The Old Man And The Sea with his oldest daughter at Tybee.
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and
http://www.israelvideonetwork.
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I just returned from the funeral of the father of a dear friend and fellow memo reader.
While away, Trump has replaced his Chief of Staff.
Priebus was not effective in this position but riding herd on Trump is neither easy. Hopefully Kelly took the job only after being assured Trump will let him do the one he was just hired to do and that means Trump must not undercut his Chief of Staff.
Being a Marine I have no doubt Kelly will bring discipline to an unruly White House.
Also, more military staff people is good at this time because we are facing some serious military challenges from N Korea, Iran, Russia and China as well as continued Islamic terrorism.
Will Kelly's appointment mark a new day.
On another matter, I was delighted that some Representatives have called upon AG Sessions for a Special Counsel be appointed to investigate Clinton and various Obama appointees for their shenanigans.
Will it happen? Possibly. Time will tell.
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Is school choice racist? You decide. (See 1 below.)
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Is Kim onto something? Nothing surprises me when it comes to political duplicity and certainly I would not be surprised if Democrats were behind Trump Russian collusion' troubles.(See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)Why Does Randi Weingarten Think More Freedom Is Racism?
By Star Parker
Randi Weingarten, president of the nation's second-largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, used a speech last week to brand the education choice movement as racist. (To learn more about Randi Weingarten, click on this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
She also got personal, trying to pin the racist label onto Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos because DeVos is a passionate supporter of parents being able to choose where to send their child to school.
I've been through this too many times. No matter the subject, liberals invariably try to kill an idea they don't like, or destroy a person they don't like, with the label "racist."
Sorry, but it won't work this time. Too much is at stake, and the truth is too clear.
Every time we go through a new round of National Assessment of Educational Progress testing, the Nation's Report Card, we see the same results: Dismal performances by black children, yawning gaps in performance between black children and white children, and overall test scores that show practically no improvement over the years.
In 2015, 35 percent of black fourth-graders and 52 percent of black eighth-graders were "below basic" in math and 48 percent of black fourth-graders and 42 percent of black eighth-graders were "below basic" in reading.
Seventeen percent of black fourth-graders were "at proficient" in math compared with 41 percent of white fourth-graders. Sixteen percent of black fourth-graders were "at proficient" in reading compared with 34 percent of white fourth-graders.
Eric Hanushek of Stanford University took a look at the last 50 years of black test scores compared with white test scores. His conclusion: virtually no improvement.
"(T)he modest improvements in achievement gaps since 1965 can only be called a national embarrassment," writes Hanushek. "Put differently, if we continue to close gaps at the same rate in the future, it will be roughly two and half centuries before the black-white math gap closes and over one and half centuries until the reading gap closes."
It took almost two centuries from our nation's founding until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. Most black parents are not interested in waiting another two centuries until the math and reading scores of their children catch up to those of white children.
But Weingarten seems to have plenty of time on her hands. She thinks things are just great. She's upset that DeVos called our public schools a "dead end."
"Our public schools are not a dead end," says Weingarten. "They're places of endless opportunity." Yes, for union bureaucrats with fat salaries and pensions. But certainly not for low-income children looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.
One reason teachers unions hate school vouchers is that public school funding can be redirected for the vouchers that children can use at any school.
That's a good thing. Stanford's Hanushek reports that since 1965, expenditures per student in our public schools have quadrupled with virtually no change in test scores.
There's a reason why a million kids are on waiting lists for acceptance into charter schools; why 64 percent of black parents, in an Education Next poll, supported tax-credits to fund scholarships to send low-income children to private schools; and why today almost 450,000 children are in some type of school choice program, up from effectively zero 20 years ago.
Why is everyone trying to get out of what Randi Weingarten thinks is so wonderful?
And why does she think it is racist to give black parents the freedom to choose where to send their child to school? Since when is it racist to give people more freedom?
Whatever Randi Weingarten's agenda happens to be, improving the lot of black children is certainly not high on it. Regarding racism, maybe she should do her own soul-searching.
Star Parker is an author and president of CURE, Center for Urban Renewal and Education. Contact her at www.urbancure.org. Contact her atwww.urbancure.org. To find out more about Star Parker and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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2) Who Paid for the ‘Trump Dossier’?
Democrats don’t want you to find out—and that ought to be a scandal of its own.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
It has been 10 days since Democrats received the glorious news that Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley would require Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort to explain their meeting with Russian operators at Trump Tower last year. The left was salivating at the prospect of watching two Trump insiders being grilled about Russian “collusion” under the klieg lights.
Yet Democrats now have meekly and noiselessly retreated, agreeing to let both men speak to the committee in private. Why would they so suddenly be willing to let go of this moment of political opportunity?
Fusion GPS. That’s the oppo-research outfit behind the infamous and discredited “Trump dossier,” ginned up by a former British spook. Fusion co-founder Glenn Simpson also was supposed to testify at the Grassley hearing, where he might have been asked in public to reveal who hired him to put together the hit job on Mr. Trump, which was based largely on anonymous Russian sources. Turns out Democrats are willing to give up just about anything—including their Manafort moment—to protect Mr. Simpson from having to answer that question.
What if, all this time, Washington and the media have had the Russia collusion story backward? What if it wasn’t the Trump campaign playing footsie with the Vladimir Putin regime, but Democrats? The more we learn about Fusion, the more this seems a possibility.
We know Fusion is a for-hire political outfit, paid to dig up dirt on targets. This columnfirst outed Fusion in 2012, detailing its efforts to tar a Mitt Romney donor. At the time Fusion insisted that the donor was “a legitimate subject of public records research.”
Mr. Grassley’s call for testimony has uncovered more such stories. Thor Halvorssen, a prominent human-rights activist, has submitted sworn testimony outlining a Fusion attempt to undercut his investigation of Venezuelan corruption. Mr. Halvorssen claims Fusion “devised smear campaigns, prepared dossiers containing false information,” and “carefully placed slanderous news items” to malign him and his activity.
William Browder, a banker who has worked to expose Mr. Putin’s crimes, testified to the Grassley committee on Thursday that he was the target of a similar campaign, saying that Fusion “spread false information” about him and his efforts. Fusion has admitted it was hired by a law firm representing a Russian company called Prevezon.
Prevezon employed one of the Russian operators who were at Trump Tower last year. The other Russian who attended that meeting, Rinat Akhmetshin, is a former Soviet counterintelligence officer. He has acknowledged in court documents that he makes his career out of opposition research, the same work Fusion does. And that he’s often hired by Kremlin-connected Russians to smear opponents.
We know that at the exact time Fusion was working with the Russians, the firm had also hired a former British spy, Christopher Steele, to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump. Mr. Steele compiled his material, according to his memos, based on allegations from unnamed Kremlin insiders and other Russians. Many of the claims sound eerily similar to the sort of “oppo” Mr. Akhmetshin peddled.
We know that Mr. Simpson is tight with Democrats. His current attorney, Joshua Levy, used to work in Congress as counsel to no less than Chuck Schumer. We know from a Grassley letter that Fusion has in the past sheltered its clients’ true identities by filtering money through law firms or shell companies (Bean LLC and Kernel LLC).
Word is Mr. Simpson has made clear he will appear for a voluntary committee interview only if he is not specifically asked who hired him to dig dirt on Mr. Trump. Democrats are going to the mat for him over that demand. Those on the Judiciary Committee pointedly did not sign letters in which Mr. Grassley demanded that Fusion reveal who hired it.
Here’s a thought: What if it was the Democratic National Committee or Hillary Clinton’s campaign? What if that money flowed from a political entity on the left, to a private law firm, to Fusion, to a British spook, and then to Russian sources? Moreover, what if those Kremlin-tied sources already knew about this dirt-digging, tipped off by Mr. Akhmetshin? What if they specifically made up claims to dupe Mr. Steele, to trick him into writing this dossier?
Fusion GPS, in an email, said that it “did not spread false information about William Browder.” The firm said it is cooperating with Congress and that “the president and his allies are desperately trying to smear Fusion GPS because it investigated Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.”
If the Russian intention was to sow chaos in the American political system, few things could have been more effective than that dossier, which ramped up an FBI investigation and sparked congressional probes and a special counsel, deeply wounding the president. This is all to Mr. Putin’s benefit, and the question is whether Russia engineered it.
If Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Democrats and the media really want answers about Russian meddling, this is a far deeper well than the so-far scant case against Mr. Trump. If they refuse to dive into the story, we’ll know that the truth about Russia and the election was never what they were after.
Write to kim@wsj.com.
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