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Kim will never run but if she does she gets my vote and I would move to wherever she lives. (See 1 below.)
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Even I know better than to be writing memos at 98, should I make it, God forbid. (See 2 below.)
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It is not politic to gloat but the radical progressive "deplorable's" got what they deserve. Set against Sen. Collin's beautiful speech they look small as if it took her comments to make them such.
Perhaps Feinstein did not leak Ford's letter. I always thought it was Ford's grossly partisan lawyers, but no praise from Collins makes Feinstein any taller. She will end her career always known for being Schumer's dutiful handmaiden lackey.
Kavanaugh has been crippled by character assassination efforts on the part of "despicable's" but he will rise over the years as a superb selection because, if Kavanaugh is the Jurist Collins portrayed, his flag will unfurl for all to see. As it does, the radical progressives, who have captured the so called Democrat Party, will look even pathetically smaller.
Years from now, America will also look better as well because Senators like Grassley, McConnell, Graham,Collins et al helped save American Jurisprudence. Trump is also due some credit for hanging New York tough.
Trump is correct when he suggests the behaviour of the "deplorable's" is backfiring.
"Deplorable's" may be slow to react but eventually they get fed up, fall back on their squirrel logic and reason their way to the correct decision.(See 3 below.)
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Stacey goes to California to collect money so she can become Governor in Georgia.
"Stacey Abrams is in San Francisco for a "secret" fundraiser with wealthy leftist elites. The location is to be revealed to RSVP'd guests only.
They're going all-in to turn Georgia into the next California... and they have their PERFECT candidate in Stacey Abrams!
Ms. Abrams may want to portray herself as some type of reasonable "moderate" while campaigning here in Georgia, but I guarantee you she feels 100% at home out there.
And Friend,I know you agree she is TOO EXTREME for Georgia!"
Meanwhile:
MSNBC really stretches the truth to accuse Trump. Soros no longer claims to be Jewish.
"While media outlets accused the president of spreading an implicitly antisemitic conspiracy about George Soros, one protester revealed to MSNBC she works for a Soros-funded advocacy group. (The Daily Caller)
President Donald Trump slammed protesters opposed to Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Friday, accusing the women who confronted Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of being paid by billionaire liberal activist George Soros."
Bolton speaks about Trump and Iran. (See 4 below.)+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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Dick
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1)
This is not hard. Democrats and the media have worked ceaselessly to create the impression that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote is the toughest the Senate will ever take. It isn’t. Not even close.
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1)
Kavanaugh: An Easy Vote
A ‘no’ would alienate Republican voters and invite the smearing of future nominees.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
This is not hard. Democrats and the media have worked ceaselessly to create the impression that Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote is the toughest the Senate will ever take. It isn’t. Not even close.
True, by using some of the most vicious, ruthless and soulless tactics ever seen in Washington, the left has managed to escalate this moment. But step back, wipe the mud from your eyes, and view this nomination again with 20/20 vision. It’s an easy vote.
Judge Kavanaugh is one of the most respected jurists in the country, with 12 years and hundreds of opinions on the nation’s pre-eminent court of appeals. He has served his country ably and with distinction for decades. He is the definition of a bright, solid conservative jurist, a natural pick for any Republican president—a George W. Bush, a John McCain, a Mitt Romney. Voting for a stellar judge universally praised across the establishment? Easy.
Senators should remember that he was chosen in part for these specific credentials—to spare more-moderate Republicans the debates over abortion and other touchy subjects that might have accompanied different nominees. The entire process has been marked by deference to those moderates—from White House pre-nomination consultations to a rock-solid confirmation process that was the most transparent in history.
Judge Kavanaugh endured 31 hours of initial hearings and answered nearly 1,300 subsequent written questions. He met 65 senators. The Judiciary Committee made available to senators thousands of documents spanning his career in government service. All this was done to ensure an orderly, thorough and honest process. Voting for a man who has been more thoroughly vetted than any nominee in history? Easy.
Republicans can also point to a fair and exhaustive examination of the ugly allegations lodged at the last minute against the nominee. Christine Blasey Ford’s claims were immediately investigated by the Judiciary Committee. She was provided a hearing and treated with utmost courtesy. At senators’ requests, the vote was delayed and the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted a seventh Kavanaugh background check, this one into the claims of Ms. Ford and Deborah Ramirez. The resulting report confirms the allegations are entirely uncorroborated, and the people the accusers claim were present deny any knowledge of the purported events. Voting for a man who is innocent under any standard of due process? Easy.
The new claim that Judge Kavanaugh lacks the “temperament” to sit on the court is likewise untethered from reality. When he appeared at last week’s hearing, he was not testifying in his capacity as a judge, a federal employee or even a lawyer. He was testifying as a human being—one falsely accused by Senate Democrats of gang rape. Of course he was indignant. But whatever his reaction, it bears no relation to his judicial temperament, to how he conducts himself on the bench. On that score his record is beyond reproach. The ABA interviewed hundreds of people about him and reported: “Lawyers and judges overwhelmingly praised Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial temperament.” Voting for a man who is described in that report as “honest,” “humble,” “open-minded,” “decent” and “fair”? Easy.
Politically, too, this is easy. Republican voters are furious about the treatment of Judge Kavanaugh and want him confirmed. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll this week showed the Democratic “enthusiasm” edge in the midterms has evaporated. As many Republicans as Democrats now say this election is “very important”—which directly ties to the Kavanaugh battle. Recent polls show Democratic senators from red states who have declared against Judge Kavanaugh to be in growing political peril—from North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp to Missouri’s Claire McCaskill to Montana’s Jon Tester. Any Republican who votes against this judge puts himself in the same camp as Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, and risks turning that voter wrath onto themselves.
Don’t tell the “resistance,” but the hard vote to defend would be a “no.” That’s the vote that would legitimize these shameful tactics and guarantee similar gruesome treatment for future nominees. That’s the vote that turns #MeToo into #MeCarthyism. It’s the vote that potentially removes Judge Kavanaugh from even his existing position, as Democrats pursue perjury charges and impeachment. A “no” is a vote against every value Republican senators claim to hold dear—due process, the presumption of innocence, civility, conservative jurisprudence, the Senate’s solemn role in advice and consent.
Democrats want Republicans to fear this vote. Republicans should embrace it. Because it is the right thing to do, and because the Supreme Court rulings that will come with a Justice Kavanaugh will serve as a point of pride for decades to come.
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2) John Paul Schumer
The former Justice plays last-minute confirmation politics.
The Editorial Board
To the list of Senate confirmation norms and Supreme Court traditions violated by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh, you can add one more: Public lobbying by a former Supreme Court Justice.
From a retirement redoubt in Boca Raton, former Justice John Paul Stevens chose the eve of a Senate vote to sound like a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. The 98-year-old, who retired from the Court in 2010, praised Judge Kavanaugh and one of his rulings in a 2014 book. But on Thursday the former Justice had a confirmation conversion.
The former Justice said Judge Kavanaugh’s response to the sexual misconduct allegations raised questions of political bias. “I think there’s merit to that criticism and I think the Senators should really pay attention [to] that,” Justice Stevens told a group of seniors, the newspaper said.“At that time, I thought (Kavanaugh) had the qualifications for the Supreme Court should he be selected,” Mr. Stevens said, as quoted by the Palm Beach Post. “I’ve changed my views for reasons that have no relationship to his intellectual ability . . . I feel his performance in the hearings ultimately changed my mind.”
So in the name of protecting the Supreme Court from politics, the former Justice plays politics with the Court. Justice Stevens may no longer hear cases, but no one will miss that he is saying precisely what Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wants him to say. That’s why the tradition has been for former Justices to stay quiet during even the most contentious confirmation battles.
Since Justice Stevens directly asked Senators to consider his views, they might want to know that Mr. Stevens has been popping off about other issues from the political left. In March he wrote an op-ed under the headline: “Repeal the Second Amendment.” Justice Stevens, who wrote the main dissent in the landmark Heller gun-rights case in 2008, called the language of the Second Amendment “a relic of the 18th century.” Senator Lisa Murkowski’s constituents in Alaska should know that with her vote against Judge Kavanaugh she has sided with Justice Stevens’s logic.
We don’t recall hearing Justice Stevens object in 2016 when current Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Donald Trump a threat to the country. Justice Stevens’s concern over the politicization of the Court runs in only one ideological direction—against judges who adhere to the original meaning of the Constitution. His opposition is one more reason to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.
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4) Does Trump's Tough Talk on Iran Have a Next Step?
By Armin Rosen
4) Does Trump's Tough Talk on Iran Have a Next Step?
By Armin Rosen
One of the value propositions of a Trump presidency is that the chief executive and his various helpers will say exactly what’s on their minds, regardless of how impolitic or contradictory or flat-out nonsensical their thoughts might be. So it was at United Against Nuclear Iran’s third-annual summit last week, where several of the country’s top foreign policy officials seemed to hold nothing back in discussing the Iranian threat.
“It’s very important that we restore deterrence,” said Brian Hook, the State Department’s special representative on Iran, adding, “We’re accumulating risk in the Middle East by not getting at Iran’s regional activities.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is a towering physical presence and a fast talker, said in his prepared remarks: “The Iranian regime robs its own people to pay for death and destruction abroad.” National Security Adviser John Bolton called the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), “the worst diplomatic debacle in American history” and an agreement “based on a flat-out lie, the illusion that the Iranian regime never desired a nuclear weapon.”
This is thrilling, or possibly terrifying stuff, especially on the sidelines of all the global agenda-setting that usually takes place during the week the United Nations General Assembly opens—and especially with Yossi Cohen, the oddly photogenic Mossad director, sitting in the front row. Cohen gave a bombshell-free off-the-record speech and otherwise appeared jarringly normal considering he’s the director of the Mossad as he posed for photos with whatever well-wishers summoned the nerve to approach him. The administration wanted to make it unmistakable that U.S. policy towards Iran had radically and irrevocably shifted, and that the U.S. would now be pursuing what Bolton called “a maximum pressure campaign.”
But to what end? It’s unclear what happens in the long-run now that the U.S. has pulled out of the nuclear deal, or whether there is, in fact, a specific long-run that the administration actually has in mind. Hook, Pompeo, and Bolton gave unsparing speeches of near-Trumpian frankness that were also notable for what they didn’t mention. None of the three explored the possibility of regime change, even in euphemistic terms. Bolton said there would be “hell to pay” if Iran continued down its current path, without really trying to define “hell.” Hook condemned Obama administration diplomacy with Iran, calling the nuclear deal the result of “an experimental foreign policy.” He also discussed the recent attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq and implied that Iran would be held responsible for any further Shiite militia strikes on American targets in the country. “The president says that if this escalation continues it will be met with a swift and decisive response,” Hook said. The U.S. is seeking to isolate the Iranian economy to the greatest degree possible. “Sanctions relief didn’t work,” Hook declared. Echoing Bolton, he said that “our new strategy is one of maximum economic pressure.”
It is possible that the Trump administration is building towards a North Korea-type reversal and that after a few months of aggressive rhetoric and intensive U.S.-enforced sanctions, the president will attempt to use his transcendent negotiating skills to bring a longstanding U.S. enemy to heel. It’s also possible that the current administration believes it can collapse Iran’s economy within the next few years and marshal enough economic and diplomatic pressure to force a transformative change inside the country. With this president, you just don’t know—and last week didn’t necessarily bring us any closer to an answer.
At least the near-term looks stable. The U.S. isn’t facing any urgent choices regarding Iran at this exact moment. The first major test of the administration’s new policy will come on Nov. 4th, the U.S. deadline for ending Iranian oil imports—after that, any company that buys even a single barrel of Iranian crude leaves itself vulnerable to the effects of American sanctions. This policy is in sharp contrast to the Obama administration’s pre-JCPOA enforcement of oil-related sanctions, which only required unspecified dramatic reductions in Iranian imports. If every major U.S.-aligned importer meets the deadline, the administration bolsters its argument for pulling out of the deal and proves that the post-JCPOA landscape isn’t as dangerous for global peace as critics feared it would be. “It is incumbent on every country to join our efforts to change the regime’s lawless behavior,” said Pompeo, more or less declaring that the U.S. is still powerful enough to whip the international community into line (even with ”international community” an increasingly dubious notion and the JCPOA still in place).
So far, the Iranians have been careful not to exceed any of the agreement’s fissile material stockpile limits nearly five months after the U.S. announced its departure from the nuclear deal. “We’ve got the nuclear constraints, however you may value them, on the cheap at the moment,” Brookings Institution Iran expert Suzanne Maloney said during one of the UANI summit’s panel discussions. Maloney explained that the special purpose vehicle—the EU’s financial instrument to facilitate investment in Iran despite U.S. sanctions—was unlikely to change much. “Realistically nobody thinks this will compensate for what was expected to happen under the nuclear deal,” Maloney said. She described the arrangement as “posturing—giving the Iranians the appearance of a political win.”
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