The FBI was great, is great and will be great.”
Page, who was previously a member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel team, came under fire for allegedly sending “anti-Trump” text messages to a colleague.
She was one of Comey’s advisers in 2016 when the former director announced the bureau would not pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her handling of classified emails.
Comey has said he would have removed Page from any relevant investigations had he known of her anti-Trump bias.

Hypocrite Democrat Cartoons

Dem to resign after ethics report linked to charges against husband

Massachusetts state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg speaks in Boston, March 14, 2016.  (Associated Press)

State Sen. Stanley Rosenberg, for decades one of the most powerful Democrats in Massachusetts, announced Thursday that he will resign Friday after 31 years as a lawmaker because of a scandal involving his estranged husband.
His decision follows Wednesday’s release of an ethics report that states Rosenberg “failed to protect the Senate” from his estranged husband, who faces charges of racially and sexually harassing Senate employees.
“In light … of the disciplinary measure recommended by the ethics committee, it would not be fair to my constituents to have a representative in the Senate who lacked the authority to represent their interests fully,” Rosenberg said in a letter to the Senate clerk, the Boston Herald reported.
Rosenberg, 68, of Amherst, a former president of the Massachusetts Senate, was the first openly gay lawmaker to lead a legislative chamber in the Bay State, Boston’s Fox 25 reported.
He stepped down as president in December, after the Boston Globe reported in November that four men alleged that Rosenberg’s husband, Byron Hefner, had sexually assaulted and harassed them, and boasted of his influence in the Senate.
Hefner was indicted in March. Rosenberg claims to have been unaware of Hefner’s alleged crimes.
Rosenberg’s resignation will take effect at 5 p.m. Friday, State House News Service reported.
Following the release of the ethics report, both Republican Gov. Charlie Baker and Democratic Attorney General Maura Healey called for Rosenberg to resign, Fox 25 reported.
According to the station, the report was prepared by independent investigators hired by the Senate Ethics Committee. It said that while Rosenberg did not violate any formal Senate rules, he showed poor judgment and violated the Senate's information technology policies by granting Hefner “unfettered access” to Rosenberg's Senate email account.
That access began before Rosenberg became Senate president in 2015 and ended in March 2017, after staffers detected two instances of Hefner allegedly sending emails to public officials under Rosenberg’s name.
Rosenberg "knew or should have known Hefner had racially and sexually harassed Senate employees" and failed to address the issue adequately, the report said.
Hefner, 30, pleaded not guilty in Suffolk Superior Court in April to charges of sexual assault, criminal lewdness and distributing nude photos without consent. He was released on his own recognizance pending further court action.

Newt Gingrich, Mary Mayhew: Hope for those trapped in welfare dependency -- Thanks to Trump

Republicans and members of the Trump administration must keep up the pressure and focus on achieving welfare reform.
When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, many believed that the law would indeed “end welfare as we know it.” It’s what we intended when Congress created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and implemented work requirements to restore welfare to its original intent as a springboard to self-sufficiency.
These policies were intended to be the beginning of welfare reform – the beginning of a nationwide policy focused on ending dependency. Instead, President Obama launched a war on the very thing we know is most successful at achieving this goal: work.
Over the past decade, too many of our fellow citizens have fallen deeper into the welfare trap, ensnared by government policies that pay people to not work. The so-called “War on Poverty” has left our nation with record-high levels of welfare enrollment – despite a 17-year record-low unemployment rate and more than 6 million open jobs across the country.

Over the past decade, too many of our fellow citizens have fallen deeper into the welfare trap, ensnared by government policies that pay people to not work.

Many of these new enrollees are able-bodied adults with no disabilities keeping them from working. They are not the individuals our welfare system is designed to aid – the disabled, the elderly, and others who are truly in need.
There are now nearly 21 million able-bodied adults dependent on food stamps – three times as many as in 2000. Some 28 million able-bodied adults are now dependent on Medicaid, quadrupling the number of those enrolled in 2000.
This is not what we envisioned in Congress – on either side of the political aisle – when we passed welfare reform in 1996 with bipartisan support. We included work requirements in the legislation because we knew the power of work. The reforms were compassionate – they gave people the opportunity to build better lives and create their own American dreams.
We know this not only because the research has proven it, time and time again, but because we’ve seen the transformational power of promoting work firsthand.
When Maine enforced time limits on its TANF program and refocused the program on employment and job training, it drew criticism from those on the left who called the reforms uncompassionate.
But the results spoke for themselves: Over the four-year period after the reforms, enrollees with records of prior earnings saw their wages increase by 237 percent on average. Throughout the duration of the evaluation period, these people dramatically increased their total earnings from $2.6 million to $8.6 million.
In October 2014, Maine began requiring able-bodied and childless adults who were receiving food stamps to work, train, or volunteer – at least part-time – in order to receive their benefits.
The reform drew criticism from the Obama administration – but once again, the power of work emerged. Those who left the program saw their incomes, on average, more than double within the first year, offsetting any lost welfare benefits. And the number of able-bodied adults receiving food stamp benefits fell from approximately 16,000 to 1,500.
But Maine was unfortunately the exception. Instead of empowering able-bodied adults to work to lift themselves out of dependency, most states implemented work requirement waivers, allowing adults to collect taxpayer-funded benefits without being required to work at all.
Loopholes have been exploited by federal and state bureaucrats who have robbed these able-bodied Americans of the opportunity to escape welfare and create better lives for themselves and their families.
Rather than viewing welfare as a temporary safety net, many government leaders have instead implemented policies that have turned welfare into a permanent trap.
Thankfully, President Trump’s recent executive order – Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility – delivers a welcome policy change that offers hope to those trapped in welfare dependency.
The executive order lays the groundwork for federal agencies that administer welfare to prioritize work and encourage economic mobility, particularly for able-bodied adults. It reiterates the principle that those of us who have worked within the government know all too well: Government assistance is not the answer to ending poverty and dependency. Work is.
If Congress and agency leaders deliver on President Trump’s initiative, our welfare system can return to the truly compassionate policies of its past. Its success should once again be wholly measured by the number of people moved off the welfare rolls, not the number of people trapped on them. Only then will state successes like Maine’s become the norm rather than the exception.
Mary Mayhew served for six years commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, where she spearheaded transformational welfare reform. She currently serves as a senior fellow with the Opportunity Solutions Project.
Newt Gingrich is a Fox News contributor. A Republican, he was speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Follow him on Twitter @NewtGingrich. His latest book is "Understanding Trump."

Kanye West banned from radio station over recent comments

A Detroit radio station said it will ban Kanye West's music over controversial comments the rapper made earlier this week that slavery “was a choice.”
Hosts Shay Shay and BiGG of 105.1 the Morning Bounce made the announcement Thursday on Facebook with the hashtag “Mute Kanye.”
“Kanye has gone too far” with his latest comments, they said. They wrote that they are refusing to give him a platform,” according to New York Post.
"We don't want to hear Kanye's music, we don't want to play Kanye on our show, we don't want to talk about Kanye anymore,” the post read. “So we are taking a stand and we aren't playing his music anymore; we just are refusing to give him a platform."
The ban will be for the entire hip-hop station and will include tracks that West produced or is featured in as well, the Detroit Free Press reported.
West faced swift backlash following an interview with TMZ on Tuesday, where he said "when you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice."
The music mogul took to Twitter shortly after to try and walk back his comments and compared himself to both Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman.

"when you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice."

“If this was 148 years ago I would have been more like Harriet or Nat," West tweeted, before clarifying the reason he “brought up the 400 years point is because we can’t be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought…It was just an idea.”
The two morning DJs didn’t announce how long the ban will last, and left it open to a “gut feeling.”
“That’s what it is right now. We need a break,” Shay Shay, told the paper. “I think it’s a gut feeling of when we’ll be able to feel comfortable playing it again, when we’ll want to hear it again, and more importantly, when will our listeners want to hear it again.”
West was banned from a Hot 103.5 in Sacramento in 2016 after he attacked radio stations and fellow artists during a concert for his Saint Pablo Tour, USA Today reported. 

Fresh embarrassment for NBC as embattled network has to correct itself on Cohen wiretap story

For NBC News, it was another in a series of embarrassments on Thursday as it had to correct a story saying federal investigators had placed a wiretap on the phone lines of President Donald Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen.
As Fox News is reporting, the feds were monitoring only what calls were being made but weren’t listening in — contrary to NBC’s earlier reporting. The Peacock Network’s major turnabout was made more than four hours after the original story moved online Thursday, when it caused immediate chatter in the cable news universe.
NBC had attributed its original story to two anonymous sources with knowledge of the legal proceedings against Cohen. In an editor’s note preceding the rewritten story, NBC explains that three senior U.S. officials disputed the account, saying that the phones were monitored by a pen register, which records the phone numbers on both ends of the conversation, not the substance of the calls themselves.
The erroneous NBC report added to widespread speculation about what exactly the feds were able to seize in their April raid. Cohen’s lawyers and President Trump’s legal team have been battling in court over access to those materials.
NBC moved its original story online shortly after 1 p.m. on Thursday, and it became immediate fodder on MSNBC and other cable networks. The correction was issued online at 5:27 p.m. with that editor’s note, and was discussed on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press Daily.”
The correction offered ammunition to the nation’s highest-ranked media critic: Trump has frequently criticized the mainstream media for catering to America’s left wing and coastal elite with “fake news.”
The screw-up also gave media watchdogs a chance to mock NBC online for its latest blast of “fake news.”
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, tweeted that the mistake was “pretty big.”
The correction is just the latest storm for a network reeling from them. It is currently dealing with unflattering stories involving sexual misconduct, secrecy, homophobia and bad decision-making, causing headaches for NBC and its news chairman, Andy Lack.
There’s the controversy over the findings of an internal review to determine who knew about disgraced “Today” host Matt Lauer’s bad behavior but didn’t report it in a timely manner; antigay slurs connected to MSNBC star Joy Reid’s blog posts; and the accusations that legendary anchor Tom Brokaw engaged in forceful and unwanted kissing of then-NBC correspondent Linda Vester in the 1990s.
Also still in play are persistent questions over why NBC sat on two major sex harassment stories: the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump and the blockbuster reporting on alleged Hollywood sex predator Harvey Weinstein by Ronan Farrow, which won him the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Then there’s the foundering and hugely expensive experiment with former Fox News star Megyn Kelly, who reportedly has been dragging down NBC News’ most important show by far, “Today.”
NBC has been silent on the Reid and Brokaw matters, the two most recent humiliations before the news story correction.
“If legendary icons like Matt Lauer and Tom Brokaw can be accused by apparently responsible individuals, the company should act as others have done and dispense with internal investigations and engage a high profile, independent investigator to determine the root causes as well as the specifics of these horrendous accusations,” famed reporter-turned-entrepreneur Porter Bibb previously told Fox News, adding that NBC was “seriously derelict” in not ordering an independent investigation of the entire company’s policies, protocols, and past performance.

Deep State Cartoons

Hillary Clinton says being a capitalist likely hurt her among socialist Dems

Former U.S. Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks in Washington, Nov. 2, 2017.  (Reuters)

Hillary Clinton agreed Wednesday that being a capitalist likely damaged her 2016 campaign because nearly half of Democrats say they are socialists.
"Probably," Clinton said at the Shared Values Leadership Summit in New York City, after being asked whether support for capitalism hurt her at the polls.
"It's hard to know, but if you're in the Iowa caucuses and 41 percent of Democrats are socialists, or self-described socialists, and I'm asked, ‘Are you a capitalist?' And I say, ‘Yes, but with appropriate regulation and appropriate accountability,' you know, that probably gets lost in the ‘Oh my gosh, she's a capitalist.'"
Clinton won the Iowa caucus by a mere half-point.
The former U.S. secretary of state was challenged from the left during the Democratic primaries by self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who repeatedly criticized her for being bankrolled by Wall Street and not going after capitalism and with the same hostility as the Democratic grassroots hoped for.
During the first Democratic debate in 2015, Sanders refused to identify himself as a capitalist.
“Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little?” he asked. “By which Wall Street greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No I don’t.”
Clinton, meanwhile, offered a defense of capitalism, saying: “When I think about capitalism, I think about all the businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families … We would be making a grave mistake to turn our backs on what built the greatest middle class in the history.”
Following a short hiatus from promoting her election post-mortem book "What Happened," Clinton returned to political activities Monday, just six months before the midterm elections.
The former candidate attended a gathering of nearly a dozen progressive groups supported by Onward Together, the post-election political organization she founded that's aimed at “advancing the progressive vision that earned nearly 66 million votes in the last election.”
“I don’t want to see us go backwards,” Clinton said. “But organized interests fueled by ideology and huge amounts of money are trying to take us backwards. So I feel as strongly today as I ever have that we all have to stand up and defend our country, and most importantly, our democracy.”