ICYMI: Charles Murray, Coming Apart

*BUMPED.*

A great book, at Amazon, Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Roger Kimball, Saving the Republic

At Amazon, Roger Kimball, Saving the Republic: The Fate of Freedom in the Age of the Administrative State.

Crossfire Hurricane: Obama's F.B.I. Spied on Trump Campaign

It's "bigger than Watergate," but it's not this administration that's in trouble; it's the previous one.

Here's the big story at WaPo, "'Bigger than Watergate': Trump joins push by allies to expose role of an FBI source."

And also, from yesterday at NYT, "A Secret Mission, a Code Name and Anxiety: Inside the Early Days of the F.B.I.'s Trump Investigation." (Also at Memeorandum.)

Still more, from Mollie Hemingway, at the Federalist, "10 Key Takeaways From the New York Times’ Error-Ridden Defense of FBI Spying on Trump Campaign." Still more, at NRO, "Spinning a Crossfire Hurricane: The Times on the FBI’s Trump Investigation."

And most of all, see Kim Strassel, at WSJ, "Was Trump’s Campaign ‘Set Up’?":

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes appeared on “Fox & Friends” Tuesday, where he provided a potentially explosive hint at what’s driving his demand to see documents related to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Trump-Russia probe. “If the campaign was somehow set up,” he told the hosts, “I think that would be a problem.”

Or an understatement. Mr. Nunes is still getting stiff-armed by the Justice Department over his subpoena, but this week his efforts did force the stunning admission that the FBI had indeed spied on the Trump campaign. This came in the form of a Thursday New York Times apologia in which government “officials” acknowledged that the bureau had used “at least one” human “informant” to spy on both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. The Times slipped this mind-bending fact into the middle of an otherwise glowing profile of the noble bureau—and dismissed it as no big deal.

But there’s more to be revealed here, and Mr. Nunes’s “set up” comment points in a certain direction. Getting to the conclusion requires thinking more broadly about events beyond the FBI’s actions.

Think of the 2016 Trump-Russia narrative as two parallel strands—one politics, one law enforcement. The political side involves the actions of Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign and Obama officials—all of whom were focused on destroying Donald Trump. The law-enforcement strand involves the FBI—and what methods and evidence it used in its Trump investigation. At some point these strands intersected—and one crucial question is how early that happened...

Keep reading.

1. So a few important points on that new NYT "Hurricane Crossfire" piece. A story that, BTW, all of us following this knew had to be coming. This is DOJ/FBI leakers' attempt to get in front of the facts Nunes is forcing out, to make it not sound so bad. Don't buy it. It's bad.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

2. Biggest takeaway: Govt "sources" admit that, indeed, the Obama DOJ and FBI spied on the Trump campaign. Spied. (Tho NYT kindly calls spy an "informant.") NYT slips in confirmation far down in story, and makes it out like it isn't a big deal. It is a very big deal.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

3. In self-serving desire to get a sympathetic story about its actions, DOJ/FBI leakers are willing to provide yet more details about that "top secret" source (namely, that spying was aimed at Page/Papadopoulos)--making all more likely/certain source will be outed. That's on them

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

4. DOJ/FBI (and its leakers) have shredded what little credibility they have in claiming they cannot comply with subpoena. They are willing to provide details to friendly media, but not Congress? Willing to risk very source they claim to need to protect?

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

5. Back in Dec., NYT assured us it was the Papadopoulos-Downer convo that inspired FBI to launch official counterintelligence operation on July 31, 2016. Which was convenient, since it diminished the role of the dossier. However . . .

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

6. Now NYT tells us FBI didn't debrief downer until August 2nd. And Nunes says no "official intelligence" from allies was delivered to FBI about that convo prior to July 31. So how did FBI get Downer details? (Political actors?) And what really did inspire the CI investigation?

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

7. As for whether to believe line that FBI operated soberly/carefully/judiciously in 2016, a main source for this judgment is, um . . .uh . . . Sally Yates. Who was in middle of it all. A bit like asking Putin to reassure that Russia didn't meddle in our election.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

8. On that, if u r wondering who narrated this story, note paragraphs that assure everybody that hardly anybody in DOJ knew about probe. Oh, and Comey also was given few details. Nobody knew nothin'! (Cuz when u require whole story saying u behaved, it means u know you didn't.)

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) May 17, 2018

Chantelle Connelly on the Beach

At Taxi Driver, "Chantelle Connelly Nip Slip on the Beach."

'I know who I want to take me home...'

It's "Closing Time" from Semisonic, a "1990s anthem," says one of the commenters at the video.

This was on during my morning drive-time on Tuesday, but the playlist's not available on TuneGenie, apparently.

At 93.1 Jack F.M. Los Angeles:

Shop Today

Thanks for your support everybody. As always, my associate's commissions fuel my book reading addiction.

Thanks again!

At Amazon, Today's Deals. New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

And especially, HP 13-Y023CL ENVY X360 Convertible Laptop, 13.3" 4K Ultra-HD IPS Touchscreen, Intel Core i7-7500U 2.7GHz, 512GB PCIe Solid State Drive, 16GB DDR3, 802.11ac, Bluetooth, Win10H (Certified Refurbished).

Also, from Professor Michael Curtis, Should Israel Exist? : A Sovereign Nation Under Attack by the International Community (Kindle Edition).

And from Caroline Glick, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

Still more, Joshua Muravchik, Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.

More, from Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History.

Plus, Giulio Meotti, A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism.

BONUS: REEBOW GEAR: Tactical Sling Bag Pack Military Rover Shoulder Sling Backpack Small.

Petra Nemcova on the Cannes Red Carpet

At Taxi Driver, "Petra Nemcova Upskirt on the Cannes Red Carpet."

BONUS: At Drunken Stepfather, "FARRAH ABRAHAM AND HER STAGED PUSSY FLASH OF THE DAY."

Why Trump Is a President Like No Other

Conrad Black is out with a new biography of the president, Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other.

VDH reviews, at American Greatness:

Why Trump Is a President Like No Other https://t.co/aldMc6f7yq pic.twitter.com/5HOgYgqLo2

— American Greatness (@theamgreatness) May 15, 2018

Kirstjen Nielsen, Secretary of Department of Homeland Security, on Laura Ingraham's (VIDEO)

At Fox News:

Matt Walsh, The Unholy Trinity

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Matt Walsh, The Unholy Trinity: Blocking the Left's Assault on Life, Marriage, and Gender.

Resistance Candidates Win Tuesday Primaries

Well, this oughta help clarify things heading into November. At a time when national Democrats want centrists to win, radical leftists are starting to sweep up.

At the Hill, and below at 538.

Progressive Dem defeats establishment candidate in stunning upset: https://t.co/c88SN8J2cg pic.twitter.com/UIK8sTCXAK

— The Hill (@thehill) May 16, 2018

The #Resistance had a very good night. https://t.co/Qjb8Sd3fCZ

— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) May 16, 2018

Tom Wolfe, 1931-2018

What a guy!

Dead at 88.

At NYT, and from Kyle Smith below:

Tom Wolfe "seemed astonished by America, and over his long career he expressed that astonishment in sentences that zinged up and out like bottle rockets" https://t.co/yi2G1rFNyF

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 16, 2018

Tom Wolfe's Yale Ph.D. thesis about communist writers was rejected for being too harsh on them. pic.twitter.com/6VsLn38VIW

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) May 15, 2018

So he rewrote it with academic jargon and took out the jokes and toned down his anti-communism and brought in "a little liberal merde." And it was accepted. pic.twitter.com/RXCHphsWxN

— Kyle Smith (@rkylesmith) May 15, 2018

Tamara de Lempicka Google Doodle

I don't normally comment on Google Doodles, but this woman is striking, and I love Art Deco.

Meet Tamara de Lempicka, the Polish art deco painter honoured in today's Google Doodle https://t.co/g1MLssSb5x pic.twitter.com/ZYyCE4bdsX

— World Tech News (@TechNewsTWS) May 16, 2018

Today's Google Doodle commemorates Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), whose glorious portraits include striking interwar fashion images such as 'Young Lady with Gloves (Girl in a Green Dress)', 1930 pic.twitter.com/cR2tjYTuzM

— Jayne Shrimpton (@JayneShrimpton) May 16, 2018

Paintings by Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) #HBD
“I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don't apply to those who live on the fringe.”

Portrait of Ira
Self Portrait
Portrait of Marquis D’afflitto
Young Girl in Green#tamaradelempicka #artists pic.twitter.com/WCZuDbMd7E

— Guy S. Ricketts (@GuyRicketts) May 16, 2018

Katie Hopkins, Rude

Out last week.

At Amazon, Katie Hopkins, Rude.

Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy

At Amazon, Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works - and How It Fails.

And a great book review, at L.A.T., "Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis makes capital comprehensible":

One of the more compelling arguments in the book is his explanation of experiential values — a walk on the beach, a dinner with friends — versus exchange values, a commodity that can be sold. "A dive, a sunset, a joke: all can have an enormous amount of experiential value and no exchange value whatsoever." Varoufakis warns, "Anything without a price, anything that can't be sold, tends to be considered worthless, whereas anything with a price, it is thought, will be desirable." Of course, Facebook and other social media outlets have found a way to monetize our family photos, our vacations and our private lives. Now a dive, a sunset, a joke has an exchange value. Does the monetization of everything erode our humanity? "Our market societies manufacture fantastic machines and incredible wealth, astounding poverty and mountainous debts, but at the same time they manufacture the desires and behaviors required in us for its perpetuation." This is where he gets at what's meaningful about human existence and how the economy affects us all.

The economy touches every aspect of our lives and yet we typically leave it to bankers, financiers and economists. Varoufakis sees that as a mistake. "Leaving the economy to experts is the equivalent of those who lived in the Middle Ages entrusting their welfare to the theologians, the cardinals and the Spanish inquisition. It is a terrible idea."

And what about that anger I mentioned at the beginning of this piece? Almost all of the problems enraging people on both sides, Varoufakis says, stem from income inequality, corporate greed and other issues that are deeply embedded in the economy and the perpetuation of the status quo. If we're going to direct our anger toward solving problems, then this book is a good place to start. As Varoufakis says in the prologue, "Ensuring that everyone is allowed to talk authoritatively about the economy is a prerequisite for a good society and a precondition for an authentic democracy."

That authentic democracy is what he's pushing for. He isn't advocating for socialism or the destruction of capitalism. As he says, it doesn't matter which system you use: "All systems of domination work by enveloping us in their narrative and superstitions in such a way that we cannot see beyond them." What he is suggesting is that we take a step back, allowing some distance and humor into our thinking, and channel our anger into creating a market society that is more humane and more equitable, so that the few don't enjoy the wealth of the world at the expense of the many.

RTWT.

Long After Civil War, Spain Searches for Its Fallen

This is pretty fascinating.

Inside the Valley of the Fallen, a search for two brothers killed in the Spanish Civil War https://t.co/RqoYHOpX7E pic.twitter.com/0qQS9mFHpK

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) May 10, 2018

At LAT, "Inside the Valley of the Fallen, a search for two brothers killed in the Spanish Civil War":

In the decades since Francisco Franco's death, the Spanish dictator's colossal Valley of the Fallen mausoleum has stood untouched in the rolling countryside outside Madrid, guarded by a towering cross.

Run as an abbey by Benedictine monks on a site owned by the state, Franco's monument has survived Spain's transition to democracy, socialist governments and a host of experts pressing to remove the generalissimo's body and turn the mausoleum into a modern museum for a democratic era.

Above all, the site has remained beyond the reach of families hoping to retrieve the remains of relatives they never wanted buried there alongside the dictator and the bodies of more than 33,000 victims of the brutal civil war he started.

Until now.

Late last month, the first beams of light illuminated the vaults that hold the dead as a team of structural engineering experts entered an ossuary in search of the bodies of two men — Manuel Lapeña, a leftist union leader and father of four, and his brother Antonio. Both were executed by Franco's forces in Aragon during the first days of the civil war in the summer of 1936.

"It is a place beyond the bounds of democracy," said Eduardo Ranz, the lawyer who represents the Lapeña family and others attempting to claim the remains of eight other men buried in the crypt of the Valley of the Fallen's basilica.

"There is no other monument in the world like it, celebrating the victory of one group from the same nationality over another," Ranz said. "The victors stole the very identity of the defeated."

The mausoleum was built in part by political prisoners in the decades after the 1939 civil war victory of the general's Nationalist faction. Over the years, thousands of war dead — Nationalists and Republicans alike — were unearthed from graves across Spain and interred, often anonymously, in the basilica, an apparent attempt to bring the nation together.

Only a third of the 33,847 dead who rest with Franco in his mausoleum are named on their tombs. The rest are stacked in ossuaries inside vaults that have deteriorated over the decades. Identifying the remains is a daunting task, and the relatives' best hope now rests on a report being prepared by the state institution National Heritage after last month's exploration, in which the viability of identifying and safely removing remains will be assessed.

Whatever the answer, relatives such as Purificacion Lapeña, the granddaughter of the executed unionist, are determined to keep fighting, spurred on by a 2016 civil court ruling that ordered the Lapeña brothers to be exhumed.

Like others, Purificacion Lapeña is driven by the fear that time is running out for people such as her 94-year-old father, Manuel Lapeña, who wants to bury his father alongside his mother in Zaragoza, their hometown in Spain's northeast. As it stands, Manuel Lapeña said his father is "interred alongside his killer, Franco, the greatest criminal."

In 2011, a commission of experts recommended to Spain's parliament that Franco's remains be removed and the Valley of the Fallen be transformed into a depoliticized memorial site. But the conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy ignored the recommendations and derailed the previous, socialist administration's efforts to allow relatives to dig up more than 100,000 Republican victims of Spain's civil war-era repression from mass graves dotted around the country. The church too has shown resistance to freeing the dead. The Benedictine abbot in charge of the basilica opposed the court ruling ordering the search for the Lapeña brothers' remains...

More.

French Fashion Model Chloé Nicolas

At Editorials Fashion Trends, "Chloé Nicolas by Guillaume Gaubert."

She's on Instagram.

Dana Loesch: The U.S. Keeps Winning Under Trump Administration's Foreign Policy (VIDEO)

This is great. It's all great. Democrats are not great, of course, and they're hating it.

Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 'Rookie of the Year' Alexis Ren (VIDEO)

She's amazing.

Did the F.B.I. Spy on Donald Trump's Presidential Campaign?

From the inimitable Kim Strassel, at WSJ, "About That FBI ‘Source’: Did the bureau engage in outright spying against the 2016 Trump campaign?":

The Department of Justice lost its latest battle with Congress Thursday when it agreed to brief House Intelligence Committee members about a top-secret intelligence source that was part of the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign. Even without official confirmation of that source’s name, the news so far holds some stunning implications.

Among them is that the Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation outright hid critical information from a congressional investigation. In a Thursday press conference, Speaker Paul Ryan bluntly noted that Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes’s request for details on this secret source was “wholly appropriate,” “completely within the scope” of the committee’s long-running FBI investigation, and “something that probably should have been answered a while ago.” Translation: The department knew full well it should have turned this material over to congressional investigators last year, but instead deliberately concealed it.

House investigators nonetheless sniffed out a name, and Mr. Nunes in recent weeks issued a letter and a subpoena demanding more details. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s response was to double down—accusing the House of “extortion” and delivering a speech in which he claimed that “declining to open the FBI’s files to review” is a constitutional “duty.” Justice asked the White House to back its stonewall. And it even began spinning that daddy of all superspook arguments—that revealing any detail about this particular asset could result in “loss of human lives.”

This is desperation, and it strongly suggests that whatever is in these files is going to prove very uncomfortable to the FBI.

The bureau already has some explaining to do. Thanks to the Washington Post’s unnamed law-enforcement leakers, we know Mr. Nunes’s request deals with a “top secret intelligence source” of the FBI and CIA, who is a U.S. citizen and who was involved in the Russia collusion probe. When government agencies refer to sources, they mean people who appear to be average citizens but use their profession or contacts to spy for the agency. Ergo, we might take this to mean that the FBI secretly had a person on the payroll who used his or her non-FBI credentials to interact in some capacity with the Trump campaign.

This would amount to spying, and it is hugely disconcerting. It would also be a major escalation from the electronic surveillance we already knew about, which was bad enough. Obama political appointees rampantly “unmasked” Trump campaign officials to monitor their conversations, while the FBI played dirty with its surveillance warrant against Carter Page, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that its supporting information came from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now we find it may have also been rolling out human intelligence, John Le Carré style, to infiltrate the Trump campaign...

More.

And at Instapundit, "WALL STREET JOURNAL: About That FBI ‘Source:’ Did the Bureau engage in outright spying against the 2016 Trump campaign?":

I don’t think the FBI is being straight. I’m speculating, of course, but I think it’s going to turn out that they were spying on Trump from surprisingly early on, and that they didn’t expect him to win, and that when he did win, the Russian “collusion” thing was hyped up as a smokescreen.

Keep reading.