+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dershowitz tackles the New York Times and their anti-Semitic cartoon episode. (See 2 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Is a bomb about to go off? (See 3 below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) What if the New York Times Cartoon had depicted a Muslim, a Lesbian, an African American or a Mexican as a Dog?
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.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
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.
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.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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.
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."
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment