| Mother's Day is Sunday. Order flowers today! The Big Takeaway Is That Everybody Was Wary about Flynn? That's It? Democrats sure seem convinced that at the end of the investigation of Trump campaign officials and the Russian government, there's a big pile of indictments. The media treated yesterday's Senate testimony from former acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates as a big deal, complete with live coverage of the questioning and lots of talking-head analysis afterwards. The New York Times tells us, "the biggest takeaway on Monday was that a lot of people had serious concerns about Michael Flynn serving as national security adviser. But none of them was named Donald J. Trump." Yeah, Trump does that sometimes. If everybody in the world tells him to zig, he'll zag. But the news that a lot of people were wary about Flynn doesn't seem like a particularly shocking revelation. By mid-November 2016, we knew that Flynn was running a firm that lobbied for foreign clients, that "a Turkish businessman with real estate, aerospace, and consulting interests" was paying Flynn's firm "tens of thousands of dollars" for lobbying services, and that Flynn was running the firm, he was receiving classified intelligence briefings as part of the campaign. In other words, we already knew that he was in a murky region where he insisted that he wasn't lobbying but his firm was, and that he was getting classified information while he was paid, indirectly, by foreign interests. By itself, a former lawmaker or military official becoming a registered foreign agent isn't unethical and it certainly isn't illegal. Heck, it's common: Of the 1,009 members of Congress who have left Capitol Hill since 1990, 114 of them — just over 11 percent — lobbied for or otherwise represented a foreign government, foreign-owned company or think tank, according to a POLITICO review of records filed with the tiny DOJ office charged with enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a 1938 law passed to deal with the threat of Nazi propagandists in the United States. The top 10 former lawmakers-turned-foreign-agents, according to POLITICO's review, include a wide range of retired members, including congressional leaders and presidential contenders like Dick Gephardt, rank-and-file members like Albert Wynn and back-bench bomb-throwers like former Florida Rep. Connie Mack IV, each of whom worked on FARA contracts bringing more than $1 million to their respective firms in 2015. But Americans can't accept a revolving door between serving public office on behalf of us and working for a foreign government. Perhaps we should make the door swing one way. You can become a foreign agent, lobbying our government on behalf of a foreign interest, but you can't return to a taxpayer-funded position after that. The Good News about Millennials The Fund for American Studies has a new survey out that should cheer us; they find that 93 percent of Millennials support religious freedom and 92 percent of Millennials support free speech. It's worth remembering that it's mostly Millennials who are wearing the uniform to keep us safe. Figures from the Pentagon in 2014 found that just 14.4 percent of the enlisted force was 36 or older, and more than half the active-duty officer corps fell in the Millennial bracket. The angry mob at Middlebury College in Vermont doesn't really speak for a generation. "The media keeps showing us images of violent protests on college campuses, young Americans being angry and disruptive, but the truth is that millennials support religious and social freedoms more than non-millennials," said Roger Ream, President, The Fund for American Studies (TFAS). "There's a vast, silent majority of millennials who embrace these freedoms and those are the young men and women we are seeing in our programs." Most people who really follow politics understand that "conservative" and "Republican" are not synonyms. On a Venn diagram, they overlap quite a bit, but the TFAS survey found what might be an interesting dividing line: whether the top priority is liberty or security: When asked to choose between individual liberty and concerns about security, conservatives split evenly between their support for liberty (51%) and security (49%). Republicans fall more in the camp of "more government" that ensures national security. Conservatives fall primarily in the camp of "less government" that promotes liberty. "When you take a comparative look at conservative and Republican ideologies toward freedom, you would expect a lot of overlap. One of the surprising findings of this survey is that Republicans favor an active government approach which prioritizes security over individual liberties," said Roger Ream. "This may explain some of the resonance for President Trump's message in the GOP primaries, resonance that many, at the time, didn't fully grasp. Conservatives were more supportive of a passive government which prioritizes liberty over security concerns," Ream concludes. So smile at the next Millennial you see, they're not all as bad as you've heard. Fine, Let's Have a Trump–Hillary Rematch It's not that hard to see that deep down, Hillary Clinton doesn't really think of Donald Trump as a legitimate winner of the presidential race; it was a lucky fluke. Old habits die hard; Clinton referred to President Trump as "my opponent" five times in that interview. Two words that never escaped Hillary Clinton's lips in this sequence: "President Trump." When Clinton boasted about winning the national popular vote, Amanpour joked, "I see a tweet coming." The former secretary of state responded, "Better that than interfering in foreign affairs if he wants to tweet about me!" Except… President Trump isn't "interfering" in foreign affairs; whether you voted for him or not, he is the president of the United States and is implementing a foreign policy. You can love that foreign policy or hate it, but he's not some outsider who wandered into the Oval Office when no one was looking. Despite some generous gestures, such as attending Trump's inauguration, Clinton's real perspective is starting to slip out. Trump didn't really win fair and square, and thus, he's not really president. He's just some goofball who won by accident and is "interfering" in the process of governing that is Hillary Clinton's natural responsibility. ADDENDA: Oh, no. Bob Owens, a prominent Second Amendment blogger, passed away suddenly, leaving behind a family and many friends wondering how something like this could happen. If you want to help his family out, you can do so here. | 
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