One of the greatest ads ever!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/embed/
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From a dear former neighbor:"Thank you for you very insightful memos, Dick. I look forward to them. The amount of fake news is astounding! There are no heroes on the other side. Unfortunately, the vitriol will get worse as support for President Trump continues to grow.
Enjoy the weekend. My best to Lynn.
This from one of my oldest and dearest friends as well as one of the brightest attorneys I have had the pleasure of knowing and also a fellow memo reader:
"Dick:
Always happy to get your perspective. You remain one of the most informed, thoughtful, and realistic people I know. And the human race needs more people with all those qualities. B--"
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Accords with my view of conservatism:
What Is Conservatism?At its core, conservatism is still a practical, applicable, and logical political philosophy. More++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ My wife is very perceptive and she often synthesizes things beautifully. Today she said if Bloomberg is the nominee and Trump has to debate him the president should say to Bloomberg: 'the only reason your are running is because you hate me. What have I ever done that makes you hate me?'++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++I have a tennis friend I love dearly not because he is rational but because he believes everything the New York Times writes. Today he told me Putin/Russia were pulling for Trump again and he heard Trump was going to pardon Al Capone. I told him I heard he was also going to pardon Hitler because with two you get egg rolls.
Life can be a bowl of cherries if you don't break your tooth on the pits.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++There once was a song entitled "Getting To Know You." Well now you can get to know Bloomberg better if you wish but be careful the language is graphic and not coming from the lips of Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.
Also:
Levin lays out the case why Sanders should be rejected: https://spectator.org/mark-
And:
https://www.dailywire.com/
And:
Omar has been outed by her own people and should be thrown out of Congress but I seriously doubt the Democrats have the guts.
Life can be a bowl of cherries if you don't break your tooth on the pits.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++There once was a song entitled "Getting To Know You." Well now you can get to know Bloomberg better if you wish but be careful the language is graphic and not coming from the lips of Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.
Also:
Levin lays out the case why Sanders should be rejected: https://spectator.org/mark-
And:
https://www.dailywire.com/
And:
Omar has been outed by her own people and should be thrown out of Congress but I seriously doubt the Democrats have the guts.
Ilhan Omar Furious After Somali Community Leader Says She Married Her Brother to Defraud US Immigration - Read More
Finally: Palestinians take a hit in The Hague:
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The fumigating continues.
NSC staffer Kash Patel tapped to serve as senior adviser to Amb. Rick Grenell, acting Intel chief (DNI.) Source said mandate is to “#cleanhouse including “top to bottom” review DNI operations that expanded dramatically since 2005.<<
That helps explain the hysterical panic we are witnessing in response to the Grinnell appointment as acting DNI.
Patel was Nunes' staffer who was instrumental in uncovering much of the wrongdoing of the Obama administration that they hoped Trump's administration would never learn about.
If he's a senior aide to Grinnell as DNI, and has a mandate to "CLEAN HOUSE" inside the IC, I suspect there are people quaking in their boots... not the least of whom should be IG Atkinson.
This ties into a theme I have mentioned previously: someone from another forum on the web, whom I respect enormously, and who has had professional contact with various entities in the IC, said shortly after Trump took office, and it became clear there were many holdovers who had worked to undermine the Trump campaign and new administration, that firing them all at that point would be a bad idea. He opined the best thing to do is leave the conspirators in place, so they can be monitored, and their network of co-conspirators with whom they were working against the administration could be identified. Only after mapping out the full extent of the conspiracy would it then make sense to remove them, once they were no long useful to the investigation.
The fact that NSC and now IC are BOTH going to get a fumigation and house cleaning to remove the bugs and vermin suggests the investigators have collected everything they need from these people; their metadata has been analyzed, the networks mapped, and the co-conspirators identified.
The House-cleaning could thus be indicative of imminent indictments, IMHO.... and that helps explain why people like Brennan are foaming at the mouth like "mad dogs in the midday sun."
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Often, when things start to come apart they do so quickly.
Kennedy, the Democratic Party candidate, recalled that Abraham Lincoln, in the 1860 presidential election cycle, said the great question facing the nation was whether it could exist “half-slave and half-free.”
The fumigating continues.
NSC staffer Kash Patel tapped to serve as senior adviser to Amb. Rick Grenell, acting Intel chief (DNI.) Source said mandate is to “#cleanhouse including “top to bottom” review DNI operations that expanded dramatically since 2005.<<
That helps explain the hysterical panic we are witnessing in response to the Grinnell appointment as acting DNI.
Patel was Nunes' staffer who was instrumental in uncovering much of the wrongdoing of the Obama administration that they hoped Trump's administration would never learn about.
If he's a senior aide to Grinnell as DNI, and has a mandate to "CLEAN HOUSE" inside the IC, I suspect there are people quaking in their boots... not the least of whom should be IG Atkinson.
This ties into a theme I have mentioned previously: someone from another forum on the web, whom I respect enormously, and who has had professional contact with various entities in the IC, said shortly after Trump took office, and it became clear there were many holdovers who had worked to undermine the Trump campaign and new administration, that firing them all at that point would be a bad idea. He opined the best thing to do is leave the conspirators in place, so they can be monitored, and their network of co-conspirators with whom they were working against the administration could be identified. Only after mapping out the full extent of the conspiracy would it then make sense to remove them, once they were no long useful to the investigation.
The fact that NSC and now IC are BOTH going to get a fumigation and house cleaning to remove the bugs and vermin suggests the investigators have collected everything they need from these people; their metadata has been analyzed, the networks mapped, and the co-conspirators identified.
The House-cleaning could thus be indicative of imminent indictments, IMHO.... and that helps explain why people like Brennan are foaming at the mouth like "mad dogs in the midday sun."
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Often, when things start to come apart they do so quickly.
The massive – but reversible – defeats of Iran and Turkey
By Caroline Glick
With our attention focused on other things – Israel’s elections, the legal fraternity’s aggressive lawfare against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump’s peace plan, to name just a few – profound strategic shifts have upended the strategic balance in the Middle East.
Israel’s two most formidable adversaries – Iran and Turkey – both came up short in their quests for regional domination, and Israel is reaping the rewards of their losses.
Two weeks ago, Netanyahu held a previously unannounced meeting in Uganda with Sudanese President Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Burhan. Instant commentaries presented the meeting as a salutary side product of the Trump plan. But the truth is much more significant. The sight of the two leaders sitting next to one another smiling made heads explode from Tehran to Ramallah. The Netanyahu-Burhan meeting was no mere byproduct of a peace plan. It was a long planned and hoped for result of a set of policies, that aided by good fortune felled a cataclysmic blow against Iran and its terrorist proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Until last April, Sudan was ruled for thirty years by Omar al-Bashir. Bashir, an Islamist, was a major sponsor of global terrorism. From 1991-1995, Al Qaeda was headquartered in Khartoum.
Al-Bashir was also a close ally of Iran. He permitted the Iranian regime to use Sudanese ports to move weapons to Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, to Hezbollah in Lebanon and to the Assad regime in Syria. Al-Bashir also allowed the Iranians to use Sudanese territory to surround Saudi Arabia, to transfer weapons to the Houthis in Yemen and to threaten the Saudi port in Jeddah, outside of Mecca, and to threaten Saudi oil platforms at Yanbu.
In December 2018, disgusted by rampant corruption and human rights abuses, the Sudanese people rose up against their leaders. For five months, massive anti-government protests were held throughout the country. Responding to public pressure, last April the Sudanese military overthrew al-Bashir.
The units that overthrew al-Bashir were supported by the Gulf states, Egypt, the U.S. and according to some reports, Israel. The new regime, which is pledged to transition to some form of democracy within two years, is supported by these governments.
Al-Bashir for his part was supported by Iran, Qatar and Turkey. His removal, then was a huge blow to all three. For the Iranian regime, his removal from power by forces allied with Iran’s bitter enemies was arguably a greater loss that the loss of terror master Qassem Soleimani and his lieutenants last month at the hands of a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad. The loss of Sudan calls into question Iran’s continued ability to maintain its regional campaigns.
Consider its positions in two of its satrapies – Iraq and Lebanon.
Among the people killed along with Soleiani was Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of Iran’s Shiite militias in Iraq. This week the Guardian reported in the wake of their deaths, Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi sent his top advisor to Beirut to meet with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Mahdi is an Iranian proxy. His representative beseeched Nasrallah to take command of the Shiite militias in Iraq that Soleimani and Muhandis directed. Nasrallah acceded to the request. But, apparently fearing that he would end like Soleimani if he began flying around to rally the troops, Nasrallah said that he would run the militias by remote control from Beirut.
Nasrallah’s decision to take control over Iran’s proxy forces in Iraq endangers Lebanon. The more the evidence piles up that Lebanon is a Hezbollah-controlled Iranian colony, the more likely it becomes that the U.S. will end all its military and civilian assistance to Lebanon.
After a long delay, last month Secretary of State Mike Pompeo approved the transfer of military and civilian aid to Lebanon. That approval is already being questioned and conditioned in the Senate. Without U.S. assistance, the Lebanese economy will crumble.
Like Sudan before it, for the past four months, Lebanon has experienced mass anti-regime protests throughout the country. Long-serving prime minister Saed Hariri resigned last October in a bid to quell the protests. But his resignation had little effect. The protests have continued since. They didn’t diminish with the appointment of Hariri’s replacement Hassan Diab, who was hand-picked by Hezbollah.
In the last week, Iran’s Foreign Minister Jawad Zarif and its speaker of the parliament Ali Larijani both visited Beirut and promised financial assistance. But Iran is in no position to keep such promises. U.S. economic sanctions have dried up Iran’s coffers. The deeper Hezbollah is pulled into Iran’s wars in Syria and Iraq, the worse off Lebanon will be. And the worse the situation becomes in Lebanon, the less likely it becomes that Hezbollah will risk starting a war with Israel.
This then brings us to Iran’s frenemy Turkey.
In a paper published last week by the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle East and Africa Studies, Turkey scholar Dr. Soner Cagaptay described how, over the past decade, Turkish President Recep Erdogan has made and lost a series of strategic gambles that have diminished Turkey as a regional player.
Erdogan views himself as a neo-Ottoman ruler and the head of the Muslim Brotherhood. As such, at the outset of the war in Syria, Erdogan bet on the Sunnis. With halting, lackadaisical U.S. support, he formed the Free Syria Army. The FSA was presented as a coherent fighting force with the will and capacity to defeat Assad and his Iranian patrons. But it was nothing of the sort. The FSA, dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, was a hodgepodge of fighters with no coherent ideology or operational plan. Over time, it was eclipsed by Islamic fanatics who used the FSA organizational framework to form what became the Islamic State.
Since Erdogan supports Islamists, he placed no limits on the entry of foreign fighters to Turkey en route to Syria. From 2013-2015, the Turkish side of the Turkish-Syrian border became the logistical base and economic hub of IS in Syria.
International revulsion at IS’s barbarism compelled the Obama administration to send forces to Syria to fight it. The U.S. forged an alliance with the Kurdish YPG militia to advance this aim. The YPG is a spinoff of the Turkish Kurdish PKK, which the Turks consider an existential threat. The U.S. partnership with the YPG, forged as a consequence of Turkey’s indirect sponsorship and facilitation of IS, significantly strained U.S.-Turkish relations.
To fight the U.S. allied Kurds, Erdogan betrayed Washington and tried to make a deal with Russia and Iran at the Kurds’ expense.
Angered by Turkey’s embrace of Russia and by regime-incited anti-Americanism that fomented the arrest and judicial persecution of American pastor Andrew Brunson, last year President Trump imposed economic sanctions on Turkey that nearly destroyed the economy.
Today, Erdogan is in a new mess of his own design. In the battle for Idlib, Turkish forces are pitted against their erstwhile Russian, Iranian and Syrian partners. The Americans have publicly sided with the Turks, but to receive more than rhetorical support from Washington, Erdogan will be forced to undermine his own tenuous ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin still further.
Which brings us to the self-inflicted mess Erdogan has created for himself in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Erdogan’s Muslim Brotherhood sympathies made him the greatest supporter of Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt in 2012. When the Egyptian military deposed the Morsi government in 2013, Turkish-Egyptian relations became openly hostile.
In part to undermine Turkish power, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has forged close ties with other Mediterranean Basin countries – and Turkish foes – Greece, Cyprus and Israel. Supported by the Trump administration, the burgeoning alliance between these four states has led to joint military exercises between Egypt, Cyprus and Greece on the one hand and Israel, Greece and Cyprus on the other. It also is the context in which Egypt signed a deal to import Israeli natural gas. The Israeli-Cypriot-Greek gas pipeline to Europe will bypass Turkey.
To extricate Turkey from the regional isolation he induced, last December Erdogan signed a maritime cooperation agreement with the Tripoli-based Libyan government. The Tripoli-based government is at war with the Tabruk-based Libyan government supported by Egypt, the UAE and Russia. Today, Tabruk-based forces are advancing in their offensive against Tripoli.
To save his allies in Tripoli, Erdogan will need Putin’s help. And if he receives it, it will further weaken his ties with America.
In other words, Erdogan is boxed in and has no good options.
Then there is the Turkish economy. As a Chatham House report on the Turkish economy published early this week showed, Turkey’s government stimulus-induced inflation and cheap credit are positioning the Turkish lira for another collapse. The political implications of another economic meltdown, just two years after the last one are self-evident.
Israel and the Sunni Arab states, as well as the United States are enjoying the benefits of the Iranian and Turkish defeats. This owes in great part to the strategic priorities their leaders have adopted. Netanyahu, Trump, Sisi, and the other allied leader have placed a premium on defeating and weakening their enemies. New leaders, with different strategic priorities are liable to squander these gains and even reverse them.
During the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Senator Chris Murphy, (D., CN) met secretly with Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif. Former U.S. secretary of state John Kerry and other Democratic senators reportedly also participated in the meeting. After the U.S. media reported that the secret conclave had taken place, Murphy acknowledged his participation. He argued that the Trump administration’s maximum pressure strategy is a complete failure – even as Iran’s regional position is collapsing in broad daylight.
Last year, the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution committing the next Democratic administration to restoring the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. All of the Democratic presidential candidates have expressed varying degrees of commitment to the pledge.
Since leaving office, Kerry has remained in contact with Zarif and has reportedly advised him about how to ride out the economic sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in order to survive into the next Democratic administration.
As for Israel, earlier this week, Blue and White party leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid harshly criticized Netanyahu for maintaining close ties with Trump. Both men pledged to cultivate Israel’s relations with the Democrats.
Gantz’s top advisor Yoram Turbovich was Ehud Olmert’s chief of staff during his tenure as prime minister. Last week Olmert travelled to America as the guest of J Street, which in turn enjoys close relations with radical, anti-Israel Democrats. Gantz’s campaign strategist Joel Benenson served in the same role for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 and for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
If the next Israeli government prioritizes good relations with pro-Iranian Democrats over defeating Israel’s enemies, it will necessarily undermine the strategic windfall we are now experiencing. Nothing happens by accident. If the strategic processes now taking place don’t have the time to mature, they can and likely will be reversed.
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Kennedy, the Democratic Party candidate, recalled that Abraham Lincoln, in the 1860 presidential election cycle, said the great question facing the nation was whether it could exist “half-slave and half-free.”
In the 1960 election, said Kennedy, the issue was “whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free.”
“Whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking … will depend in great measure upon what we do here in the United States,” he said.
How things change. The Democrats’ candidate in 1960 headlined freedom as the issue defining his campaign. Now, 60 years later, Democrats are moving down the road to nominating a socialist, pushing freedom as an American ideal out of the picture.
It is astounding that many Democrats are ready to cast aside the core value that has defined our nation, for which so many have fought and died.
One major part of the story is our youth.
In 2016, a majority of those under age 44 voted for Hillary Clinton. Fifty-five percent of those ages 18-29 voted for her, compared with 37% for Donald Trump. Trump received the majority of those 45 years and above.
In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 40% of Democrats ages 18-29 expressed preference for Sen. Bernie Sanders to be their party’s candidate, compared with 25% of those 30-49, 13% of those 50-64 and 10% of those 65 and over.
In a Gallup poll, 51% of those ages 18-39 expressed a positive view of capitalism and 49% a positive view of socialism. Among those 40-54, 61% were positive about capitalism compared with 39% for socialism. And those 55 and over, 68% were positive about capitalism compared with 32% for socialism.
What’s driving these young Democrats to the far left?
Niall Ferguson of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and consultant Eyck Freymann suggest, in an article in The Atlantic, “The Coming Generation War,” that the capitalist America that worked for earlier generations is not working for these youth.
“They face stagnant real wages” and carry a large burden of student debt, they say. It’s a generation “to whom little has been given, and of whom much is expected,” they continue.
I think it is just the opposite. It is a generation to whom much has been given and from whom little is expected.
When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, America’s youth still faced a military draft. In 1960, 72% of Americans over 18 were married, compared with 50% today.
According to Pew, 78% of those ages 18-29 say it is acceptable for an unmarried couple to live together, even if they don’t intend to get married.
Over the decade 2009-2019, there was a drop of 16% among those ages 23-39 who identify as Christian and an increase of 13% of those self-identifying as religiously unaffiliated.
And that age group doesn’t vote. Since 1980, the percentage of eligible voters in their 20s who voted in presidential elections has averaged between 40% and 50%, compared with 65% to 75% of those over 45, Ferguson and Freymann report.
We have a generation of American youth today who have grown up in a culture of legal abortion and same-sex marriage, with little sense of responsibility to God and country.
Such values among our youth do not bode well for our future.
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Dick
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