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Nunes Tells Sessions to Stop Digging - 

Looks Corrupt, Give Us the Information

by rickwells.us 

{ rickwells.us } ~ Sean Hannity asks Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to explain the slow-walking of information... the use of “redactions in the name of national security that turn out not to be true,” and how DOJ “has been unwilling to answer Congress’ subpoena and how that is the constitutional role of Congress.” That’s a lot of explaining, more, says Nunes, than the total time remaining on their program permits. He picks a couple of recent points, the fact that it took 6 weeks for redactions that kept secret the fact that James Comey is lying about whether the FBI agents who interviewed Michael Flynn thought he was lying. There are multiple instances involving the release of information about the conduct of Fusion GPS. Nunes reveals that they believe the FBI and DOJ actually knew that the liar-Clinton campaign and the DNC paid for the Steele dossier from the beginning. They were directly involved with Fusion GPS through Bruce Ohr and his wife so it’s unimaginable that they did not...   https://rickwells.us/nunes-sessions-stop-digging/

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvEBE_o7Ymc

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Iran in the US Backyard

by Judith Bergman

{ gatestoneinstitute.org } ~ Iran and Hezbollah have been operating in Latin America since the 1980s, effectively undisturbed... During this time, Iran and its proxy, the terrorist organization Hezbollah, have been Islamizing Latin America, seemingly to create a forward base of operations for the Islamic Republic in the backyard of the United States. No Latin American country has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization: Hezbollah can operate with relative impunity there. In April 2017, a Hezbollah operative, Mohamad Hamdar, arrested in Peru, was acquitted of all terrorism-related charges. The Peruvian court found that Hamdar's role within Hezbollah was in itself insufficient to consider him a terrorist. This legal vacuum regarding Hezbollah might also be why Islamic terrorism, drug-trafficking and organized crime in the region is frequently underestimated. According to testimony at a United States House of Representatives panel hearing on Iran's global terrorism network on April 17, 2018, Iran and Hezbollah have converted and radicalized thousands of Latin Americans to Shia Islam...   https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12268/iran-latin-america
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Time's up for Iran deal

by Reuel Marc Gerecht

{ washingtonexaminer.com } ~ It is now nearly certain that President Trump is going to walk away from his predecessor’s nuclear deal with Iran... the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The president in his announcement Tuesday may provide a bit of wiggle room by slowing the reinstitution of sanctions lifted by the accord in the hope that the Europeans will eventually join the United States in demanding tougher restrictions on the regime. But the effect most likely will be the same: The deal is dead. Washington will soon be confronted with the thorny issue of what the president, Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and, last but not least, Iranians will do in response. The accord’s denouement could bring an enormous trans-Atlantic rift, preventive military strikes against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear sites, Iranian terrorism against U.S. troops and civilians, Russian arms deliveries to Tehran, and even a bipartisan congressional revolt against the president. That probably isn’t where this is going, but the possibility remains that the White House could poorly handle its escape from a deeply flawed arms-control agreement, leaving the United States in a worse position than where it was with the JCPOA...   https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/times-up-for-iran-deal 

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President Trump Announces Withdrawal from Iran Nuclear Deal

by JACK CROWE

{ nationalreview.com/ } ~ President Trump announced Tuesday that he will not renew the Iran nuclear deal... defying European allies and escalating tensions with an Iranian regime that vowed not to return to the negotiating table should the U.S. withdraw from the liar-nObama-era nonproliferation agreement. “It is clear to me we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb, under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement..the Iran deal is defective at its core,” Trump said during his announcement from the White House. The announcement marks the beginning of a 90 day delay period, after which the U.S. will reimpose the harsh economic sanctions that were lifted in 2015 in exchange for the regime’s commitment to cease developing its nuclear program for ten years, according to Fox News. Trump has repeatedly maligned the 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, calling it “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”...   https://www.nationalreview.com/news/iran-deal-trump-withdraws-us-obama-era-agreement/ 

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Mueller Has Three Disturbing Conflicts of Interest

by restoreamericanglory.com 

{ restoreamericanglory.com } ~ Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson has made a name for herself as one of the few journalists in the mainstream media who woke up... took a look behind the curtain, and realized she was working for people who wanted to obscure the truth as much as they wanted to expose it. After realizing that her bosses at CBS would kill any story that might put the liar-nObama administration in a bad light, she lit out for the territories and has been a beacon for truth in reporting ever since. As such, when she writes an op-ed about the current state of politics, anyone interested in what’s really going on would be wise to pay close attention. This week, Attkisson, having perused the list of questions published by The New York Times that Robert Mueller wants to ask President Donald Trump, she determined that the special counsel is laboring under “at least three serious conflicts of interest.” Conflict #1: Mueller is investigating rumors of his own firing. “Think of it this way: You’re the boss at a company and decide to fire an important manager,” Atkisson writes. “Maybe you believe he acted improperly, conspired against you, or is simply not the right man for the job. He’s unhappy you fired him. Now imagine the fired employee — or his good friend and colleague — is awarded the power to judge and assess your motives regarding that firing and other matters. Would it be fair to have the very people who feel wronged be put in charge of determining your fate?”...

http://www.restoreamericanglory.com/breaking-news/attkisson-mueller-has-three-disturbing-conflicts-of-interest/

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{ tommclaughlin.blogspot.com } ~ Perhaps the most-quoted poem in the English language is “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. For nearly a century different writers have cited one or more of its 22 lines written ninety-nine years ago which begins with:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

The second and third lines resonate most for me:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Maybe it was world-wide demonstrations last week on Mayday, which has for more than a century been a day for the left to rally against capitalism. Masked, black-clad, anarchist ANTIFA demonstrators rioted once again in Europe, Canada, and America. In Paris where they burned cars and businesses and clashed with police and over 200 masked thugs were arrested. The left and the right in America are increasingly polarized since the 2016 election prompting renewed fears that maybe “the centre cannot hold” here.

Begun by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sometime in the 1880s, Mayday demonstrations often turned into riots and became a worldwide phenomenon after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. That event, among others, shook Yeats and catalyzed his famous poem. Others included the “Great War,” or what we now call World War I, and Ireland’s “Easter Rebellion” which, after many unsuccessful attempts to gain Irish independence from Great Britain, did eventually result in liberating most of the island, but only after a long, brutal struggle.

Despite the religious tone implied by the poem’s title, Yeats was for the most part agnostic. Though born into what Irish historians call the wealthy “Protestant Ascendancy” in 1865, Christianity meant little to Yeats. He dabbled in mysticism and the occult and worked against the influence of Catholic Church in his native Ireland. 

Despite the overwhelming prevalence of Catholic Irish peasantry in the independence movement, Yeats became a leader of sorts and a senator in the new Irish government around the time he won the Nobel Prize for literature. He wrote The Second Coming in 1919 when it seemed, as he described in the next four lines:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats grew up comfortably and could dabble in poetry without worrying about supporting himself, but he could see that, were anarchists to topple everything in their passionate intensity and things really did fall apart, his family money and his leisurely life could disappear also. But it didn’t; the centre held until his death in January, 1939, just before the blood-dimmed tide was loosed again across Europe and the world.

Literary analysts claim Yeats was referring to clergy when he claimed: “The best lack all conviction,” as if they didn’t really believe what they preached, “while the worst” — anarchists, socialists, and Bolsheviks — looked as if they might well take over western civilization.

Western pundits today call Europe “post Christian” as churches are abandoned across the continent — or converted into mosques for another religion “full of passionate intensity.” To end the poem, Yeats seems to describe the Sphinx:

A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Finally, he asks:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? 

Judge Robert Bork edited the last line as title for his 1998 book Slouching Toward Gomorrah which I’ve been reading for the past three months. At the same time I was reading Jordan Peterson’s 2018 book 12 Rules For Life; An Antidote for Chaos which has been a bestseller across the English-speaking world. Both authors analyze Yeats’ poem at some length.

The subtitle for Bork’s book is: Modern liberalism and American Decline. It’s more direct and hard-hitting than Peterson’s. Writing twenty years apart, both men perceived that: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Bork’s nomination to the US Supreme Court was famously sabotaged with passionate intensity by leftist Democrats including Joe Biden and Ted Kennedy.

Some claim President Trump caused the increased polarization in today’s America. Others claim his victory was a result of pre-existing polarization. Trump’s blunt talk and scrappy style endear him to his base and enrage his opposition, but which side is the best and which is the worst depends on your perspective.