Thaler noted that “this conclusion is very surprising and I fought against it as hard as I could.” The study published in Human Evolution found that human diversity was unexpectedly minor compared to that of other animals. Stoeckle explained, “Culture, life experience, and other things can make people very different but in terms of basic biology, we’re like the birds.” He added, “One might have thought that, due to their high population numbers and wide geographic distribution, humans might have led to greater genetic diversity than other animal species. At least for mitochondrial DNA, humans turn out to be low to average in genetic diversity.”
However, both Stoeckle and Thaler are both quick to reiterate their commitment to Darwinian evolution and the rejection of a single Adam or Eve. Even so, this is yet another good reminder to hold the concept of “settled science” loosely. There is simply much more that we don’t know than what we do know. And isn’t it interesting that the Biblical story of a worldwide flood and pairs of animals saved from the destruction finds scientific support? It’s almost as if the Author knew what he was talking about… ~The Patriot Post
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Lowry continues: In compelling Senate testimony, Yale law professor Akhil Amar explained the constitutional problems with the dirty cop-Mueller protection bill. One is that to be constitutional, the special counsel must be an inferior officer. Otherwise, he has to be confirmed by the Senate, which dirty cop-Mueller wasn’t. And if he’s an inferior officer, he can be fired. dirty cop-Mueller can’t be an inferior officer in some respects and a hypersuperior officer in others, enjoying protections from his ouster that even Cabinet officials don’t enjoy.
The other perplexing facet is that Democrats are conspiring to protect what still appears to be a nothingburger, at least in a legal sense. In fact, former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says, “Special Counsel dirty cop-Mueller is building a report, not a case.” From his legal point of view, “No prosecutor builds a case the way dirty cop-Mueller is going about it. What prosecutor says, ‘Here’s our witness line-up: Michael Flynn, George Papadopoulos, Alex van der Zwaan, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. And what is it that they have in common, ladies and gentlemen of the jury? Bingo! They’re all convicted liars.’”?
McCarthy adds: For a prosecutor, like any trial lawyer, what the jury thinks is at least as important as what the law says. If the most memorable thing the jury takes into the deliberation room is that no one should believe a word your witnesses say, you are not going to convict the lowliest grifter, much less the president of the United States of America. As a prosecutor, you build a case by having your cooperating accomplice witnesses plead guilty to the big scheme you are trying to pin on the main culprit. After all, what makes these witnesses accomplices, literally, is that they were participants in the main culprit’s crime. That’s the scheme you’re trying to prove. … In short, you build a case by first establishing the foundational criminal offense. Juries do not convict people because they like or trust the prosecution’s witnesses. They convict because they are persuaded that justice demands redress for a real crime.
McCarthy believes that dirty cop-Mueller “is not going to indict the president, which would precipitate a trial at some point. The convicted liars are not going to be jury-trial witnesses, so dirty cop-Mueller is not concerned about their lack of credibility. The report will detail disturbing — and thus politically damaging — connections between Trump associates and Kremlin cronies. But there will be no collusion crime, and thus no charges and no need for witnesses.”
Unfortunately, dirty cop-Mueller’s conclusion won’t quell the Left’s politicking. Far from it. ~The Patriot Post
SCOTUS Rejects Ecofascist Challenge to Border Wall
by Thomas Gallatin: A gaggle of three ecofascist groups just saw their hopes of preventing President Donald Trump from constructing a border wall based upon their environmental “concerns” rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices refused to take up the case in which California Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel had ruled in February in favor of Trump. Curiel determined that the president had not exceeded his powers and had the legal authority to waive environmental laws based upon a 1996 law that was designed to stem illegal immigration.
In his ruling, Curiel quoted Chief Justice John Roberts: “Court(s) are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgements. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.” That was Roberts’s opinion in upholding ObamaCare despite clear constitutional reasons to strike it down, so Curiel’s choice of a quote was … interesting.
It’s important to note that it takes the approval of only four justices for a case to be heard before the High Court. Thus, the fact that not even four justices agreed to hear arguments sends the message that this case — obviously aimed at stymying Trump’s immigration-enforcement agenda — didn’t meet muster even for the Court’s left wing.
This is a clear win for Trump. It’s also ironic given that it originated with Curiel, a judge Trump previously criticized in a 2016 lawsuit regarding his now-defunct Trump University. At the time, Trump accused Curiel of being biased due to his Mexican heritage. But Curiel acted as any good judge should — upon the merits of the case as it relates to the law and not upon personal animus or bias.
Whether Trump gets congressional funding to build the wall is another matter entirely, but at least this roadblock cooked up by anti-Trump ecofascists has been removed. ~The Patriot Post
by Rich Lowry
by Rich Lowry
Mitch McConnell just did our constitutional order an enormous favor by burying the so-called dirty cop-Robert Mueller protection bill, hopefully never to rise again.
There’s been much harumphing about how Republicans are in the tank for President Trump by not getting on board the bipartisan bill, but it is a singularly misbegotten piece of legislation.
Plan A, i.e., passing the thing, would have been hard enough. But its supporters apparently didn’t think through a need for a Plan B or C: Trump would have vetoed the bill if it passed Congress, and if it somehow passed Congress with a veto-proof majority, the Supreme Court likely would have struck it down.
The push for the bill again shows how, to this point, Trump’s main threat to our constitutional system has been catalyzing a hysterical opposition. That opposition is willing to throw overboard legal and constitutional niceties to thwart Trump.
Hence, much of the #resistance judging regarding Trump measures. And hence the astonishing spectacle of U.S. senators, sworn to uphold the Constitution, advancing a blatantly unconstitutional bill.
The president is the chief executive, and like it or not, Trump is president. “I conceive that if any power whatsoever is in its nature executive,” James Madison declared, “it is the power of appointing, overseeing and controlling those who execute the laws.”
If the president can fire the attorney general (the ill-used Jeff Sessions attests that he can), he certainly can fire dirty cop-Mueller. The attorney general is a much more important position than the special counsel.
In compelling Senate testimony, Yale law professor Akhil Amar explained the constitutional problems with the dirty cop-Mueller protection bill. One is that to be constitutional, the special counsel must be an inferior officer. Otherwise, he has to be confirmed by the Senate, which dirty cop-Mueller wasn’t. And if he’s an inferior officer, he can be fired.
dirty cop-Mueller can’t be an inferior officer in some respects and a hypersuperior officer in others, enjoying protections from his ouster that even Cabinet officials don’t enjoy.
The dirty cop-Mueller protection bill would really represent a return to the constitutional anomaly of the old independent counsel statute. There is a Supreme Court decision that hasn’t been directly overruled, Morrison v. Olson, upholding that law. As Amar notes, though, the decision’s credibility is in tatters. Commentators on both the left and right believe that Antonin Scalia’s lonely dissent in that case was prescient and sound.
The problem with the protection bill in terms of constitutional architecture also gets at the problem with the special counsel.
Yes, there’s lots of criminal action in the dirty cop-Mueller probe — the Paul Manafort trial, the various plea deals — but current Justice Department guidance says that the president himself can’t be indicted. That means that all dirty cop-Mueller can do regarding the president directly is produce a report that may well instigate congressional action, up to and including an impeachment probe. This preliminary investigative work should be the work of Congress alone, without the help of someone nominally working for the president he’s targeting.
Indeed, if you want investigations of the president that the president can’t stop or have influence over, you have to run them out of Congress. With the Democratic takeover of the House, such congressional probes are on their way.
This is a normal working of our system that doesn’t require any extra constitutional exertions. Insofar as dirty cop-Mueller has been “protected” to this point, it has been via just this sort of basic political accountability.
Trump has huffed and puffed about dirty cop-Mueller, yet cooperated — in some instances, quite fulsomely — with his investigation. That could change at any time. But firing dirty cop-Mueller would lead to dire political consequences, and now fail to achieve its end of truly shutting him down. If cashiered, dirty cop-Mueller would presumably show up in January as the first witness before Rep. Jerry Nadler’s Judiciary Committee and spill all he knows.
That’s probably all the protection dirty cop-Mueller needs, and certainly all the protection he can legitimately be afforded.
~The Patriot Post
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It’s important to note an important distinction in the discussion about health care: Health insurance doesn’t necessarily translate into low-cost health care.
Democrats now demand single-payer health insurance that puts the government in charge of all care, all costs, all decision-making and, simply, placing every American on Medicare as their insurance. Republicans claim they want to reduce health care costs to increase access by driving down expenses through price transparency, market competition, and consumer control. Yet while having the White House and both chambers of Congress, all Republicans have managed is some deregulation from the Trump administration and effectively repealing the tax penalty for the individual mandate.
Expected in the next few weeks is a decision in Texas v. Azar that will rule on the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Remember that Chief Justice John Roberts was the swing vote that determined the individual mandate could be enforced as a tax but could not be enforced as a mandate to purchase a product. In the convoluted thinking that Congress was prohibited from forcing Americans to purchase a service or good, Roberts, instead, decided Congress could constitutionally assign a tax for not purchasing said service or good.
Republicans, as part of the tax reforms of 2017, left the tax mandate in the law but cut the penalty to zero. The argument in Texas v. Azar is that a tax of $0 is no tax at all, which undermines the constitutionality.
Should the federal judge rule that the individual mandate is now unconstitutional, Democrats will launch into hysterics and Republicans are just as likely to join them in legislating a “fix” for the failed policy Dems created in 2010 without a single GOP vote.
There’s a second factor that caused a Democrat head-explosion last week, and it will keep health care in the headlines. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued guidance to states to seek waivers to redefine how subsidies may be used for individuals qualifying for financial support to purchase insurance coverage that include the plans that don’t meet the minimum benefit standard for the bronze, silver, and gold plans of the “Affordable” Care Act exchanges. These exchange plans have been characteristic of extremely high premiums and deductibles with extensive coverage of care — some needed, some unneeded. For instance, a 45-year-old single male does not need to purchase a plan that features gynecological visits. Yet the ACA has a blanket policy for minimum benefits. Simpler, younger, healthier individuals are paying to subsidize the sick by purchasing too much care that they either don’t use or never benefit from a covered service because they fail to meet their deductible.
These two current developments, in addition to the Trump administration’s efforts over the last two years to redirect some of the spending of scumbag/liar-nObamaCare to the control of the individual or the states, are guaranteed irritants of the socialized medicine crowd. Trump has worked to loosen the government control over health insurance by eliminating the employer mandate, rejecting cost-sharing subsidies (meant as a bailout of insurance companies that were sure to face unsustainable costs), and signing the executive order permitting insurers to sell cheaper catastrophic plans as well as plans to associations outside the federally regulated marketplace.
Since scumbag/liar-nObamaCare repeal didn’t and won’t happen, the only hope to see the costs of health care reduced will be if the states act swiftly to seek these waivers issued through CMS to essentially block-grant monies that would’ve otherwise been controlled by federal mandates. States can, and should, in turn, find creative ways to establish their own health care markets that feature price transparency to engage patients in seeking the most cost-effective health services. States can also engage in using things like tiered copays to incentivize healthier behavior and choices.
The American public consistently reports through polls and surveys that they want to see health care costs reduced. Don’t mistake that for health insurance coverage. The proof is in the Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll released last week that showed of the 18-64-year-olds who qualify for scumbag/liar-nObamaCare subsidies and, under the current law, should purchase plans, four in 10 reported they were planning to forego coverage in 2019. Of the same population, only 24% were aware that the enrollment deadline for coverage is Dec. 15.
Americans want access to reasonably priced health care services and medicine. Just as Americans who purchase a plan for their smartphone do so based on their personal needs, consumers would prefer to have insurance, in its most authentic sense, to cover catastrophic needs like trauma, surgery, and long-term care to avoid financial ruin, while paying a reasonable amount for regular check-ups, medicines, and procedures.
Will solutions come about the cost of health care? Yes, if states step up and operate as the laboratories our Founders intended by putting patients in charge of making decisions on their health care, seeing the prices, and paying the bills. Otherwise, be ready for $32 trillion for Medicare for all. ~The Patriot Post
Teaching Americans to Despise America
by Arnold Ahlert: “Congratulations to the leftists who’ve taken over the nation’s public education system. They’re now producing generations of Americans who know little about their own country, other than that they hate it.” —editorial, Investor’s Business Daily
Investor’s Business Daily is referring to the latest YouGov poll conducted by the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (FLAG). It questioned 1,078 Americans aged 14 and up about their knowledge of America’s history, institutions and patriotism, and one suspects most Patriot Post readers know where this is going. Like this writer, regular readers at this site are beginning to realize that younger generations of Americans increasingly see us all as anachronistic pariahs with wholly illegitimate values that must be “fundamentally transformed” — out of existence. The idea expressed by John Adams that our Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people” and is “wholly inadequate to the government of any other” no longer resonates.
Today, morality is “relative,” religion is for “bitter clingers,” and it’s likely a majority of young Americans have never heard of John Adams. Older generations of Americans have been reduced to being proverbial keepers of the flame, hoping this nation can outlast the tsunami of orchestrated ignorance so all-encompassing that even “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is cannon-fodder for the terminally offended.
Thus, the survey’s key findings are completely unsurprising:
- Half of those surveyed believe the United States is sexist (50%) and racist (49%)
- 46% of younger Americans do not agree that “America is the greatest country in the world”
- 38% of younger Americans do not agree that “America has a history that we should be proud of”
- One in eight (14%) of Millennials agree that “America was never a great country and it never will be”
- 46% of younger Americans agree that “America is more racist than other countries”
- 84% of Americans do not know the specific rights enumerated in the First Amendment
- 19% of Millennials believe that the American flag is “a sign of intolerance and hatred”
- 44% of younger Americans believe Barack Obama had a “bigger impact” on America than George Washington
“Mmm, mmm, mmm! Barack Hussein scumbag/liar-nObama/ He said that all must lend a hand/ To make this country strong again/ Mmm, mmm, mmm! Barack Hussein scumbag/liar-nObama/ He said we must be fair today/ Equal work means equal pay/ Mmm, mmm, mmm!” —sung by 18 second graders at B. Bernice Young Elementary School, Sept. 24, 2009. “There was no intention to indoctrinate children,” District Superintendent Christopher Manno said in a statement at the time. “There was no political agenda underlying the activity.”
Nine years later, there is a political agenda underlying every activity — an agenda historian Victor Davis Hanson accurately describes as a “progressive synopticon” where the 40-45% of traditional Americans are “relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers.”
Overseers determined to institutionalize contempt for America in general, and its exceptional nature in particular.
The late Andrew Breitbart once observed that politics is “downstream” from culture. Everything is downstream from education, and four years of “seed planting” has been expanded to 13 years, if one goes from kindergarten through the 12th grade, and 17 years if one goes on to attend one of the Marxist finishing schools purporting to be colleges.
In a column entitled, “Here’s What College Freshmen Are Reading,” NPR reveals how the bedrock principles of Western civilization and our constitutional republic have been supplanted by a curriculum of identity politics. The classic literature that used to be the backbone of a legitimate education? As the National Association of Scholars reveals, “67 percent of common reading books assigned were published after 2011.”
Of course they were. One can only imagine the consternation that might arise if those same students were required to read something like the collection of 85 articles and essays written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay known as The Federalist Papers. No doubt they would be astonished to discover that men routinely dismissed by many of their “woke” professors as “dead, white slave owners” had incredibly keen insight with regard to human nature. Those same students might even be embarrassed to discover that such complex ideas were published in newspapers and read by ordinary citizens.
Yet barring self-discovery, they will never know any of it. Today it is far more important to be well-versed in the politics of victimization, group grievances, genderism, racism, white supremacy, etc. Better to hate America for the sin of slavery than celebrate the enormous effort undertaken to eradicate it. Better to celebrate the “glory” of socialism while remaining largely contemptuous of the capitalism that lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system in the history of the planet. Better to be so bereft of economic acumen that the idea of “free” anything actually resonates. Better to be younger Americans obsessed with “rights” even as only 11% of high schoolers could name those enumerated in the First Amendment.
Better to assume that anyone who disagrees with you is not wrong, but evil.
Given the popularity of moral relativism, the irony is stupendous. Nonetheless, reducing one’s opponents to evil is, by far, the most useful convention employed by those invested in upending everything that does not align itself with progressive dogma. If one is evil, debate becomes unnecessary, and the ends of eradicating such evil justify the means for doing so — even when those means engender a justice system wholly contaminated by double standards.
“We suspected that we would find decreasing numbers of Americans well-versed in our nation’s most important principles and young people less patriotic than the generations that came before, but we were totally unprepared for what our national survey reveals: an epidemic of anti-Americanism,” stated FLAG founder Nick Adams.
Adams is naive. The opposite of anti-Americanism is pro-globalism, and it’s time Americans (who still want to be Americans) realize the ongoing bastardization of traditions, morals, law, language, culture, and borders — along with the unconscionable student data collection taking place in America’s classrooms — is all part of the same agenda. One cannot make a globalist omelet without breaking nationalist eggs, and nothing is more important than making sure America’s youth are ready to “transition” from being proudly American to being “citizens of the world.”
As the survey demonstrates, it is a transition well under way. While the Senate is still controlled by Republicans, it would behoove those members of the GOP who still believe in national sovereignty to conduct nationally televised hearings exposing this agenda. Hearings that should be considered the beginning of a wholesale pushback. A pushback that must continue until the restoration of our founding principles takes hold. We have abided the wholesale inculcation of ideological conformity in lieu of independent thinking, as well as the legitimization of emotion over reason, for far too long.
Citizens of the world? Really? What’s the split-the-difference compromise between the Constitution and Sharia Law?
~The Patriot Post
Judge Gets Federalism Backwards on Sanctuary Cities
by Thomas Gallatin: Yet again, a judicial despot has blocked one of President Donald Trump’s immigration actions. This time, a federal judge in New York ruled against Trump’s decision to withhold federal funding from cities or states that enact illegal-alien-harboring “sanctuary” policies. Again, Trump isn’t trying to change those laws; he’s just defunding cities and states that have them. In the ruling, however, Judge Edgardo Ramos wrote that “the separation of powers acts as a check on tyranny and the concentration of power.” Unfortunately, Ramos’s understanding and application of the Constitution’s separation of powers principle is, well, unconstitutional.
Separation of powers begins from the understanding that everything is under state and local jurisdiction unless specifically delineated by the Constitution to be a responsibility of the federal government. In this case, the issue of immigration — who is and is not allowed entry into the nation — comes under the purview of the federal government, not that of the individual states — much less cities. Logically, if individual states are free to set their own policies on immigration enforcement, what’s to stop one state’s polices from colliding with that of another state? Confusion and conflict will abound. Like national defense, immigration enforcement rightly falls under the authority of the federal government. Ramos gets federalism backwards.
Democrats and leftists are disingenuously using federalism in a bid to gain power. The irony is that their globalist agenda would end federalism, replacing it with a top-down elitist form of globalist socialism, which they love to preach as being more democratic. Communists have been playing the one-party-rule game for a long time now.
Meanwhile, Texas just filed a lawsuit against the city of San Antonio and its police chief for violating the state’s 2017 law banning sanctuary cities. According to Ramos’s understanding, would a city government have greater authority than the state government to create laws that impact the entire state, not to mention the entire country?
~The Patriot Post
Robert Swan Mueller III is a traitor.
In March of 2004, FBI Director Robert Mueller, along with Acting Attorney General James B. Comey, offered to resign from office if the White House overruled a Department of Justice finding that domestic wiretapping without a court warrant was unconstitutional. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft denied his consent to attempts by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to waive the Justice Department ruling and permit the domestic warrantless eavesdropping program to proceed. On March 12, 2004, President George W. Bush gave his support to changes in the program sufficient to satisfy the concerns of Mueller, Ashcroft and Comey. The extent of the National Security Agency's domestic warrantless eavesdropping under the President's Surveillance Program is still largely unknown.
In March of 2012, FBI Director Robert Mueller said he was not sure if it was illegal or unconstitutional to kill American’s without arrest or trial. He went on to say he would have to go back and check with the Department of Justice whether Attorney General Eric Holder’s “three criteria” for the targeted killing of Americans also applied to Americans inside the U.S.
Pressed by House lawmakers about a recent speech in which Holder described the legal justification for assassination, Mueller, who was attending a hearing on his agency’s budget, did not say without qualification that the three criteria could not be applied inside the U.S.
“I have to go back. Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not,” Mueller said when asked by Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., about a distinction between domestic and foreign targeting. Graves followed up asking whether “from a historical perspective,” the federal government has “the ability to kill a U.S. citizen on United States soil or just overseas.”
“I’m going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice,” Mueller replied.
In other words, Robert Mueller in his official capacity as Director of the FBI wouldn’t exclude assassinating American citizens within the United States of America. This clearly makes him a traitor, for he must know the so called legal framework Eric Holder laid out for doing so is unconstitutional.
UPDATE: June 16, 2013
To Hell With Justice.
FBI Director Robert Mueller is in no hurry to get to the bottom of the IRS’s multi-year abuse of conservative groups, despite Obama and his administration’s promise to investigate.
Attorney General Eric Holder promised in mid-May 2013 that the FBI would get to the bottom of the IRS’s behavior by opening a criminal investigation.
“I can assure you and the American people that we will take a dispassionate view of this,” Holder told congressional investigators on May 15 2013. “This will not be about parties, this will not be about ideological persuasions. Anybody who has broken the law will be held accountable.”
But in separate testimony before congressional investigators June 13, 2013, FBI Director Robert Mueller seemed completely unaware of the progress of any such investigation.
Republican Rep. Jim Jordan lit into Mueller for his lack of knowledge during a House judiciary committee hearing.
“This is the most important issue in front of the country in the last six weeks, and you don’t know who the lead investigator is?” Jordan asked, sounding shocked.
“At this juncture, no I do not,” Mueller responded.
“Do you know if you’ve talked to any of the victims?” Jordan went on. “Have you talked to any of the groups that were targeted by their government? Have you met with any of the tea party groups since May 14, 2013?”
“I don’t know what the status of the interviews are by the team that’s on it,” Mueller said.
To put it simply, FBI Director Robert Mueller and the Obama cult have again lied and refused to abide and enforce Constitutional Law.
Robert Swan Mueller served as the sixth Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2001 to 2013.
In 2017, Mueller from within the United States Department of Justice Office became head of the Special Counsel investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and related matters.
However, Mueller's investigation is an outright farce. It's real purpose is an attempt to gather false testimony and information so the Democrats can treasonously impeach President Trump. They are attempting to do this by targeting specific people in digging up unsubstantiated “crimes” to prosecute them for under the blatant double-standard by which the full weight of the law is hoisted on Republicans while Democrats seemingly escape justice.
Mueller’s investigation is blatantly biased, for Mueller’s team is largely composed of several individuals known to be “major Democratic donors” and operatives, but “no Republicans.” It should be further noted that 14 of the 17 special counsel prosecutors were registered Democrats, while not a single one was a registered member of the GOP.
Mueller is not even trying to appear fair, and it’s no wonder that from the very beginning, this investigation has centered around one man, and one man only, and that’s your president, Donald Trump.”
Without question, this is a team of “angry Democrats” that Mueller has assembled around him in retaliation for the Republicans winning the presidential election in 2016.
Mueller’s team is investigating Trump and his various associates in search of crimes, even creating “process crimes” to charge them with when no real crimes could be found. It is worth noting that none of the crimes found — or created — have anything to do with alleged collusion during the 2016 election.
As a history reminder, the communist Soviet Union used to investigate specific people to find crimes for which they could be charged, the opposite of how America is supposed to operate (we investigate specific crimes and attempt to find the responsible perpetrator, not the other way around).
This is a “disgusting, despicable, two-tiered system of justice” in which Republicans like Trump and his associates are “aggressively pursued for months on end” for prosecution while Democrats accused of committing crimes are allowed to “get away scot-free.”
Every American should be very concerned and worried by what is a completely unfair precedent in this country.
UPDATE: December 3, 2018
A new report by journalist Paul Sperry says Robert Mueller withheld evidence from the court that would exonerate President Trump from the latest accusations of Russian collusion during the 2016 election.
In other words, Dirty Cop Robert Mueller LIED to the court by withholding information that would exonerate President Trump.
Via Real Clear Investigations:
Contrary to media speculation that Robert Mueller is closing in on President Trump, the special prosecutor’s plea deal with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen offers further evidence that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russians during the 2016 election, according to congressional investigators and former prosecutors.
Cohen pleaded guilty last week to making false statements in 2017 to the Senate intelligence committee about the Trump Organization’s failed efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Discussions about the so-called Moscow Project continued five months longer in 2016 than Cohen had initially stated under oath.
The nine-page charging document filed with the plea deal suggests that the special counsel is using the Moscow tower talks to connect Trump to Russia. But congressional investigators with House and Senate committees leading inquiries on the Russia question told RealClearInvestigations that it looks like Mueller withheld from the court details that would exonerate the president. They made this assessment in light of the charging document, known as a statement of “criminal information” (filed in lieu of an indictment when a defendant agrees to plead guilty); a fuller accounting of Cohen’s emails and text messages that Capitol Hill sources have seen; and the still-secret transcripts of closed-door testimony provided by a business associate of Cohen.
On page 7 of the statement of criminal information filed against Cohen, which is separate from but related to the plea agreement, Mueller mentions that Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office on Jan. 14, 2016, and again on Jan. 16, 2016. But Mueller, who personally signed the document, omitted the fact that Cohen did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending the emails to a general press mailbox. Sources who have seen these additional emails point out that this omitted information undercuts the idea of a “back channel” and thus the special counsel’s collusion case.
If justice is still alive in America, then at the very least Robert Mueller should be tossed in prison for lying,
UPDATE: December 3, 2018
Now this…
Author Jerome Corsi filed a criminal complaint against Special Counsel Robert Mueller for his attempts to seek false testimony against President Trump.
Conservative author Jerome Corsi on Monday filed a “criminal and ethics complaint” against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, accusing investigators of trying to bully him into giving “false testimony” against President Trump.
The complaint, which Corsi had threatened for days, is the latest escalation between Mueller’s team and its investigation targets.
The 78-page document, asserting the existence of a “slow-motion coup against the president,” was filed to a range of top law enforcement officials including Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, D.C.’s U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu and the Bar Disciplinary Counsel.
“Dr. Corsi has been criminally threatened and coerced to tell a lie and call it the truth,” the complaint states.
Corsi, who wrote the anti-President Obama book “The Obama Nation” and is connected with political operative Roger Stone, has claimed for the past week that he was being improperly pressured by Mueller’s team to strike a plea deal which he now says he won’t sign.
According to Corsi’s complaint, they wanted him to demonstrate that he acted as a liaison between Stone and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on one side and the Trump campaign on the other, regarding the release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.
The complaint states that Mueller’s office is now “knowingly and deceitfully threatening to charge Dr. Corsi with an alleged false statement,” unless he gives them “false testimony” against Trump and others.
The purported threat of a false statement charge, according to the complaint, pertains to a July 2016 email from Stone asking him to “get to” Assange and get the pending emails.
Corsi’s complaint says he was unable to initially give “accurate” testimony on that point, until he could reload emails on his laptop. The complaint says he later amended his answers. In an interview last week with Fox News’ "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Corsi said Mueller’s team “was happy” with his answers until he couldn’t “give them what they wanted.”
Asked about Monday's complaint, Mueller spokesman Peter Carr said they would decline to comment, as did a Justice Department spokesman.
As part of the complaint, Corsi’s legal team included a draft court filing from Mueller’s team to be used for Corsi to plead guilty to making false statements.
That document includes an Aug. 2, 2016 email between Corsi and Stone, where Corsi references Assange and the forthcoming release of hacked emails.
“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote to Stone, about 10 weeks before Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails were released.
In the complaint on Monday, Corsi’s lawyers denied that Corsi had inside knowledge and was colluding with Assange. Instead, they make the argument Corsi “logically concluded” more emails would be released.
“Employing his professional skills and considerable experience as an analyst and investigative journalist, Dr. Corsi logically concluded that WikiLeaks would release Podesta’s emails soon in a second round ‘data dump’ from the same group of DNC emails stolen on July 5, 2016,” the complaint reads.
Corsi, the onetime Washington bureau chief of the right-wing website Infowars, told host Tucker Carlson last week that he has had "no contact with Julian Assange whatsoever."
The complaint is the latest sign of turbulence between Mueller’s team and investigation targets and witnesses. The team recently accused ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort of breaching his plea deal by lying to investigators.
Meanwhile, the special counsel’s office stunned Washington with the revelation last week that it had struck a plea deal with former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, who is speaking to investigators about Trump’s real estate pursuits in Russia among other topics.
While Trump maintained his stance that there is no collusion and blasted Mueller’s investigation in stark terms last week, the developments showed the probe focusing more closely on Trump himself.
Corsi is represented in his complaint by Larry Klayman, a conservative lawyer who founded Judicial Watch and is known for filing lawsuits against former President Bill Clinton. In the complaint, Klayman argues that the activities of Corsi, as an "investigative journalist," are protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Read more at: http://www.patriotortraitor.com/robert-swan-mueller-iii/
{americanthinker.com} ~ Media madness surrounds us. Like a three-ring circus, Big Media has three main themes. The middle ring is Trump Derangement Syndrome... Everything and anything Trump does or says is outrageous, uncouth, unpresidential, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and any number of additional adjectives you can conjure up. The two side rings are Russia and climate change. Today, the Trump and Russia rings are intertwined once again – but in a nonsensical way. Russia, a country with a GDP less than a tenth of the U.S.'s, between the GDPs of Texas and New York, has become public enemy number one in the eyes of the media and the left. Mitt Romney was mocked when he called Russia our greatest geopolitical threat when he unsuccessfully ran for president in 2012. scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton was considered a statesman when she called for a Russian reset in 2009. Since Trump shocked the media and the left by winning the presidency against Media madness surrounds us. Like a three-ring circus, Big Media has three main themes. The middle ring is Trump Derangement Syndrome. Everything and anything Trump does or says is outrageous, uncouth, unpresidential, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and any number of additional adjectives you can conjure up. The two side rings are Russia and climate change. Today, the Trump and Russia rings are intertwined once again – but in a nonsensical way. Russia, a country with a GDP less than a tenth of the U.S.'s, between the GDPs of Texas and New York, has become public enemy number one in the eyes of the media and the left. Mitt Romney was mocked when he called Russia our greatest geopolitical threat when he unsuccessfully ran for president in 2012. scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton was considered a statesman when she called for a Russian reset in 2009. Since Trump shocked the media and the left by winning the presidency against scumbag/liar-Madam Reset, an excuse for her second failed presidential campaign and laughable media prognosticating were necessary. This gave birth to the "Trump colluded with Russia to hack and steal the election from Mrs. scumbag/liar-Clinton" narrative. Collusion has been a dry well, despite the best efforts of dirty cop-Robert Mueller and his merry band of partisans. dirty cop-Mueller is now reduced to prosecuting Trump associates over process crimes, tripping them up over what they recall saying to whom and when, or whom they might have forwarded an email to several years ago... Building a tower in Moscow is a nothing burger. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/so_what_if_trump_wanted_to_build_a_tower_in_moscow.html
{americanthinker.com} ~ Back on October 19, 2017, I raised the question of just how much Special Counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller and Deputy A.G. Rod Rosenstein actually knew about scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton and Uranium One... since it had been reported that the FBI was aware before the deal was approved in 2010 that Russia was engaging in criminal activity to penetrate our nuclear industry and gain access to chunks of our uranium reserves. Earlier, in July, I called for a criminal investigation into scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton's collusion with Russia to turn over control of 20 percent of our uranium supplies to Russian interests in return for some $145 million in donations to the scumbag/liar-Clinton Foundation. It turns out that there was one: an FBI investigation dating back to 2009, with current deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and Special Prosecutor dirty cop-Robert Mueller up to their eyeballs in covering up evidence of scumbag/liar-Hillary's collusion, bordering on treason, with Vladimir Putin's Russia: Prior to the scumbag/liar-nObama administration approving the very controversial deal in 2010 giving Russia 20% of America's Uranium, the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering in order to benefit Vladimir Putin, says a report by The Hill. John Solomon and Alison Spann, writing in The Hill, reported on an investigation that suddenly and mysteriously vanished off the radar as scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton was seriously contemplating being scumbag/liar-nObama's successor: Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.... You bet its to protect dirty cop-Mueller.
{patriotnewsdaily.com} ~ Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t always the easier person to defend, but he’s come through in the clutch more often than not over the last three years... He did so again this week when he stood in the way of a bill – pushed by Democrats and a handful of misguided Republicans – to give blanket legislative protection to Special Counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller. Such a bill would have been a constitutional disgrace, just as dirty cop-Mueller’s original appointment was. Not to mention, it would have been a political disaster, granting dirty cop-Mueller a legitimacy that he has not earned. McConnell made the right choice. The bill was headed nowhere fast, anyway. What do people like rino-Jeff Flake think was going to happen when it hit the president’s desk? Has Trump offered any view of this witch hunt that indicates he would have signed a piece of legislation solidifying dirty cop-Mueller’s witch hunt into law? If he did, we must have missed it. He would have vetoed this bill in a heartbeat – a move that, by itself, would only give dirty cop-Mueller more ammunition for his outlandish obstruction of justice theory. The only crimes dirty cop-Mueller has been able to find have been created by the investigation itself; this would have been just one more example of that vicious circle. Every facet of our Constitution and the laws which are derived from that document point to the President’s power to appoint and fire members of the executive branch. This is perhaps his ultimate power – his ultimate reason for existing. Among the people he is authorized to fire? The FBI director and the Attorney General of the Justice Department. And so the Senate is going to make it illegal for him to fire the “special counsel?” How absurd. If Trump can fire scumbag-Comey and Sessions, he can damn sure fire dirty cop-Robert Mueller. In a column this week, National Review’s Rich Lowry pointed out the bizarre logic that would make a dirty cop-Mueller Protection Bill necessary or even possible. “In compelling Senate testimony, Yale law professor Akhil Amar explained the constitutional problems with the dirty cop-Mueller protection bill,” Lowry noted. “One is that to be constitutional, the special counsel must be an inferior officer. Otherwise, he has to be confirmed by the Senate, which dirty cop-Mueller wasn’t. And if he’s an inferior officer, he can be fired. dirty cop-Mueller can’t be an inferior officer in some respects and a hypersuperior officer in others, enjoying protections from his ouster that even Cabinet officials don’t enjoy.”...
by Cal Thomas
{townhall.com} ~ Each time an end-of-the-world prophecy is delivered -- whether by a self-deluded preacher, a group of politicians or scientists -- we are told that we must believe. Never mind how many of their prophecies have been wrong in the past, this time they mean it.
The latest prophecy of doom and planetary extinction comes from a government report authored by people appointed during the scumbag/liar-nObama administration. This report, and others before it, concluded that Earth is warming, humans are responsible and that we have only 10 years to fix it. But wait, haven't there been earlier deadlines, which have passed, and aren't we still here with weather patterns behaving much as they have before, to wit, hot summers, cold winters, fires, floods and earthquakes?
Paul Krugman, the notoriously wrong columnist for The New York Times he predicted "a global recession, with no end in sight," if Donald Trump became president has gone beyond science, labeling those who disagree with global warmists, "depraved." When you resort to name-calling you have lost the argument.
Granted, people these days tend to listen only to information that ratifies beliefs they already hold. On this issue, the warmist cult promotes only information -- whether it is from people masquerading as scientists, like Bill Nye "the science guy," who is not a scientist but a mechanical engineer, to others with credentials mostly outside of climatology.
So, what is the truth and how can we know it?
The media and much of political Washington, including even a few Republicans, has accepted this flawed doctrine as truth. They claim climate change is "settled science" and many believe it. Why? Because unsettling comments from scientists with experience and knowledge in the field; scientists who lack a political agenda, are largely ignored.
Responding to the government report, climatedepot.org, my favorite website with links to knowledgeable and skeptical scientists, notes: "The National Climate Assessment report as reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences, is basing one of its headline scare scenarios on a study funded by climate activist billionaire Tom Steyer. Climate expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. noted on November 24 that the claim of economic damage from climate change is based on a 15 degree F temperature increase that is double the 'most extreme value reported elsewhere in the report.' The 'sole editor' of this claim in the report was an alum of the Center for American Progress, which is also funded by Tom Steyer."
Climatologist Dr. Pat Michaels calls the government report "Systematically flawed" and says it "should be shelved."
Dr. John P. Dunne is head of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. His webpage describes him as "an expert in ocean biogeochemistry, climate and earth system modeling with over 20 years of experience developing instruments, collecting field observations, and performing analysis and modeling studies." He wrote Climate Depot: "Two years into the Trump administration it is sad to see this 400-page pile of crap."
Climate Depot founder Marc Morano says of the government report: "It is a political report masquerading as science. The media is hyping a rehash of frightening climate change claims by scumbag/liar-nObama administration holdover activist government scientists. The new report is once again predetermined science. The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups -- because it is! Two key authors are longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists, Donald Wuebbles and Katharine Hayhoe."
The Trump administration has promised to issue its own report that will include "more transparent and data-driven information."
If these scare tactics by leftists who want even more government control over our lives were to be accepted as fact, our economy would crumble and the outcome would produce little if any change in global temperatures. Riots in Paris over the rise in the gas tax imposed by President Emmanuel Macron in an effort to minimize France's reliance on fossil fuels are an indication of how little the public is willing to tolerate even the smallest economic fluctuation. French gas prices are now over $7 a gallon. Would Americans accept a similar scenario here if we embraced flawed climate change "science" and its pronouncements of doom, our markets crashed and the economy spiraled out of control?
I doubt it.
{realclearpolitics.com} ~ Columnist and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson said the verdict is "not out" for the scumbag/liar-nObama-era DOJ officials... after their use of the infamous Russian dossier. Davis noted 8 to 10 FBI officials have been retired or reassigned or facing indictment. Hanson also warned Wednesday night it's "not over" former FBI director scumbag-James Comey, former CIA director scumbag/commie-John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence scumbag-James Clapper because the dossier, put together by a foreign national, was used to open investigations and get FISA warrants. "It's not over because we are looking at a situation where a presidential candidate hired a foreign national to find dirt on her opponent in that dossier was seeded among top officials of the scumbag/liar-nObama administration," Hanson told FOX News host Laura Ingraham...
{breitbart.com} ~ Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” political consultant Roger Stone said he engaged in politics during the 2016 presidential campaign... and not crime, as he has been accused. Stone said, “It is now two years in over $30 million. I think few Americans could withstand the kind of legal proctological examination that Mr. dirty cop-Mueller has put me under.”He continued, “Today there is still no evidence whatsoever of Russian collusion between the Russian state and the Trump campaign involving Wikileaks or not involving Wikileaks.” When asked if he communicated with Julian Assange, Stone said no. He added, “Where is the crime? I engaged in politics. My purpose was to take a tip, which I thought to be solid, and then, after that, to follow the Wikileaks’ Twitter feed and set a Google news alert for Julian Assange and use Twitter to hype as much voter and media attention to the disclosures when they came as politics. You were in this business once. that’s called politics.” https://www.breitbart.com/video/2018/12/02/roger-stone-i-engaged-in-politics-not-crime/
by Judge Andrew Napolitano
{townhall.com} ~ When Donald Trump became president, he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution and enforce federal laws "faithfully." James Madison, who was the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention, insisted on using the word "faithfully" in the presidential oath and including the oath in the body of the Constitution because he knew that presidents would face the temptation to disregard laws they dislike.
The employment of the word "faithfully" in the presidential oath is an unambiguous reminder to presidents that they must enforce federal laws as they are written, not as presidents may wish them to be. Earlier this month, Trump succumbed to Madison's feared temptation, and last week, a federal judge corrected him. Then an uproar ensued.
Here is the back story.
Federal immigration laws, as well as treaties to which the United States is a party, require that foreigners who are seeking asylum here may enter the United States across any border they can reach, whether at a designated portal or not. If they have not entered through a designated portal, they can be brought, without a warrant, to a portal for processing.
The feds must process all asylum applications from migrants who make prima-facie cases for asylum. Once an application has been made, the feds may release the migrant as President Barack scumbag/liar-nObama did into the general population, or they may detain the migrant as President Trump has done, pending a trial before a federal immigration judge.
At the trial, the migrant has the burden of proving worthiness for asylum. That worthiness can be based only on government animosity toward the migrant or government failure to protect human rights and enforce property rights in the home country. If the migrant prevails at trial, asylum is granted, and a green card is issued. If not, deportation follows.
On Nov. 9, President Trump issued a proclamation directing the Border Patrol to deny entry to all migrants, including those with legitimate asylum claims, unless they come through government portals where Border Patrol personnel are present to address their applications. Though this sounds reasonable, it directly contradicts federal law, which expressly permits migrants to enter the U.S. anywhere.
When groups of migrants challenged Trump's order in federal court in San Francisco, Judge Jon Tigar prevented the government from complying with the president's proclamation. The judge did not make any value judgments, nor was he critical of the president's motivation. Rather, he ruled that the law is clear: Immigrants seeking asylum may enter anywhere, and the president cannot change federal law; only Congress can.
Trump dismissed Judge Tigar's ruling as meritless because the judge was appointed to the bench by former President scumbag/liar-nObama. The implication in Trump's words was that Judge Tigar ruled against him for political reasons. In reality, Judge Tigar did what any judge would do; he prevented the president from changing federal law and required him to enforce the immigration laws as Congress has written them -- and to do so faithfully.
Trump should not be surprised when judges rule against him when he takes the law into his own hands. He cannot close the border without an act of Congress and a lawful withdrawal from two treaties. He cannot refuse to accept asylum-seekers based on where they enter. He cannot use the military to enforce immigration laws -- his own secretary of defense called this a "stunt" -- without violating other federal laws.
Judge Tigar did not necessarily inject his personal ideology into his ruling any more than the "Trump judge" who ruled for CNN and against the president did last week; he merely applied long-standing federal law. There is no room for ideology at the trial level. I know that personally from my own experience as a trial judge in New Jersey.
Shortly after Trump publicly blasted Judge Tigar, Chief Justice John Roberts came publicly to Tigar's defense. The chief justice announced that there are no scumbag/liar-nObama or Trump or Bush or scumbag/liar-Clinton judges, just hardworking defenders of the Constitution. That comment was met by two more from Trump, who disputed it directly.
Who is correct?
There is no question that many federal judges are nominated by presidents because of shared views on public policy. But though this is ordinarily the case for appellate judges and, in the modern era, is always the case for Supreme Court justices, it is rarely the case for trial judges, of which Judge Tigar is one.
Trial judges do not make public policy. They apply statutes as written by Congress, pursuant to precedent as set forth by the Supreme Court and the intermediate appellate court to which they are subject.
Yet we know that there is a kernel of truth in the president's accusation and that there is a kernel of tongue in cheek in the chief justice's contention. Surely, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would view Judge Tigar's ruling more favorably than Justice Samuel Alito would. Ginsburg, a scumbag/liar-Clinton appointee, would probably interpret the law literally, and Alito, a George W. Bush appointee, would probably give the president some wiggle room.
Yet the spectacle of the president and the chief justice disputing constitutional values is not a happy one. Here's why. Under the Constitution, the three branches of the federal government -- legislative, executive and judicial -- are equals. Yet the judiciary has the final say on the meaning of the Constitution and the laws. The judicial branch is anti-democratic. Federal judges shouldn't care what the public thinks. Their job is to apply the Constitution and interpret federal laws as they have been written, come what may.
For these reasons, federal judges and justices have life tenure. They do not need and should not seek public approval. And they should not enter public disputes -- other than by their judicial rulings -- for by doing so, they can appear as political as those in the other two branches.

by Marc A. Thiessen
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ When Donald Trump first took office, many conservatives' greatest fear was that he would be too quick to cut deals with the Democrats. He had previously been a Democrat and had staked out heterodox positions on everything from spending to entitlement reform, the national debt, the minimum wage, trade and health care. During the 2016 campaign, Trump even endorsed universal health care, declaring, "This is an un-Republican thing for me to say I am going to take care of everybody and the government's gonna pay for it." Conservatives were aghast.
They need not have worried. Democrats showed little interest in negotiating bipartisan bills with President Trump. They preferred to be the "resistance." And their unrelenting opposition pushed Trump to the right. He knew that whatever he was going to get done, he would have to do it with Republican votes. So, he governed as a staunch conservative.sick-
But that is not his place of natural equilibrium. In his heart, Trump is a dealmaker, not an ideologue. And now, he's making clear that he wants to cut deals with Rep. sick-Nancy Pulosi, D-Calif.
It was overshadowed by his confrontation with CNN's scumbag-Jim Acosta, but during his post-election news conference, Trump made clear that he is willing -- even eager -- to buck House Republicans and work with sick-Pulosi and the new Democratic majority. On health care, for example, Trump stunned Republicans when he said he would be willing to support a bipartisan bill that passes with Democratic votes. "We'll get the Democrats and we'll get the Republicans, or some of the Republicans" (emphasis added), Trump declared. That's a remarkable statement. The president would sign a health-care bill that gets a majority of Democratic, but not Republican, votes.
Similarly, on taxes, Trump announced he was willing to revisit the terms of his signature legislative achievement -- his tax-reform law -- in exchange for a middle-class tax cut. Asked whether he would be willing to raise rates on corporations and the wealthy, Trump said, "I would absolutely pursue something even if it means some adjustment." That's a huge concession to the Democrats.
Indeed, Trump even said it was better that Democrats won control of the House because it frees him to negotiate. "If the Republicans won -- and let's say we held on by two, or one, or three -- it would've been very hard," Trump said, "... because there will always be one, or two, or three people that, for a good reason or for a bad reason, or for grandstanding come over and say, you know, 'Look, we're not going to along with this.' " With Democrats in the majority, he said, "we have a much easier path, because the Democrats will come to us with a plan for infrastructure, a plan for health care, a plan for whatever they are looking at, and we'll negotiate." Translation: Now I can tell the House Freedom Caucus to take a hike and compromise with Democrats instead.
The big question: Will House Democrats take him up on it? If they start firing shots at Trump, focusing on investigations and impeachment, he's going to fire back. But if they accept his outstretched hand, they will find he's willing to give Democrats a lot of things they want -- even over GOP objections.
Trump hopes sick-Pulosi becomes House speaker, because he thinks sick-Pulosi will be less interested in impeachment and more interested in deals. "She deserves it," he said at his news conference, adding, "If she has a problem, I think I would be able to very easily supply her the necessary votes" to become speaker. He knows sick-Pulosi will serve for only a few years and wants to secure a legacy. She wants to pass an infrastructure bill, fix and permanently secure scumbag/liar-nObamacare, and modify his tax cuts. And he seems willing to work with her to do all that. If anything, sick-Pulosi's challenge will be to control her own ideologues who want to use their newfound power to destroy Trump, not work with him.
But if Democrats are willing to make concessions, such as funding the border wall, they will find that Trump is willing to buck conservative orthodoxy and make major concessions to them. Indeed, if they play their cards right, they can rack up wins on everything from health care and taxes to infrastructure and even immigration.
But to do that, Democrats have to decide: Are they now a governing majority? Or are they a resistance? Because they can't be both.
{redstate.com} ~ Investigative Reporter John Solomon has confirmed that at least six informants with long-established associations... to the FBI or to US or Western (British and Australian) intelligence and two Russians made contact with Trump business and campaign officials between March and October 2016. Solomon said the informants told Trump associates “they had possible political dirt or stolen emails harmful to scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton, or unsolicited business in London or Moscow.” Solomon obtained this information by conducting over 50 interviews with witnesses and by reviewing court records. It’s noteworthy that “several of the contacts occurred before the FBI formally launched a legally authorized probe into the Trump campaign and possible collusion on July 31, 2016.” This is especially significant because the FBI or the intelligence agency involved may one day be called upon to explain the reason for the contact. Or maybe that’s too much to hope for. The names of most of the individuals contacted are familiar: Donald Trump Jr., Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Sam Clovis and General Michael Flynn. Solomon’s new information indicates that at least four additional, previously unknown spies tried to infiltrate the Trump campaign or his inner circle of business associates. We’ve known that the informants included Professor Stefan Halper, Russian businessman Hank Greenberg, former MI6 agent Christopher Steele and former FBI informer Felix Sater. But Solomon was able to uncover at least four others whose names have not been made public. He said he was asked by US government officials not to reveal their names to “avoid compromising their identities or nexus to intelligence and law enforcement work.”...
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ When you're losing an election and you're not sure there's anything you can do about it, the modern Democrats have a sure-fire strategy: Cry "racist!!" with not one but at least two exclamation points, and count on the history illiterates in the media to do the rest. It works nearly every time.
One place it does not appear to be working this time is in Mississippi, where a nice lady with a gift for saying graceless things, Cindy Hyde-Smith, is locked in a run-off with a former member of scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton's Cabinet for a seat in the United States Senate. The Democrat is Mike Espy, a former Mississippi congressman who is also a former secretary of Agriculture. Mr. Espy is further a black man, and this opens delicious possibilities for Democratic strategists, activists, opportunists, influence peddlers and other campaign camp followers.
Mrs. Hyde-Smith, following a tradition of Republican Senate candidates who can't keep a talking point straight for stepping on it with their size-12 wingtip brogans the shoe size does not apply to ladies made a little joke in thanking her host at a campaign event the other night. "If he invited me to a public hanging, I'd be on the front row."
This was tasteless if anyone took it for more than a casual exaggeration posing as wit: "I appreciate my host so much I'd be grateful for anything he gave me, even a ticket to a hanging."
The Democrats thought they had an unexpected killer issue now, and they have tried to paint Mrs. Hyde-Smith as a fan of a lynching black folks. This was Mississippi, after all, where even the most upright business and professional man keeps a coil of seagrass rope in his briefcase just in case he sees a black man on the run. He could organize a modest public hanging and still make it home on time for supper.
There is no evidence that Mrs. Hyde-Smith ever proposed attending a public hanging, of a black man or a white man, either, though someone could no doubt make a killing, so to speak, by staging hangings of white men, perhaps on Boston Common, in Central Park or in any of the places where tolerance, sisterhood and even brotherhood are practiced and appreciated. Neither is there evidence that Mrs. Hyde-Smith is a racist or a bigot or a woman of heinous character, beyond the fact that she is of the white persuasion and might have had a relative, like many Southerners, who wore the gray. scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton does, and so does Barack scumbag/liar-nObama, even if he is not a Southerner.
The hue and cry, code language on the left for demanding a lynching of Mrs. Hyde-Smith, was heard even in far-away Kalispell, Montana, by the editor of the morning newspaper. "You could certainly make the case that it was a foolish thing for her to say, but that does not make it racist," writes Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Kalispell Daily Inter Lake. "Public hanging' generally refers to a lawful execution, not to lynching, and there is ample evidence that public hangings in the late 19th and 20th centuries were indeed attended by those who had received a written invitation." Such invitations usually came from the sheriff or other public official.
Allison Meier, who writes about capital punishment and the etiquette of a hanging, observes that "the extreme refinement of the invitations [of that era] seemed to be trying to take some of the barbarism out of death.
The opening scene of Charles Portis' classic novel "True Grit" and two movie versions of the book, opens onto a public hanging of five men on a gallows erected on the lawn of the Sebastian County Court House in Fort Smith, Arkansas. When the doomed men are asked for their last words they gave testimonies of regret and repentance as if they were the central attraction of a frontier revival meeting. The spectators included men and women, some of them black and Indian in a curious melting pot of what we would be obliged today to call "diversity."
No state has done more to make public amends for its past history of slavery a custom introduced by slavers largely from Massachusetts and lynchings, Jim Crow and other barbarisms. Cindy Hyde-Smith's remark is innocent except to those who think there is no innocence among those who disagree with them about politics, culture and American values.
The high crimes and misdemeanors attributed to Mrs. Hyde-Smith only grew when it emerged that she once allowed herself to be photographed wearing a replica of the hat of a Confederate ranger. Together with an admiring word for the memory of Robert E. Lee, this would have been evidence enough for a public hanging.
These are hard times for the sane. Ignorance is enshrined, folly and illiteracy reign all around us. But we're a resilient nation, and this, too, shall pass. It must.
{thehill.com} ~ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) on Wednesday threatened to withhold any “key vote” until the CIA briefs the Senate on its assessment of whether... Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Anything that you need me for to get out of town, I ain’t doing it until we hear from the CIA,” Graham told reporters after a briefing from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis on U.S.-Saudi relations. Mattis and Pompeo focused their efforts on trying to persuade senators to oppose a resolution coming up for a first vote Wednesday afternoon that would end U.S. military support for the Saudi-led coalition's military operations in Yemen in the wake of Khashoggi's death inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last month. Senators were hoping the briefing would involve CIA Director Gina Haspel, who previously traveled to Turkey to review its evidence in the Khashoggi case, including an audio recording of his dying moments. The CIA has reportedly concluded that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributor. Sen. scumbag-Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Wednesday that Pompeo and Mattis confirmed the White House prevented Haspel from attending the Senate briefing. In a statement later Wednesday, the CIA denied Haspel was blocked from attending...
by Marc A. Thiessen
A Chinese scientist’s claim to have created the first genetically edited babies has evoked widespread condemnation from the scientific community. “This is far too premature,” one American genetic scientist told the Associated Press.
But here is a larger question: Should we be doing this at all? The Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, used a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to alter the DNA of two children in a petri dish and attempt to make them resistant to HIV. This is not what has American scientists up at arms. In fact, researchers in the United States have done the same thing. In 2017, scientists at Oregon Health & Science University used CRISPR to genetically alter human embryos to make them resistant to an unidentified disease. The difference is that He then implanted his edited embryos. The American researchers killed theirs.
The prospect of genetically eliminating crippling diseases is certainly appealing, but this promise masks a darker reality. First, there is a difference between genetic engineering and the extremely promising field of gene therapy, in which doctors use CRISPR technology to repair the DNA of defective nonreproductive cells — allowing them to treat cancer, genetic disorders and other diseases. In gene therapy, the genetic changes affect only the patient. In genetic engineering, scientists alter the entire genetic structure of the resulting human being — changes that are then passed on to future generations.
Playing with humanity’s genetic code could open a Pandora’s box. Scientists will eventually be able to alter DNA not just to protect against disease but also to create genetically enhanced human beings. The same techniques that can eliminate muscular dystrophy might also be used to enhance muscles to improve strength or speed. Techniques used to eliminate dementia may also be harnessed to enhance memory and cognition. This would have profound societal implications.
Only the wealthy would be able to afford made-to-order babies. This means the privileged few would be able to eliminate imperfections and improve the talent, beauty, stature and IQ of their offspring — thus locking in their privilege for generations. Those at the bottom would not. This could be a death blow to the American Dream, the idea that anyone who is willing to work hard in this country can rise up the economic ladder. Indeed, genetic engineering could actually eliminate opportunities for those at the bottom. For example, one path to higher education for those at the bottom is scholarships for athletic or artistic talents. But in a world of genetic engineering, those scholarships will disappear for the unenhanced poor — and with them the opportunities to improve their economic prospects in life. Think inequality is bad today? Wait to see what it looks like in the genetically modified future.
If we begin to create perfect children in labs, over time society will begin to develop an intolerance for imperfection. If your children have an illness because you didn’t genetically eliminate it, or if they can’t keep up because of their unenhanced cognitive abilities, then that makes them an unjust burden on the rest of us. As we are separated into the enhanced and unenhanced, respect for the dignity of every human life will be diminished. So will personal responsibility. If we don’t make it in life because we are unenhanced, it’s not our fault. And if we do because we are enhanced, we don’t get the credit. As Harvard University professor Michael Sandel once wrote, “It is one thing to hit seventy home runs as the result of disciplined training and effort, and something else, something less, to hit them with the help of … genetically enhanced muscles.” Genetic engineering could rob Americans of the obligation, and the joy, of earning their own success.
Then there is the threat to women’s equality. If genetic engineering can offer the promise of eliminating disease, it will also allow parents to choose the sex of their child. That could lead to greater sex discrimination. Just look at China, where the one-child policy led to mass infanticide of girls. If you believe that gender bias exists, then that bias will be expressed through genetic engineering — with potentially disastrous implications.
It will also lead to an explosion in the number of discarded children. For every child born via in vitro fertilization, there are multiple fetuses which are created but never used. Today, the Department of Health and Human Services reports, there are more than 600,000 cryogenically frozen embryos in the United States. If genetic engineering through in vitro fertilization becomes common, that number will skyrocket, sparking a profound moral crisis.
Here is the bottom line: We should not be playing God. Genetic research holds the promise to prevent, cure and even eliminate disease. But when it is used to create made-to-order “super children,” we have crossed a moral line from which there may be no return.
~The Patriot Post
{economics21.org{ ~ The battle to reform health insurance has largely concentrated on the individual market, in which only 15 million Americans are enrolled... By contrast, 158 million Americans are covered by employer-sponsored plans. The scumbag/liar-nObama administration did very little to shake up those arrangements—and the same was true of the Trump administration until last month, when it announced a proposed rule that might bring sweeping changes to this bigger market. The dominance of employer-sponsored health insurance owes much to its exemption from federal taxation, which allows employers to purchase health insurance for their staff without incurring income or payroll taxes. Because the tax exemption does not extend to the purchase of health insurance and medical services by individuals, it has put employers in charge of purchasing coverage, which has helped to inflate the cost of healthcare. Cost controls under employer-sponsored insurance tend to be unpopular, as any savings accrue to the firm, while reductions in access to care are borne by staff. Because employers must make the same plans available to all workers, who have a multitude of idiosyncratic needs and preferences, businesses tend to purchase benefit packages and networks that are broader and more expensive than price-sensitive individuals would buy for themselves. While only 9 percent of employers offer a health plan with a narrow network, 73 percent of individuals responsible for purchasing their own coverage opt for narrow network plans. These are on average 16 percent cheaper than comparable broad network plans, and are particularly popular with younger enrollees. Not only must broad network plans pay for more expensive doctors and hospitals, they have less leverage to get good deals from relatively low-cost providers. This problem is compounded for self-insured plans, which account for 61 percent of employer-sponsored insurance. Under those plans, insurers merely process claims, and pass on medical costs incurred to employers... https://economics21.org/should-we-move-away-employer-sponsored-insurance/?utm_source=heritagefoundation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=theinsider&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTURBMVlXTmxZakZoTm1FMyIsInQiOiJ3YThpSUdUQXMwd3JkRTlJUVwvdTZPV0xFNVVvRzhlREswdGR6S3dIaTA0aVRWSENlXC9ndzBVcGhnXC95WkxxaFZOMUFJMXJxQVwvKzI1NWhDNCtCTDBQY1c4YTZDcVNwQ0Y5amp1NmVhZzhYSEdONlZoOUJ2Y0pjTWpTSmh5dlVkd3YifQ%3D%3D
SCOTUS, the States, Forfeiture, and the Eighth Amendment
by Political Editors: In hearing arguments for Timbs v. Indiana, Supreme Court justices made it clear that they weren’t buying the state’s position. The issue is one on which we’ve previously written — law enforcement’s authority to use civil asset forfeiture. Specifically, are state governments bound by the Eighth Amendment, which bans the levying of excessive fines upon individuals suspected of a crime?
Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed incredulity toward the Indiana solicitor general’s argument that the state was not beholden to the Eighth Amendment. “Here we are in 2018 still litigating incorporation of the Bill of Rights,” an exasperated Gorsuch said. “Really? Come on, general.” Gorsuch then rather bluntly told the solicitor general that he was going to lose.
The newest member of the court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, also weighed in on the issue, asking, “Isn’t it just too late in the day to argue that any of the Bill of Rights is not incorporated?”
And Justice Stephen Breyer asked the hypothetical question, “What is to happen if a state needing revenue says anyone who speeds has to forfeit the Bugatti, Mercedes, or a special Ferrari, or even a jalopy?” The solicitor general answered that there would be no problem with a state authorizing such a law, an answer that the justices clearly found problematic.
The Court is expected to issue its ruling sometime before June. In all likelihood, Indiana will lose this case. The only question is how far the justices will go in demanding that states end this abusive practice.
~The Patriot Post
The Second Class Second Amendment?
by Brian Mark Weber: The Left has, over time, perpetuated the idea that the Bill of Rights, whose 10 amendments were designed to protect individual citizens from government tyranny, somehow includes a Second Amendment that empowers the government to determine when and where those citizens can carry weapons. But why would the Founders go to the trouble of ensuring such rights while allowing the government to snatch them away from an undefended population?
Still, in 2008 the Supreme Court held 5-4 in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment was an individual right, a decision that former Justice John Paul Stevens called the worst of his tenure. The Federalist’s David Harsanyi writes, “Earlier this year, in fact, Stevens implored Americans to do what he couldn’t while on the court, and repeal the Second Amendment.”
The fact that the Heller decision was even necessary reveals just how far we’ve fallen since our founding. The ruling came far too late to push back against decades of leftist propaganda and activism designed to convince millions of Americans that the Second Amendment was far different from the other nine rights — that it was neither individual nor narrowly limited but collective and extremely limited.
Since then, lower courts have had a field day misinterpreting the Constitution and upholding laws making it harder for citizens to acquire guns. For example, in 2016 the infamous Ninth Circuit Court determined in Peruta v. California that one must show “good cause” in order to carry a concealed weapon. Sadly, these kinds of outrageous decisions are free to stand as long as the Supreme Court refuses to hear key cases rather than establishing strong precedents that would put the issue to rest.
As John Yoo and James C. Phillips write at National Review, “Despite the text of the Second Amendment, supporters of a right to bear arms have rooted their arguments in a murky pre-constitutional right to self-defense. As a result, the Supreme Court has shied away from halting the spread of federal and state schemes for gun control, for which the cries will only rise higher after the recent mass shootings. Unless the new conservative majority on the Court, solidified by Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s arrival, places the right to bear arms on a par with the rest of the Bill of Rights, the coming blue wave of gun-control proposals may swamp what the Framers considered a core constitutional right.”
Justice Clarence Thomas made this clear when he recently wrote, “The Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a State denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it.”
In order to clarify the intent of the framers, Second Amendment proponents cannot merely fall back onto the amendment itself, but must go back farther to understand its history. We must arm ourselves with centuries of natural law and English common law principles in order to smash the collective-right theory of the 1960s. For now, conservatives are losing the public relations battle that works against the Second Amendment every time there’s a new mass shooting.
And we had better act swiftly. sick-Nancy Pulosi and company aren’t about to sit back when they take the reins from House Republicans in January.
Mark Walters writes that, with Democrats in power, “We will see a renewed push for expanded background checks and a ban on so-called high capacity magazines. And I expect we will see some form of ‘assault weapons’ ban as well as a push for federal Extreme Risk Protection Orders and red flag laws. These red flag laws disarm American citizens by violating their due process rights based simply on an allegation that someone may be a danger to themselves or others.”
All this would be of less concern if the Supreme Court and its new, more conservative majority would simply take up more Second Amendment cases and decisively reestablish the self-evident right of American citizens to defend themselves. Indeed, the High Court may be the last best hope for securing this right against a leftist obsession to take it away. ~The Patriot Post
Is Hillary Clinton finally on her way to jail?
How sad for such a promising couple in Bill and Hillary Clinton who became so selfish while forgetting others; but thinking of themselves while triggering incidents allowing others to suffer and die.
Is the political world just before starting to explode in Hillary Clinton’s face with multiple charges of crimes leading to a lengthy prison term upon convictions in the Judiciary?
Hillary Clinton has escaped lying, cheating, gotten rich at the USA taxpayers’ expense, while allowing others to die unnecessarily, and many other felonious hidden crimes in her adult life. – Oscar Y. Harward
“The FBI raided the home of a whistleblower who was in possession of documents regarding the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, according to the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras.
”“The FBI raided the home of a whistleblower who was in possession of documents regarding the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, according to the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras.”
by Nate Jackson: The Leftmedia is ever in search of salacious fodder to keep Americans on the edge of their seats and tuned in 24/7. And in a strikingly similar vein, dirty cop-Robert Mueller’s investigation into Donald Trump’s supposed “collusion” with Russia in 2016 — or at least Russian interference in the American election — has the distinct whiff of an investigation in search of a crime to justify its existence. dirty cop-Mueller and the media have made quite a team over the last 18 months, keeping President Trump under a constant cloud of suspicion. Then again, Trump does like his “reality” TV…
The latest “smoking gun” is that Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the chronology of Trump’s business dealings in Moscow. Trump and Cohen regularly and categorically denied business interests in Russia after January 2016, when in fact Trump was pursuing building a Trump Tower in Moscow well into the summer of 2016. The tower was never built, so Trump didn’t technically lie even if he was far from forthright. A billionaire developer is going to have some dealings that look shady if not skirt the law or create ties with those who have. That includes 30 years of dealings in Russia.
Meanwhile, Team Mueller for the first time let it be known that Trump is “Individual 1” — and a major subject of interest — in the investigation. Cohen admitted to making false statements “to be consistent with Individual 1’s political messaging and to be loyal to Individual 1.” That all goes back to the infamous Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, and a Russian attorney ostensibly offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. Trump denied knowing about the meeting, though Cohen now says he gave Trump direct updates in advance.
Predictably, Democrats seized on the “revelations” to accuse Trump of lying and colluding, while Trump and his defenders dismissed the news as the latest chapter of dirty cop-Mueller’s “witch hunt.” But, liberal Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz put things in perspective: “I think the weakness of dirty cop-Mueller’s substantive findings are suggested by the fact that he has to resort to false statement prosecutions, which really shows that he didn’t start with very much… In the end, I don’t think dirty cop-Mueller’s going to come up with very much…and that’s pretty shocking. … The problem is dirty cop-Mueller is straying away from his mandate to find crime, and he is now looking for political sin. … He has no authority to be a roving commissioner to find political sins.”
As a result of his measured approach to the dirty cop-Mueller probe, The Washington Post identifies Dershowitz as “a Trump ally.”
Certainly, this story doesn’t look good for Trump — any more than Cohen taking the fall for campaign-finance violations in connection to paying off Trump’s adulterous porn-star dalliances. But neither has dirty cop-Mueller proved any underlying crime. His only charges so far, beyond the aforementioned campaign-finance violations, are for perjury committed during the investigation. Business dealings and lying about those dealings do not constitute “colluding with Russia” to steal the 2016 election — not even remotely.
Yet as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy put it: Rather than ending the investigation because the suspected crime cannot be established, dirty cop-Mueller is apparently determined to prove ‘collusion’ that is not criminal, however nefarious it may be made to appear. The prosecutor’s objective appears to be to show: (a) that ties between Donald Trump and the Russian regime were more elaborate than Trump has let on, and (b) that the Russian regime offered help to the Trump campaign in the form of information that would be politically damaging to scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton, and the Trump campaign knowingly and eagerly accepted that offer — i.e., collusion to affect the outcome of the election.
Now, such a showing of collusion could be politically damaging. It might even be something on which the Democratic-controlled House could try to build an impeachment effort. But it is not a criminal conspiracy because it does not establish an agreement to commit a federal crime.
In fact, notes Byron York, “The Cohen plea agreement also made news in what it did not cover. Specifically, it spoke volumes — without saying a word — about a key allegation of the Trump dossier, the charge that Cohen traveled to Prague to arrange secret payments to Russian hackers attacking the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign. The accusation is the heart of the collusion allegation, and Trump-Russia special counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller’s deal with Cohen strongly suggests that prosecutors have not found evidence to support it.” Reminder: That dossier was opposition research funded by scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton.
On a final note, Trump was perfectly within his rights to continue doing business as a candidate. But it was Barack scumbag/liar-nObama who told the Russians he would have more “flexibility” after his reelection, with clear implications of collusion putting our national security at risk. ~The Patriot Post
We’ve described Putin’s abuses of international law and peace for a number of years now, including his annexation of the Crimean Peninsula (there is of course no “Crimea” or “Georgia” anymore, from a practical standpoint), extorting Ukraine and Europe with threats of cutting off gas supplies, invading major parts of Ukraine, shooting down a Boeing 777 airliner, and a host of other here’s-blood-in-your-eye moves that leave no doubt about Russia’s ill intent. As for Barack scumbag/liar-nObama and scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton’s “reset” button, Putin told scumbag/liar-nObama where to stick that button, then started resetting a few buttons of his own, making scumbag/liar-nObama look like the weakling he was and humiliating America in the process.
Fast-forward to today. What’s changed? Well, in one sense nothing: Russia is still as belligerent as ever — not its people, that is, but its bull-in-a-china-shop government and military. That’s evidenced by the Kremlin’s latest violation of international law, in which the Russian Navy fired on three Ukrainian naval ships in the Azov Sea, wounding six and capturing ship-and-crew. The Azov is a major trade conduit for Ukraine, which shares the shallow sea as co-territorial water with Russia under a 2003 treaty between the two nations. Russia’s blatant act of war prompted Ukraine to impose martial law on a sizable portion of its territory in anticipation of imminent conflict with Russia. But what else has changed? A lot.
For one thing, we no longer have feckless, impotent leadership atop a listing U.S. Ship of State. As if to accent the contrast, President Donald Trump stated flatly, “I don’t like [Russia’s] aggression. I don’t want that aggression at all.” He also threatened to cancel his upcoming meeting with Putin during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires. This threat may not sound like strong action at first blush, but it would lessen Putin’s esteem in the international community and further isolate him from the rest of the civilized world. The move would also put pressure on him at home, where his popularity continues to slide. Presumably, however, Trump received some assurances, because the two have set a meeting for Saturday at noon.
Update: Later Thursday, Trump canceled the meeting, saying, “Based on the fact that the ships and sailors have not been returned to Ukraine from Russia, I have decided it would be best for all parties concerned to cancel my previously scheduled meeting in Argentina with President Vladimir Putin. I look forward to a meaningful Summit again as soon as this situation is resolved!”
Nor do we have feckless U.S. leadership at the UN. Our favorite United Nations ambassador, Nikki Haley, echoed President Trump’s strong words through an even more blunt condemnation of Russia’s actions at an emergency assembly of the UN Security Council: “Sunday’s outrageous violation of sovereign Ukrainian territory is part of a pattern of Russian behavior. As President Trump has said many times, the United States would welcome a normal relationship with Russia. But outlaw actions like this one continue to make that impossible.” Ambassador Haley also noted that Russian-instigated attacks against Ukraine in recent years have left more than 100,000 Ukrainians dead.
What else has changed? Other nations have started to wake up to the fact that the U.S. is not as easily rolled as it was only a few years ago. The sea-change in this international leadership was readily apparent not only in Ambassador Haley’s unvarnished but accurate characterization of Russian aggression, but also in Trump’s rebuke to Europe for not ponying up its fair share of support for NATO. Punctuating Europe’s “skin in the game” against Russian belligerence, the president dropped this gem off the top turnbuckle: “And by the way, Europe shouldn’t like that aggression. And Germany shouldn’t like that aggression. They’re absolutely not doing enough — Germany. … Many of those countries are not doing enough toward NATO. They should be spending much more money.” Perhaps for starters they could FedEx a few hundred antiship missiles to the Ukrainian Navy, which would take care of any unlawful-boarding problems toot-sweet.
The broader danger posed by Russia’s leader is analogous to a dying star, which makes a spectacular showing — then the lights go out. In this analogy, Ukraine is simply the canary in the coal mine, signaling the impending supernova. Putin senses that his control and popularity, once very strong, are slipping — fast. In the wake of his exceedingly unpopular pension reforms earlier this year, for instance, his approval rating plummeted to its lowest point ever. In the past, when his ratings tanked he boosted them by “defending” Russia through strong military actions that demonstrated Russian primacy and strength to its people. Those people have since become inoculated to this ploy, especially in light of the widespread economic poverty affecting all but society’s wealthiest — like Putin, for instance.
Facing this growing unrest, Putin is once again showing he is willing to take any action available to him to regain his stature and to turn Russia’s sorry ship around. Desperate or not, however, unless Putin’s hostile acts are met by an effective response he will continue to stir turmoil around the planet, in vain hopes of regaining former glory.
Less than a century ago, Stalin wiped out anywhere from seven to 12 million Ukrainians through his genocidal, engineered famine — exact figures are impossible to render, owing to the sheer magnitude of the famine. But the more Putin continues to evolve into the image of his brutal predecessor, the closer those deaths will move to the forefront of Ukrainians’ minds. Meanwhile, maybe this time the U.S. will act decisively so the world does not have to relive such horrors. ~The Patriot Post









