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One of the most difficult businesses to be in - restaurants.
Restaurants aren’t just a big part of millions of Americans’ lives. They’re a huge part of the U.S. economy. And yet, few people know how difficult it is for restaurants to survive, and even fewer know about the rules and regulations that make opening a restaurant (and keeping it open) so hard. In this week’s video, learn five facts that every American should know about the restaurant industry.
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Democrat stonewalling could well be because they are frightened by the boomerang they launched regarding Trump/Russian collusion heading back their way.
Something I have talked about for months.
Democrats bark a lot, gnash their teeth and growl. Then we find out, after tortuous investigations, they may well be guilty of that which they accuse others. Is ain't always is, is it? Why? Because Democrats love to obfuscate and send others off track while they accuse Trump of doing the same. (See 1 below.)
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This is how you spread radicalism on campuses among the unwashed neophytes who already are leaning so far left they are ready to fall flat on their faces. (See 2 below.)
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Trump won what Obama was afraid to try but now that he has helped win the war against ISIS we must not lose the victory. (See 3 below.)
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The minute Democrat candidates appear they are becoming vulnerable they fall back on their historic playbook which is: a) smear your opponent, b) play the race card, c) lie about anything that has the prospect of winning votes and d) go into the mode of identity politics. (See 4 below.)
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No one has ever accused Trump of being articulate, a smooth talker like his predecessor who , with the help of a prompter, had a silver tongue. Take Obama away from the prompter and he often became a blithering idiot.
No one in the mass media are going to give Trump the benefit of the doubt either. Their mission is to continue to destroy him because he made them look like the biased fools they are and have chosen to become.
The latest dust-up with the 'ding bat' Democrat Rep.from Florida, has tuned into a race card matter reaching all the way to Gen. Kelly's spit shined shoes. It is the card of last resort for liberals, Democrats, progressives and most particularly blacks who claim they have been disenfranchised. It has been played by Messrs Jackson, Sharpton, Rev. Wright, Rep's. Wilson and Waters,Obama and the list is endless whenever it suits their purpose of dividing.
I believe it is beginning to wear thin and be seen for what it is.
Last night Lynn and I went to see the movie : "Marshall." It is about Thurgood Marshall, the first Negro to become a Supreme Court Justice. I recommend it not only because he was a great fighter for the right causes, and a fine Justice but also because it makes a lie out of those who are unwilling to look at the progress we have made as a nation that believes in justice for all. No, we are not there yet, nor probably will ever be enough to suit some and yes, man will continue to practice hatred against his fellow man because that is what he does.
That said, more progress will be made if we do not play race cards, listen to the other side's legitimate arguments and pleas and recognize, if only from an economic standpoint, we are better off and stronger when we come together and unite than when we split apart.
Obama was a racial and class divider and those who hate Trump make the same claim about him. Yes, Trump attacks those who attack him but he also has offered a better way for those who want to give cohesion a try. The problem is unity is not something Democrats believe wins votes and could even lose their base. They are unified in voting against everything Trump seeks to do and they come up with reasons that sound plausible but are, more often than not, an excuse to rally the core. They could enter the arena and use their leverage but Schumer and Pelosi have no desire to take Trump's bait. So we will remain politically and socially divided until exhaustion and discontent takes over and the impetus for change wins and forces a greater degree of political comity. Until then expect more comedy.
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Dick
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1) The Fusion Collusion
Democrats are trying to protect the firm’s secrets—so the GOP should keep digging.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Washington is obsessed with the word “collusion” but has little understanding of its true meaning. The confusion might explain why D.C. has missed the big story of collusion between Fusion GPS and the Democratic Party.
To read the headlines, a poor, beleaguered opposition-research firm was humiliated and constitutionally abused this week by partisan Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. Fusion’s lawyers sent a 17-page letter to the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, accusing him of misdeeds, declaring his subpoenas invalid, and invoking a supposed First Amendment right to silence. Yet the firm’s founders, the story went, were hauled in nonetheless and forced to plead the Fifth. “No American should experience the indignity that occurred today,” Fusion’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, declared.
Fusion is known as a ruthless firm that excels in smear jobs, but few have noticed the operation it’s conducting against the lawmakers investigating it. The false accusations against Mr. Nunes—that he’s acting unethically and extralegally, that he’s sabotaging the Russia probe—are classic.
This is a firm that in 2012 was paid to dig through the divorce records of a Mitt Romney donor. It’s a firm that human-rights activist Thor Halvorssen testified was hired to spread malicious rumors about him. It’s a firm that financier Bill Browder testified worked to delegitimize his efforts to get justice for Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer beaten to death in a Russian prison.
It’s the firm behind the infamous “dossier” accusing Donald Trump of not just unbecoming behavior but also colluding with Russia. Republicans are investigating whether the Fusion dossier was influenced by Russians, and whether American law enforcement relied on that disinformation for its own probe.
But Fusion’s secret weapon in its latest operation is the Democratic Party, whose most powerful members have made protecting Fusion’s secrets their highest priority. Senate Democrats invoked a parliamentary maneuver in July to block temporarily Mr. Browder’s public testimony. Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, has been engineering flaps to undercut and obstruct Mr. Nunes’s investigation. Democrats on the House Ethics Committee have deep-sixed what was meant to be a brief inquiry to clear Mr. Nunes so as to keep him sidelined.
Then there is the intel committee’s meeting this week. Despite the spin, forcing Fusion to appear was Republicans’ only recourse after months of stonewalling. Fusion’s letter ludicrously claimed that Mr. Nunes’s subpoenas were invalid, which essentially forced the committee to show otherwise. It was a question of authority.
Florida Rep. Tom Rooney put the Fusion attendees through a series of questions not out of spite but to clarify finally just what topics the firm is refusing to talk about. The Fifth Amendment doesn’t provide protection against answering all questions. It only protects against providing self-incriminating evidence. It is therefore revealing that Fusion took the Fifth on every topic—from its relationship with British spook Christopher Steele, to the history of its work, to its role in the dossier.
The untold story is the Democrats’ unprecedented behavior. Mr. Rooney had barely started when committee staffers for Mr. Schiff interrupted, accused him of badgering witnesses, and suggested he was acting unethically. Jaws dropped. Staff do not interrupt congressmen. They do not accuse them of misbehavior. And they certainly do not act as defense attorneys for witnesses. No Democratic lawmakers had bothered to come to the hearing to police this circus, and Mr. Rooney told me that he “won’t be doing any more interviews without a member from the minority present.”
Private-sector lawyers also tend not to accuse congressmen of unethical behavior, as Mr. Levy did in his letter to Mr. Nunes. But Fusion’s legal eagle must feel safe. He’s former general counsel to the Senate’s minority leader, Chuck Schumer. He has also, I’m told by people familiar with the committee’s activities, more than once possessed information that he would have had no earthly means of knowing, since it was secret committee business. Consider that: Democratic members of Congress or their staff providing sensitive details of an investigation to a company to which the committee has given subpoenas.
The Washington narrative is focused on special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe. But the ferocious pushback and unseemly tactics from Democrats suggest they are growing worried. Maybe the real story is that Democrats worked with an opposition-research firm that has some alarming ties to Russia and potentially facilitated a disinformation campaign during a presidential election.
The media has its own conflict of interest, since it would prefer nobody find out about its years of, ahem, colluding with Fusion. Don’t expect any investigative reporting. But also don’t believe the stories about GOP harassment. The ferocity of the Fusion-Democrat campaign is proof Republicans are looking in the right place.
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2) Hamas-Supporting CAIR Leader to Lecture Harvard Student Group
He has publicly endorsed Hamas and secretly schemed with the Palestinian terrorist group's supporters to thwart U.S.-led peace efforts.
Now Nihad Awad is preparing a prestigious lecture for Harvard University students on how “to inspire a deeper engagement with critical social issues on campus and in the wider community.” He is scheduled to be honored the first weekend of November with the Phillips Brooks House Association's Robert Coles “Call of Service” Lecture and Award. Past recipients of the honor include former Vice President Al Gore and Children's Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman.
A Harvard release describes Awad as “a leading advocate for justice and mutual understanding, promoting dialogue and empowering American Muslims.”
That's extraordinarily generous, as Awad's words and deeds foster mutual enmity, not understanding; deception, not dialogue.
He was a member of a Muslim Brotherhood-created network of organizations operating in the United States with a mission to help Hamas politically and financially. Awad appears on the “Palestine Committee's” telephone list. Internal records seized by the FBI also show that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which Awad co-founded in 1994 and has served as its only executive director ever since, was a Palestine Committee branch.
Before creating CAIR, Awad ran a second Palestine Committee entity, called the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). The IAP served as a Hamas propaganda arm, publishing the terrorist group's communiques and articles advocating on its behalf. The FBI described his partner at both IAP and CAIR, Omar Ahmed, as a “leader within the Palestine Committee.”
Again, all of this is drawn from internal Muslim Brotherhood/Palestine Committee records seized by the FBI. They were entered into evidence in a federal terror financing trial involving the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. The foundation, another Palestine Committee entity, and five former officials all were convicted of illegally routing $12 million to Hamas through a network of charities.
All of this information is in the public domain.
So what prompted a Harvard student group – by definition smart, educated young people – to identify Nihad Awad as an inspirational paragon of service?
It turns out that the Phillips Brooks House Association's programming chair, Anwar Omeish, is the daughter of another advocate for Palestinian violence, former Muslim American-Society President Esam Omeish.
Omeish was forced to resign from a Virginia state immigration panel in 2007 after an exclusive IPT video showed him praising Palestinians for choosing the “the jihad way … to liberate your land.”
Awad was in Omeish's home for a 2010 political fundraiser where U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., accused Israel of controlling U.S. foreign policy.
We are First Amendment supporters, and the Phillips Brooks House Association is free to invite whomever it pleases. Whitewashing Nihad Awad's decades of work on behalf of terrorists and radicals, however, doesn't seem to be in the best interests of a group seeking inspiration on public service.
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3) After Victory in Raqqa
Iran stands to benefit from a post-caliphate U.S. withdrawal.
By The Editorial Board
The Raqqa victory follows the fall of Mosul in Iraq in July and sweeps Islamic State from the territory it controlled since its rapid rise in 2013-2014. This is a crucial blow because the ability to control much of Syria and Iraq contributed to ISIS’s appeal as it recruited jihadists around the world. It seemed to be the vanguard of the Islamist future. Even as it burned apostates in cages, beheaded Christians and exterminated Yazidis, ISIS could boast that it was immune in its haven.
No more. As anti-ISIS coalition spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon tweeted Tuesday, “Our partners have removed ISIS from 87% of territory they once held and liberated over 6.5 million people.”
This humanitarian and military success wouldn’t have been possible without U.S. air power, intelligence and special forces assisting the Kurdish and free Syrian troops. Russia, Iran and China did virtually nothing. Europe provided some planes, and Turkey let the U.S. Air Force fly from Incirlik. But make no mistake, this is another example of America policing the world. If not for U.S. planes and the Peshmerga, Kirkuk in Iraq would have fallen to ISIS—and maybe Baghdad too.
The tragedy is that it took so long. President Obama devised a long strategy that would put few U.S. soldiers on the ground. He didn’t want to admit that he had to re-intervene in Iraq after having pulled out in toto in 2011.
The long campaign allowed ISIS to recruit and plant seeds of terrorism around the world. Islamic State now has offshoots or allies in some 30 countries, and its acolytes have claimed credit for murders across Europe and even in the U.S. Defeating ISIS became a major campaign theme for Donald Trump, and his generals sped up the pace of the campaign upon taking office.
The question is what comes next? Islamic State fighters fleeing Raqqa and Mosul are migrating to Deir al-Zour province in eastern Syria, where the terror group still holds sway. Bashar Assad’s Syrian government forces, with the help of Russian air power and Iranian-backed troops, are moving quickly to secure control of the area. Colonel Dillon says the U.S. will let our allies in the Syrian Defense Forces decide whether to continue their fight, which seems to suggest that the Trump Administration is happy to declare victory and move on.
If the Trump Administration has a post-ISIS strategy, it isn’t obvious. And other forces are quickly filling the vacuum. The Iraqi Army is trading fire with the Kurds on the edge of Kirkuk and the Kurdish Regional Government. If the U.S. had a long-term arrangement for keeping some troops in Iraq, it would retain more influence against Iran and play a brokering role between the Kurds and Baghdad. We certainly owe some support for the Kurds who have been our best anti-ISIS allies.
As for Syria, if the U.S. withdraws, it’s only a matter of time before Iran and its allies assert control over the area once held by ISIS. This would amount to defeating Islamic State so Iran can dominate the region—from Tehran through Iraq to Western Syria and Lebanon.
Iran is also trying to establish control over southern Syria near the border with Israel. Mr. Trump gave that a boost with his July decision to abandon the Free Syrian Army and forge a cease fire with Russia in the south that has sent moderate Sunnis into the arms of the Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda. Israel has launched periodic bombing runs against Iran’s proxies, and a wider war is possible.
Mr. Trump campaigned to defeat ISIS, and he is loathe to make U.S. commitments abroad. But this month he also promised a new strategy to deter Iranian designs for regional hegemony. That strategy won’t work if the U.S. declares victory over ISIS and walks away.
Like Barack Obama, sooner or later Mr. Trump will be pulled back in—either by a reconstituted Sunni jihadist vanguard, or an Iranian threat to Jordan, the Kurds, Israel or the Sunni Arab States. The Trump Administration needs a policy to consolidate the victory against ISIS into a strategic gain for U.S. interests in the Middle East.
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4) Smearing Ed Gillespie in Virginia
Could a Republican win in the only southern state carried by Clinton?
By The Editorial Board
Looks like it’s panic time for Democrats in Virginia. Naturally they are responding by playing the race card against Ed Gillespie, the Republican candidate for Governor.
Mr. Gillespie’s rival, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, enjoys a two-to-one cash advantage, and for most of the race he has also enjoyed a comfortable margin in the polls. That changed in the past week, with one new poll showing Mr. Gillespie within the margin of error and another putting him ahead by a point. Some stories report Mr. Northam’s internal polling shows Mr. Gillespie within striking distance.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. With Donald Trump loathed by 96% of Northam voters, the Democratic calculation has been that in an off-year all the party needed for victory was to tie Mr. Gillespie to Mr. Trump and make the campaign about the President.
But Mr. Gillespie avoided that trap and stressed state and local issues, since he’s running for a state job. The former head of the national GOP has hit Mr. Northam hard on the economy and proposed a 10% across the board tax cut. He’s also been running ads that focus on MS-13, a Central American gang whose members savagely murdered a 15-year-old girl in January in a Fairfax County park—and have been linked to other Virginia murders. The accusation is that Mr. Northam is soft on crime, having cast the deciding vote against a state bill that would have banned sanctuary cities.
Mr. Northam says he’s voted for tough prison sentences for gang members and accuses Mr. Gillespie of promoting “hatred and bigotry.” On Thursday Barack Obama campaigned for Mr. Northam, saying that “our democracy is at stake” in Virginia and that Mr. Gillespie is stoking fears in a way he called “damaging and corrosive.” For his part Mr. Gillespie says that his opponents are insulting law-abiding Latino immigrants by making no distinction between them and violent gang members.
Our guess is that what’s really freaking out Democrats is the increasingly real prospect of a GOP upset in the only southern state carried by Hillary Clinton last November. They know that three years ago Mr. Gillespie came within a whisker of defeating Sen. Mark Warner even as the national GOP failed to provide last-minute money.
Democrats have held the Virginia state house for four years—the current Governor is term-limited—which is an exception to the GOP dominance in state elections around the country in recent years. If Mr. Gillespie pulls this one out, the message will be that candidate quality matters and, even in a state trending left, Democrats need to stand for something more than opposition to Donald Trump.
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