President Trump appointed Richard “Ric” Grenell to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the surprise appointment begins immediately.  Within minutes the media intelligence apparatus displayed apoplexy at the announcement.

All of the right administrative state interests are visibly triggered by the appointment; and it appears this could be a key turning point in President Trump’s push-back against the permanent intelligence apparatus that has targeted his administration for three years.

However, this appointee will now have the full and focused attention of the SSCI and Intelligence Community, the Eye of Sauron.

Yesterday (2/17) was not Presidents Day.  If you enter “Presidents Day” into Wikipedia, you will be redirected to the entry for “Washington’s Birthday” – because by federal law, the third Monday is a national holiday in honor of the First President – the “Father of his country” – George Washington.

Not every president, including Millard Fillmore, Woodrow Wilson, or Bill Clinton.

George Washington’s birthday was celebrated yesterday.  So consider this thought experiment:

It is 2020 and Washington and close military advisers like Alexander Hamilton return for a 235th-anniversary ride on the eight decisive battlefields where American independence was won, finally at Yorktown in 1781.  They would be shocked and disgusted.  Here’s why.

For four years, polling has documented that the president’s strongest support demographic is America’s Orthodox Jews.

The support runs between 70 percent in radical Los Angeles to 90 percent most everywhere else. This has been documented here and here and here and here and here.

Although much of that support stems from a deep affinity with his stands on the whole gamut of traditional American cultural and social issues, an underestimated factor is that community’s natural acquaintance with Borscht Belt humor. Those who “get” that humor know precisely how to understand Trump, what to take seriously, what to brush off, and what deeper messages to take away from his speeches and tweets.

Those who do not get the style and nuance end up completely misunderstanding him and then attacking him for communicating thoughts he never contemplated. Like the Corrupt Journalist Corps.

I think those of us on the left need to take a long look in the mirror and have an honest conversation about what’s going on.

If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing.

So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting. Yes, knitting.  I kid you not.  Here’s my story.

MANCHESTER, N.H. – Democrats running for president here in the snow-blanketed hills, valleys, towns and villages of this legendary New England political bellwether need to lighten up a bit.

We all know that politics is a serious business, but not so serious that we can’t share a joke or a quip once in a while. However, humor among this batch of Democrat contenders appears to be in short supply.

If any of the Dem candidate crowd were saying crazy angry things to be funny, that would be one thing. But these Democrats are all serious, all of the time. They are on a mission for change that doesn’t allow for the light touch.  They are all Total Buzzkill.

Just as an aside, it’s pretty funny that Bernie Sanders’ initials are BS.  Why aren’t there bumperstickers saying “BERNIE SANDERS IS BS”?

Now that the four-and-a-half-month-long Ukraine impeachment bookend to the 22-month Mueller charade is over, it clearly accomplished nothing other than substantially raising the polls of both Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The public was reminded that Representative Gerald Nadler (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are every bit as childish, peevish, and absurd as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

Eventually, someone will sort out whether that post-election effort on the part of federal officials to abort the Trump presidency, abetted by the media and #TheResistance, was a simple follow-up to the Clinton-DNC-Perkins Coe-Fusion GPS collusion against candidate Trump.

Or a sick preemptive attempt of the administrative state to smear Trump as a “Russian asset” because of their worries about the exposure of their own prior criminality and Trump’s iconoclastic agenda.

But for now, the following statements are irrefutable.

Now that Bernie Sanders—once an obscure socialist senator from Vermont—is officially the front-runner for the Democrat presidential nomination, it is time to confront what that means.

It does not mean the U.S. is flirting with socialism. That’s not going to happen. The meaning of Bernie’s ascent is that the Democrat Party, older even than he is, has simply run out of gas.

The Democrats’ floundering to find a candidate is deeper than the split between moderates and the left. It looks to me like the accumulated costs of its long history as the self-declared party of government are finally coming due.

Unlike Gaul, the Democrat primary electorate is divided into only two parts.

Bernie Sanders's victory in Tuesday's (2/11) New Hampshire primary reminded observers of what we have known for a long time, namely that the smaller of these two parts remains united in favor of his candidacy for the Democrat presidential nomination.

The larger moderate one remains split, not quite evenly, between Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden.

We know which side the Democrat National Committee, the party's leadership in Congress, wealthy mega-donors, and luminaries like the Obamas and the Clintons are on. We also know that they are willing to do pretty much anything to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination in 2020.

The question is whether they will be able to.  It is increasingly doubtful the answer is yes.

The mood on the set of MSNBC was grim.

Rachel Maddow fought back tears of rage. Brian Williams struggled to make sense of it all. A former U.S. senator flailed her arms in frustration and indignation.

Their collective panic attack, however, was not caused by the results of the Democrat presidential primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday night (2/11). The electoral tie between an aged socialist and a sinister small-town mayor did not alarm the panelists assembled around the colorful set, shoulders stooped in despair, eyes ablaze.

What triggered them instead is proof it is too late to calm the unhinged: the Left and NeverTrump Right is in full meltdown mode.

It took all of ten seconds for the first winner at last night’s Oscars to unleash an angry political statement against President Trump.

Frankly, I’m only surprised it took that long.

Hollywood despises Trump with a volcanic passion despite many of its own leading lights representing exactly the same kind of ruthless, venal, self-aggrandizing, duplicitous, charlatan, narcissistic and hypocritical character traits they claim to see and hate  in him.

But shameless hypocrisy and chronic lack of self-awareness seem to go hand in hand with being a movie star these days.

Transgender ideology can take on a comical character, yet it’s one thing to claim that a man can “identify” as a woman or vice versa. Increasingly we see a dangerous and antiscientific trend toward the outright denial of biological sex.

The argument is that because some people are intersex—they have developmental conditions resulting in ambiguous sex characteristics—the categories male and female exist on a “spectrum,” and are therefore no more than “social constructs.”

If male and female are merely arbitrary groupings, it follows that everyone, regardless of genetics or anatomy should be free to choose to identify as male or female, or to reject sex entirely in favor of a new bespoke “gender identity.”

To characterize this line of reasoning as having no basis in reality would be an egregious understatement. It is false at every conceivable scale of resolution.