Obama Is Staying on in Washington but He and his Progressive Media Are Out-Matched by Hard-Knuckled Trump and Eloquent Ted Cruz

It has been a busy 24 hours and they have shown us just how different the next four years in Washington will be. • • • THE OBAMA FAREWELL AT LONG LAST. Chicago’s Lakeside Center at McCormick Place was the setting for President Obama’s Tuesday evening “farewell address” before an enthusiastic crowd. It was the second time that an outgoing President has said good-bye in a venue outside Washington. Obama didn't use his last prime time speech to look to the future, as most presidential farewell addresses have done, from George Washington to George Bush. Instead, Obama, in his true narcissistic style, chose to bask in self-congratulations and tears, and to warn that he isn't going away -- more the pity that after 8 years of failing at every turn, Obama now wants to continue to weigh in on everything from illegal immigration, replacing Obamacare, and climate change, to the Iran nuclear deal, when he feels it is necessary. Obama will be the first ex-President since Woodrow Wilson to stay in Washington once his administration ends -- a reminder perhaps that Progressives believe that what they could not do while living in the White House they somehow think they can do living close to it. • Obama spoke of his 'achievements' -- broadening the definition of marriage, rebooting relations with Cuba, what he claims to be a healthier economy with receding poverty, more social program spending and higher taxation of the affluent. It should be no surprise, then, that part of Obama’s post-presidency will include re-energizing Organizing for Action, a group born from his campaign machine and tasked with candidate recruitment. Obama also claimed that race relations have improved over the recent decades. It took a real blindspot to say that in his hometown, Chicago, a city being paralyzed by homicides, where just five days ago four black Chicagoans were arrested for torturing a white special-needs teen and shouting anti-white anti-Trump slogans live on Facebook. • Last week, David French, a scholar at the Hoover Institution, wrote in national Review about a fallacy that Barack Obama has clung to from Travon Martin onward -- that white police forces are the fundamental problem with American race relations. French wrote of Chicago : "Policing matters. When a culture breaks, it falls to the police to keep order. When they pull back, people die. That’s the lesson of Chicago. On January 1, 60 Minutes ran an extended piece, Crisis in Chicago, that’s must viewing for those who believe black lives matter. An entire police department is in full retreat. The numbers don’t lie: As killings rose, police activity fell. In August of 2015, cops stopped and questioned 49,257 people. A year later those stops dropped to 8,859, down 80 percent. At the same time arrests were off by a third, from just over 10,000 to 6,900. Police, afraid of becoming the subject of the next “viral video” and subject to onerous new ACLU oversight, are reducing themselves to mainly answering 911 calls. Chicago has had problems with police brutality and racists in uniform (it’s paid out a staggering sum in civil settlements), but the answer isn’t to restrict effective policing but rather to better police the department. When a culture breaks, it falls to the police to keep order. When they pull back, people die. That’s the lesson of Chicago. But don’t tell that to anti-police activists. They’ll use incandescently idiotic statistics to try to “prove” racism by comparing police activity to overall demographics, decrying “disproportionate” stops and “disproportionate” shootings -- when everyone knows that criminal activity doesn’t break down neatly along racial lines." • So, farewell, President Obama. May your insight, common sense and agreeable personality serve you and America better in you post-presidency than it ever did while you were in the White House. But, to be honest, we are not holding our collective breath waiting for any change. • • • TED CRUZ ELOQUENTLY DEFENDS JEFF SESSIONS. On Tuesday, the Senate kicked off confirmation hearings for President-Elect Trump's cabinet appointees. Senator Jeff Sessions, Trump's choice for US Attorney General, faced intense scrutiny from several Democrats, including Senator Al Franken, who challenged Sessions' record and even accused him of lying about his accomplishments. Texas Senator Ted Cruz felt compelled to defend Sessions' character. Addressing the nominee, Cruz said : "Senator Franken engaged you in a discussion that I think was intended to undermine your character and integrity. And in particular, Senator Franken suggested that you had somehow misrepresented your record. It is unfortunate to see members of this body impune the integrity of a fellow Senator with whom we've served for years. It is particularly unfortunate when that attack is not backed up by the facts." Then, Cruz laid into Democrats who oppose Sessions but failed to hold the Obama Department of Justice accountable when it broke the law. • You can watch Senator Cruz take apart Senator Franken's attempt at character assassination of Senator Jeff Sessions on You Tube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xht96t6K9Hw. Below is a part of his remarks, but I urge you to watch Ted Cruz speaking. It is impressive. Senator Cruz said : "When the Department of Justice used operation choke point to target legal businesses because they disagree politically with those businesses, the Democrats on this committee were silent. When the Obama Justice Department sent millions of dollars of taxpayer monies to sanctuary cities that were defying federal immigration law, the Democrats on this committee were silent. When the Obama administration refused to enforce federal immigration laws and unilaterally rewrote those laws, the Democrats on this committee were silent. When the Obama administration released tens of thousands of criminal illegal aliens including rapists and murderers into the general population, Democrats on this committee with silent. When the Department of Justice signed off on the Obama administration paying a nearly two billion dollar ransom to Iran contrary to federal law, the Democrats on this committee were silent. When the Obama administration ignored and rewrote provision after provision of Obamacare contrary to the text of the law, the Democrats on this committee were silent. When the Obama administration signed off on illegal recess appointments that the Supreme Court had to strike down unanimously, the Democrats on this committee were silent; and, when the Obama administration released five Guantanamo terrorists without the required notification of Congress, the Democrats on this committee were silent." • Well said, Senator Cruz. • Trump is the person we need now. The brilliant conservative Ted Cruz is too polite, too ethical, too dedicated to the right way of doing things to face down the current Obama Progressive bullies and liars in Congress and the Obama appointees in executive agencies. Ted Cruz would be beaten up by these Obama-led Progressives and his answers would be too elegant to stop them. Trump proved during the campaign that he has the battle- scarred tough-minded self-assurance -- hard-earned through his battles to achieve enormous business success and wealth -- to bare his knuckles and beat them, not worrying about the beauty of his words and the clarity of his principles, only being hellbent on destroying their anti-constitutional program to take over America. That, at bottom, is why America elected him. Ted Cruz will have his day -- after Trump drains the swamp. • • • THE INTEL REPORT ON RUSSIA-TRUMP CONNECTION. CNN was attacked by President-Elect Trump at his news conference on Wednesday for pushing the questionable BuzzFeed story about classified documents presented last week to President Obama and Trump -- that CNN said included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Trump. CNN said it had talked to multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings. The reports by CNN and Buzzfeed made other media outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, publish their own articles, some of which included generalized descriptions of the unverified allegations about Trump and most of which said they had the information but did not publish it because it was unverifiable. By late Tuesday, only BuzzFeed had published the full document. BuzzFeed’s decision, besides its hoped-for immediate political ramifications for a President-Elect set to be inaugurated in 10 days, was sure to accelerate a hot debate about the role and credibility of the traditional media in today’s polarized information age. It was the use of unsubstantiated information from anonymous sources, a practice that has fueled some of so-called fake news -- false rumors passed off as legitimate journalism that proliferated during the presidential election -- that set off the firestorm. • CNN said that its journalists had reviewed the full 35-page compilation of memos, the same document later published in full by BuzzFeed, but declined to include some details, saying that the network “has not independently corroborated the specific allegations.” CNN said its reporters spoke with multiple high-ranking intelligence and government officials before publishing its report. • On social media, even some left-leaning writers who generally oppose Trump expressed skepticism about the document published by BuzzFeed. Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who was instrumental in publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks about government surveillance wrote : “An anonymous person, claiming to be an ex-British intel agent & working as a Dem oppo researcher, said anonymous people told him things.” But BuzzFeed’s publication of the story was welcomed by others, who expressed concern that news outlets and government officials with access to the allegations had not disclosed them sooner. Almost immediately, the report’s publication prompted questions from Hillary Clinton’s camp about why the claims had not surfaced earlier. Brian Fallon, Mrs. Clinton’s chief campaign spokesman, wrote on Twitter : “Today has brought a gush of reporting that outlets knew about and sat on prior to November 8. I repeat: certain media outlets were told this prior to November 8.” Mother Jones, a left-leaning publication, published an article in late October about the existence of the information. Newsweek also published some of the allegations. • Immediately after BuzzFeed’s publication, some reporters volunteered that they, too, had received copies of the report. Julia Ioffe, a journalist who has written extensively on Russia, tweeted : “Raise your hand if you too were approached with this story.” Ioffe added that she had not reported on the information in the document “because it was impossible to verify.” Writers at the blog Lawfare, which covers national security issues, said they had been in possession of the document “for a couple of weeks” but opted not to publish because the allegations were unproven, and wrote on Tuesday evening : "Yes, they are explosive; they are also entirely unsubstantiated, at least to our knowledge, at this stage. For this reason, even now, we are not going to discuss the specific allegations within the document.” • THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE. But, it was the New York Times that published the details. On Tuesday evening, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the NYT said the paper would not publish the document because the allegations were “totally unsubstantiated. “We, like others, investigated the allegations and haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in the business of publishing things we can’t stand by." Here is what the NYT finally did publish on Tuesday : "The chiefs of America’s intelligence agencies last week presented President Obama and President-elect Donald J. Trump with a summary of unsubstantiated reports that Russia had collected compromising and salacious personal information about Mr. Trump, two officials with knowledge of the briefing said. The summary is based on memos generated by political operatives seeking to derail Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Details of the reports began circulating in the fall and were widely known among journalists and politicians in Washington. The two-page summary, first reported by CNN, was presented as an appendix to the intelligence agencies’ report on Russian hacking efforts during the election, the officials said. The material was not corroborated, and The New York Times has not been able to confirm the claims. But intelligence agencies considered it so potentially explosive that they decided Mr. Obama, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders needed to be told about it and informed that the agencies were actively investigating it. Intelligence officials were concerned that the information would leak before they informed Mr. Trump of its existence, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about it publicly." • On Tuesday night, Trump responded on Twitter : "FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!" In an appearance recorded for NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” Trump’s spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, said of the claims in the opposition research memos, “He has said he is not aware of that.” On Wednesday, a spokesman for President Putin dismissed the allegations through his spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, at a news conference : “The Kremlin has no compromising dossier on Trump, such information isn’t consistent with reality and is nothing but an absolute fantasy.” The NYT said in its article : "The decision of top intelligence officials to give the president, the president-elect and the so-called Gang of Eight -- Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress and the intelligence committees -- what they know to be unverified, defamatory material was extremely unusual." The intel report, according to descriptions published by the NYT, dug up many of the stories already circulating during the campaign that had been disproved or were old news. • • • HILLARY / GOP ANTI-TRUMP GROUP PAID FOR THE REPORT. The original report was the work of a retired British intelligence operative for a Washington political and corporate research firm. The firm was paid for its work first by Trump’s Republican rivals and later by supporters of Hillary Clinton. The NYT says it has checked on a number of the details included in the memos but has been unable to substantiate them. The former British intelligence officer who gathered the material about Trump is considered a competent and reliable operative with extensive experience in Russia, American officials said. But, he passed on what he heard from Russian informants and others, and what they told him has not yet been vetted by American intelligence. Michael Cohen, a lawyer and advisor to Trump, also went to Twitter to deny a specific claim in the opposition research involving him. One of the memos claims that Cohen went to Prague in August or September to meet with Kremlin representatives and to talk about Russian hacking of Democrats. Cohen tweeted on Tuesday night : "I have never been to Prague in my life." The media's report supporters then argued that the report refers "to another Michael Cohen." In addition, in a recent interview with the New York Times that it reported on Tuesday, one of the Russian officials named in the memo as having met with Cohen -- Oleg Solodukhin, part of the Russian organization Rossotrudnichestvo that promotes Russian culture and interests abroad -- denied that he had met with Cohen or any other Trump representative : “I don’t know where that rumor came from.” • • • DEAR READERS, at his Wednesday press conference, President-Elect Trump said he has no business interests in Russia, he has no pending deals in Russia and he has no loans from Russian sources. That should put to bed one more Democrat / Progressive / Obama-led intel effort to discredit and potentially remove Donald Trump from the presidency, either before or after January 20. It is almost laughable to see how the enormous incompetence of Obama and his insider gang has even tainted and possibly corrupted parts of the US intelligence community. Trump on Wednesday said the leaks are criminal and his intelligence leaders -- Coats, Flynn, Pompeo -- will put things back into working order in the IC. It is not a minute too soon to salvage the real IC professionals, who must be appalled by the dirty tricks and politicized intelligence fostered by Barack Obama and his Progressive cronies. • Donald Trump refused to take questions from CNN at his Wednesday news conference. That is the tip of the iceberg -- Obama, Progressives, and their lapdog media are no match for President Trump.