Venezuela and The Second Amendment. Dershowitz Confronts The NYT's. Horowitz's Bomb Ticks! ow, Cuomo Right First Time Ever. Bernie Sinks.

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Just some thoughts to contemplate:

Now that food has replaced sex in my life, I can't even get into my own pants.

I signed up for an exercise class and was told to wear loose fitting clothing  If I HAD any loose fitting clothing, I wouldn't need the freakin' class!

Don't argue with an idiot; people watching may not be able to tell the difference.

Wouldn't you know it!  Brain cells come and brain cells go, but FAT cells live forever.

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With respect to the 2d Amendment is there any relevance to what is currently taking place in Venezuela? (See 1 below.)
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Dershowitz tackles the New York Times and their anti-Semitic cartoon episode. (See 2 below.)
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Is a bomb about to go off? (See 3 below.)
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Gov. Cuomo seldom right about anything .  This might be the first time.

Meanwhile, Bernie  seems to have stepped in it big time. (See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick
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1) Here’s The Reason Why The Second Amendment Is Essential


The uprising in Venezuela today is a stark reminder to all freedom loving Americans why the Second Amendment is a right they should cherish and fight for. The Daily Callerreports:

Venezuela banned private citizens from owning guns seven years ago, leaving firearms solely in the hands of the army and the police. Now, as the country’s opposition attempts to oust the oppressive Maduro regime from power, it is a decision some have come to regret.

Interim President Juan Guaido called for a military uprising, dubbed Operacion Libertad, against socialist dictator Nicholas Maduro on Tuesday. Venezuelans have been protesting for months against Maduro’s “re-election,” which the United States has declared to be illegitimate in light of Maduro’s jailing of political dissidents and protesters.

As the unrest in the country approached a breaking point, some citizens told Fox News in December that they wished they had guns available to them to fight back against the Maduro regime. A 2012 gun ban made that option all but impossible.

“It was never easy to obtain a handgun permit in Venezuela but at least before 2012 it was possible,” Daniel Di Martino, a Venezuelan expatriate, told The Daily Caller. “Since Venezuelans are unarmed we now depend on a military uprising for our freedom rather than a popular uprising.”

With an AR-15 in the hands of every Venezuela citizen, this dictatorship would be overthrown by the end of the day. Let it be a reminder to every lover of freedom.

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2) What if the New York Times Cartoon had depicted a Muslim, a Lesbian, an African American or a Mexican as a Dog?

by Alan M. Dershowitz

Only three quarters of a century after Der Stürmer incentivized the mass murder of Jews by dehumanizing them we see a revival of such bigoted caricatures.

• I do not believe in free speech for me, but not for thee. But I do believe in condemning those who hide behind the First Amendment to express anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, homophobic, sexist or racist views.
• For years now, the New York Times op-ed pages have been one-sidedly anti-Israel. Its reporting has often been provably false, and all the errors tend to favor Israel's enemies.
• Most recently, the New York Times published an op-ed declaring, on Easter Sunday, that the crucified Jesus was probably a Palestinian. How absurd. How preposterous. How predictable.
•  

Imagine if the New York Times cartoon that depicted Israel's Prime Minister as a dog had, instead, depicted the leader of another ethnic or gender group in a similar manner? If you think that is hard to imagine that you are absolutely right. It would be inconceivable for a Times editor to have allowed the portrayal of a Muslim leader as a dog; or the leader of any other ethnic or gender group in so dehumanizing a manner.

What is it then about Jews that allowed such a degrading cartoon about one of its leaders? One would think that in light of the history of the Holocaust, which is being commemorated this week, the last group that a main stream newspaper would demonize by employing a caricature right out of the Nazi playbook, would be the Jews. But, no. Only three quarters of a century after Der Stürmer incentivized the mass murder of Jews by dehumanizing them we see a revival of such bigoted caricatures.

The New York Times should be especially sensitive to this issue, because they were on the wrong side of history when it came to reporting the Holocaust. They deliberately buried the story because their Jewish owners wanted to distance themselves from Jewish concerns. They were also on the wrong side of history when it came to the establishment of the nation state of the Jewish people, following the holocaust.

When it comes to Jews and Israel, the New York Times is still on the wrong side of history. I am a strong believer in freedom of speech and the New York Times has a right to continue its biased reporting and editorializing. But despite my support for freedom of speech, I am attending a protest in front of the New York Times this afternoon to express my freedom of speech against how the New York Times has chosen to exercise its.

There is no inconsistency in defending the right to express bigotry and at the same time protesting that bigotry. When I defended the rights of Communists and Nazis to express their venomous philosophies, I also insisted on expressing my contempt for their philosophy. I did the same when I defended the rights of Palestinian students to fly the Palestinian flag in commemoration of the death of Arafat.

I went out of my way to defend the right of students to express their support of this mass murder. But I also went out of my way to condemn Arafat and those who support him and praise his memory. I do not believe in free speech for me, but not for thee. But I do believe in condemning those who hide behind the First Amendment to express anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, homophobic, sexist or racist views.

In recent years, it has become more and more difficult to distinguish between the reporting of the New York Times and their editorializing. Sometimes its editors hide behind the euphemism "news analysis," when allowing personal opinions to be published on the front page. More recently, they haven't even bothered to offer any cover. The reporting itself, as repeatedly demonstrated by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), has been filled with anti-Israel errors.

The publishers of the New York Times owe its readers a responsibility to probe deeply into this bias and to assume responsibility for making the Times earn its title as the newspaper of record. Any comparison between the reporting of the New York Times and that of the Wall Street Journal when it comes to the Middle East would give the New York Times a failing grade.

Having said this, I do not support a boycott of the New York Times. Let readers decide for themselves whether they want to read its biased reporting. I, for one, will continue to read the New York Times with a critical eye, because it is important to know what disinformation readers are getting and how to challenge that disinformation in the marketplace of ideas.

So I am off to stand in protest of the New York Times, while defending its right to be wrong. That is what the First Amendment is all about. Finally, there is some good news. One traditional anti-Semitic trope is that "the Jews control the media." People who peddle this nonsense, often point to the New York Times, which is, in fact, published by a prominent by a Jewish family, the Sulzberger's.

Anyone who reads the New York Times will immediately see the lie in this bigoted claim: Yes, the New York Times has long been controlled by a Jewish family. But this Jewish family is far from being supportive of Jewish values, the nation state of the Jewish people or Jewish sensibilities. If anything, it has used its Jewishness as an excuse to say about Jews and do to Jews what no mainstream newspaper, not owned by Jews, would ever do.

[1] Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Gatestone Institute and author of The Case Against The Democrats Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019.

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3) The Real ‘Bombshells’ Are About to Hit Their Targets

By Julie Kelly
The next bombshell report to drop from the Justice Department likely  will earn earn none of the breathless fanfare and media coverage that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report received, but it could be far more incriminating.

In the next several weeks, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to issue his summation of the potential abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by top officials in the Obama Administration and holdovers in the early Trump Administration who were overseeing the investigation of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

And the perpetrators of the so-called FISAgate scandal now are scrambling for cover as the bad news looms.

Horowitz announced last March that his office would examine the Justice Department’s conduct “in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) relating to a certain U.S. person.” That U.S. person is Trump campaign associate Carter Page. In October 2016, just two weeks before the presidential election, the Justice Department submitted an application to the FISC seeking authorization to wiretap Page. The court filing accused Page, a Naval Academy graduate and unpaid campaign advisor, of being an agent of Russia.

The application cited the infamous Steele dossier—unsubstantiated political propaganda that had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee—as its primary source of evidence. But the specific political origin of the dossier intentionally was omitted in the court filing. (Robert Mueller similarly tap danced around the role of Fusion GPS, the political consulting firm that hired Christopher Steele to create the dossier. Mueller never mentioned the name “Fusion GPS” in the 448-page document, referring to it only vaguely as “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.”)

Attorney General Sally Yates signed the original FISA application. It was renewed three times; subsequent signers included former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. If there’s one document that represents the malevolence, chicanery and arrogance of the original Trump-Russia collusion fraudsters, it’s the Page FISA application.

But—to borrow a favorite term of the collusion truthers—the “walls are closing in” on the FISA abusers.

Representative Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and James Jordan (R-Ohio) recently met with Horowitz and offered some ominous news for Comey and company: “We anticipate the IG’s report will come out . . . in the next four to six weeks and I think it’s highly likely that we’ll see criminal referrals coming from them,” Meadows told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on April 14.

President Trump also speculated that the inspector general’s report would contain damning allegations against former top officials for the world’s most powerful law enforcement agency.

“I think he [Horowitz] knows how big this is,” Trump told Sean Hannity in an interview last week. “The IG report coming out in three or four weeks, from what I hear, is going to be…a blockbuster because he has access to information that most people don’t.” If anyone misled the FISA court, including Comey and Yates, Trump suggested that “they’ll all be in a pile of trouble.”

Since last fall, Trump has threatened to declassify the entire application, much of which is still concealed behind redactions, but that has presumably been delayed to protect the integrity of the investigation. Once the inspector general’s report comes out, however, Trump would be free to unredact crucial portions of the application.

So the targets of the inspector general’s probe and their media pals now are spinning hard in preparation of the report’s release.

Natasha Bertrand, a reliable mouthpiece for Fusion GPS, is smearing Horowitz and raising questions about his investigation. “Former U.S. officials interviewed by the inspector general were skeptical about the quality of his probe,” she wrote in an April 17 piece for Politico. “The inspector general seemed neither well-versed in the FISA process nor receptive to the explanations, the officials said.”

Comey unconvincingly is rejecting accusations by Attorney General William Barr and others that there was “spying” on the Trump campaign. “When I hear that kind of language used, it’s concerning,” serial uptalker Comey said in an April 11 interview. “The FBI and the Department of Justice conduct court-ordered electronic surveillance. I have never thought of that as spying. I don’t know of any court-ordered electronic surveillance aimed at the Trump campaign (emphasis added).”

Yates appeared on Sunday for a softball interview with NBC’s “Meet The Press” host Andrea Mitchell. Without any sense of irony, Mitchell introduced Yates as “someone who seems to show up at key moments in the Trump presidency,” including her central role in the set-up, laughable Logan Act inquiry, and subsequent firing of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. (Yates served as acting attorney general for 10 days before Trump fired her for insubordination.)

Yates, much like Comey, has a flair for the dramatic, often using hushed tones, theatrical facial expressions, and overwrought rhetoric to make her point: “When the Russians came knocking at their door, you would think a man who likes to make a show of hugging the flag would have done the patriotic thing and would have notified law enforcement.” (Hard eye roll.)

Yates referred to Trump campaign objections about Russian collusion as “a lie” and (falsely) lamented that “now we have devolved to ‘there’s nothing wrong with taking help,’ illegal help, from a foreign adversary. Surely that’s not where we’ve come to.”

But Yates’ own words might come back to haunt her, and soon.

An April 19 article in the New York Times, which now is backpedaling on the legimitacy of the Steele dossier in advance of the Horowitz report, speculated that the dossier was part of a Russian propaganda campaign targeting the Trump team.

“There has been much chatter among intelligence experts that Steele’s Russian informants could have been pressured to feed him disinformation,” the Times reported. Further, at the time Steele was working for Fusion GPS on Russian-sourced dirt against Trump, he also was lobbying on behalf of Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin.

So if Yates signed a court document that heavily relied on shady sources and a lobbyist (Steele) for a Putin-connected billionaire, who would be guilty of relying on help from a foreign adversary for political purposes? Not Donald Trump.

The imperious Yates and her accomplices might have a chance to answer that question—and others—in front of Congress in the very near future.

In response to her “Meet the Press” interview, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) tweeted that Yates’ actions “will certainly be part of forthcoming Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearings on FBI/DOJ during Obama years in which she served as Deputy AG under Loretta Lynch.”

The Horowitz report could do what the Mueller report could not: Find legitimate evidence of conspiracies between political operatives, Russian interests, and top government officials; uncover attempts to obstruct justice as the various investigations into misconduct proceeded; and expose rank corruption at the highest levels of a presidential administration.

It just won’t be the presidential administration that Mueller and his colleagues were targeting.

Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.

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4) Gov. Cuomo: Democrats’ Problem Is a Failure to ‘Actually Provide Results’

By Nic Rowan

New York Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo leveled criticism against his fellow Democrats during an appearance on MSNBC Live on Tuesday, saying that his party's major problem has been to "provide results in people's lives."

Cuomo went on to praise Democratic candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden, whom he considers a long-time friend and the best hope for the Democrats in the coming presidential election.

"I think what Democrats are concerned with, they want someone who can beat Trump, and I think Joe Biden is the man there. I think they want someone who understands what this race is all about. And it's not just about specific issues: it goes much broader and deeper than that," Cuomo said. "It's the character of the country, its values, and its priorities. And Joe Biden represents that: They want someone who can actually get something done once elected."

Cuomo added that Biden's long record in the Senate show a commitment to progressive policies he believes Democratic voters want to see implemented in their everyday lives, a quality he believes other candidates do not possess.

"The Democrats' problem, I think, has been their failure to actually provide results in people's lives. People can't eat rhetoric. They need more income. They need more bread. They need more jobs. And Joe Biden can actually get something done," Cuomo said. "It's not the politics of symbolism. He will be a person who can have a government that actually delivers."

Biden has run for president twice, once in 1988 and again in 2008. Both times, he flamed out in the primaries. The 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Barrack Obama chose Biden to serve as his vice president in 2008, a role which Biden filled or eight years when Obama won the general election.

Biden launched his third presidential campaign last week, amid scandals surrounding his overly touchy public persona and his treatment of Anita Hill at her testimony during the 1991 confirmation process of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

4a) https://freebeacon.com/blog/bernie-sanders-terrorist-vote/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=3e344b3a62-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_04_30_08_46_COPY_186&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-3e344b3a62-46061881

Bernie Sanders Slides in Polls After Doubling Down on Massively Unpopular ‘Terrorist Vote’ Position

This entry was posted in Politics and tagged 2020 Election, Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) is having a rough week. A new poll by Morning Consult has him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, fresh off his official entry into the Democratic primary, by 14 percentage points. Another poll of New Hampshire voters shows Sanders tied for second with South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 12 percent, with Biden leading the pack at 20 percent.

Both polls were conducted in the wake of Sanders' controversial proposal to extend voting rights to incarcerated felons, including murderers and terrorists such as Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The candidate has since doubled down on his position, saying he envisions a "vibrant democracy" in which even "terrible people" like Tsarnaev are allowed to participate in elections.

Rival Democratic candidates did not exactly share Bernie's views on the issue. Buttigieg, for example, succinctly rejected the idea that incarcerated felons be given the right to vote. Sen. Kamala Harris (D., Calif.), on the other hand, initially expressed a willingness to consider the idea, but promptly backtracked, stating that violent prisoners "should be deprived of their rights" to vote.

Harris' actions make sense when you consider the massive popular opposition to extending voting rights to all prisoners. According to a recentpoll, just 15 percent of Americans agree with Sanders' position that every prisoner, regardless of their crimes, should be allowed to participate in elections; 75 percent said they disagreed. The remaining 20 percent said they would support giving voting rights to prisoners convicted of non-violent offenses.

Few issues in American politics are this lopsided, but Sanders is unlikely to back down anytime soon. In fact, he authored a USA Today op-edon Tuesday offering "no apologies" for stating his views on prisoner voting rights.

"If we are serious about calling ourselves a democracy, we must firmly establish that the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period," Sanders wrote. "[P]unishment for a crime, or keeping dangerous people behind bars, does not cause people to lose their rights to citizenship. It should not cause them to lose their right to vote."

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Not Going Quietly. Spending Money Allows Even Democrats To Finesse Trump Hatred The Beginning of Our Republic's End? Smart Stacey Bows Out.

(Sign our petition demanding the resignation of New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and calling for an advertiser boycott of the paper... Read More)

When the New York Times published an anti-Semetic cartoon and then apologized you could conclude they had made a mistake but when they repeated and posted a second anti-Semitic cartoon one must  conclude the Ochs-Sulzberger's family DNA, of denying their Jewish heritage, has truly permeated "The Grey Lady."

These two families have become Episcopalians thinking they could escape their belief being Jewish was a social blemish.

I am not ritualistically Jewish. I am  more gastronomically Jewish but I, like the Chabad Rabbi, have chosen not to go silently. However, I am not claiming to be a hero. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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More interesting Wall Street Journal Op Ed's worth reading:

Big Labor’s Big Shrink

By The Editorial Board

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The Party of Buttigieg and Sharpton

By Matthew Hennessey

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Segregation by Design

on Campus

By Peter W. Wood and Dion J. Pierre

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The Prosecutor (Kamala Harris)Who Can’t Make Up Her Mind

By Harmeet K. Dhillon
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Trump and the press. (See 2 and 2a below.)

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Perhaps Stacey Abrams is smarter than I have given her credit because she chose not to run against Sen.David Perdue. (See 3 and 3a  below, edited)

David is a solid senator.  Hard worker, and intelligent . He deserves to be re-elected.

Meanwhile, Venezuela's democratically chosen president, Guaido, has called upon his citizens to seek their freedom. They are currently protesting their socialist president, Maduro, who has broken the country's economy.

We have stated we support the Venezuelans, whatever that means when China, Russia and Cuba, are backing Maduro Two of the aforementioned nations have already stationed troops there. Fifty nations have aligned themselves against Maduro.

I thought Sen. Scott, from Florida, made a most cogent comment when he said: 'what is happening in Venezuela is the equivalent of what happened in Syria and The Middle East.'

If South and Latin America lose their democratic governments and socialism is allowed to grow  and you add The U.S' porous borders to expand the beginning of the end of our republic will have begun as if it has not already.

There are many who disagree and believe the last thing we need do is try and save Venezuela from itself.

Perhaps they are wiser but I am concerned if we allow our adversaries to gain a foothold in Venezuela the situation will spread.
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Another Rant. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Heroism at the Synagogue

By The Editorial Board

The best defense against a killer with a gun is a defender with a gun.

When a gunman filled with anti-Semitism opened fire Saturday at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., worshipers turned into heroes. Sixty-year-old Lori Kaye was killed after jumping between Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein and the attacker, according to witnesses. Others shielded nearby children or hurried them to safety. Rabbi Goldstein, who was shot in the hands and lost his right index finger, wrapped his bloody wounds in a prayer shawl and rallied his congregation outside.

Two men confronted the attacker. An Army veteran named Oscar Stewart, 51, shouted and charged the gunman, who ran. An off-duty Border Patrol agent at the service, whom the Rabbi identified as Jonathan Morales, also gave chase, firing his own weapon at the getaway car. The assailant was arrested shortly afterward and is charged with murder and attempted murder.

One person was killed and three injured. But, Rabbi Goldstein said, it could have been much worse. Police say the attacker’s rifle may have malfunctioned. He could have been left unharried to continue killing. “Mr. Stewart risked his life to stop the shooter,” the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department said, “and saved lives in the process.

Mr. Stewart demurred. “I’m not a hero or anything. I just reacted,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I thank God that he gave me the courage to do what I did.”

In the wake of last year’s attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, which killed 11, some places of worship have hired guards. Rabbi Goldstein said his congregation can’t afford that. But he spoke with Mr. Morales “about coming to the synagogue armed, because he’s trained, and I want trained security as much as possible.” The best defense against a killer with a gun is a defender with a gun.

As for the battle with anti-Semitism, may everyone mirror Rabbi Goldstein’s resolve. “The Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of religion for all faiths. We are so grateful to live here in this country that protects our rights to live openly and proudly as Jews,” he told NBC. “We will not be intimidated or deterred by this terror.”

1a) Why Most (Liberal) Jews Aren’t Bothered by the Times’ Anti-Semitic Cartoon

by Dennis Prager

Last week, The New York Times published a cartoon so anti-Semitic that Bret Stephens wrote in his Times column that it was “an image that, in another age, might have been published in the pages of Der Sturmer.” Der Sturmer was the Nazis’ major anti-Semitic newspaper.

A Times columnist charging the Times with publishing a Nazi-like cartoon is quite a moment in American publishing history.

For those who haven’t seen the cartoon, here is Stephens’ description:

“The Jew in the form of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing missing was a dollar sign.”

The dog leading Trump had the face of Benjamin Netanyahu and was wearing a Star of David necklace. Trump was wearing a back yarmulke.

For those naifs and Israel-haters who dismiss such depictions as merely “anti-Zionist” or “anti-Israel” but not anti-Semitic, the yarmulke on Trump’s head should be the giveaway, as should the theme itself — the Jew leading the Gentile astray, one of the oldest anti-Semitic canards.

Of course, the cartoon is not just about Israel or Jews. It is about Trump, whom the left so hates. It depicts him as the stooge of both Vladimir Putin and Netanyahu. There is no truth to either depiction, but if truth mattered to the left, there would be no left. Truth is a liberal value, and it is a conservative value, but it is not a leftist value. Truth to the left is pravda. Pravda, the Russian word for “truth,” was also the name of the Soviet Communist Party newspaper.

So, the question is: Why would The New York Times, published in the city where more Jews live than any other city in the world outside of Israel, whose publisher is a Jew and whose editors are disproportionately Jewish, publish a Nazi-like anti-Semitic cartoon?

Here is Stephens’ answer:

“For some Times readers — or, as often, former readers — the answer is clear: The Times has a longstanding Jewish problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about the Holocaust, and continuing into the present day in the form of intensely adversarial coverage of Israel. The criticism goes double when it comes to the editorial pages, whose overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range, with some notable exceptions, from tut-tutting disappointment to thunderous condemnation.

“For these readers, the cartoon would have come like the slip of the tongue that reveals the deeper institutional prejudice. What was long suspected is, at last, revealed.”

Stephens continues:

“How have even the most blatant expressions of anti-Semitism become almost undetectable to editors who think it’s part of their job to stand up to bigotry?

“The reason is the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry. So long as anti-Semitic arguments or images are framed, however speciously, as commentary about Israel, there will be a tendency to view them as a form of political opinion, not ethnic prejudice. But as I noted in a Sunday Review essay in February, anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent, however much progressives try to deny this.”

Exactly right. As I wrote in “Why the Jews? The Reason for Anti-Semitism” 40 years before Stephens wrote his column, there is no difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Of course, one can criticize Israel, just as one can criticize any country, but that is not anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is not criticism of Israel. It is a hatred of Israel — a hatred greater than that of any other country and a delegitimization of Zionism, the movement to reestablish the Jewish national home. Imagine someone who argued that the establishment of the Italian state — Italy — was illegitimate and who hated Italy more than any other country in the world yet claimed that he was in no way anti-Italian, as he had Italian friends and loved Italian culture. No one would believe such an absurdity.

Why aren’t most American Jews troubled by the Times’ cartoon? Why were all American Jews horrified by the anti-Semitic shootings at the California synagogue this past weekend, while most barely had their feathers ruffled by the anti-Semitic cartoon in one of the most influential media in America?

The answer is most American Jews, while ethnically Jewish, are ethically leftist. And ethics trump ethnicity — as they should. For most American Jews, therefore, the Times is far more consonant with their ethical values than are Jewish values (if, by Jewish values, we are talking about the Torah and traditional Jewish religious/moral teachings). So, then, when you combine hatred of the right-wing prime minister of Israel and reverence for the left-wing Times, even a Nazi-like cartoon — if it negatively depicts Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump and is published in The New York Times — is no big deal.

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2) Son, It Was Obama We Journalists Had to Fear
By Jack Cashill

“I was driving my then 11-year-old son somewhere, probably soccer practice, when he burst into tears and asked me, ‘is Donald Trump going to put you in prison?'” So claimed the embarrassingly serious Olivier Knox, the White House Correspondents Association president, at the association’s annual grub fest on Saturday. What Knox should have said is, “No, son, President Trump is at least open in his hostility. The First Amendment gives him the same rights as it gives us. It was President Obama’s dirty, covert war on the media that had me worried.” At this point, little Knox should have asked, “Did this sneaky, back-door attack prefigure Obama’s subversion of the Trump candidacy?” Now, there is a correspondent’s dinner I would pay to watch. In May 2010, when Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Law, few of America’s reporters and editors were aware that Obama as president represented the single greatest threat to press freedom in their professional lives. True to his reputation as messiah, Obama would soon make even the willfully blind see. In May 2013, the illusion of an unfettered press disappeared like a magician’s bunny. It was in this month that the Associated Press learned Obama’s Justice Department had quietly seized all of the relevant records for twenty AP telephone lines a year earlier. These included the personal and professional lines of several reporters. The seizure had to do with AP reporting on a covert CIA operation in Yemen. Although only five reporters were involved in that story, more than one hundred reporters used the lines and switchboards whose records were seized. AP President Gary Pruitt wrote Attorney General Eric Holder that the “government has no conceivable right to know” the content of those records. On Face the Nation, Pruitt boldly assessed White House strategy, “I know what the message being sent is: If you talk to the press, we’re going after you.” A coalition of some fifty newsgathering organizations promptly came to the AP’s defense. In a barely polite letter to Holder, the coalition accused him of ignoring the Department of Justice’s decades-old guidelines governing subpoenas of journalists and news organizations. The authors of the letter reminded Holder, “The approach in every case must be to strike the proper balance between the public’s interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information and the public’s interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice.” The DOJ did none of the above. Its attorneys went behind the AP’s back, failed to negotiate the scope of the subpoena with the AP, and refused to explain what threat to the integrity of the investigation made the subterfuge necessary. An even more disturbing story broke a week later. It seemed that for the prior three years the DOJ had been secretly dipping into the personal and professional communications of Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen. The case involved Rosen’s interactions with a State Department contractor monitoring North Korea’s nuclear program. What troubled the media community most about the DOJ response was the use of search warrants to investigate a reporter and the threat to prosecute him under the terms of Espionage Act as an “as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.” "Search warrants like these have a severe chilling effect on the free flow of important information to the public,” First Amendment lawyer Charles Tobin told the Washington Post. “That’s a very dangerous road to go down.” On May 16, 2013, a few days after the AP story broke but a few days before the Rosen story did, Obama took a moment during a joint press conference with the Turkish prime minister to say he would “make no apologies” for investigating national security leaks that threatened the well-being of the American military. “I don’t think the American people would expect me as commander in chief not to be concerned about information that might compromise their missions or might get them killed,” Obama said defiantly. This was one of those finesses that served Obama so well with the uninformed. In fact, the probes dug much deeper than “national security.” A few weeks later, in June 2013, the McClatchy newspapers broke the story of an “unprecedented” Obama administration initiative launched in 2011 in the wake of the Bradley (or, in NYT-speak, “Chelsea”) Manning leaks. Much like Nixon’s “plumbers,” the operatives of  “Insider Threat Program,” as it was known, worked to suppress leaks in the national security agencies. Unlike the plumbers, however, the Insider Threat people extended their mission into the seemingly benign regions of education, agriculture, and social security.    Scarier still, in the Maoist spirit of the Obama administration, everyone was expected to plumb. The administration obligated employees to turn themselves and their coworkers in for failing to report leaks. Specifically, the program’s strategic plan mandated supervisors to “penalize clearly identifiable failures to report security infractions and violations, including any lack of self-reporting.” None of this, of course, stopped Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor who first went public with his massive document dump a week before the McClatchy article. What the Internal Threat Program could do, however, was discourage employees from reporting routine waste and corruption. “You don’t get people speaking up when there’s wrongdoing,” said Liana Greenstein former CIA case officer. “You don’t get people who look at things in a different way and who are willing to stand up for things. What you get are people who toe the party line, and that’s really dangerous for national security.” Most of all perhaps, the Internal Threat Program discouraged disgruntled employees from talking to the media. “The suspicion has to be that maybe these ‘leak’ investigations are less about deterring leakers and more about intimidating the press,” opined the Wall Street Journal. Liberal First Amendment lawyer James Goodale was harsher still. In a Times op-ed Goodale declared that “President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom” In liberal circles, the Nixon comparison was very nearly as damning as the Hitler one. Ouch! Unlike Richard Nixon, who had good reason to distrust the media, Obama has no apparent motive for his secrecy other than that it gave him the space to do as he pleased and get away with it. “They feel entitled to and expect supportive media coverage,” admitted veteran correspondent Josh Meyer in speaking of the White House press office. For all the love that the media showered on the Obama administration, what they got in return, said Meyer, was “across-the-board hostility.” In the age of Obama, however, many in the media had a hard time holding a grudge, and Obama knew it. Weeks after the Rosen story broke, the president made what the New York Times called a “ringing affirmation of press freedom.” The Times reported that Obama was “troubled” by the revelations of DOJ mischief and that wingman Holder -- take out those hankies -- “shared those concerns.” The Times summarized the speech with the redemptive headline, “Obama, Offering Support for Press Freedom, Orders Review of Leak Investigations.” Obviously, not everyone in the media was as easily appeased as the Times editors, but too many were. Six months after Goodale’s blistering op-ed and three months after the release of the devastating CPJ report, New Yorker editor and Obama biographer David Remnick went unchallenged on the Charlie Rose Show when he listed as one of Obama’s many accomplishments “the fact that there's been no scandal, major scandal, in this administration, which is a rare thing in an administration.” For all its merits, the CPJ report did not use the word “scandal” or any of its derivatives either. It has been said that a political incident becomes a scandal only when the Times calls it a “scandal” on its front page. Despite Obama’s shocking disregard of his commitment and the media’s acknowledgement of the same, the Times editors chose to reserve the S-word for bigger things like, say, a president’s failure to attend a dinner where even eleven-year-olds get to ding him. 2a) The Left Continues to Peddle the Lie that Trump Represents a Threat to Press Freedom By William Sullivan Saturday night’s White House Correspondents dinner once again came and went without most Americans having paid it any serious attention, and for the third straight year, our president chose to miss this increasingly farcical event where journalists pat each other on the back for the fine jobs they believe themselves to be doing.  What made this year’s event a little different than years past is that none of the other senior members of the White House staff attended, either. “That decision came after Sarah Huckabee Sanders endured cruel taunts at the hands of last year’s featured speaker, comedian Michelle Wolf,” Emily Zanotti reports at The Daily Wire.  “[D]espite a longstanding tradition of good-natured ribbing between the press and the president, through dueling speeches, the White House simply stopped RSVPing to the event.” Without the luxury of roasting their political enemies in attendance to feign a comedic tone rather than a purely adversarial one, the organizers of the event dropped the façade of humor in favor of a “funerary tone” led by a historian rather than the traditional choice of a comedian.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the event offered anything short of bad comedy. For example, the White House Correspondents Association’s president Olivier Knox committed to a “dark sermon,” according to Grabien News.  In February of 2017, he told the audience, “the president called us the enemy of the people,” he said.  A few days later, he said, his son asked if Donald Trump was going to put him in prison.  “At the end of a trip to Mexico,” he continued, “he mused that if the president tried to keep me out of the country, at least Uncle Josh is a good lawyer and will get you home.” For the record, Trump has never threatened to imprison a journalist or prevent a citizen journalist from reentering the country from abroad.  If Knox were an honest man, he might have told his son: “No, son, none of that will happen.  You only believe that because a lot of people make their living by making up such nonsensical stories about how this president might do such things.” But he certainly wouldn’t say that, because those are the lies upon which this entire event was centered.  There was a calculated effort to portray this administration as uniquely at odds with a free and critical press in the scope of American history.  For example, historian and host Ron Chernow quipped that “George Washington felt maligned and misunderstood by the press, but he never generalized that as a vendetta against the institution.” Can any sane person, much less a “historian,” actually argue that Trump is the only president to malign the free press, as an institution, for spreading “fake news?” Franklin Delano Roosevelt certainly did, and he remains a hero of the left despite having done so. According to Columbia professor Raymond Moley, a close confidant of FDR, his president believed that a “long list” of newspapers was “guilty of falsifying news.”  He said that “nothing would help him more [in the 1936 election] than to have it known that the newspapers were all against him.” Sure enough, in the 1936 election campaign, FDR “claimed that 85% of newspapers were against him,” complaining about their “poisonous propaganda.”  Despite there being an awful lot of criticism about the employment of his “new instruments of public power,” FDR was almost certainly exaggerating the extent of the newspapers’ bias against him.  Even still, he was none too kind toward the press about their consistent criticism, and generalized his opinion as a “vendetta against the institution” of the then-mainstream press.  Should we expect Trump, today, to be any different?  Trump endures a constant barrage of criticism via 24-hour news cycles, prominently disseminated by mainstream coverage, and practical data has suggested that as much as 91% of that coverage is negative.  So, while it’s easy to argue that FDR was imagining (or purposely fabricating) such widespread opposition among the press, such bias against President Trump definitely exists, and it’s obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention.  The difference is that Trump hasn’t used his power to clamp down on his opposition in the press beyond offering harsh criticism.  Sure, he’s been highly critical of the mainstream media which is obviously aligned against him, but he’s never used the power of the federal government to punish journalists.  The closest he’s come, one might argue, is temporarily revoking Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which was certainly warranted due to his childlike, attention-seeking antics in refusing to surrender his microphone after asking several questions and grandstanding for political effect.  FDR, on the other hand, famously used the power of the federal government to strongarm newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.  A one-time supporter of Roosevelt in 1932, Randolph had “turned against his ally,” leading FDR to instruct the “Treasury Department to closely monitor Hearst’s taxes,” according to David Beito of Reason.com. It’s convenient for the left to occasionally ignore this sort of activity, obviously.  After all, the leftist media chose to ignore Barack Obama’s secret monitoring of phone call records of New York Times, AP, and Fox News reporters and exclusion of Fox News from conference calls available to other media, among other abuses. (But “not a whisper of a scandal” in the Obama years, says Joe Biden.) On the contrary, Trump’s used his executive authority to do no such thing to his political opponents.  Yet, somehow, Trump is the real threat to the First Amendment? Journalists like Olivier Knox pretending that there’s any realistic possibility that they could be jailed or prevented from reentering the country by this president for having said nasty things about him is worse than an honest fear or fantasy.  It’s nothing more than a comical effort to earn a badge of heroism from his media colleagues on the cheap.  Firstly, there is nothing more fashionable in the broad media circles than criticizing President Trump.  Secondly, the possibility that President Trump might abuse his power in any such way is nothing more than a phantom threat that Knox’s kid might believe, but few others would. But with some other presidents in American history, such a threat might have been very real.  In 1917, Woodrow Wilson “warned that those who were disloyal had given up their civil liberties,” and would face “stern repression.”  He used an executive order to create “a new federal agency that would put the government in the business of actively shaping press coverage,” called the Committee on Public Information (CPI). The Committee recruited 75,000 “Four-Minute Men” for their skills in propagandizing Wilson’s agenda in speeches, and it produced newsreels rallying support for the war.  It produced “guidelines” for U.S. newspapers for “patriotic” newspaper editors to follow, and actually published a daily “Official Bulletin,” which some view as the “closest the United States has come to a paper like the Soviet Union’s Pravda.”  Even outside the government press, the CPI publications appeared, at taxpayer expense, in “20,000 newspaper columns each week,” effectively burying the private press beneath mountains of government propaganda. The Wilson administration’s most famous action against the free press was the Espionage Act of 1917, under which 2,000 people were charged during WWI, and jailed many members of the press. Interestingly enough, it was under the auspices of the Espionage Act that President Obama cracked down on journalists “more than any other administration since Woodrow Wilson,” according to Michael Barone at the Washington Examiner in 2013.  He cites 20-year veteran of The New York Times, David Sanger, as having called the Obama administration “the most closed, control-freak administration” he’d ever witnessed. And yet, the same leftist media mouthpieces claiming that Trump is some monumental threat to press freedom were oddly silent during Obama’s presidency while all of that was going on. Members of the media today suggesting that Donald Trump represents some uniquely dangerous presidential threat to our free press are either in desperate need of education, or they knowingly lack an interest in truth.  And all of the evidence suggests the latter, and that they are willing to sell lies in order to claim some specious mantle of victimhood.  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3) After months of self-promotion, and much to the liberal media’s disappointment, Stacey Abrams finally said she is not running against David. Radical Democrats know that it will be difficult to run against a Washington outsider with a proven record of getting results. David, alongside President Trump, is helping lead the greatest economic turnaround in U.S. history.Meanwhile, the Democrats' socialist policies have been proven to fail over and over again. Make no mistake, Chuck Schumer still believes that the road to winning a Democrat majority in the U.S. Senate and the White House runs through Georgia. Schumer will expend every resource at his disposal to defeat David in 2020. No matter the opponent, there will be a clear choice between David’s positive agenda that has changed the direction of our country and socialist policies that will take us backward. You’ve helped David before. Your strong show of support is one of the reasons Democrats are being forced to search for a candidate, but we need you to step up again. The weeks ahead are critical. Schumer believes Georgia is still a top target. And Stacey Abrams has pledged to keep organizing and mobilizing in an effort to swing Georgia for out-of-touch Democrats. We have to stay energized and united, no matter who becomes our Democrat opponent. David is fighting for us every day. Can we count on you to keep standing with him? Thank you so much for everything you have done so far and what you will continue to do for our cause. 3a) STACEY ABRAMS IS SAYING SHE WON BECAUSE DEMS DON'T CARE ABOUTELECTIONS OR FACTS By Daniel Greenfield The New York Times has a high-profile article touting loser Stacey Abrams. It's titled, "Why Stacey Abrams Is Still Saying She Won." Let me save you the trouble. Abrams is saying it for two reasons. 1. The Democrats no longer care about election results. They always assume that any election they won, no matter how, is legitimate. And any race that they lost was stolen from them. This was why they rejected the wins of both Bush Jr. and Trump. This is now the new normal 2. The Democrats also don't care about facts. In an atmosphere choked with conspiracy theories, where Russian bots hack Facebook and somehow change election outcomes, claiming, as Abrams does, that something happened is just as good. Russia hacked the election. The moon landing was faked. 9/11 was an inside job. The FBI keeps framing Muslims. Hillary Clinton was sabotaged to prevent the truth about Area 51 from getting out. (Yes, that's an actual conspiracy theory out there.) There's no downside for Stacey Abrams. Losing is no longer a reflection of one's failure in the Hillary age. It just means Bigfoot hacked Facebook.  +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 4)3.2% GDP is well above all the pundits forecast, except JP Morgan who was at 2.9%. Note that just a few weeks ago they were all saying under 2% was the number, and recession was possible. Then suddenly they all shifted to 2.5% or better. My regular point that the pundits blather, but you shouldn’t pay a lot of attention to them. Inflation is still well below 2%. Durable goods orders were up 2.7%. Domestic investment and consumer spend were all up nicely.  First quarter is always a weak quarter, and this year we had the shutdown and especially bad weather, so the current quarter should be even better.  A strong sign of good production numbers ahead. Bond yields are now lower than loan yields which is highly unusual. Loans are more secure in a BK, so they should have a lower yield based on risk, but they have inverted lately. A good sign of confidence in the economy.  Junk bond yields are down around 6.5% from 7.3%. All of this suggests the market thinks risk is very low, and rates will not move higher for quite a while. After the Q1 report, the chance of a rate decrease this year is off the table. My lefty economist friends now have some explaining to do as they were giving me forecasts of under 2% GDP growth. One more example of don’t go by what the so called pundits and talking heads say on TV.  They have a political agenda in many cases. It does raise a real question of the economic models that are being used, and how could they be so far off. The data is available to the economic forecasters on a current basis, and they have these fancy computer models, so maybe  their model assumptions and correlations are way wrong. One more reason that equities will continue to be the winning investment. If GDP stays above 3% all year and into 2020, and if there is a China deal, and wages continue to grow at 6% for the low end, Trump wins in a landslide. There is nothing on the horizon to suggest a recession in 2019, and unlikely in 2020 despite all the talk of recession. The Dems keep saying they are going to fix the economy and inequality.  How are they going to show that now, and what is Biden going to say after Obama never got anywhere near 3%, and wages adjusted for inflation went nowhere, and black unemployment went nowhere. Oh I forgot, we are going to give everyone everything for free, and tax the job creators out of business to pay for it. Biden can pontificate t union sponsored events, but the union workers know they are far better off today than when he was VP. Especially factory workers in places like PA, MI, IL, OH. The bond market, and especially the ten year, are good indicators of what the economy is doing, and where it is going in the short term. You may have noted the ten year has sat still for weeks at around 2.55%, and is actually a bit lower at 2.50% after the GDP number. Up a bit, down a bit, but basically very stable. The VIX is similar at a low level. Hedge funds are shorting the VIX at record amounts which shows they think the stock market is likely to stay strong. All of that indicates the markets are seeing a solid, stable economy continuing for at least the short term, being the next few months. It suggests there is expectation the China deal will happen, the other trade disputes, other than maybe the EU, will be resolved, and the US economy will grow at least 2.5% to 3%, or very probably more than 3% this year, with no major hiccups. There is always a chance of a black swan, but it looks like pretty clear sailing for now. The Mueller report ended the collusion issue, and other than Trump haters in the press, and Dems in Congress, most people seem to think there is no chance of impeachment. That is what the bond market and the VIX are telling us.  The oil markets are stabilizing and prices will likely decline a  little from here as the Saudis, UAE, and US frackers ramp up production.  Brexit is off the radar for the moment, and there is no way now to know where that ends. A trade deal with the EU will be difficult to achieve, but it will get done this year. In the end the Dems will vote for the USMC, or they will get hurt badly for 2020. They have no good reason to vote no. Steel and aluminum tariffs will end and be replaced by some type of quota system. Despite good demand for hotel stays by guests, reality is, labor costs are eating the bottom line, rising 4% vs revenue rising 2%. Labor costs will very likely increase even more as this year goes on and raises come thru. Hotel values are down 10% in the past year across the board according to the data collectors. The hotel business has seen its better days. There is no up in values from here, except on a here or there individual case by case basis depending on a local market situation. Ignore the hype about rising Revpar or ADR. All that matters is cash flow, and the hotel industry never reports that because it would reveal the truth, instead of the hype put out by STR and the “pundits’ who make a living trying to make things look rosy. They are paid to be over optimistic because they either are employed by, and are part of brokerage firms, or are on retainer to them. There are almost no objective data providers in the hotel industry. They all know you do not get to speak at conferences, nor do you get consulting assignments  unless you say optimistic things. The real issue coming in the next three weeks or so, is the start of a series of objective reports, beginning with the one from the FISA chief judge, that implicates Comey, et. al in a massive violation of the law. The first report will go after Comey, and is backed up by a final judgment from the chief judge of FISA, that there has been improper FISA warrant use by the FBI.  The NSA supposedly provided the court with proof. There may be indictments coming in the next three weeks. Then there will be the IG report on the FBI to come by mid-June. It will show there were 4 contractors working for the FBI illegally spying on US citizens for several years. All under the Obama administration. Then the Graham report from the Senate to follow on. The dossier will be shown to have been possibly the idea of Brennan, and funded by Hilary, who laundered the money thru Perkins Coie, and then was paid to Russian agents by Steele. Clapper will be shown to have lied to Congress, others in that orbit including the now well known suspects like Strozk, Lisa Page, Baker, Jarret, Mills, Susan Rice, and more, will eventually be shown to have been party to a conspiracy to destroy Trump and force him out of office. This is the conspiracy I have been talking about for nearly two years as blowing up and causing the Dems to be very sorry they ever began this whole attack on Trump. It will expose the vast corruption in the swamp, and the extent they have gone to in their effort to change the election of Trump. It was an attempted soft coup. And now we learn there was probably a major collusion between Dems and Ukrainian actors to get Manafort and Trump. It will be laid out over months by these various reports, just as the Dem debates are happening, and as the so called investigations of Trump are at fever pitch in the House with the battle to get his taxes and records, and to get McGhan to testify really heats up. The real reason the Dems are attacking Barr so viciously, and trying to discredit him, and going after Trump, is they know what may be coming. If it is what I believe, the Dems get wiped out in 2020. Trump will appear to be the victim of a massive conspiracy. Barr did not say there was spying by accident. He was already sitting on the charges by the FISA chief judge, and the NSA reports about the spying, which is what he was really alluding to. Nunes was on to this early on, and the Dems tried everything to shut him down including false ethics charges, but now it will all come out. We just need to see who will be the John Dean when faced with jail. The press will lose all remaining credibility, if they still have any. As I have said several times, this makes Watergate look like kindergarten. Trump will prove correct that this was the worst political scandal in American history. The level of growing anti-Semitism in the US as seen on many campuses lately, is now on full display with the horrible anti-Semitic cartoon in the NY Times, of all places. The cartoon was as bad as anything I have ever seen in this country. Yet where are the mass media, and where is Pelosi or the Dems raging against this. They are defending Omar. They are nowhere. On campus it is out in the open, but dare you say anything about a Muslim and you get pounded as a racist. We have a major problem now in the US with growing anti-Semitism, and the Times cartoon is just the most public form it has taken. This is the Times, not Trump, we are talking about. Trump is a hero in Israel. If you think I over state what is going on at universities just consider this: At many schools now, the students are encouraged to anonymously report any professor who does not promote inclusion and diversity etc in the classroom. First I don’t even know what all that really means, but more importantly think about what this is- Stalin, Hitler, Stasi, et al having secret reports on the speech and thoughts of professors, and punishment for any thinking or comment that may be perceived by a snowflake as being “insensitive”, and not in line with the school’s policies on all the so called inclusive, racial, LGBT, illegal alien, and probably even Martians edicts. Professors are now rated and hired based on their pushing “inclusiveness”.  Merit in their field is less important.  However being for BDS and anti-Israel is considered good on many campuses.  This is what American universities have come to- anti- free speech dictatorships propounding radical ideologies, with what amounts to students being told to act as secret police to report on professors.  In case you wonder how did the country get so divided and hateful, and who gave the snowflakes the right to make demands at work. There is a massive crisis on campus and as alumni you need to speak out and stop donating. Russia is reducing military spending because they do not have the money. Their spend is down the past two years.  It is all about oil prices. Without high oil prices Russia is broke and cannot wage war. Putin is not in trouble because anyone who raises issues is shot or arrested. But outside Moscow the people are not happy, and they consider Moscow to be filled with highly corrupt Putin buddies who do little for the people. Putin was a hero early on because he made a real positive change in people’s lives and living standards, but that has run its course now and Russia is being left behind economically. The lack of funds keeps Putin from interfering as much as he would like to in world events, and Trump is taking action to enhance NATO and doing other things to counter Putin, including letting the NSA do whatever it is they do in cyber to counter Russia in 2020. Obama we now know did nothing. A Trump reelection is looking much more likely as time goes on and the economy outperforms.  He may be obnoxious and crazy, but he gets things done despite every effort by the Dems to resist and delay. My money is on a Trump win barring the black swan.  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++