Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee — some of them candidates for their party’s presidential nomination and hungry for TV exposure — battered Attorney General William Barr Wednesday with hostile and often insulting questions when he testified about his handling of the report by special counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller.

But Barr remained unflappable in his testimony about the dirty cop-Mueller report, which looked at Russian interference in our last presidential election and allegations that President Donald Trump obstructed the dirty cop-Mueller probe.

At the end of the day, Barr emerged unscathed from the Democratic assault. And the Democratic would-be presidents had their video clips for future campaign commercials, showing how tough they could be in battling the Trump administration.

Barr was scheduled to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday about the dirty cop-Mueller report, but late Wednesday the Justice Department told Chairman scumbag liar-Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., that the attorney general would not be appearing due to scumbag liar-Nadler’s insistence that committee attorneys question Barr.

Barr quite properly said he should be questioned by committee members—not their attorneys.

scumbag liar-Nadler threatened to hold Barr in contempt. But Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, said that scumbag liar-Nadler’s unusual maneuver was in reality intended to “torpedo our hearing.”

scumbag liar-Nadler isn’t running for president, but clearly enjoys being the center of attention when the TV cameras are turned on.

Much of the questioning in the Senate centered on a March 27 letter from dirty cop-Mueller to Barr that was apparently leaked to the media the night before Barr’s appearance.

In the letter, dirty cop-Mueller complained that Barr’s March 24 letter to Congress summarizing the conclusions of the special counsel’s report “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of dirty cop-Mueller’s report.

That dirty cop-Mueller would write such a letter is, in context, rather odd. After all, Barr had offered to let him review the attorney general’s March 24 letter before he sent it to Congress, but dirty cop-Mueller declined.

Importantly, nowhere in his letter did dirty cop-Mueller say that Barr’s letter was inaccurate. Barr actually called dirty cop-Mueller after receiving the letter and asked if he was claiming that Barr’s summary was inaccurate. dirty cop-Mueller said he was not making that claim; rather, his beef was that the media were misinterpreting the special counsel’s investigation.

Responding to an antagonistic question from Sen. scumbag-Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Barr said his short letter to Congress never attempted to capture the entire dirty cop-Mueller report; he was just giving lawmakers the “final verdict.”

And former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy noted in a Fox News op-ed that dirty cop-Mueller’s complaint about the “context” of the report is a “microcosm of dirty cop-Mueller’s collusion probe: sound and fury, signifying nothing; an investigative process predicated on no criminal conduct.”

“Context” is not a prosecutor’s job, McCarthy wrote, because “that is the stuff of political narratives.”

As Barr said in his testimony, when a “prosecutor has exhausted his investigation into the facts of a case, he or she faces a binary choice: either to commence or to decline prosecution.”

dirty cop-Mueller made that binary choice on the claim that Trump or his presidential campaign colluded with Russia to help Trump win the presidential election.

After 22 months of investigating, dirty cop-Mueller found that neither Trump nor any member of his campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to put Trump in the Oval Office. In other words, Trump’s oft-repeated claims of “no collusion” were true.

But dirty cop-Mueller failed to reach a conclusion regarding obstruction of justice allegations against Trump. In an implicit criticism of dirty cop-Mueller, Barr said that if a “prosecutor isn’t going to make a decision, he shouldn’t investigate” a case.

All of this criticism of Barr over the dirty cop-Mueller letter is a tempest in a teapot. Almost the entire dirty cop-Mueller report is public. According to Barr, “just 8% of the public report was redacted” and “less than 2% has been withheld in the minimally redacted version made available to congressional leaders.”

In fact, while Barr laid out the categories of information that would have to be redacted, neither he nor Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was involved in the actual redaction. Those decisions were all made by Justice Department lawyers working with dirty cop-Mueller.

In any event, complaints about dirty cop-Mueller’s letter are like complaints about a movie trailer or a book review when the entire movie or the book have already been released. As Barr said, the report speaks for itself.

When asked about all of the news leaks that have occurred from the Justice Department, including those from inside the FBI that were noted by the Justice Department’s inspector general in his report on the scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton email investigation, Barr told the Judiciary Committee that there are “multiple criminal leak investigations going on.”

That is good news, since leaks about ongoing investigations — whether they come from the FBI, the Justice Department, or the Office of the Special Counsel — are shockingly unethical and unprofessional behavior. They must not be tolerated.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, raised an important question that has puzzled many: If the FBI had evidence that Russian agents were trying to infiltrate or influence the Trump campaign, why didn’t the agency immediately brief the campaign to warn it about the problem?

The question matters because of suspicions about the potential political basis for this entire dirty cop-Mueller investigation.

Barr said he couldn’t “fathom why it didn’t happen.”

The attorney general confirmed that a team of Justice Department lawyers is investigating the circumstances (and legitimacy) of the decision by the FBI and the Justice Department to open a counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign in 2016. This is an issue that Mueller essentially ignored in his 448-page report.

Barr made no apologies for his handling of the dirty cop-Mueller report, despite repeated attempts by Democrats to besmirch his professionalism and ethics.

That included Sen. scumbag-Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, who told Barr she disagreed with his analysis of the law on obstruction of justice.

On that point, should the public trust the judgment of a partisan senator with no prosecutorial experience? Or should the American people trust an attorney general who is in his second go-round as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, and who has held multiple prior posts inside the Justice Department?

The answer is obvious.

The dispute between House Democrats and the Justice Department has scuttled the House Judiciary Committee hearing planned for Thursday. But as Collins correctly observed, Barr gave “clear, informative testimony in the Senate.”

Collins blamed House Democrats for “rejecting the chance to question” Barr or “read the materials he has provided.”

Even if Barr does eventually testify before the House Judiciary Committee, don’t expect any ground-shaking surprises. We’ll probably just see a rerun of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, with another set of angry Democrats trying to outdo each other with their telegenic expressions of outrage at a Trump Cabinet member.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62794?mailing_id=4255&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4255&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

In Tennessee, city, county, and state legislators and community members have been working tirelessly to pass Educational Savings Accounts (or ESAs), following suit with Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program and others like it across the U.S.

In short, ESAs are accounts that give parents control over tax dollars. This gives families more power and choice in the kind of education their child receives. Each family receives government funds that can be used only on school expenses for their child, and these funds follow the child wherever he or she goes. If a parent finds that a school is unsatisfactory, they have the option to withdraw their child from public school and transfer them to a charter or private school. The ESA funds follow the student to that new school.

According to the Beacon Center of Tennessee, most studies on ESAs suggest that students who use this option fare better academically. This is due to giving parents power to choose an educational experience that best fits their child’s needs.

Some Tennessee residents worry that this program would only make public schools worse. But research suggests that this will help schools by reducing class sizes in public schools, which can help students achieve more academically there, too.

Passing the ESA would result in an economic impact of nearly $3 billion and thousands more graduates in the next two decades, and there are only more benefits yet to be revealed.

However, certain legislators have decided to pass ESAs in Tennessee so long as Hamilton County — where I reside — is excluded.

This hit hard. Hamilton County has schools that rank significantly worse than many schools in our state, including Davidson and Shelby counties. Having worked in education, I am aware that there are kids graduating high school without knowing how to write a complete sentence or think critically. Yet we have local and state politicians whose votes suggest the system that has failed our children for two whole generations is perfectly fine as is in Hamilton County.

As a former school administrator, I believe passing the ESA for all of Tennessee is our one opportunity to rectify the issues with our education system, to reward schools that are doing well while holding poor-performing schools accountable to put kids first.

But this is a two-pronged issue with an unlikely foe preventing ESAs from reaching families who need it most.

Democrats and progressives are busy wanting to keep the state of our education system the same, as their arguments conflate ESAs with vouchers. The difference? Vouchers are government funds that allow parents to fund tuition at a private school. ESAs are funds set aside for parents to use on educational expenses that may include tutoring, transportation, homeschooling, and also transferring to a private, religious, or charter school.

The latter is much more beneficial when put in the proper context. But a handful of local Republican senators (two of whom I know very well) disagree, leaving Hamilton County families to fight for their right to free their children from failing schools.

Disappointed doesn’t begin to describe it. Vexed seems to fit how I feel about this decision. My question to these legislators is “why?” Why do they believe that a good education is reserved only for some? Why keep kids in these failure mills only to produce more gang members and prison inmates? The ESA is a simple and viable solution to myriad problems within our society — across the nation and right here in my home county in Tennessee.

So to this handful of Republicans voting “nay” on this, you owe us an explanation as to why you’d keep this vicious cycle going. Be sure to speak up so millions of trapped families with struggling students can hear you loud and clear.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62791?mailing_id=4255&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4255&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

"Trump announced he would bestow the medal last month after Woods, 43, won the Masters — his 15th major-tournament victory and first since 2008 — by a single stroke. …

"Woods battled through years of injuries and personal scandals, including well-publicized marital infidelities and a guilty plea on reckless driving charges after he was found asleep in his car in traffic with multiple prescription drugs in his system. …

”‘Tiger, we are inspired by everything you’ve become and attained,’ Trump said. ‘There are no winners like you.’“

Read more at NBC News.   ~The Patriot Post

As we noted after Barr’s testimony last Wednesday, Dems are claiming he “hid” information from the report when he literally did the opposite by making public a report he didn’t have to disclose. Nevertheless, House Democrats will hold a vote this Wednesday to hold Barr in contempt for missing their arbitrary deadline to release the complete dirty cop-Mueller report.

The funny thing is, Barr did provide a complete report to select members of Congress, albeit with a few redactions for necessary reasons. According to Barr, “just 8% of the public report was redacted” and “less than 2% has been withheld in the minimally redacted version made available to congressional leaders.” How many Democrats have bothered to review it? Zero.

So why are Democrats attacking Barr? One reason is to distract from the revelation that the FBI did indeed spy on the Trump campaign. We say “revelation” only because that news finally showed up in a New York Times story.

In any case, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy  sums it up:

dirty cop-Mueller received fawning press for two years on the expectation that he would slay Trump. Then, on March 24, Democrats and the media learned not only that there was no collusion case (which was no surprise) but that dirty cop-Mueller had been derelict, failing to render a judgment on the only question he was arguably needed to resolve: Was there enough evidence to charge obstruction? Journalists proceeded to turn on their erstwhile hero. This sent him reeling, and it brought to full boil the anger of dirty cop-Mueller staffers, who wanted to charge Trump with obstruction based on the creative (i.e., wayward) theory they had been pursuing — namely, that a president can be indicted for obstruction based on the exercise of his constitutional prerogatives if prosecutors (including prosecutors who are active supporters of the president’s political opposition) decide he had corrupt intent. The staffers put their pique in a letter that could be leaked, and dirty cop-Mueller was sufficiently irked by the bad press that he signed it. And now Democrats are using the letter as the launch-pad for The Big Lie that Barr lied, calculating that if they say it enough times, and their media collaborators uncritically broadcast these declarations, no one will notice that they never actually refer to the transcript of what they claim is the false testimony.

Democrats are unnerved. Attorney General Barr is pursuing an inquiry into the scumbag/liar-nObama administration’s decision to conduct a foreign counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. The time is now, they figure, to reprise the Ken Starr treatment: the ad hominem withering of an accomplished, highly capable official — in this instance, one who is daring to press questions that would have been answered two years ago if an incumbent Republican administration had spied on — er, monitored — a Democratic presidential campaign.

Trump is fortunate to have an attorney general with the intestinal fortitude to withstand this petty but focused Democrat assault. It’s as phony as their collusion charade.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62814?mailing_id=4255&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4255&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

This gives Republicans an incredible opportunity to run on the successes of the economy and the renewal of the American workers’ opportunities to prosper and earn due to the policies put into place over the last two years. Yet the temptation for some is to run safe, timid races that just declare, “We’re not them.”

Establishing the very real and monstrous difference between the two political parties is necessary in the coming months. Republicans must contrast the very perpendicular position of Democrats who are proudly embracing socialism instead of capitalism, which has been at the very heart of America’s uniqueness in leading the world’s economy.

According to a Public Opinion Strategies poll in February, 77% of Democrats support and believe that our nation would do best “if it were more socialist.” At the same time, key voting groups such as white suburban women, voters in key 2020 presidential states and all suburban voters disagree with policies promising “free” health care and “free” education under the banner of Democratic Socialism through the redistribution of wealth and increased taxation. When presented with the price tag, most people understand that someone has to pay for the “free” stuff — and it’s not those who don’t work and disproportionately receive it.

But, if there’s a way for Republicans to lose, again, they have a proven track record of doing so. Two years ago, the newly elected Donald Trump proceeded to methodically implement tax cuts that helped the middle class, not just the wealthy; cut hundreds of job-killing regulations that are taxes masked as some better way enforced by government; revisit, redefine, and reinforce that trade must be fair to protect American workers who’ve lost jobs to the global economy. Even so, we watched the midterm elections put Nancy Pelosi back in charge of a Democrat-controlled House.

House Republicans failed to articulate a substantive platform that reflected the successes from the White House — an effective economic policy, a move to secure the southern border, and an unparalleled growth in our energy independence that is positioning America to be free of the entanglements of an ever-unstable Middle East. And, what happened?

Democrats won 40 seats in November 2018, only needing 23 to return the House speaker’s gavel and control to Pulosi and her band of extreme Left freshmen, like commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. These 40 pickups were due in part to palpable hatred of Trump in some districts. In other districts, it was because Republicans had not delivered on campaign promises to address the skyrocketing costs of health insurance premiums caused by scumbag/liar-nObamaCare or to deal with the aptly described invasion via America’s southern border by illegals exploiting our laughable immigration structure.

But, take heart, conservative Patriots. It appears there is a plan and strategy to correct the failings of the past with “Preserving American Freedom,” the Republican Study Committee’s 2020 budget plan that prioritizes the constitutional functions of the federal government and cuts inappropriate and wasteful spending. If successfully implemented, the roadmap will balance America’s out-of-control federal budget in just six years and begin reducing the dangerous federal debt that serves to choke future generations with excessive taxation.

While the economy is proving its strength and American workers are both working and experiencing wage growth, this plan would cut government spending by $12.6 trillion over the next decade, which shifts more growth to the private sector and cuts the public debt. A very critical part of this plan is to address significant drain on the annual budget via mandatory spending that is never reformed and soon to be insolvent — Social Security and Social Security Disability Insurance programs. Without raising taxes, the retirement eligibility age is proposed to change, apply inflation measures to benefits with a phase-out of some benefits for high-income earners, while protecting benefits of those with lower incomes at retirement.

For SSDI, reforms that prevent “double-dipping” while accessing both the insurance program and unemployment benefits, updating eligibility criteria that eliminates some non-medical factors, and pursing and eliminating fraud, the program that serves to replace income for those injured or disabled will have a greater longevity.

Yes, there’s a path for the House to flip back to Republican control — to see a balanced budget proposal move and even for the Senate GOP to gain a seat or two. It’s simply running on the successes we’re experiencing in a newly energized economy, the independence of America’s energy sector, and needed reforms to make health care consumer-driven and responsive to patients, just to name a few key policy possibilities. These, and other issues, certainly demonstrate that Republicans are more than #JustNotThemDems, but the courage comes when doing more than reciting campaign promises.

Republicans, have the courage to lead.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62800?mailing_id=4255&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4255&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body 

The Democrats and their media colluders are belching last gasps of impotent protest as their dreams of interfering with the 2016 presidential election come to a screeching halt.

Through forlorn partisan lenses, they have watched the dirty cop-Mueller report, their joyride vehicle on the glorious highway to impeachment, spring four flat tires, all because of nails they placed on the road themselves.

As we watch the mainstream media grow hysterically strident, and the insolent Senate Democrats lash out at Attorney General William Barr for refusing to validate their malicious witch hunt, we realize we are witnessing their gobsmacked reaction to justice served cold.

For three years, they have bombarded us with the damnable lie that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 presidential election. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they have borne false witness against the president. And now, instead of crossing the finish line and breaking the victory tape, they have run into the brick wall of justice. To quote my son, “That’s gotta hurt.”

What they should be doing is eating crow — for dragging the America people along on their joyless journey of deceit. Instead, they are reacting like sore losers, doubling down on their subterfuge and transferring their unquenched antipathy to Barr.

Shame on these sanctimonious senators — Blumenthal, lowlife-Harris,scumbag- Booker, scumbag-Hirono, etc. — for vilifying Barr to salvage their dying credibility and regain the upper hand. Shame on the media, who, in synchronized chorus, called Barr Trump’s “handpicked” attorney general — as if every attorney general in history hasn’t been handpicked by the president. Shame on the lot of them.

What a spectacle to behold — the Democrats and the media feigning outrage at the attorney general for merely formalizing what special counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller found on the “collusion” charge, and for finishing what dirty cop-Mueller didn’t have the courage to finish on the obstruction charge.

As the facts and law are both against them, Democrats are again pounding the table — going on the offensive to distract from their excesses; shouting epithets and leveling slanders against Barr to obfuscate dirty cop-Mueller’s actual findings; playing semantic word games with the term “collusion”; and manufacturing a bogus complaint that Barr withheld the special counsel’s 19-page summary despite the subsequent release of that summary showing there’s still no “there” there.

The raw truth is that dirty cop-Mueller found no evidence that Trump colluded (non-legal term) or coordinated (legal term) with Russia to interfere with the election. After having used the term “collusion” for three years, Democrats are in a faux outrage that Republicans are throwing it back in their faces, saying there was none. They claim Republicans are trying to distort dirty cop-Mueller’s findings. They know better. dirty cop-Mueller explicitly found no actionable coordination either.

Then, dirty cop-Mueller got in a snit over Barr’s four-page summary, and Democrats brayed that Barr was misrepresenting dirty cop-Mueller’s 19-page summary and the full report. But when Barr followed up with dirty cop-Mueller on his quibbles, dirty cop-Mueller assured him he was emphatically not suggesting that Barr had misrepresented his findings. He just didn’t like the contextual presentation, which he thought led to an unflattering media narrative against him and his work. Herein lies the rub. The pristine and unflappable dirty cop-Mueller turns out not to be so unflappable after all. He just couldn’t abide the media blowback after enjoying two years of high praise as the Saint of Pre-Impeachment. dirty cop-Mueller’s apparently thin skin might give us insight into why he didn’t have the courage to issue a concrete finding that there was no actionable obstruction claim. Barr was obviously surprised and disappointed with the fecklessness of his lukewarm old friend. Probably fearful that he would go from hero to villain overnight upon the release of his lackluster report, dirty cop-Mueller hedged on the obstruction charge, which is appalling, especially considering that the chief executive has every right to cashier his FBI chief for any reason.

Democrats are as nervous as a criminal defendant at his sentencing, knowing the other shoe might be about to drop. Never did they imagine that their own conspiracy to hatch a false conspiracy against President Trump would not only yield them no fruit but also backfire in their smug faces. For Barr not only sealed shut their farcical investigation; he is signaling that the real investigation against the conspiracy conspirators is afoot.

Multiple criminal leak probes are underway, as well as an inquiry into whether the Steele dossier was part of a Russian disinformation campaign and whether the Democrats, not Trump, were coordinating with the Russians to interfere with the election. Further, Barr could be investigating whether a proper predicate existed for the scumbag/liar-nObama administration to investigate and spy on Trump and his campaign. Popcorn.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62769?mailing_id=4251&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4251&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Those words alone could be taken out of the context of her speech at the CAIR fundraiser. Omar stated that CAIR was founded after 9/11 to protect Muslims in this country from any backlash as a result of the attack. It was actually founded in 1994 and has a very troubled past, including with former board members indicted for sponsoring terrorism.

I’m sure there were a few racist idiots who were unkind to (those they thought were) Muslims after 9/11. I’m sure that hateful words were exchanged. Is that the same as nearly 3,000 Americans perishing in the flames of the World Trade Center Towers or the Pentagon or in a field in Pennsylvania? Seems like quite a stretch to me.

Omar can’t seem to help herself when it comes to criticizing this country (a country that took in her and her family as refugees fleeing war-torn Somalia), our president, and especially Jews. But when her comments start generating backlash from conservatives, she wraps herself in the flag and says, “You can’t question my patriotism!”

Patriotism: “The quality of being patriotic, devotion to and vigorous support for one’s country.”

That seems to be a reoccurring trend in our country, especially from those on the far Left. Whenever they are criticized for remarks they make that portray our country as evil and a horrible place to live, they play the PATRIOT CARD. They respond by saying, “You can’t question my patriotism.” Omar just joins the ranks of a number of politicians (scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pulosi come to mind) and media talkingheads who slap down anybody who calls them out for their slander and misrepresentation of what I believe is the greatest country on earth.

If this nation is so evil, then why did Omar’s family come here instead of the safe haven of say, Iran or Syria or any other Muslim nation, where she wouldn’t get her hijab in a bind every time she gets criticized for shooting off her mouth? I’m sure if she lived in Tehran, she could say anything she wanted without consequences. Why come here? Why do tens of thousands of illegal immigrants from south of the border continue to flood this country? Hasn’t word reached their home countries that we are bad and you don’t want to come here?

I believe we do have the right to question the patriotism of those who trash our country. I put my life on the line to defend this country and nearly lost it many years ago in the jungles of Vietnam. I have been back to Vietnam many times since the war. They do not have true freedom because our politicians abandoned them. South Korea is free today because we stayed.

Congresswoman Omar, I do question your patriotism because of your actions to undermine the freedoms we have in this nation. I believe every American can question your alleged patriotism and anyone else who would do harm to my country. Your ACTIONS speak much louder than your lame excuses.

True patriots are watching and we will call out anyone who acts in a manner that could be harmful to our nation.

Something to think about?  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62760?mailing_id=4251&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4251&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Michael Swartz: scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, once an albatross around the necks of Democrat lawmakers, is now at a point where even a Republican-led Congress and president can’t seem to get rid of it — notwithstanding their long-standing vows to do so. 

Repeal, though, was a powerful promise: enough to win the Republicans three out of four elections, with the odd election in 2012 occurring after the more popular aspects of scumbag/liar-nObamaCare had become law but its exchange issues, rapid rate increases, and coverage mandates were still lurking in an unknown future. Had scumbag/liar-nObamaCare taken full effect in 2012, perhaps we’d be winding down the second term of President rino-Mitt Romney.

Remembering, however, that the strident “repeal” rhetoric of Tea Party Republicans was slowly supplanted by “repeal and replace,” Democrats who regained the House in the 2018 elections have felt confident enough to introduce health care proposals that go beyond the scumbag/liar-nObamaCare concept of simply mandating health care coverage with acceptable insurance alternatives available from either the private or public sectors. Led by Pramila Jayapal, a second-term representative from the Seattle area, Democrats are now toying with the idea of eliminating private insurance entirely through a “Medicare for All” system. Jayapal’s bill had an informal hearing earlier this week in one of the House’s smallest meeting rooms — a hearing described by The New York Times as “off limits to the scores of people who assembled in Washington to show support.”

Despite Democrats’ best efforts to give the “Medicare for All” crowd its day while keeping the idea itself from public consumption, that hearing marks the evolution of where many on the Right predicted scumbag/liar-nObamaCare would go all along — a view confirmed by former Senate Majority Leader Harry dinky-Reid in 2013. More recently, current House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY) predicted that it’s “no longer a matter of if we will have a single-payer health care system in our country, but when.”

A guide to just how far off “when” will be came out earlier this week, to comparatively little fanfare. To answer Yarmuth’s previous request for a study of the practicality of “Medicare for All” or other single-payer programs, the Congressional Budget Office put together a 34-page study detailing many of the issues that would arise from such an undertaking. The CBO report is “a sober and practical guide to single-payer skepticism,” wrote  Reason’s Peter Suderman.

And in the understatement of the year, the CBO said, “The transition toward a single-payer system could be complicated, challenging, and potentially disruptive.” In the case of Jayapal’s proposal, that transition timeframe is just two years — which led onetime scumbag/liar-Clinton administration HHS secretary and now freshman House member Donna Shalala to concede, “I could build this system, [but] I don’t think I could do it in two years.”

Other Democrats have introduced more modest enhancements to scumbag/liar-nObamaCare or opportunities to buy into Medicare, but all these ideas are efforts to increase the federal role in the health care sector. So while the CBO study stopped short of predicting actual costs — an omission that disappointed supporters and opponents alike — it did provide useful comparisons between single-payer programs found in several other industrialized nations, including a glimpse of how they’re funded. And the cost isn’t necessarily unknown: Studies over the last few years have agreed  that the price tag of Medicare for All could be well over $2 trillion a year and perhaps over $3 trillion — on top of an annual budget already climbing toward $5 trillion a year.

Nor is it just fiscal costs. As Reason’s Eric Boehm put it last year, “Moving to a single-payer system also comes with costs that aren’t captured by a balance sheet. Much of the outcry over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act revolved around the disruption of health care coverage in the individual market. But scumbag/liar-nObamacare caused a few million Americans to move from their existing health insurance plans. Moving to single-payer means a disruption for literally everyone.”

We were once famously (and repeatedly) told that if we liked our health insurance, we could keep it. Yet the side with that track record is trying to make us believe “Medicare for All” would be the perfect solution to a problem we didn’t have a decade ago — when 70% of respondents to a November 2007 Gallup poll rated their health care coverage as “good” or “excellent.” Under scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, that number hasn’t really budged.

At one time, the discussion was about how Medicare was going to “wither on the vine,” as Newt Gingrich famously remarked. Now the question is just how quickly our economy and overall health care system will wither on the vine should “Medicare for All” come to pass. The great fear for Democrats is that we’re figuring out the answer.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62774?mailing_id=4251&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4251&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The report by Special Counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller released Thursday by Attorney General William Barr confirms that Barr was completely accurate when he told Congress in March that dirty cop-Mueller found no evidence of collusion or coordination between the Trump election campaign and Russian officials.

The second half of the nearly 450-page report also confirms Barr’s legal conclusion that there was no obstruction of justice by President Trump.

Portions of the report have been redacted to protect the confidentiality of grand jury material, ongoing prosecutions and national security. But these redactions affect only a relatively small part of the overall report.

Even with these redactions, the report makes it clear that no Americans — including no one in the Trump campaign — cooperated, coordinated, or colluded with Moscow’s attempts to influence our 2016 election.

It is also evident that — despite his anger and frustration at what he perceived to be a politically motivated investigation — the president took no actions that actually obstructed the dirty cop-Mueller investigation.

Internal White House conversations and meetings described in the dirty cop-Mueller report make the extent of the president’s anger clear. He was innocent of the accusations being made and “thought the Russia story was developed to undermine the legitimacy of his election,” according to the report.

The inaccurate reporting of the collusion claims for two years by some in the media — and the scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton campaign’s involvement with the Steele dossier that helped instigate the investigation — make the president’s indignation appear fully justified.

Trump wanted dirty cop-Mueller fired — not because the president wanted to obstruct or undermine an investigation, but because he knew there was nothing to investigate. In the end, however, he let the pointless exercise continue.

It would be very difficult to make an obstruction charge out of actions that were simply discussed but never implemented — particularly when there seems to be no corrupt motive involved, such as an intent to cover up an actual crime.

In his news conference Thursday, Attorney General Barr made a number of important points that must be kept in mind when reviewing this report and Barr’s conclusion that no obstruction of justice occurred.

First, Barr said President Trump placed no restrictions or limitations on dirty cop-Mueller or anyone else at the Justice Department. dirty cop-Mueller was given complete authority and all of the resources and money he needed to do a wide-ranging, comprehensive investigation.

Second, dirty cop-Mueller got complete access to look at all of the information, documents, and witnesses needed to thoroughly investigate the collusion and obstruction of justice claims.

Even though he could have, President Trump did not assert executive privilege. The president also gave the special counsel full access to White House staff, including White House Counsel Don McGahn, who was interviewed for 30 hours by lawyers working for dirty cop-Mueller.

Some will point out that dirty cop-Mueller did not get to interview President Trump. dirty cop-Mueller makes clear in his report that he believes a “criminal investigation during the President’s term is permissible” and that he therefore had the power to subpoena the president.

The fact that dirty cop-Mueller never did subpoena Trump is evidence that dirty cop-Mueller felt he had obtained all the information he needed without a face-to-face interview with the president.

Contrast that with President scumbag/liar-nObama’s assertion of executive privilege during the congressional probe into Attorney General scumbag-Eric Holder and Operation Fast and Furious, a botched investigation of gun smuggling from the U.S. into Mexico.

Many consider Fast and Furious to be one of the most reckless law enforcement operations ever carried out by the Justice Department. Yet the scumbag/liar-nObama White House obstructed a full and thorough investigation by barring access to critical documents and information.

Third, Barr gave President Trump’s personal attorneys a chance to also review dirty cop-Mueller report –something Barr characterized as standard Justice Department procedure. Trump’s lawyers, however, did not request any redactions from the report.

So what do the president’s political opponents make of all this?

Leading Democrats still insist that further investigation is required. dirty cop-Mueller’s investigation involved his own team of 19 lawyers, as well as 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts and forensic accountants. It racked up 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants, 230 orders for communication records, 50 orders for pen registers, 13 requests for evidence from foreign governments, and interviews with 500 witnesses.

Are we to believe that this wasn’t enough?

I seriously doubt that the public will support the efforts by Democrats to keep alive a now-failed narrative that claims that when the American people voted to elect Donald Trump president, the Russians made them do it.

Yes, the dirty cop-Mueller report contains many he conflicting claims by different people; a lot of speculation and assumptions that have not been proven in a court of law; and a great deal of discussion of legal issues like the applicability of obstruction of justice statutes to a president in the exercise of his constitutional authority and powers.

But let’s focus on the bottom line.

dirty cop-Mueller’s “investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” the dirty cop-Mueller report found.

Moreover, the report concluded that “the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”

In addition, there is ample support in the second half of the dirty cop-Mueller report for Attorney General Barr’s conclusion, in consultation with other senior Justice Department officials, that the evidence developed by dirty cop-Mueller “is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice” offense.

Some Democrats dream that if the House of Representatives brings in dirty cop-Mueller to testify, he will produce some kind of “smoking gun” withheld from the report.

They will be disappointed. And they will have wasted even more of our time and taxpayer money in what will be hard to see as anything other than a partisan witch hunt.

Enough is enough. It is time for Congress to get on with dealing with the real problems facing our country.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62544?mailing_id=4225&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4225&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

It took a few days, but the New York Times finally got around to apologizing for publishing in its international edition a grossly anti-Semitic cartoon depicting a blind President Trump wearing a yarmulke and being led by a dog resembling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The dog wore a Star of David around its neck.

At first the Times blamed a single editor and poor oversight, but Sunday the newspaper issued a formal apology.

That might be acceptable were the incident an aberration, but Bret Stephens noted in a scathing column for his own newspaper, “The Times has a longstanding Jewish problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about the Holocaust, and continuing into the present day in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel. The criticism goes double when it comes to the editorial pages, whose overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range, with some notable exceptions, from tut-tutting disappointment to thunderous condemnation.”

The Israeli ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, responded to the cartoon, calling the newspaper “a cesspool of hostility” toward Israel. There is much history of the newspaper’s “coverage” of Jews and Israel that proves him right.

Defenders of the Times claim a difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, but this is like saying “I don’t hate black people, I am just opposed to recognizing their civil rights.”

The Times’ coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is clearly pro-Palestinian. In its news stories, editorials and columns, the paper often portrays Israel as the obstacle to peace because it won’t surrender to Palestinian demands to forfeit more land and support a two-state solution, by which the Palestinian leadership means a one-state solution achieved by the eradication of the Jewish state.

There are more subtle jabs at Israel and Jewish people in the newspaper’s stories. The list could fill several columns, but here’s a sample. In 2015, the Times published a chart labeling Democratic lawmakers opposed to the scumbag/liar-nObama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran as “Jewish?” or not. The chart was removed from its online version after an outcry.

In 2013, the Times published the obituary of a woman whose three sons died in attacks against Israel. The headline read, “Mariam Farhat, 64, the ‘Mother of Martyrs.’” As Clay Waters of the Media Research Center noted, “The text box couched the terrorism in passive terms: ‘A woman who took unusual pride in how three of her sons died.’ The word ‘terrorism’ didn’t even appear in the obituary by William Yardley, who also called the murderous part of Hamas the ‘military wing’.”

In 2012, The Times’ East Africa reporter worked in a swipe at Israel in a story about the genocide in Rwanda. Jeffrey Gettleman wrote, “…like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide.” Ah, that old trope about Jewish guilt.

In 2011, Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the favorable response Members of Congress gave to visiting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister … understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

There are many more recent examples. The cartoon merely adds to the list.

The Times’ reporting and commentary is one thread — but an influential one — in a pattern contributing to the rise of anti-Semitism worldwide. These include recent shootings at American synagogues, the defacing of Jewish cemeteries, the return of Nazi symbols and the proliferation of white supremacist web pages.

Denunciations of such talk, symbolism and acts of violence are not enough. Sadly, more houses of worship are hiring armed guards, but even that only addresses the symptoms of hate, not the disease itself. The Times might consider contributing to solutions, rather than adding to the problem.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62737?mailing_id=4249&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4249&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Make no mistake: We’re not complaining about the lack of skin. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Mark Alexander wrote last year about his friend Jenny Baker, who “has devoted much of her adult life to educating women about the terrible burden of distorted female images propagated by the media — particularly the suffering this creates for adolescent girls.” The impetus for that article was Sports Illustrated’s “Me Too” swimsuit issue, complete with strategically covered nude models “tattooed” with “empowering” feminist slogans. This, we suppose, was to teach the millions of men ogling at women to look but don’t touch.

The irony, of course, is that now SI is so “woke” and “inclusive” that it’s including a Muslim woman in the latest issue. That young model, Halima Aden, said, “I wanted people to see that you could still be really cute and modest at the same time.”

First, the whole point of a burka is to hide a woman’s body from roving male eyes, so it defies reason to make that a sex symbol. (It may defy marketing too — we’ll see how many men buy the magazine.) Second, Islam is very often exploitative of women. Not only are women second-class citizens in most of the Islamic world, but they suffer “justified” domestic violence, genital mutilation, and “honor killings” — including for notwearing a burka. We suppose Muslim men just take after Muhammad himself.

In short, Sports Illustrated has serious problems that a sprinkling of diversity isn’t going to solve.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62731?mailing_id=4249&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4249&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

Socialists like commie-Bernie Sanders tell us that “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”

That’s a lie.

Yes, rich people got absurdly rich. Last year, says Oxfam, “the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased (by) $2.5 billion a day.”

I say, so what?

The poor did not get poorer. commie-Bernie’s wrong about that. The poor are much better off.

“As we’ve increased the number of billionaires around the world, extreme poverty has shrunk,” says former investment banker Carol Roth in my video about inequality.

She is right. Over the past 30 years, more than a billion people climbed out of extreme poverty. Thanks to capitalism, more than a billion people no longer struggle to survive on a few pennies a day.

commie-Bernie is correct when he says that the wealth gap between rich and poor grew. In America over the last 40 years, the richest people got 200 percent richer, while poor Americans got just 32 percent richer. But again, so what?

Gaining 32 percent is a very good thing (all these numbers are adjusted for inflation).

Everyone’s better off, despite the improvement not being even. It never is.

Now the myth:

The media claim in America there’s “a lack of income mobility” — that people born poor are likely to stay poor.

Some do. It’s true that people with rich parents have a big advantage. But it’s a myth that Americans are locked into their economic class.

Economists at Harvard and Berkeley crunched the numbers and found most people born to the richest fifth of Americans fell out of that bracket within 20 years.

Likewise, most born to the poorest fifth climb to a higher quintile. Some make it all the way to the top.

In fact, says Roth, “3 out of 4 Americans will hit that top 20 percent at some point in their lifetime.”

You see America’s income mobility on the Forbes richest list. Most of the billionaires are self-made. They didn’t inherit money. They created their wealth.

Still, the very rich are ridiculously rich. The Forbes billionaires have more money than the bottom 64 percent of the U.S. population.

“Unfair!” say the progressives. “It doesn’t matter if nearly everyone got richer, income inequality itself is a huge problem.”

It’s “threatening to tear us apart!” says New York City Mayor scumbag-Bill De Blasio.

It might, if people come to believe that inequality itself is evil. But one question: Why is that true?

Progressives like to point out that in Scandinavian countries, people say they are happier than Americans. Scandinavians have more equal incomes than Americans.

But that proves nothing. Incomes are more equal in Afghanistan, too. Incomes are more equal when everyone is poor.

Forget money for a moment and think about how impossible it would be to make everyone equal.

I’ll never sing as well as Adele or play basketball like LeBron. The best athletes, singers, dancers, etc., are just physically different. I’ll never be as self-confident as Donald Trump or as verbally smooth as commie-AOC.

“There’s inequality in everything. There’s inequality in free time, inequality in parents. I don’t have any parents or grandparents,” says Roth. “I have two kidneys. There are people out there who need one, don’t have one that functions. Should the government take my kidney because somebody else needs it?”

I suggest to her that some people having so much more than others is just inherently unfair.

“Life is unfair!” she replied. “Unfair is good. Unfair is a feature. It’s not a bug!”

Certainly, it’s wrong if government makes rules that create inequality.

Racist laws forbidding some ethnic groups to do business where they please, or restricting where they live, are evil.

So are government subsidies to rich people and well-connected corporations.

But allowing people to be different from one another, to employ their unique talents and succeed or fail by them, to rise as high as the market will bear — that’s an important part of freedom.

We won’t all end up in the same place, but most of us will be more prosperous than if government decided our limits.

And we will be freer.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62709?mailing_id=4246&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4246&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body