Posts on Wednesday, May 22, 2019
In a book from the 1950s entitled And Not a Shot is Fired: How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in the Transition to Socialism, Jan Kozak, a Czech Communist, explains how Czechoslovakia was transformed from a free country into a communist dictatorship in 1948 without armed revolution taking place. They voted the communists in and, once they had a taste of power, they held on to it for 40 years. That would not be possible in the United States, right? After all, President Trump has said America will never be a socialist country.
Is there no end to Democrat corruption?
Here's what's going on with one of the most supposedly respectable of them, Rep. Elijah Cummings of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, according to the Washington Examiner:
A charity run by the wife of Rep. Elijah Cummings received millions from special interest groups and corporations that had business before her husband's committee and could have been used illegally, according to an IRS complaint filed by an ethics watchdog group.
Cummings, 68, a Maryland Democrat, is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
The pro-life movement's moment
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Since 1973, when Roe vs. Wade ushered in what would eventually lead to abortion on demand, including partial-birth abortion and even the failure to protect babies born alive after failed procedures -- the pro-life movement has achieved few legislative victories. (Snip) Unrestricted abortion has been aided by an increasingly secularized society that appears to view human life as merely the highest form of evolution, but of no greater moral significance than animals that seem to be afforded more protection in law than an unborn child.
White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif, had a terse exchange after a meeting between President Trump and Democratic lawmakers was cut short on Wednesday. Trump scrapped the meeting, which was slated as an opportunity to discuss the country's infrastructure, after Pelosi told reporters that the president "engaged in a cover-up" following a meeting with her caucus. After Trump left the room, Conway asked the Speaker if she had a "direct response to the president," Fox News confirmed. "I'm responding to the president, not staff," Pelosi shot back.
The Democrats have become a cult of anti-personality.
The ‘anti’ phenomenon is not unique. Past Democrat generations had built their identity around hating Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan. But the internet monetized the cult of anti-personality in a big way.
And Democrats are paying the price. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Dem House leadership have tried everything possible to stop the talk of impeachment. But nothing that she and her deputies can do has made a dent in the madness.
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Is socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez getting really out there?
She's out promoting urban farming by selecting the kinds of crops she thinks her constituents should be growing. And naturally, those crops to be grown are viewed through the prism of "colonialism," not the actual growing climate, which ironically, she claims to be an expert on.
According to Fox News:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Sunday that growing cauliflower in community gardens is part of the "colonial" attitudes that her Green New Deal will stamp out.
The New York Democrat, who introduced the proposal to tackle climate change by radically transforming the economy, posted a series of Instagram videos filmed in her home state
By the holidays this year the historically ginormous field of 23 Democrat wannabe presidents will likely be cut at least in half. The debates that start next month in Miami will expose several for the shallow creeks they are. Among those likely to get clipped is Robert Francis O’Rourke, who calls himself Beto because Robert Francis is insufficiently down home. It happens every presidential primary campaign, which
Navy leaders failed to address sailors' safety concerns after a sexually explicit list targeting female crewmembers surfaced aboard the service's second submarine to integrate women, resulting in the firing of a commanding officer and several other punishments.
SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea has labeled Joe Biden a "fool of low IQ" and an "imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being" after the U.S. presidential hopeful called North Korean leader Kim Jong Un a tyrant during a recent speech.
Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday said the former American vice president had insulted the country's supreme leadership and committed an "intolerable and serious politically-motivated provocation" against the North.
Biden during a campaign launch in Philadelphia on Saturday accused President Donald Trump of cozying up to "dictators and tyrants" like Kim and Russian
Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, driver accused of I-70 crash, thanks supporters in Facebook video
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DENVER – The semi driver accused of causing a fiery crash on Interstate 70 that killed four people and injured many others spoke publicly for the first time since the deadly crash on April 25.
In a nearly 30-minute Facebook live video, Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos, 23, offered his condolences to the four families impacted by the I-70 crash and thanked supporters for the demonstrations of affection and support they’ve shown over the past several weeks.
Starring in a reality show or documentary has it's good sides and its bad sides. If you're looking for fame, it's probably exciting since it means you get recognized when you go out, but fame can also come back and bite you as it did for a woman featured on the Netflix show Jailbirds, which chronicles the lives of women at the Sacramento County Jail. Megan Hawkins, who is known as "Monster" on the series, attempted to open a checking and savings account at a Sacramento-area bank using an ID that wasn't hers. Unfortunately for her, one of the bank employees recognized
Gillibrand wrote her thesis on Chinese
oppression in Tibet but has been
silent about it in Congress replies
oppression in Tibet but has been
silent about it in Congress replies
U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad is scheduled to make a rare visit to Tibet this week to raise concerns about Chinese restrictions on Buddhist practices and to advocate for the preservation of Tibetan culture. If he wanted, he could seek knowledge and advice from a surprising source: Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who wrote her college thesis on Tibet, but has been strangely quiet about the issue while in Congress. (Snip} But despite her knowledge and experience, Gillibrand has not been vocal about the relationship between China and Tibet since she joined Congress in 2007.
There’s an old saying in sports that “you can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” That same adage applies to Middle East politics. For example, in Saudi Arabia, the English daily newspaper Arab News – or “The Green Flash” as it is called by ex-patriots because of its green-tinted cover pages – reports that the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces “intercepted and destroyed two missiles launched from Yemen by Iran-aligned Houthi militias on Monday.”
After coming under quite a bit of fire, Rashida Tlaib has clarified her controversial Holocaust comment. Here is the original comment that garnered so much attention:
“There’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land, and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out
Ace investigative columnist John Solomon told Fox News‘ Sean Hannity Tuesday night during his show that, according to Solomon’s sources, POTUS Donald Trump is expected to begin declassifying a series of documents exposing President Obama’s deep state “Spygate” plot to undermine his presidency.
"I flew too close to the sun. No question.
Icarus" Inside the epic fall of Michael Avanettitti replies
Icarus" Inside the epic fall of Michael Avanettitti replies
Michael Avenatti was looking at his phone, scrolling through his Twitter mentions, when it all came crashing down. Not long before noon on March 25, he was walking toward an escalator in the newly opened 720,000-square-foot shopping mall in the middle of Hudson Yards. It’s a city within a city, purpose-built for people who don’t much like Manhattan even if they want to live here, with restaurants run by Michelin-starred chefs, shiny new high-rise apartment buildings, and headquarters for companies like WarnerMedia and Related and, as it happened, the law offices of Boies Schiller Flexner—the white-shoe firm that represents Nike.
Less than a week earlier, Avenatti had contacted the athletic-apparel giant
Things seem to be moving quickly now. It has been a remarkable few weeks in American history. Momentum is building toward uncovering the distasteful possibility that the targeting of a U.S. presidential campaign was actually a political operation, fostered at the highest levels of government, masquerading as an FBI counterintelligence investigation.
Attorney General William Barr has signaled that his interest in examining the origins of the investigation into the Trump campaign extends beyond whether the FBI operated “by the book,” as former FBI Director James Comey asserts. Barr also wants to understand the role that the larger intelligence community, or IC, may have played in all of this.
“Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.”
―Robert Frost
In a state with more than its share of biting, stinging, and creeping and crawling insects and arachnids with little or no charm to any but their own species, fireflies (or lightning bugs as they are variously known here) have long enjoyed a special place in our hearts, that rarest of varmints—a charismatic insect.
To those of us who grew up in suburbia or out in the country
WASHINGTON—House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) said the Justice Department had agreed to turn over 12 categories of counterintelligence and foreign intelligence materials connected to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mr. Schiff said Wednesday that the Justice Department had agreed to turn over the documents on a rolling basis, to be completed by the end of next week. He also postponed a committee meeting, but said the panel remained ready to enforce its subpoena for the full report and underlying documents. Mr. Schiff had set Wednesday as a deadline for the Justice Department to cooperate.
TAMPA, Fla. - The Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops is urging Gov. Ron DeSantis to spare the life of convicted Tampa Bay serial rapist and murderer Bobby Joe Long.
In a letter to the governor, the bishops asked DeSantis to commute Long's sentence to life in prison, specifically pointing out mitigating circumstances in Long's case.
The letter reads, in part:
"Since his sentencing, modern medicine has learned a great deal about the effects of brain trauma. His attorneys have filed briefs that call attention to the multiple traumas he experienced throughout his life, including the motorcycle accident he suffered in 1974. That incident
The United States, and much of the Western world, has gone badly off the rails on the subject of energy. Obsessed with CO2 emissions, a minor factor in the Earth’s climate, Western policymakers have turned to archaic technologies like wind energy as though they were futuristic. The Science and Environmental Policy Project comments:
"Energy expert Mark Mills has produced five parts of a series in Real Clear Energy discussing the tremendous demands for electricity from developing electronics and associated high-tech equipment. The development of “smart” technology and artificial intelligence will place burdens on the grid that renewables cannot meet.
Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.
Start with Australia, where Prime Minister Scott Morrison won a surprising victory last week. Before the election, polls had almost uniformly indicated that his Liberal-National Coalition would have to step down, but voters were of another mind. With their support of Morrison, an evangelical Christian who has expressed support
In Money We Trust?
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Look at the dollar bills in your wallet. They say they are "legal tender for all debts." But are they? What makes them valuable? What makes them worth anything Each bill says, "In God We Trust." But God won't guarantee their value. The $20 bill depicts the White House. Congress is on $50s. But neither guarantees the value of our dollars.
I wouldn't trust them if they did. I don't trust politicians, generally, but I especially don't trust them with money. Since President Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, the dollar has lost 80 percent of its value. So what makes money trustworthy?
President Trump has fueled a resurgence in racial prejudice, right? That’s the story the country has been told almost from the moment he came down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015 to announce that he was running for the office.
A widely cited Quinnipiac University Poll, for example, found that 54% agreed that “President Trump has emboldened people who hold racist beliefs.” A Pew Research Center survey found that 56% say Trump has made race relations worse.
But a new study by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found the opposite has occurred,
The last few days have been a clear example of why Sen. Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is wobbling.
Let’s begin with the former district attorney’s visit to her home ground for the 75th anniversary celebration of the Sun Reporter, the town’s African American newspaper.
Harris worked the pre-party crowd with charm, sharing jokes and memories with everyone she came across.
But when she took the stage, we got a 30-minute lecture on the importance of the First Amendment. An inspiring subject, but she went on way too long and without any reference to where she was or who was in the room.
If there was a reason President Donald Trump chose the small Pennsylvania town of Montoursville to hold a campaign rally, no one in the media is saying what it is. In the absence of any answers, let me suggest one, admittedly more speculative than proven but a possibility nonetheless.
In 1996, during the midst of Bill Clinton's desperate drive to become president, 16 French club members from the Montoursville high school and five of their chaperones died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island.
Although the phrase has been much abused, there is none better than "cover-up" to describe what followed.
The Nevada Senate approved Tuesday a National Popular Vote bill on a party-line vote, sending the legislation aimed at upending the Electoral College to the governor.
Assembly Bill 186, which passed the Senate on a 12-8 vote, would bring Nevada into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement between participating states to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has put up just 1.7 miles of fencing with the $1.57 billion that Congress appropriated last year for President Donald Trump’s wall along the Mexican border, a federal judge was told.
A lawyer for the U.S. House of Representatives provided the information Tuesday to the judge in Oakland, California, who is weighing requests from 20 state attorneys general and the the Sierra Club to block Trump from using funds not authorized by Congress to build the wall.
"The administration recently provided updated information to Congress on the status of its efforts as of April 30, 2019," the attorney, Douglas Letter, said in a court filing.
Former Rep. Trey Gowdy stunned House investigators recently by all but announcing the existence of secret FBI recordings of Trump campaign foreign policy volunteer adviser George Papadopoulos, made in the summer of 2016 by an undercover FBI operation.
Gowdy made the revelation in an interview Sunday with Fox Business' Maria Bartiromo.
"There are a lot of serious questions that need to be asked" during Attorney General William Barr's investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, Gowdy said. Among them: "Where are the transcripts, if any exist, between the informants and the telephone calls to George Papadopoulos?"
The polls were wrong. The pundits were wrong. The party insiders were wrong. The bookies were wrong. I was wrong. Even Burt the psychic croc was wrong.
Australia’s dysfunctional, unpopular, conservative government (the Liberal and National parties, currently in coalition, sit on the right in Australian politics) held onto power for a third term in Saturday’s national election. This happened despite the fact that most analysts expected it to lose a large number of seats; despite being (seemingly) out of step with the nation’s emerging consensus on climate change, marriage equality, religion, and race; despite a chaotic tenure in office that has seen three leaders since 2016; despite a threadbare
Is the U.S. government under the control of a shadowy group of insiders, unseen by the public and unaccountable to voters? A newly published report suggests the answer is “yes.”
But lay aside the elaborate conspiracy theories about Russian infiltration. This insidious threat is far more mundane, stemming from bureaucrats who have hijacked the regulatory process to evade accountability for their actions. It’s time for Congress and President Trump to push back against federal agency rule-makers who are overstepping their authority.
Three years after the twin shocks of President Trump's triumph in the Republican primaries and the narrow win for "Leave" in the Brexit referendum, the evidence has never been stronger that the world has entered an era of anti-liberalism.
Later this week, voters across Europe go to the polls to vote in EU parliamentary elections that could deliver a quarter or more of the seats to the continent's right-wing populists and nationalists. Meanwhile, exit polls in India suggest that Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party will win re-election when results are announced on May 23. This follows the surprise victory in Australia of Scott Morrison's conservative coalition,
Rat-infested piles of rotting garbage left uncollected by the city of Los Angeles, even after promises to clean it up, are fueling concerns about a new epidemic after last year's record number of flea-borne typhus cases.
Even the city's most notorious trash pile, located between downtown LA's busy Fashion and Produce districts, continues to be a magnet for rats after it was cleaned up months ago. The rodents can carry typhus-infected fleas, which can spread the disease to humans through bacteria rubbed into the eyes or cuts and scrapes on the skin, resulting in severe flu-like symptoms.
Jerry Nadler was at it again Tuesday, waxing indignant about former White House counsel Don McGahn’s refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee. It’s all a show, meant to keep old news in the headlines, and to appease the large “Impeach Now!” wing of the Democratic Party without actually doing anything.
Everyone on Judiciary knows perfectly well that Congress can’t compel testimony from top presidential advisers except in the most extraordinary circumstances: The chief executive’s right to frank, confidential discussions with his staff is well-established.
So Nadler’s bluster about how he’ll “go to court to secure” McGahn’s appearance is just noise for the cameras.
Then again, that’s all
Of all the wild tales that Christopher Steele spun about Russia-Trump collusion during a visit to the State Department shortly before the 2016 election, only one was deemed worth forwarding to his FBI handlers.
Long hidden, the now-disclosed email speaks volumes about both the quality of Steele’s so-called intelligence gathering and the FBI’s willingness to vet an informant who was openly biased against Donald Trump, paid by Trump’s Democratic opponent, and motivated by an Election Day deadline.
Multiple sources confirm to me that the attachment that Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec sent to then-FBI section chief Stephen Laycock on Oct. 13, 2016,
Michael Avenatti, the lawyer who became famous representing adult film actress Stormy Daniels against President Donald Trump, said on Twitter he expects to be indicted in New York within 48 hours.
Avenatti was arrested in March and charged in a criminal complaint with trying to extort millions of dollars from Nike Inc. He was separately charged in California in a federal indictment alleging he embezzled money from his clients, failed to pay millions of dollars in taxes and lied in bank loan applications. He didn’t say in his tweet whether the New York indictment will include new charges.
The New German Anti-Semitism
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One of Wenzel Michalski’s early recollections of growing up in southern Germany in the 1970s was of his father, Franz, giving him some advice: “Don’t tell anyone that you’re Jewish.” Franz and his mother and his little brother had survived the Holocaust by traveling across swaths of Eastern and Central Europe to hide from the Gestapo, and after the war, his experiences back in Germany suggested that, though the Nazis had been defeated, the anti-Semitism that was intrinsic to their ideology had not. This became clear to Franz when his teachers in Berlin cast stealthily malicious glances at him when Jewish characters — such as Shylock
Joe Biden might be leading the race for his party's nomination now, but the former vice president is a "walking time-bomb" and has to perform a "high-wire act" if he is to emerge from the crowded Democratic field in first place, according to Brit Hume.
Hume, Fox News' Senior Political Analyst, made the comment while discussing Biden's 2020 prospects on the latest episode of the Fox News podcast, "The Candidates with Bret Baier."
"I like Biden on a personal basis, but I think he is a walking time-bomb," Hume said. "I think his age is an issue, I’m the same age as he is, my age is an issue,
It would be a profound mistake for Democrats to be goaded into pursuing impeachment of President Trump now or any time in the future.
I say this based on the evidence that is publicly available about what Trump did or did not do – whether it be on non-existent collusion with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election, or allegations that he obstructed justice in the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Some Democrats believe Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice and can be impeached for that offense.
There are few things that a Democratic state legislature can’t write a new law about.
Now, the New York Senate is working on a new statute to ban texting while walking. Unfortunately, New York is not the first United States locality seeking to subvert Darwin’s survival of the fittest law. As in Hawaii and some municipalities in, of course, California, it would impose fines between $25 and $250 on people for texting, browsing online, emailing or playing games on their cellphone while in a crosswalk
The Nevada Senate approved Tuesday a National Popular Vote bill on a party-line vote, sending the legislation aimed at upending the Electoral College to the governor. Assembly Bill 186, which passed the Senate on a 12-8 vote, would bring Nevada into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, an agreement between participating states to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote. If signed as expected by Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, Nevada would become the 16th jurisdiction to join the compact, along with 14 states and the District of Columbia.