Pappy Harris not happy because his dope of a daughter joked abut her college dope smoking experience because of political pandering.
https://www.newsmax.com/
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Thursday she supports reparations for black Americans affected by slavery, The New York Times reports.
Warren said in an interview with the Times that "we must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country that has had many consequences, including undermining the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations." She also said that "we need systemic, structural changes to address that."
Warren did not provide any specifics about what her plan would be, but the Times notes that this is significant given that it's a policy previous Democratic presidential candidates chose not to support. For instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who recently announced his 2020 bid, was not in favor of reparations in 2016, saying at the time that it would not pass Congress and would be "very divisive." For that matter, neither was former President Barack Obama or former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Why did she leave out her native American ancestors?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Go Bernie! (See 1 below.)
And:
I was coming home and worrying about all the stuff going on in my life, my family’s lives, my friends’ lives, and what's happening in Washington, Moscow, North Korea, the Middle East, Hillary Clinton's scandals, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the DEEP STATE, the terrorists infiltrating our border, the illegals, the refugees, and how our country is rapidly losing its sanity and its Christianity, then I saw a yard sign that said:
NEED HELP?
CALL JESUS
800-555-3787
Out of curiosity and desperation, I called the number.
A Mexican leaf blower answered.
Finally:
What is going on with Trudeau? https://tiny.iavian.net/rf6l
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Hanson's new book will be out in March. This is an excerpt and similar to what Bossie and Lewandowski had to say when they appeared here. (See 2 below.)
I am currently reading Michael Lewis' unflattering: "The Fifth Risk."
I am half way through his portrayal of Trump's preparation for becoming president i and if close to factual it is a disturbing template.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is Brexit ready to unravel? (See 3 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
America's real enemies. (See 4 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Smollett made a fool of himself and revealed the depth of hatred towards Trump on the part of liberals of all stripes. After his fake incident, perhaps he will begin wearing some.
Those candidates who rushed to believe what Smollett claimed, because they could not wait for convincing evidence, displayed terrible judgement and yet, they want us to trust their judgement as president.
Obama was also frequently guilty of similar premature knee-jerk reactions when comparable events occurred during his 8 year tenure.
What we are witnessing and experiencing is another transition period. Old established organizations and alliances (think the U.N and NATO), domestic political parties are failing etc.. China is emerging as a power, challenging our own nation after decades of American singular dominance and in response we elected a president not in character with the traditional role model.
European unity is also in turmoil and our relationship is under stress.
Terrorism has emerged as a threat to order and social media technology has created further instability.
Where this all ends is anyone's guess but unless the great powers with clashing ideologies devise strategies to live in peace and avoid threatening each other's mutual survival world tranquility is out of the question. and potential devastating war(s) could become inevitable.
As America prepares to cope with this threatening transition period, the political path we have chosen of hatred toward our elected president and the incessant pursuit of his legitimacy and constant sniping and investigations simply increase our inability to meet the mounting threats we face.
The path Democrats are on may satisfy their narrow goal on the road to regaining power but in the long run it establishes threatening markers which ill serve our nation.
Trump has a sordid past in many respects and he is beyond orthodox but neither are the times. His policies are sound, his execution is unique and untried but that is why he had appeal. We concluded Hillary was unsuited for the challenges and we had plenty of history and time to assess her qualifications and we rejected them.
Democrats and their allies in the mass media, FBI and State Department, apparently, have been and remain unable/unwilling to accept the voter's decision and to justify their malcontent they have begun to question the very foundations on which our republic rests. They offer radical economic solutions , they claim our president is pursuing immorality and are thwarting his every decision. Democrats believe lurching to the left is the answer both to our domestic challenges as well as the best suited strategy to meet external threats.
The candidates seeking to replace Trump are a strange mixture with few credible achievements and bizarre personalities. Their appeal is directed at the most immature and nihilistic of wants based on the mistaken belief our constitution offers a vast array of entitlements and porous borders. Their message is: " Come to America, the welcoming empathetic nation of pinatas all for the taking."
If this odd assortment of sycophant base politicians are not totally rejected you can kiss this nation goodbye. (See 5 and 5a below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++.
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)
'THANKS FOR NOTHING, AOC!': Massive Billboard In NYC Blasts Ocasio-Cortez
"It comes after Ocasio-Cortez vigorously defended her role in sinking Amazon’s move to New York City on Tuesday in the face of bipartisan criticism," Fox News reported. "The freshman Democratic New York congresswoman has faced days of criticism from normally friendly media voices and fellow Democrats over her role in Amazon's decision to pull back from building a $2.5 billion campus in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens."
The billboard, located on 42nd street near 8th Avenue, reads:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++25,000 Lost NYC Jobs$4 Billion in Lost Wages$12 Billion in Lost Economic Activity for NYThanks For Nothing, AOC!
2) SURVIVAL at the White House
The administrative state took aim at Trump, but it has not been able to destroy him
No one in Washington called Donald J. Trump a “god” (as journalist Evan Thomas in 2009 had suggested of Obama) when he arrived in January 2017. No one felt nerve impulses in his leg when Trump talked, as journalist Chris Matthews once remarked had happened to him after hearing an Obama speech. And no newsman or pundit cared how crisply creased were Trump’s pants, at least in the manner that New York Times columnist David Brooks had once praised Obama’s sartorial preciseness. Instead, Trump was greeted by the Washington media and intellectual establishment as if he were the first beast in the Book of Revelation, who arose “out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.”
Besides the Washington press and pundit corps, Donald Trump faced a third and more formidable opponent: the culture of permanent and senior employees of the federal and state governments, and the political appointees in Washington who revolve in and out from business, think tanks, lobbying firms, universities, and the media. Or as the legal scholar of the administrative state Philip Hamburger put it: “Although the United States remains a republic, administrative power creates within it a very different sort of government. The result is a state within the state — an administrative state within the Constitution’s United States.”
Since the U.S. post-war era, the growth of American state and federal government has been enormous. By 2017, there were nearly 3 million civilian federal workers, and another 1.3 million Americans in the uniformed military. Over 22 million local, state, and federal workers had made government the largest employment sector.
The insidious power of the unelected administrative state is easy to understand. After all, it governs the most powerful aspects of modern American life: taxes, surveillance, criminal-justice proceedings, national security, and regulation. The nightmares of any independent trucker or small-business person are being audited by the IRS, having communications surveilled, or being investigated by a government regulator or prosecutor.
The reach of the deep state ultimately is based on two premises. One, improper government-worker behavior is difficult to audit or at least to be held to account, given that it is protected by both union contracts and civil-service law. And, two, a government appointee or bureaucrat has the unlimited resources of the state behind him, while the targeted private citizen in a federal indictment, tax audit, or regulation violation not only does not, but is assumed also not to have the means even to provide an adequate legal defense.
In theory, the deep state should have been a nonpartisan meritocratic cadre of government officials who were custodians of a civil service that had often served Americans well and transcended changes in presidential administrations. The ranks of top government regulators, justices, executive officers, and bureaucrats would take advice, and often be drawn, from hallowed, supposedly apolitical East Coast institutions — the World Bank, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Federal Reserve, Ivy League faculties, Wall Street, and blue-chip Washington and New York law firms.
In fact, the deep state grew increasingly political, progressive, and internationalist. Its members and cultural outlook were shaped by the good life on the two coasts and abroad. And every four or eight years, it usually greeted not so much incoming Republican or Democratic presidents as much as fusion-party representatives with reputable résumés, past memberships in similar organizations, and outlooks identical to its own.
Then the disrupter Trump crashed in.
While the deep state was far too vast to be stereotypically monolithic in the Obama and Trump years, it was a general rule that it had admired Obama, who grew it, and it now loathed Trump, who promised to shrink it. Moreover, Trump did not, like most incoming and outgoing politicians, praise in Pavlovian fashion the institutions of Washington. Nothing to Trump was sacred. During and after the campaign, he blasted the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, and Department of Justice as either incompetent or prejudicial.
When Trump cited the Department of Veterans Affairs, it was to side with its victims, not its administrators or venerable history. In Trump’s mind, the problem with federal agencies was not just that they overreached and were weaponized, but that their folds of bureaucracy led to incompetency.
Trump was not so much critical as ignorant of the deep state’s rules and its supposed sterling record of stable governance. Trump proved willing to fire lifelong public servants. He ignored sober and judicious advice from Washington “wise men.” He appointed “crazy” outsiders skeptical of establishment institutions. He purged high government of its progressive activists. And he embraced deep-state heresies and blasphemies such as considering tariffs, questioning NATO, doubting the efficacy of NAFTA, whining about federal judges, and jawboning interest rates. He also left vacant key offices on the theory that one less deep-state voice was one less critic, and one less obstacle to undoing the Obama record.
In the meantime, establishment institutions provided the seasoned opposition to almost everything Trump did. They were likely the “senior officials” to whom an anonymous New York Times op-ed writer referred when he talked about an ongoing “resistance” inside the government to thwart the Trump agenda. In the conservative old days, a Republican president could call upon New York and Washington pundits and insiders — in the present generation, names such as David Brooks, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens, or George Will — for kitchen-cabinet advice. But now they were among Trump’s fiercest critics. Only in the matter of judicial appointments could Trump find seasoned and experienced conservatives eager to be appointed or advanced, and respected organizations such as the Federalist Society eager to help him ensure conservative justices.
As an initial result, Obama holdovers lingered everywhere in the executive branch and cabinet offices. They had no immediate desire to leave when obstruction, if caught, only won accolades. Almost immediately, Trump’s private phone calls with foreign leaders such as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull were leaked to the press and appeared as transcripts in the Washington Post.
In the 1970s, the military officer corps and the top ranks of the CIA, DOJ, and FBI were, in the eyes of the Left, synonymous with conspiracies like those in Seven Days in May and The Manchurian Candidate. Yet in 2016, these same institutions had been recalibrated by progressives as protectors of social justice against interlopers and bomb throwers such as Donald Trump. Whether it was scary or needed to have a secretive, unelected cabal inside the White House subverting presidential agendas depended on who was president.
During the Robert Mueller investigations, progressives usually defended the FISA-court-ordered intercepts of private citizens’ communications, despite the machinations taken to deceive FISA-court justices. Indeed, liberal critics suggested that to question how the multitude of conflicts of interest at the Obama DOJ and FBI had warped their presentations of the Steele dossier to the courts was in itself an obstruction of justice or downright unpatriotic.
News of FBI informants planted into the 2016 Trump campaign raised no eyebrows. Nor did the unmasking and leaking of the names of U.S. citizens by members of the Obama National Security Council. Former CIA director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper soon became progressive pundits on cable news. While retaining their security clearances, they blasted Trump variously as a Russian mole, a foreign asset, treasonous, and a veritable traitor.
Both became liberal icons, despite their lucrative merry-go-rounds between Washington businesses and government service, and they sometimes lied under oath to Congress about all that and more.
On March 17, John Brennan, in objection to the firing of deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe (who shortly would be found by the nonpartisan inspector general to have lied on four occasions to federal investigators, and was soon reportedly in legal jeopardy from a grand-jury investigation), tweeted about the current president of the United States: “When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history . . . America will triumph over you.”
In mid April, Brennan followed up with another attack on Trump: “Your kakistocracy [rule of the “worst people”] is collapsing after its lamentable journey. As the greatest Nation history has known, we have the opportunity to emerge from this nightmare stronger & more committed to ensuring a better life for all Americans, including those you have so tragically deceived.”
If such hysterics from the former head of the world’s premier spy agency and current MSNBC/NBC pundit seemed a near threat to a sitting president, then Samantha Power, former U.N. ambassador and a past ethics professor on the Harvard faculty, sort of confirmed that it really was: “Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.”
Trump was warned by friends, enemies, and neutrals that his fight against the deep state was suicidal. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, just a few days before Trump’s inauguration, cheerfully forecast (in a precursor to Samantha Power’s later admonition) what might happen to Trump once he attacked the intelligence services: “Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
Former administrative-state careerists were not shy about warning Trump of what was ahead. The counterterrorism analyst Phil Mudd, who had worked in the CIA and the FBI under Robert Mueller, warned CNN host Jake Tapper in August 2017 that “the government is going to kill” President Donald Trump. Kill? And what was the reason the melodramatic Mudd adduced for his astounding prediction? “Because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd then elaborated: “Let me give you one bottom line as a former government official. The government is going to kill this guy. The government is going to kill this guy because he doesn’t support them.” Mudd further clarified his assassination metaphor: “What I’m saying is government — people talk about the deep state — when you disrespect government officials who’ve done 30 years, they’re going to say, ‘Really?’”
It was difficult to ascertain to what degree Mudd was serious or exaggerating the depth of deep-state loathing of Trump.
Despite the predictions and expectations of nearly everyone associated with the establishment, in the first two years of his presidency, Trump has not resigned. He has not been impeached. He has not been indicted. He has not died or been declared non compos mentis. Trump did not govern as a liberal, as some of his Never Trump critics predicted. He had not been driven to seclusion by lurid exposés of his womanizing a decade earlier as a Manhattan television celebrity.
An administrative state, swamp, deep state, call it what you wish, was wrong about Trump’s nomination, his election, and his governance. It was right only in its warnings that he could be crude and profane, with a lurid past and an ethical necropolis of skeletons in his closet — a fact long ago factored and baked into his supporters’ votes.
At each stage, the erroneous predictions of the deep state prompted ever greater animus at a target that it could not quite understand, much less derail, and so far has not been able to destroy. By autumn 2018, the repetitive nightly predictions of cable-news pundits that the latest presidential controversy was a “bombshell,” or marked a “turning point,” or offered proof that “the walls were closing in,” or ensured that “impeachment was looming on the horizon,” had amounted to little more than monotonous and scripted group think.
Never before in the history of the presidency had a commander in chief earned the antipathy of the vast majority of the media, much of the career establishments of both political parties, the majority of the holders of the nation’s accumulated personal wealth, and the permanent federal bureaucracy.
And lived to tell the tale.
–This essay is adapted from Mr. Hanson’s new book, The Case for Trump, which Basic Books will publish in March.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) Brexit: The End of the Beginning
The United Kingdom stands at the precipice of its greatest change since the collapse of empire. It will be just as painful.
BY: Peter Zeihan
This week Britain got a new parliamentary grouping – the Independent Group – that might in time form the kernel of a new political party. It started with a breakaway of seven opposition Labor MPs, and on Feb 20 picked up an eighth defector as well as three MPs who ditched the ruling Conservatives.
The environment shaping the splintering, unsurprisingly, is Brexit.
Let’s start with the Conservatives. Prime Minister Theresa May arguably has the worst job on the planet right now. May believes the 2016 referendum in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union obliges her to lead the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. We can debate whether referendums truly are the will of the people (I’d argue that since referendums ask explicit questions they are purer gauges of the popular will than elections), but the point is that May’s interpretation of the results are that hell-or-high-water the UK will leave.
It was always going to be messy. There was never going to be a divorce deal with the European Union. EU policy dictates that in any big issue each individual EU member must approve of the final text. The Irish want to maintain restriction-free access to Northern Ireland. The Spanish want a path to recovering Gibraltar. The Dutch want the British as close to the common market as possible, but not if it means they have to follow rules the British do not. The French want to gut the British geopolitically. The Germans seek to maintain market access but deny London any rule-making influence.
There simply is no iteration of any deal that can satisfy all these divergent interests, much less in the short two-year timeframe the Brexit negotiations allowed. Getting a comprehensive trade deal with Canada took the EU a decade. Even if there were a path forward that would please all of Europe, any such deal couldn’t get through the British Parliament. In losing those three MPs, May has lost her majority – which was already razor thin and only in existence at all with the help of a minor Northern Irish party which has some pretty uncompromising views on issues Irish.
No, there is zero way forward here that is anything other than a hard crash out. I’ve held this position from the beginning, but now the United Kingdom cannot get anything done that requires a parliamentary majority.
Those of you on the political left, don’t get cocky. British Labor’s mess is just as bad with the added problem of not being in power. Between 2016 and 2018 the Labor Party came back from the bleeding edge of dissolution under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn by tacking to the hard left and bringing in a lot of youthful energy.
The problem is that young Brits tend to be exceedingly pro-Europe while Corbyn is anti-…. pretty much everything, with Europe near the top of his list. When you’re not in power it is easier to paper over such differences, but with many in the Labor Party agitating for a second referendum to undo the first one and with Brexit the issue of the moment, it is getting harder to hold the party together. The seven Labor MPs who founded the Independent Group did so expressly because they want the UK to remain in the EU and felt their leader was on the wrong side of the issue.
I see a few things here:
First, the United Kingdom’s party structure is in freefall. Neither the Conservatives nor Labor are unified on the issue of the day and so MPs are breaking off in an attempt to form new poles of power.
Something similar is occurring in the United States, but features of the British system enable the shift to occur much more quickly.
The United States distributes power among local, regional and national levels, while the presidency is elected independent of Congress. In such a system the level of direct/local democracy is higher, but on the big issues change tends to come more slowly because a party breakdown doesn’t immediately or necessarily change the national government. (This design quirk is part of why any American administration always seems so tone deaf while Congress seems so feckless.) The biggest shock to the American system, the end of the Cold War, is only now – three decades later – working its way through the political framework. And it has taken that combined with things like digitization, the ongoing Baby Boomer mass retirement, and the rise of China to force a long-overdue political reshuffling.
In contrast in British national elections the various elected representatives meet in Parliament and select the national leader from among their own number. If the ruling party cracks, it can no longer command a majority in Parliament. A vote of no confidence can bring the government down in a day, force new elections in a month, and voila! New parties, new government, new policies.
Second, in the United Kingdom the next few weeks to months will be utter political paralysis. May has lost her majority so even if the European Union could stomach a Brexit deal more favorable to the UK, May can no longer get any deal approved. Only five weeks remain until Brexit occurs. With the reality of a hard Brexit belatedly sinking in, Parliament should be incredibly busy with a mass of enabling legislation that would help smooth the process within the United Kingdom in preparation for what happens after nearly a half-century of laws and regulation are invalidated in a day. No such luck. This is going to make the transition much more difficult than it needed to be and it was already going to be very difficult.
Third, if anyone wants to take advantage of the United Kingdom, now is the time. Upon leaving the EU the Brits will lose access to half of their trade portfolio and there is zero vision within the country’s political and cultural structures as to how to move forward.
Politically, the Brits cannot chart a route forward. May undoubtedly is not in it for the long haul, and Brexit challengers within the Conservative Party are, how shall I put this, not exactly carved out of honesty, thoughtfulness or creativity.
On the other side, Labor is led by a man who makes Donald Trump look honest, thoughtful and inclusive. The defectors who formed the Independent Group had some choice words for their former leader that included things like bigot and Stalinist. Considering how fast a single election in the United Kingdom can change policy paired with the epic possibilities for rapid change that Brexit provides, the election of Jeremy Corbyn would be a disaster that would take the United Kingdom a generation to recover from.
For Brits reading this, please take to heart that this criticism of Corbyn’s character and policy preferences comes from a citizen of the United States, a country with a well-documented and respected track record in recent decades of selecting the absolute worst candidate from among a wide range of suitable options. I know a damp squib who is chuffed at his own chunder when I see one.
The country most likely to seek advantage over the Brits is a country that has done it before: the United States. In World War II the Americans nailed the Brits to a borderline-usurious deal known as Lend-Lease in which the Brits received some shoddy, outdated ships in exchange for almost every bit of the British Empire in the Western Hemisphere. That deal subjugated the United Kingdom to American strategic preferences for the next two generations.
Post-Brexit Britain will be its most geopolitically desperate since those dark days when it stood alone against the Nazis, and the American administration is already in the process of rewiring all its foreign relations. Any deal negotiated in the post-Brexit chaos will be at least as disadvantageous as Lend-Lease and will – at a minimum – result in most of the British financial sector decamping to New York City.
Finally, a few words about what the Brits are leaving. The drama of Brexit has enabled the Europeans to shift attention from all those issues that were already past the point of no return in 2016: immigration, refugees, the Ukraine War, Russian aggression, the Syrian War, overloaded pensions, demographic collapse, sovereign debt, Greek insolvency, Italian banking, the failure of the German political center, the deliberate destruction of liberal democracy in Poland and Hungary, the end of productive relations with Turkey, etc.
Not only have none of these issues gone away, all have gotten worse.
Many are fully capable of killing the European project independently.
All of them combined simply make the end of the EU an issue of a betting pool for the date. With the Brexit “process” about completed, all European eyes will refocus back upon these unsolvable issues.
For Europe, the year 2019 will suck as much as it will for the Brits.
The EU was always going to end, so the Brits getting out before the collapse and getting a head start on whatever is next will a decade from now broadly be remembered as the right call.
But it didn’t have to be nearly this hard.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)It’s Time to Get Real About Our Enemies
By Karin McQuillan
Out here in Realville, we better get real about our opponents. They are not well-meaning liberals. They are dangerous. The target is not Trump. They are out to get all of us.Out here in Realville, to borrow from Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump’s supporters could be very happy. For ordinary Americans—from the top to the bottom of the economic spectrum, black, white and brown—President Trump has brought good times. Except for the screeching drama queens in the Democratic Party and among #TheResistance—and our serious mass immigration problems—life is good and the country is secure.In a sensible world, we would be basking in this period of unprecedented prosperity and peace.The country should be unified and full of bonhomie. The whole world has advanced to inconceivable levels of global peace and prosperity. Life is easier, healthier, and more comfortable for more people than ever before in history.Socialism and Communism—those tragic sisters from the 1800s that led to the greatest human suffering, poverty, and mass starvation in human history—should barely be remembered.Instead, they are ascendant in the Democrat Party. Cultural Marxism and socialism are the new Democrat chic. The entire country is in an uproar. Everyone feels a sense of doom and gloom.There is more to #TheResistance than the political panic inspired by the likes of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). They are riding a monster not of their own making. In order to survive, they are providing cover and normalization of something not at all normal.Conservative pundits have latched onto the fun words “hysteria” and “Trump derangement syndrome.” These words, though cute, mask the seriousness of what is actually happening. The mass hysteria is a goal and a tactic, whipped up by cool-headed, purposeful people. It was not caused by Trump’s tweets or orange coloring. It has everything to do with a long game to change our country. Things are so weird in American politics on purpose or, rather, for purposes—radical left purposes.The exaggerated, weird loathing of President Trump and all Republicans—that flies in the face of our peace and prosperity—is the daily work of thousands of professional leftists. #The Resistance is their dream come true, as in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father.Their PLAN has long been Public. As Saul Alinsky taught Obama,“[An] organizer must shake up the prevailing patterns of their lives—agitate, create disenchantment and discontent with the current values, to produce, if not a passion for change, at least a passive, affirmative, non-challenging climate. [You must] fan the embers of hopelessness into a flame of fight.”The tactics of the Trump #Resistance were developed decades ago by Leninists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven along with Alinksy. They were taught by Barack Obama as both a community organizer and a University of Chicago lecturer. There’s a photo of Obama standing before a blackboard teaching Alinsky. Obama never taught constitutional law—he taught three courses on “race, rights and gender,” exploring the legal basis for reparations, the history of lynching and the failure of the Bill of Rights to redistribute wealth.The Socialist plan to create anger and chaos to undermine America is happening all around us right now. Yet we ignore it. It doesn’t fit into our image of America. It comes with an aura of unreality. We’d rather make snarky comments about snowflakes and peoples’ heads exploding than get serious.You can’t defeat an implacable enemy you refuse to name or wilfully underestimate.This is not to say there is nothing new here. The anger, chaos, and activist pressure, the corruption of the FBI and Department of Justice, are new in our lifetimes. Our parents and grandparents saw them in the 1930s with Communist and Fascist agitprop and infiltration of key institutions. We seem helplessly naïve, not understanding what has hit us.Today, the American Left is empowered with unprecedented funding. Soros is only one among a number of radical billionaires, from the Green promoter Tom Steyer, to the Pritzkers of Chicago (Hyatt Hotel heirs), who launched Obama’s U.S. Senate run. One of the Pritzkers is transsexual and a Democrat mega-donor. ActBlue raised well over $1 billion dollars for Democrats in 2018.Conservative groups aren’t even playing the same game. The Koch brothers don’t make the list of top 50 “heavy hitters’”political donors in the country, compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics—only two out of the top 20 give to Republicans. David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin in their book The New Leviathan, count 122 leftist foundations worth $104 billion. Conservative political groups? Eighty-six in the whole country, worth a measly $10 billion.Radicalized progressive groups also get federal funding not given to conservative groups, under the guise of being apolitical nonprofits for health care, poverty programs, the environment and even for helping illegal aliens.Federal support for radicalism exploded under Obama. He illegally transferred money from the U.S. Treasury—some $500 million, not small seed money—and distributed it among leftist nonprofits like La Raza, to create havoc in the name of social justice. His own organization, Organize for Action, for which he raised money as president, has a database of 2 million volunteers.We are talking about billions of dollars in total and tens of thousands of professional activists—or more. That pays for a lot of agitation, lawsuits, demonstrations, and “resistance.” That’s why the country is in turmoil.America is in trouble. We never understood that a community organizer is not a feel-good social worker looking to help people. (I was a social worker, so I know.) A community organizer is a paid agitator, out to make poor people so mad they will storm the barricades and destroy the system. They don’t respect political norms. They are out to smash norms and politicize everything.Conservatives are appalled that progressives have politicized every area of life, from fast food chicken and football to wedding cakes and shaving. These are classic leftist campaigns. Professional agitators are trained shake-down artists who go where the money and power is easiest to grab—American business.Corporate shakedowns were perfected by race hustlers after federal dollars corrupted the Civil Rights Movement. Agitators learned they could fund themselves by threatening banks and others with bad publicity and lawsuits for alleged racism. Now they target corporations as pure power moves in the culture wars.Just because it’s on Twitter, doesn’t mean corporate shaming is spontaneous. Twitter does make leftist campaigns more effective, but it is the same old agitprop.Seven years ago, way before Trump, the Color of Change, a “social justice” nonprofit headed by self-proclaimed Marxist/Maoist communist and former Obama “green jobs czar” Van Jones, launched a “name-and-shame campaign,” against corporations which support public-private partnerships. The tactic is hard-core American Marxism.Trump could shave his head and stop tweeting tomorrow, stop counter punching, start acting like the milquetoast Romney and it would make not an ounce of difference.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Out here in Realville, we better get real about our opponents. They are not well-meaning liberals. They are dangerous. The target is not Trump. They are out to get all of us.
5) Schiffting to Phase 2 of Collusion
Conspiracy theorists look for something new, anticipating a Mueller letdown.
There’s been no more reliable regurgitator of fantastical Trump-Russia collusion theories than Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. So when the House Intelligence Committee chairman sits down to describe a “new phase” of the Trump investigation, pay attention. These are the fever swamps into which we will descend after Robert Mueller’s probe.
The collusionists need a “new phase” as signs grow that the special counsel won’t help realize their reveries of a Donald Trump takedown. They had said Mr. Mueller would provide all the answers. Now that it seems they won’t like his answers, Democrats and media insist that any report will likely prove “anticlimactic” and “inconclusive.” “This is merely the end of Chapter 1,” said Renato Mariotti, a CNN legal “analyst.”
Mr. Schiff turned this week to a dependable scribe—the Washington Post’s David Ignatius—to lay out the next chapter of the penny dreadful. Mr. Ignatius was the original conduit for the leak about former national security adviser Mike Flynn’s conversations with a Russian ambassador, and the far-fetched claims that Mr. Flynn had violated the Logan Act of 1799. Mr. Schiff has now dictated to Mr. Ignatius a whole new collusion theory. Forget Carter Page, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos—whoever. The real Trump-Russia canoodling rests in “Trump’s finances.” The future president was “doing business with Russia” and “seeking Kremlin help.”
So, no apologies. No acknowledgment that Mr. Schiff & Co. for years have pushed fake stories that accused innocent men and women of being Russian agents. No relieved hope that the country might finally put this behind us. Just a smooth transition—using Russia as a hook—into Mr. Trump’s finances. Mueller who?
What’s mind-boggling is that reporters would continue to take Mr. Schiff seriously, given his extraordinary record of incorrect and misleading pronouncements. This is the man who, on March 22, 2017, helped launch full-blown hysteria when he said on “Meet the Press” that his committee already had the goods on Trump-Russia collusion.
“I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” Mr. Schiff declared then. Almost two years later, he’s provided no such evidence and stopped making the claim—undoubtedly because, as the Senate Intelligence Committee has said publicly, no such evidence has been found.
At an open House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, 2017, Mr. Schiff stated as fact numerous crazy accusations from the infamous Steele dossier—giving them early currency and credence. He claimed that former Trump campaign aide Carter Page secretly met with a Vladimir Putin crony and was offered the brokerage of a 19% share in a Russian company. That Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort tapped Mr. Page as a go-between. That the Russians offered the Trump campaign damaging documents on Hillary Clinton in return for a blind eye to Moscow’s Ukraine policy. Mr. Schiff has never acknowledged that all these allegations have been debunked or remain unproved.
There was Mr. Schiff’s role in plumping the discredited January BuzzFeed story claiming Mr. Mueller had evidence the president directed his former personal lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. The special counsel’s office issued a rare statement denying the report. There was Mr. Schiff’s theory that the mysterious phone calls Donald Trump Jr. placed before his 2016 meeting with Russians at Trump Tower were to Candidate Trump. Senate Intel shot that down. And don’t forget Mr. Schiff’s February 2018 memo claiming the Steele dossier “did not inform” the FBI probe, because the bureau didn’t obtain it until long after the probe’s start. Testimony from Justice Department officials shot that one down, too.
With a track record like this, who wouldn’t believe Mr. Schiff’s new claim, in the Ignatius interview, that the key to collusion rests in Trump finances—in particular something to do with Deutsche Bank ? But hold on. Where did we first hear that Deutsche Bank theory? That’s right. See pages 64 and 117 of the wild House testimony of Glenn Simpson—head of Fusion GPS, the organization behind the Steele dossier. It’s right there, stuffed in between Mr. Simpson’s musings that Ivanka Trump might be involved with a “Russian Central Asian organized crime nexus,” that there is something nefarious happening on the “island of St. Martin in the Caribbean,” and that Roger Stone is part of a “Turkey-Russia” plot.
Mr. Schiff is taking his cue for Phase 2 of his investigation from the same Democrat-hired opposition-research group that launched the failed Phase 1.
At the start of all the Russia craziness, Mr. Schiff had a choice: maintain the bipartisan integrity of his committee by working with Republicans to find honest answers, or take on the role of resident conspiracy theorist. He chose his path. The rest of us should know better than to follow him.
5a)Here's What a Socialist President Will Do
I'm sure I don't have to tell you...
We are witnessing a raging Socialist movement in America today. Just for starters...
- Three U.S. Senators have proposed a new plan to guarantee every American a government job.
- America's new political star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pushing for free medical care, free college, and 70% tax rates.
And a recent Gallup poll says more Democrats now have a "positive view" of Socialism (57%) than Capitalism (47%).
But what no one's really talking about in the mainstream press is WHY this is happening... and WHERE it's all headed.
Well, one wealthy businessman says there's a secret reason behind this trend... and it's all leading to a political event unlike anything we've seen in our country in more than 50 years.
If you care about your health... your wealth... your family... and your future... it's critical for you to understand what's really happening and what is most likely coming next.
I guarantee you, this written analysis, by my friend and business partner, Porter Stansberry, will help you see these events in a different light.
I strongly encourage you to check out his short written analysis here...
Sincerely,
Mike Palmer - Founding Partner, Stansberry Research
No comments:
Post a Comment