A quick jaunt through apocalyptic times: Calexit and Obama's perfidy

This Maddow segment is one of the most important she has ever broadcast.

For a while now, I've been convinced that the CalExit virus spreading throughout my home state -- a virus that has affected people I know -- is another Putin ploy. Just look at the background of Louis J. Marinelli, the head of the Yes, California movement: He is a Republican Trump supporter who lives in Yekaterinburg, Russia. (At this point, I wouldn't mind a "Yekaterinburg" solution to the world's Putin problem.)

In 2009, Marinelli relocated to Saint Petersburg, Russia where he began working for another private language school as an English teacher and became a student himself at Saint Petersburg State University, the alma mater of Russian presidents Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev. Although he initially considered giving up his U.S. citizenship to remain in Russia permanently, citing disillusionment with the United States government and political system, Marinelli came back to live in California in the summer of 2011.

I think you get the picture.

There is an alternative to the Yes, California movement which, I am sorry to say, has received positive exposure from a number of left-wing sites, including Brad Friedman's. It's called the California National Party. They claim to have nothing, nothing, nothing to do with Marinelli, the guy who reeks of vodka and treason.

Oh yeah?

On January 6, 2016, the California Secretary of State's office sent a memorandum to all 58 county Registrar of Voters acknowledging the establishment of the California National Party and asked that each county "track all registrations and inform this office of the number of voters registered with the California National Party for all future reports of registration."[15] Marinelli was subsequently listed on the California Secretary of State's website as the interim chairman of this party.

Again: I think you get the picture.

CNP spokespersons may tell you that they have no current link to Marinelli. So what? That whole line of argument should be immaterial to any thinking person.

The existence of Marinelli's movement proves that Putin wants to dismember the United States while re-assembling the USSR. Thus, we need no further proof that the CNP -- or any other secessionist movement -- is doing Putin's will. Maybe the people running the CNP are witting agents in Putin's employ; maybe they are innocents, acting for reasons of their own. Either way, the end result is the same: They are doing Putin's will. They are giving him what he wants.

And now Nigel Farage is getting into the act. That guy might as well be wearing a Putin t-shirt.

Farage and fellow Brexiteer Arron Banks (together they’re known as “the bad boys of ‘Brexit’”) just returned from a trip to California during which they reportedly raised $1 million for a campaign to set up a “Calexit” style referendum in the state for 2018, according to The Times of London.

Their “Calexit” plan isn’t like the one that’s been in the news since President Donald Trump took over the White House. Farage doesn’t want to see the state break off from the United States entirely as San Diego-based Yes California advocates (with little hope of actually accomplishing it.)

Instead, the Farage plan is to split the state into two new regions, with one being more eastern and rural and one being full of the more liberal, coastal cities.

Here’s a map of what the split could look like.

“It would be portrayed as the Hollywood elites versus the people, breaking up the bad government,” Banks said. “It's the world's sixth largest economy and it's very badly run.”

The Daily Mail reports that it’s actually polling expert Gerry Gunster and Republican Scott Baugh, a former member of the California state assembly, who are behind the concept.

If Farage gets his way, not only will California secede from the union, it will be split in twain, thereby reducing further any potential threat to a resurgent -- and fascist -- Russia.

Always keep in mind that Putin, the king of the kleptocrats, has nearly unlimited wealth. 

Did Obama screw over Hillary Clinton? Looks like he did, and not for the first time.

My interpretation of this important story owes much to my unhappy memories of the 2008 campaign (a bloody shirt I will never tire of waving).

FBI Director James Comey attempted to go public as early as the summer of 2016 with information on Russia’s campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election, but Obama administration officials blocked him from doing so, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Newsweek.

Well before the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence accused the Russian government of tampering with the U.S. election in an October 7 statement, Comey pitched the idea of writing an op-ed about the Russian campaign during a meeting in the White House’s situation room in June or July.

“He had a draft of it or an outline. He held up a piece of paper in a meeting and said, ‘I want to go forward, what do people think of this?’” says a source with knowledge of the meeting, which included Secretary of State John Kerry, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Department of Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson and the national security adviser Susan Rice.

The other national security officials didn’t like the idea, and White House officials thought the announcement should be a coordinated message backed by multiple agencies, the source says. “An op-ed doesn’t have the same stature, it comes from one person.”

The op-ed would not have mentioned whether the FBI was investigating Donald Trump’s campaign workers or others close to him for links to the Russians’ interference in the election, a second source with knowledge of the request tells Newsweek. Comey would likely have tried to publish the op-ed in The New York Times, and it would have included much of the same information as the bombshell declassified intelligence report released January 6, which said Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to influence the presidential election, the source said.

From this, we may fairly posit that Comey must have had a similar meeting in the White House before he announced the existence of those duplicate emails on the Weiner/Abedin laptop. That pseudoscandal handed the election to Trump.

Team Trump told the nation that a vote for Hillary was unthinkable because she was under FBI investigation. We now know that Trump himself was under FBI investigation for something much, much more disturbing. The Trump/Putin link is an infinitely more serious matter than was a Clinton aide's improper handling of a "classified" but inconsequential email about the new president of Malawi.

Obama made sure that the FBI's investigation of Trump was kept secret while the FBI's investigation of Hillary was out in the open. Liberals are refusing to acknowledge the implications of this Newsweek story. Lefties will quickly toss mud at Comey, at Kerry, at Rice -- at anyone other than St. Barack Obama.

Yet if this new report is accurate, Obama was the one who made the call to keep Comey muzzled on Trump and un-muzzled on Hillary. The former president's actions can only be described as perfidious.

Yeah. All of sudden, I can recall very vividly why I felt such passion during the 2008 campaign.

Newsweek doesn't tell you the full story: As Paul Wood points out, Comey was -- at this same time -- taking the Orbis dossier (often called the Steele dossier) very seriously. He must have been discussing the Steele allegations with Obama, Kerry and Rice.

The roadmap for the investigation, publicly acknowledged now for the first time, comes from Christopher Steele, once of Britain's secret intelligence service MI6.

He wrote a series of reports for political opponents of Donald Trump about Trump and Russia.

Steele's "dossier", as the material came to be known, contains a number of highly contested claims.

At one point he wrote: "A leading Russian diplomat, Mikhail KULAGIN, had been withdrawn from Washington at short notice because Moscow feared his heavy involvement in the US presidential election operation… would be exposed in the media there."

There was no diplomat called Kulagin in the Russian embassy; there was a Kalugin.

Yes, yes, yes: There are a couple of misspellings in the dossier. So what? It was not intended for public consumption. By contrast, Trump's "tapp" tweet was meant for public eyes. Misspelling Kalugin is a lot more understandable than misspelling the word tap.

But sources I know and trust have told me the US government identified Kalugin as a spy while he was still at the embassy.

It is not clear if the American intelligence agencies already believed this when they got Steele's report on the "diplomat", as early as May 2016.

But it is a judgment they made using their own methods, outside the dossier.

A retired member of a US intelligence agency told me that Kalugin was being kept under surveillance before he left the US.

Once more, the Steele report is verified.

But last June, Steele began sending pages of what would later be called his dossier.

In light of his earlier work, the US intelligence community saw him as "credible" (their highest praise).

The FBI thought the same; they had worked with Steele going back to his days in MI6.

He flew to Rome in August to talk to the FBI.

Then in early October, he came to the US and was extensively debriefed by them, over a week.

He gave the FBI the names of some of his informants, the so-called "key" to the dossier.

If we conflate the Newsweek story with Paul Wood's piece, what do we get? A scenario in which Barack Obama deliberately prevented Comey from publicizing what the Bureau had on Trump -- including the claims made in the dossier.

Steele himself expected his report to sway the election. He became angry at the FBI when they did nothing with his work. He should have directed his anger at the man running the show.

Obama really is a bad or sick guy. He elected Trump.