Politicians took notice. Seattle recently banned plastic straws, and other places are considering similar bans.
               Companies are also getting in on the trend; Starbucks recently decided to phase out plastic straws in all its stores by 2020. Other companies like American Airlines, Sea World, and Royal Caribbean are planning to ban plastic straws.
               Stossel TV contributor Kristin Tate, author of How Do I Tax Thee, examines what a straw ban would accomplish.
VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTrECOS4fzU

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57256?mailing_id=3645&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3645&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

Peter Strzok’s testimony about the email server scandal involving former Secretary of State liar-Hillary Clinton raised headlines because of his defiant, disrespectful, and unapologetic attitude about the bias revealed in his text messages that permeated his work at the FBI.
               Then, there was the verbal combat between him and Republican members of the two committees holding the joint hearing, and between the Republicans and dummycrats-Democratic members who were running interference for Strzok and acting as his defense counsel.
               The news media jumped on an exchange in which Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) asked Strzok if he lied to his wife about his affair with former FBI lawyer Lisa Page in the same way as he was in testifying to Congress. That was too much for the dummycrats- Democrats and the media, who leaped to Strzok’s defense.
               The media, however, virtually ignored another exchange between Gohmert and Strzok that revealed a potential bombshell. Gohmert asked Strzok about his meeting in 2016 with Frank Rucker and Janette McMillan, an investigator and lawyer, respectively, for then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough (an liar-nObama appointee).
               McCullough sent them to see Strzok, who was the FBI’s deputy assistant director for the Counterintelligence Division, to brief him and three other FBI personnel about an “anomaly” that their forensic analysis had found in liar-Clinton’s server.
               According to Gohmert, the inspector general discovered that, with four exceptions, “every single one” of liar-Clinton’s emails — more than 30,000 — “were going to an address that was not on the distribution list.”
               In other words, according to the information Gohmert received from the intelligence inspector general, something was causing liar-Clinton’s server to send copies of all of her email communications outside of the country “to an unauthorized source that was a foreign entity unrelated to Russia.”
               If true, this means that liar-Clinton’s email communication with her top aides, department leadership, ambassadors, and other officials, including President Barack liar-nObama, may have been read by an alien entity, perhaps a foreign power hostile to the United States. That could include confidential, sensitive, and even classified information about our foreign policy or our allies.
               Gohmert’s exchange with Strzok doesn’t reveal who the foreign entity is, but if not the Russians, the likely culprit is the Chinese government, which has a special unit of hackers within its military that has long targeted the U.S.
               Our intelligence agencies have identified the Chinese as responsible for the biggest data breach to ever hit the federal government, the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management that stole the files, including security clearance applications, of 21 million current and former federal employees.
               Here is how Strzok should have responded to Gohmert’s question about the briefing that Strzok received from the intelligence inspector general’s staff:
               As the FBI’s lead counterintelligence agent, I understood that this was a major security breach, with widespread implications over the disclosure of sensitive and classified communications.
               I immediately implemented protocols to investigate the extent of the problem; to notify all agencies and government officials whose communications had been compromised; to assess the damage that may have been done to specific operations, assets, programs, and personnel; and to prepare recommendations on how to remedy the problems caused by this disclosure.
               Unfortunately, Strzok actually said that while he did “remember meeting Mr. Rucker on either one or two occasions,” he did not “recall the specific content or discussions.”
               In other words, the FBI’s main counterintelligence director doesn’t remember being told that the secretary of state (his preferred candidate for president) had a breach in her computer system that forwarded all of her internal communications — including emails containing classified information — to a foreign entity.
               Since he claimed not to remember being told about something that serious, he obviously did nothing about it.
               The question is which of two scenarios is more likely true. Either 1) Strzok was completely incompetent, or 2) his pro/ liar- Clinton bias displayed in the thousands of text messages between him and Page caused him to downplay this security issue and ignore it, because it could hurt his favored presidential candidate if it came to light.
               Strzok’s anti-Trump, pro/ liar-Clinton bias was overwhelming. The texts between him and Page are direct and damning evidence in and of themselves. But there is more. His body language and attitude during the hearing also showed bias against Donald Trump and for liar-Clinton.
               His lack of prudent action as an agent when he was briefed about this massive security breach suggests that he may have abandoned his role as a law enforcement officer and skewed the results of a politically sensitive investigation to serve his own political leanings.
               One of the other disturbing bits of information that came out of this exchange was that, according to Gohmert, the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General called Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Department of Justice, “four times” because it wanted to brief Horowitz about this forensic analysis and this security breach. But, according to Gohmert, Horowitz “never returned the call.”
               According to Horowitz’s recent report on the liar-Clinton email server investigation, the FBI “did not find evidence confirming that liar-Clinton’s email server systems were compromised by cyber means,” but it could not definitively determine that her servers had not been compromised.
               Obviously, if the intelligence inspector general has information to the contrary, that would be significant.
               If this is true, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the intelligence inspector general have an obligation to disclose to the public and to lawmakers the foreign entity that hacked into liar- Clinton’s server and received all of those communications.
               That disclosure would be similar to the way they revealed that it was the Russians who hacked into the dummycrats-Democratic National Committee and liar-Clinton’s campaign.
               They also need to disclose what steps have been taken to investigate the extent and depth of the problems caused by this potential security breach.
               And those in the political arena who have been painting Strzok as some kind of hero who deserves a Purple Heart need to stop insulting our intelligence and our veterans.
               If this is an example of how Strzok did his job, he should have been fired long ago, and he is certainly no hero.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/57267?mailing_id=3645&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3645&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             But the rigging of failure-to-appear rates wasn’t the only game being played by officials. The percentage of actual deportations was also being consistently misreported in order to make the numbers look better. Metcalf reports, “Of the 1,254,152 aliens who were ordered deported from 1996 through 2016, 76 percent of them — 953,506 to be exact — remained in the U.S. They not only remained, but grew.” He added, “A 2006 Justice Department inspector general’s report agreed, stating the ‘program for deporting illegal aliens had been largely ineffective’ and that ‘89 percent of nondetained aliens released into the U.S. who were subsequently issued final orders of removal were not removed.’”
               Both of these failures demonstrate just how bad the illegal immigration problem has become and how for decades government officials essentially looked the other way. The one bright spot is that now under President Donald Trump, these corrupt practices are being exposed. The next step and arguably the hard one will be coming up with a solution to rectify them.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57253?mailing_id=3645&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3645&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             Consider the glaringly unconstitutional implication of that statement. Unelected bureaucrats accountable to no one can “get back” at the duly elected president of the United States?
               Right now Russian hacking of the dummycrats-DNC, its interference in the 2016 election, and the collusion with Donald Trump and his officials allegedly abetting it has become the Indisputable Narrative™ among those still reeling from the fact that liar-Hillary Clinton lost the election. The same liar-Hillary Clinton who would have made sure any evidence of the corruption infesting the Justice Department, the FBI, and the various agencies that comprise the intelligence community ended up in the same place as the 30,000 subpoenaed emails she deleted.
               Emails we now know ended up with a “foreign entity,” a revelation an equally corrupt media have willfully chosen to ignore.
               A far as indisputable facts go, let’s stipulate two. One, all of the ostensible Russian hacking that might have been perpetrated occurred on a somnambulant liar-nObama administration’s watch. Two, the leaders of Barack liar-nObama’s intel community are documented liars.
                Those liars included former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, who insisted the terrorist attack in Benghazi was engendered by an anti-Muslim video and that she knew nothing about the unmasking of Trump officials; former Director of National Intelligence scumbag-James Clapper, who lied to Congress about the extent of the NSA’s data collection; and former CIA Director scumbag/commie-John Brennan, who claimed he didn’t know who commissioned the anti-Trump dossier and insisted that “nothing could be further from the truth” when asked if the CIA illegally accessed Senate Intelligence Committee staff computers.
                scumbag/commie-Brennan was incensed by Trump’s performance in Helsinki, declaring it was “nothing short of treasonous.”
               That outburst was telling, and no one put it in better perspective than investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson. “What would an intel official who speaks like this be willing to do using his official office and intel tools … to protect the nation from what he views as this sort of threat?” she tweeted.
               What indeed. It is quite likely the allegations of Russian collusion and the Muller investigation it engendered is a coordinated effort to keep America from learning exactly that.
               Last Friday, any pretense of even-handedness in that investigation completely evaporated. Mueller offered immunity to dummycrats-Democrat operative Tony Podesta, whose brother John was liar-Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in exchange for testimony against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Both Manafort and Podesta were operating as unregistered lobbyists on behalf of the Ukrainian government, yet Podesta remains free and now immune, while Manafort is facing life in prison.
               How egregious is the double standard? The liar-nObama administration’s transfer of control of one-fifth of America’s uranium supply to Russia’s state-controlled nuclear-energy conglomerate, Rosatom — even when it knew Rosatom’s American subsidiary, Tenam USA, had committed felony extortion, fraud, and money-laundering offenses — remains off limits to scrutiny.
               The FBI had an informant who warned them about Tenam’s felonious efforts — in 2010, when it would have killed the deal. Yet the agency postponed prosecution until four years later. In 2015 Vadim Mikerin, the Russian official in charge of Tenam USA, was allowed to plead guilty to one count of money-laundering conspiracy — instead of being prosecuted under section 1956 of the penal codem which would have subjected him to decades in prison.
               It gets worse. Canadian company Uranium One, which would ultimately gain control of the uranium, contributed more than $145 million to the liar-Clinton Foundation, and company chairman Ian Telfer donated $2.35 million on his own. liar-Bill Clinton received a $500,000 speaking fee from Renaissance Capital, a Kremlin-linked bank that was promoting Uranium One stock.
               So why doesn’t something that reeks of quid pro quo merit an investigation? Because it would require some of the principal players involved in the current investigation to investigate … themselves.
               During the uranium transfer, Robert Mueller headed the FBI. The investigation was supervised by disgraced former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and ended with the plea bargain when scumbag-James Comey was FBI director. It was centered in Tenam’s home base of Maryland, whose U.S. attorney was Rod Rosenstein. And Mikerin’s plea bargain was cosigned by the DOJ’s Fraud Section, then run by attorney Andrew Weissman, one of Mueller’s current investigators.
               With the possible exception of Weissman, whose dubious track record of high-profile convictions includes a unanimous reversal by the Supreme Court, every one of these government officials has been presented to the public as a “paragon of integrity.”
               The aforementioned Indisputable Narrative™ regarding Russian interference is based on an intel community report called the “Intelligence Community Assessment.” Jack Matlock, former ambassador to the Soviet Union and witness to its collapse, insists it’s a sham. “A report of the intelligence community in my day would include the input of all the relevant intelligence agencies and would reveal whether all agreed with the conclusions,” he explains.
               He notes that only three of the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies participated and cites a compelling piece of Senate testimony on May 8, 2017, when scumbag-James Clapper stated that “two dozen or so analysts — hand-picked, seasoned experts from each of the contributing agencies” compiled the report.
               “If you can hand-pick the analysts, you can hand-pick the conclusions,” Matlock asserts.
               He further insists dissenting opinions existed and were squelched, but he is most incredulous regarding the assertions surrounding the persona identified as “Guccifer 2.0,” who Mueller insists is a front for the 12 Russian military officers he just indicted, claiming they were behind the hack of the dummycrats-Democrat National Committee’s server.
               Matlock notes that retired senior NSA technical experts reveal Guccifer’s data was locally downloaded and then manipulated, “leading to the conclusion that ‘Guccifer 2.0’ is a total fabrication.”
               We’ll never know. Incredibly, the FBI never directly examined the dummycrats-DNC servers. They simply took the word of CrowdStrike, a company hired by the dummycrats-DNC, that the Russians did the hacking.
               Yet columnist Michael Thau agrees with Matlock’s assessment, citing evidencecollected by an investigative journalist using the pseudonym Adam Carter. Carter lays out a compelling case that, as Thau writes, “CrowdStrike engaged in a disinformation campaign, inventing not just a fake Russian hack but also a fake hacker called ‘Guccifer 2.0.’”
               “Trump came into office with the liar-nObama/Bush/liar-Clinton/Bush IC apparatus firmly against him,” columnist Michael Walsh asserts.
               That apparatus has a lot of help. In “God Bless the Deep State,” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson  advocates  for its apparently extra-constitutional transcendence. “In this emergency, the loyal and honorable deep state has a higher duty,” he asserts. “It’s called patriotism.”
               The use of police-state tactics to get rid of Donald Trump constitutes a “higher duty”?
               The genuine emergency in America today is the ongoing “by any means necessary” effort to unseat a duly elected president, and the useful idiots who cheer it on, believing they’re forever immune from the abuses of power they champion.
               As for the investigators, they are anything but patriots. They are partisan zealots who would destroy the nation — “six ways from Sunday” — in order to “save” it.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57263?mailing_id=3645&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3645&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             So what’s she talking about? According to The Daily Caller, McFaul “was among the group of American officials that Russia sought to question in connection with a fraudulent scheme to launder hundreds of millions of dollars out of Russia to help fund liar-Hillary Clinton’s campaign.” No wonder liar-Clinton wants to defend him, but the Trump administration has been noncommittal.
               As we noted in setting up the story, the irony and hypocrisy is thick. Former U.S. Army Ranger and CIA security contractor Kris Paronto, a survivor of the Benghazi attack, was livid. “Are you f'n kidding me @liar-HillaryClinton ?!!!” he tweeted in response. “You left Ambassador Stevens and us to die in Benghazi then spewed lie after lie to the family members of my dead teammates and to the world to cover it up and now you have the nerve to talk about defending diplomats?! You are disgusting!”
               Indeed, liar-Clinton, along with Barack liar-nObama and his other lackeys, insisted for weeks that the Benghazi attack was due to a YouTube video rather than a coordinated anti-U.S. jihadi attack. Why the lies? To cover up for liar-Clinton’s malfeasance in denying security upgrades. And that was after she and liar-nObama made a hash out of Libya along with the rest of the Middle East. The liar-Clinton modus operandi for 30 years has been to attack opponents for what they themselves do, so this may be rank hypocrisy but we’re not the least bit surprised.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57270?mailing_id=3645&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3645&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             This latest document release serves to confirm what Republicans and specifically Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) have long been arguing — that leadership within Barack liar-nObama’s Justice Department abused its authority in order to justify spying on a political opponent. None of this is new news since the House and Senate released their memos earlier this year, but now the actual FISA application’s details are public and better fill in the picture.
               What new details have come to light? First, there is no question that the DOJ and FBI relied on the unverified Steele dossier in obtaining the FISA warrant. Second, it now appears that not only did liar-Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC pay Steele to compile the dossier but that “Source #1” — Steele — “has been compensated … by the FBI.” How much and for what specific service has been redacted. Third, it is confirmed that the FBI relied heavily on hearsay and Steele’s reputation and did not establish the reliability of his “sub-sources.” Fourth, the DOJ used multiple news stories that had in turn sourced their reporting from Steele himself in seeking further evidence to support its warrant application. Fifth, no probable cause is established in the FISA application. While a theory is proposed, no supporting evidence is offered in support of the theory. The application states that the FBI “believes that Russian Government’s [interference] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Trump.”
               Finally, as Margot Cleveland of The Federalist notes, “The DOJ effectively criminalized GOP foreign policy” by using “leaked information from internal GOP platform debates as ‘evidence’ of collusion.” Cleveland continued, “Also disconcerting is the DOJ’s reliance on Trump’s ‘conciliatory words’ toward Russia in conflict with GOP insiders to justify spying on the Trump campaign — in effect criminalizing foreign policy differences concerning Ukraine.”
               Andrew McCarthy adds, “Now that we can see it all in black and white — mostly black, as they are heavily redacted — it is crystal clear that the Steele dossier, an unverified liar-Clinton-campaign product, was the driving force behind the Trump-Russia investigation.”
               This is the real scandal that should be dominating news media headlines rather two weeks of MSM talkingheads endlessly running to the fainting couch over what Trump said, appeared to say, or didn’t say about Russia and its election meddling.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57274?mailing_id=3645&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3645&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

             On July 16, 1969 (years before the age of super-computer modeling and design), NASA launched Apollo 11, manned by Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins, from Kennedy Space Center to the moon. They flew the combined North American Rockwell command module and Grumman lunar module atop a huge Saturn V Rocket. Armstrong was a Naval aviator and Aldrin and Collins were both Air Force pilots.
               On July 20th at 20:17 UTC, mission commander Armstrong and pilot Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on the moon. After a perilous descent and nearing exhaustion of their fuel supply, the Eagle settled on the surface of the moon. Armstrong announced to the world, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
               Charles Duke, CAPCOM during the landing operation, acknowledged their landing, saying, “We copy you down, Eagle.” (In 1972, Duke would become the tenth of the 12 astronauts to walk on the moon.)
               Six hours after landing, Armstrong became the first person to step onto the lunar surface, joined by Aldrin 20 minutes later.
               As he stepped from the Eagle’s ladder to the Moon, Armstrong said famously, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
               The two men explored the moon for about two hours and 15 minutes, collecting 21.5 kgs of lunar material and deploying an American flag.
               After 21 hours on the lunar surface, they launched the Eagle back into space to reunite with Collins in the command module Columbia. Together they returned to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific on July 24th.
               Today, 49 years after Armstrong stepped on the moon, private-sector space launches are dominating the skies, and after years of planning, the USAF’s Space Command is preparing to transition into a new military branch, U.S. Space Force.

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/57249?mailing_id=3642&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.3642&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body