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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  

Thus far the Russian-backed strongman Maduro has refused to budge and instead sent military troops still loyal to his regime to forcefully quell the uprising. This resulted in another Tiananmen Square moment, as shocking video footage surfaced of military vehicles intentionally running over unarmed protesters.

While several dozen troops joined Guaido and clashed with other troops still loyal to Maduro, the conflict has not yet escalated into a forced takeover by Guaido. In fact, he is not in a position to do so — not without gaining majority support from the military. It’s a bold yet risky move by Guaido. Should he fail, it would almost definitely lead to his arrest or worse.

According to Pompeo, the only reason Maduro is still able to cling to power is due to Russian and Cuban support. “It’s been a long time since anyone has seen Maduro. He had an airplane on the tarmac. He was ready to leave this morning as we understand it and the Russians indicated he should stay,” Pompeo said. He added, “We’ve made clear all along … that Maduro is surrounded by Cubans and has been supported by Russians there in Venezuela. And we’ve told the Russians and we’ve told the Cubans, ‘That’s unacceptable.’ It’s unacceptable to starve people. It’s unacceptable to not allow sick children to get their medicine.”

The situation is shaping up like a Cold War-era proxy war, and President Donald Trump will have to decide to what degree the U.S. will involve itself in this political conflict beyond offering verbal and humanitarian support. With the Russians, Chinese, and Cubans all backing Maduro, there is much more at stake than merely ousting a socialist dictator.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62720?mailing_id=4246&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4246&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

How long can Democrats continue to claim the roaring economy should be credited to the scumbag/liar-nObama administration? How many, except the self-deluded, actually believe this?

The latest bad news for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates is the 3.2 percent GDP growth in the first quarter of this year, surpassing expectations, which is code for “we had predicted an economic disaster from the Trump tax cuts.” Additionally, a White House statement noted, “GDP also grew by 3.2 percent over the past four quarters…”

The statement also credits net exports and increased investment for helping to drive the economy in the first quarter.

Some of the presidential candidates, who have been claiming wage stagnation and promising increased salaries for workers, if they are elected, have not a dollar to stand on in light of these numbers.

Shall I go through them again? Lowest unemployment in 50 years, including among minorities and women; lowest number of people relying on food assistance since 2010. Will the major media ever acknowledge Trump’s achievements? Why should they start now, because doing so would require them to admit they were wrong, as with the Russian “collusion” narrative they pushed for more than two years?

The White House statement notes another reason for the economic gains: “A large pickup in net exports and increased investment in inventories helped drive this strong growth in the first quarter.” It gets better or, if you’re a Democrat running for president, worse.

According to Bloomberg.com, “A measure of sentiment among Americans climbed to a five-week high as views on the economy posted the largest gain since July.” And “The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index rose to 60.8 from 60.3 in the week ended April 20. A gauge of views on personal finances also increased to the best level in five weeks…”

This derives, notes Bloomberg, from increased consumer confidence due to rising stock market indexes, sustained wage growth and a decision by the Federal Reserve to hold interest rates at present levels for now. Throw in job growth and the economic picture is about as rosy as one could hope, again unless one is a Democrat running for president.

What do these candidates have to run on? Joe Biden hoped to get forgiveness from Anita Hill for voting to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. She rejected his clearly political advances. That was a bad misstep and will not resonate well among his party’s increasingly dominant left wing.

Many Democrats and some Republicans are focusing on the president’s temperament and character. Will that matter to voters who have jobs they didn’t have during the scumbag/liar-nObama administration and to those whose paychecks have been fattened not only from tax cuts, but wage increases? It is unlikely a majority of retirees in the key swing state of Florida will reject Trump and vote for the Democratic nominee when they have seen such steady growth in their stock funds.

Much of loose lips-Biden’s video announcement of his candidacy focused on the clash two years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, between white supremacists and counterprotesters that left one dead and dozens wounded. Will this rarity that the media exploited as representing conservatives matter in 2020? I doubt it.

Democrats should recall and keep repeating to themselves James Carville’s line, “It’s the economy, stupid.” People already have such a low view of politicians that they tend not to expect too much of them. They worry much more about their own pocketbooks. One might wish it were otherwise, but wishing won’t make it so.

This is why Democrats’ hopes for 2020 increasingly settle on impeachment. But as Marc A. Thiessen pointed out in a recent column for the anti-Trump Washington Post, “Impeachment over anything other than a conspiracy with Russia will backfire with the American people and help ensure Trump’s re-election.”  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/62675?mailing_id=4240&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4240&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

“And she said, ‘Go right ahead,’” said the young man. “And then I introduced myself and she introduced herself. And it’s just kind of how it all got started.”

The four of them enjoyed dinner together. “And it was really just a nice, pleasant evening,” said Eleanor.  ~The Patriot Post