And:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
William Barr: ‘One Standard of Justice’
The departing attorney general talks about John Durham, Robert Mueller, Hunter Biden, Mike Flynn and the flak he’s taken from both parties.
By Kimberley Strassel
The U.S. attorney general
is meditating on one of his frustrations with the modern Justice Department:
The outside world keeps moving faster; the wheels of justice ever more slowly.
“Nobody wants to take responsibility anymore,” William Barr says with a hint of
incredulity. “They wring their hands and push issues around the bureaucracy and
trade memos for months.” His response: “Bring it to me! I’ll make the decision. That’s
what I’m here for!”
If Mr. Barr, 70, dominated headlines over the past two years,
it’s because he made a lot of tough calls. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s
constitutionally dubious claims that President Trump committed obstruction of
justice? No. An investigation of the 2016 Russia-collusion probe and the
dismissal of charges against Mike Flynn ? Yes. New oversight of sensitive
political investigations and surveillance of U.S. citizens? Yes. A criminal
referral about Mr. Trump’s call to the Ukrainian president? No. Repeated demands—from
the left and the right—for his department to engage in politics? No, no, no.
Consequential decisions have a way of annoying people—Democrats,
Republicans, the staff, one’s boss—but Mr. Barr, who’d been attorney general
before, from 1991-93, knew that going in. “I’m in a position in life where I
can do the right thing and not really care about the consequences,” he told
senators during his January 2019 confirmation hearing. In a 90-minute phone
interview Tuesday—less than 24 hours after the announcement of his resignation,
effective Dec. 23—he sounded his usual spirited self.
He reminds me why he took the job in the first place: “The Department of Justice was being used as a political weapon” by a “willful if small group of people,” who used the claim of collusion with Russia in an attempt to “topple an administration,” he says. “Someone had to make sure that the power of the department stopped being abused and that there was accountability for what had happened.” Mr. Barr largely succeeded, in the process filling a vacuum of political oversight, reimposing norms, and resisting partisan critics on both sides.
Mr. Barr describes an overarching objective of ensuring that there is “one standard of justice.” That, he says, is why he appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham to investigate the FBI’s 2016 Crossfire Hurricane probe. “Of course the Russians did bad things in the election,” he says. “But the idea that this was done with the collusion of the Trump campaign—there was never any evidence. It was entirely made up.” The country deserved to know how the world’s premier law-enforcement agency came to target and spy on a presidential campaign.
Mr. Barr says Mr. Durham’s appointment should not have been necessary. Mr. Mueller’s investigation should have exposed FBI malfeasance. Instead, “the Mueller team seems to have been ready to blindly accept anything fed to it by the system,” Mr. Barr says, adding that this “is exactly what DOJ should not be.”
Mr. Durham hasn’t finished his work, to the disappointment of
many Republicans, including the president, who were hoping for a
resolution—perhaps including indictments—before the election. Mr. Barr notes
that Mr. Durham had to wait until the end of 2019 for Inspector General Michael
Horowitz to complete his own investigation into the FBI’s surveillance. Then
came the Covid lockdowns, which suspended federal grand juries for six months.
Mr. Durham could no longer threaten to subpoena uncooperative witnesses.
“I understand people’s frustration over the timing, and there
are prosecutors who break more china, so to speak,” Mr. Barr says. “But they
don’t necessarily get the results.” Mr. Durham will, and is making “significant
progress,” says Mr. Barr, who disclosed this month that he had prior to the
election designated Mr. Durham a special counsel, to provide assurance that his
team would be able to finish its work. The new designation also assures that
Mr. Durham will produce a report to the attorney general. Mr. Barr believes
“the force of circumstances will ensure it goes public” even under the new
administration.
The biggest news from Mr. Durham’s probe is what he has ruled
out. Mr. Barr was initially suspicious that agents had been spying on the Trump
campaign before the official July 2016 start date of Crossfire Hurricane, and
that the Central Intelligence Agency or foreign intelligence had played a role.
But even prior to naming Mr. Durham special counsel, Mr. Barr had come to the
conclusion that he didn’t “see any sign of improper CIA activity” or “foreign
government activity before July 2016,” he says. “The CIA stayed in its lane.”
Mr. Barr says Mr. Durham’s probe is now tightly focused on “the
conduct of Crossfire Hurricane, the small group at the FBI that was most
involved in that,” as well as “the activities of certain private actors.” (Mr.
Barr doesn’t elaborate.) Mr. Durham has publicly stated he’s not convinced the
FBI team had an adequate “predicate” to launch an investigation. In September,
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified a document
showing that the FBI was warned in 2016 that the Hillary Clinton campaign might
be behind the “collusion” claims.
Mr. Barr says Mr. Durham is also
looking at the January 2017 intelligence-community “assessment” that claimed
Russia had “developed a clear preference” for Mr. Trump in the 2016
election. He confirms that most of the substantive documents related to
the FBI’s investigation have now been made public.
The attorney general also hopes people remember that orange
jumpsuits aren’t the only measure of misconduct. It frustrates him that the
political class these days frequently plays “the criminal card,” obsessively
focused on “who is going to jail, who is getting indicted.”
The American system is “designed to find people innocent,” Mr.
Barr notes. “It has a high bar.” One danger of the focus on criminal charges is
that it ends up excusing a vast range of contemptible or abusive behavior that
doesn’t reach the bar. The FBI’s use “of confidential human sources and
wiretapping to investigate people connected to a campaign was outrageous,” Mr.
Barr says—whether or not it leads to criminal charges.
Also outrageous, in Mr. Barr’s view, was the abuse of power by
both the FBI and the Mueller team toward Mr. Trump’s associates, especially Mr.
Flynn. The FBI, as a review by U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen found, pulled Mr.
Flynn into an interview that had “no legitimate investigative basis.” The
Mueller team then denied Mr. Flynn’s legal defense exculpatory information and
pressured Mr. Flynn into pleading guilty to lying.
Mr. Barr didn’t order a review of the case until Mr. Flynn
petitioned to withdraw his guilty plea in January 2020. Mr. Jensen’s review
then made clear that the case “was entirely bogus,” Mr. Barr says. “It was
analogous right now to DOJ prosecuting the person Biden named as his national
security adviser for communication with a foreign government.” The Justice
Department agreed to drop the charges in May, although Judge Emmet Sullivan
spent months contesting the move until Mr. Trump finally pardoned Mr. Flynn.
Mr. Barr declines to comment on Judge Sullivan’s maneuvering.
Likewise, Mr. Barr didn’t “go looking” to get involved in the
case of Trump associate Roger Stone, convicted of charges including witness
tampering and lying to investigators. Mr. Barr thinks Mr. Stone violated the
law. But when Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors “wanted a penalty for him that was
unprecedented and outlandish”—seven to nine years in prison—“I wasn’t going to
have the department seek such a harsh penalty,” he says. He overruled the
career prosecutors’ recommendations in February, and the judge sentenced Mr.
Stone to less than half the time the Mueller team had sought.
Mr. Barr took flak from the left for that decision, and even
more for a Constitution Day speech this year in which he reminded Democrats and
the media that this is exactly how the system is designed to work. The Justice
Department’s powers are vast, and professional attorneys therefore are
subordinate to democratically accountable officials. “The Department of Justice
is not a trade association for prosecutors,” Mr. Barr says. Its client is the
American people; its duty is to ensure the principles and standards of justice
are fairly executed.
He took flak from the right for not bringing the Justice
Department hammer down on Mr. Trump’s adversaries. “A lot of Republicans think
that’s playing by Robert’s Rules—you are being soft on the other side. And I
understand that frustration. It’s painful that the system is used against
Republicans and there is an AG not willing to do the same thing against
Democrats. But that is the only way we find our way back,” he says—meaning back
to one standard of justice, to not using the Justice Department as a political
tool.
He also makes no apology for declining to divulge before the
election that Hunter Biden was under investigation. He acknowledges that the
Justice Department’s rule against confirming probes involving office-seekers is
“not absolute” and that he could “imagine” a “dilemma” in which government has
“decisive evidence of a serious crime against a candidate.” But in the absence
of those conditions there’s “damn good reason for the rule,” which protects
disfavored politicians, and private citizens with whom they’re associated,
against the deep state.
“Think about the power it would give the federal bureaucracy,”
he says. “The standard for investigating someone is low. So just gin up an
investigation, make it public, affect every election.”
Along with these politically charged topics, Mr. Barr is eager
to talk about “the other part of the job”—meaning “the management of the work
of the department—the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Marshals, all our legal
responsibilities.” The department’s politicization has overshadowed all that
but Mr. Barr says it’s a big reason he took the job and is proud of the
department’s work. He highlights its efforts on drug enforcement and opioids,
and his regrets that Covid slowed that momentum. He highlights Operation
Legend, a successful law-enforcement initiative to fight violent crime.
He’s also proud of the department’s interventions to protect
free speech and religious freedom. As early as April, Justice had intervened on
behalf of a Mississippi church whose congregants had been ticketed during a
drive-in service amid Covid, and it continued to support institutions denied
their constitutional rights by lockdowns. The department has also intervened to
protect college students’ free speech on campus. “The only rights that receive
attention anymore are those that involve human pleasure-seeking,” he says. “But
the foundational rights are what we rely on as a people to reason and to make
rational judgments on things. . . . The reason we have free speech
isn’t because everyone’s views are right; it is because we try to reach the
truth through the dialectic of competing viewpoints.”
Mr. Barr had planned to stay on in a second Trump term to work
on issues like this: He worries about an onslaught of synthetic opioids and methamphetamines
and increasingly powerful Mexican cartels. He was looking forward to a restored
FBI gearing counterespionage efforts against China. He’s sorry he won’t be able
to continue pushing a zero-tolerance policy toward “violence in our political
process.” He’s skeptical the Biden administration will deal effectively with
the growing power of big tech companies, in particular the problem of
censorship.
I ask if he has any advice for his successors, and he rounds
back to the personal quality that defined his own tenure. “There has been a
tendency for AGs to let the bureaucracy run itself, to sit in the office and
look at the inbox,” he says. “After all, you can never get in trouble by going
along with the institution.” But institutions are supposed to stand for
principles, and it’s the attorney general’s job to reinforce them every day:
“Be active. Make sure people understand the priorities, understand what they
are there to do. Make the decisions.”
Ms. Strassel writes the Journal’s Potomac Watch column.
+++
Has it really come down to this?
I made a snowman
8:00 AM I made a snowman today.
8:10 A feminist passed by and asked me why I didn't make a snow woman.
8:20 So, I made a snow woman.
8:22 My feminist neighbor complained about the snow woman's voluptuous chest saying it objectified snow women everywhere.
8:25 The gay couple living nearby threw a hissy fit and moaned it could have been two snow men instead.
8:28 The transgender man.. woman...person asked why I didn't just make one snow person with detachable parts.
8:35 The vegans at the end of the lane complained about the carrot nose, as veggies are food and not to decorate snow figures with.
8:40 I am being called a racist because the snow couple is white.
8:45 The Muslim gent across the road demands the snow woman wear a burqa.
8:55 The Police arrive saying someone has been offended.
9:00 The feminist neighbor complained again that the broomstick of the snow woman needs to be removed because it depicted women in a domestic role.
9:07 The council equality officer arrived and threatened me with eviction.
9:14 TV news crew from the CNN shows up. I am asked if I know the difference between snowmen and snow-women? I reply, "Snowballs" and am now called a sexist.
9:15 I'm on the News as a suspected terrorist, racist, homophobic, sensibility offender, bent on stirring up trouble during difficult weather.
9:20 I am asked if I have any accomplices. My children are taken by social services.
9:30n Far left protesters offended by everything are marching down the street demanding for me to be beheaded.
Moral: There is no moral to this story. It's just a view of the world in which we live today.
Merry Christmas
+++
THE TERRORISTS SPEAK
|
Let us all be: a “United States” again, message from Joe
Biden. WHY
SHOULD THAT BE AN ISSUE WITH ME ? For the last 4+ years, the Democrats have gone scorched earth. You have salted the fields and now you want to grow crops. The problem is we have memories longer than a hamster. We remember the protests the day of/after inauguration. We remember the 4 years of personal attacks and endless name
calling We remember “not our president” and the “Resistance…” We remember being called racist and evil. We remember Maxie Walters telling followers to harass Trump
supporters in department stores and gas stations. We remember the Presidents press secretary being chased out of a
restaurant. We remember hundreds of Trump supporters being physically
attacked. We remember Trump supporters getting Doxed, and fired from jobs. We remember riots, and looting. We remember “a comedian” holding up the President’s severed head. We remember a play in Central park paid with public funding,
showing the killing of President Trump. We remember Robert de Niro yelling “Fuck Trump” at the Tony’s and
getting a standing ovation. We remember Trump being accused of being a Russian spy and the
media going with it. Trying to frame him for treason. We remember Nancy Pelosi tearing up the State of the Union
Address. We remember how totally in the tank the mainstream media was in
opposition. We remember non-stop in your face lies and open cover-ups from the
media. We remember the MSM cabal in 24/7 Hate Trump broadcasts. We remember the press not holding Democrats responsible for
anything and hiding anything negative. We remember conservative voices neutered by Tech companies
(Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc.). We remember the partisan impeachment. We remember the President and his staff being spied on; even
before he was President and Obama & Biden knew of it. We remember Republican congressmen shot on a ballfield by a
Socialist supporter of Bernie Sanders. We remember every so-called comedy show turn into nothing but
Trump hate fest. We remember 95% negative coverage in the news from the mainstream
media and newspapers. We remember the state governors asking for and getting everything
they wanted to address COVID-19 then blaming Trump. We remember leftists threatening outside the homes of prominent
Republicans and TV commentators who support Trump. We remember the vile attempted destruction of Brett Kavanaugh by
Democrats, Kamala Harris in particular. We remember people pounding on the Supreme Court doors. We remember that we were called every name in the book for
supporting President Trump. We remember that many in Hollywood said they would leave after
Trump was elected, but they stayed here anyway. We remember the hundreds of taxpayer funded police cars burnt
during your ‘mostly peaceful’ demonstrations. We remember our conservative voices being cancelled on major US
campuses. This list is endless, but you get the idea. My friends will be my friends, but a party that has been attacking
the President for 4 long years does not get a free pass with me. So Joe, take your, "Let’s be United" and shove it. +++ Another Rant: All of that is nice, but completely ignores
potential risks in 2021. Jan 5 is far from certain to go Republican. It
probably will, but we don’t know. The Hunter scandal is just beginning, and is
very possibly going to mean the Joe term could possibly be short, the Paris
accord will mean much more regulation and higher costs for companies, and Iran
is going to try to do something bad in the next few months after they have
wrung all they could out of Kerry and Biden and gotten sanctions lifted. New
regulations will be flowing rapidly out of DC, and that means much higher costs
to operate, especially in regard to environment issues. Lenders will be
burdened with lots of new racial regulations and quotas meaning distorted bank
lending. China will pressure Biden if they really have
him compromised, as I believe they do. All of this assumes Republicans
win Jan 5. If not, then all hell breaks loose in Congress after January
20. To top it all off, the Manhattan DA is going to go all in to try to charge
Trump with various crimes to offset and divert the media from the Biden
scandal. If that happens, the pushback from Republicans will create new
chaos. So on one hand we will have a booming consumer economy as pent up
demand drives growth much higher, but on the other hand there will be both
geopolitical and domestic chaos, and an anti-business policy program in DC, and
black swans circling. There will be special emphasis on crushing the
fossil fuel industry which will drive up energy costs for everyone and especially
the lower income workers. The Biden foreign policies of appeasement will lead
to a rerun of the disastrous world we had under Obama. And now we have the
cyber breach and no way for us to know what comes next with that. If Trump had
been reelected I would forecast the market hitting new record highs in 21. But
with Biden, it could go either way, and not nearly so high as it would have
under Trump. There is nothing new the Fed can, or will ,
do to juice the economy. It is all now fiscal stimulus. Powell says inflation
will remain low and internationally it is more deflationary right now. Capital
markets are functioning very well now. Rates will remain low through 2021, and
maybe 22, but interest rates forecasting is always risky over time. If we get a
positive scenario going forward, I believe rates will probably rise in 2022,
not wait until 23. Powell admitted the Fed has underestimated the strength and
resilience of the economy. The ten year in 22 could go above 2% if the economy
really pops in late 21. Fannie and Freddie will probably get recapitalized next
year, but now Biden will interfere by putting in new requirements for racial
quotas or some other similar requirements that will distort the smooth
functioning of these two entities. There will then be distortion of the housing
finance market as the credit quality will decline on mortgages in order to meet
made up quotas for minority communities. There will be intense pressure on
banks to make loans to low credit minority people. Remember subprime, and how
the government brought us that wonderous result when they outlawed red lining
and subprime became the thing to do. This will not be much different. Either
you have race blind strong underwriting, or you have loans going to people who
should not have them, and the result is later problems in the mortgage markets.
One more example of they never learn. If they reopened everything, and just mandated
masks and distancing, and if they opened all schools for 5 day attendance, the
economy would improve much faster, and there would likely not be much
difference in infections. CDC just released research that shows kids in school
are not at risk. The few kids who did get sick have mostly not gotten it in
school , and they have other health issues. There is no
reason not to fully open schools for 5 days in person, but the unions continue
to refuse and let kids get harmed. 75% of infections occur in the home, not in
public settings. If they fully reopened everything there would be far less need
for a stimulus program and additions to the debt. People wear masks often when
outside, not at home, so home gatherings is where the problem lies. If FL and
TX can be mostly open with no worse infection rates than CA and NY, then so can
CA and NY. This is not hard to understand that these blue state shutdowns are
as a result of politics, arrogance, or ignorance. The SEC has finally cracked down on Robinhood,
and forced them to reveal that they get paid by Wall St for delivering stock
orders to them. Robinhood just paid a big fine. As a result Robinhood
executions are relatively poor. The other online brokers do also get paid
to deliver orders, but are much better at execution. Whatever happens, there will not be one day
when the whistle blows and the economy suddenly shoots ahead. It will evolve as
the blue states and cities are slow to reopen, and as people reemerge from
their caves. Johns Hopkins believes that by late April the crisis will have
mostly passed, and some people will wonder why they need the vaccine anymore.
They also believe that between 30% and 50% of the adults in the Midwest have
had the virus in some form, and are now immune for another three years. If that
is so, then the rate of infection will drop quickly from here in those areas,
and with the vaccine we could see very few new cases by May-June. The economy
will be mostly reopened by then except maybe in a few blue state areas.
It causes you to wonder how come in places like CA with all sorts of lockdowns,
mask mandates and restrictions, the virus is raging, but in FL with few
restrictions, it is no worse, and there are lots of old people. Recovery will depend on industry, and
even within industries like hotels, it will depend on segment. Many malls will
close, and eventually get plowed under and redeveloped as mixed use projects.
Manufacturing will do very well as will distribution. Airlines will boom
by summer as the vaccine is widespread, and consumers rush to travel again.
Urban office will slowly reoccupy while office in places like Austin, Dallas,
Denver, Boise, Vegas, Nashville and Miami boom due to the flight from coastal
Dem run cities continues. Office staffs will be 25%-30% work from home full
time, another 25% or so come in two or three days a week, and maybe share desks
in some cases, retail centers continue to close, and distribution and
industrial booms. The oil industry will face enormous problems with new
regulations to try to shut them down. NYC and CA will
continue to bleed taxpayers, and TX and FL will boom beyond their best
projections. The shutdowns in Dem cities are
counter-productive. They shut restaurants where the infection rate is 1.4%
thereby driving people to have gatherings in their homes where the infection
rate is 75%. Makes perfect sense. The more they do shutdowns in NYC and CA the
more there is crime, homeless, and no way to make a living, but living costs
remain high. Now we have another result, which is retail sales down in November
as more shutdowns cost jobs. One very interesting thing is, while the left
attacks Wall St and the rich making a lot of money on stocks, they are solving
a sizable piece of their deficits in CA and NY from all of the taxes they are
collecting from all of the high profit stock sales due to trades in the stock
market. Without the booming stock market the blue states would be in even worse
trouble. The more they raise taxes and destroy life style, and chase away the
rich and Wall St firms and Silicon Valley companies, the less they collect
taxes on stock sales. The more you shutdown restaurants and other business, the
less sales taxes you collect. The less employees due to shutdowns the less
unemployment taxes. You just really wonder if any of these
politicians ever took an econ course. Makes you really wonder about the
governor of NJ if he ever learned anything when he worked at Goldman. The data
are very clear-raise taxes and the rich leave with their tax payments. Shut
down small business and tax collections decline, creating more need to raise
taxes to chase away more taxpayers. Wall St operations have changed
dramatically, and there is no need for everyone to be in NYC anymore. With the
end of stock commissions, cost of operating has become a huge issue, further
driving some of these operations out of Manhattan to places like FL. The
Wall St of today has little similarity to the Wall St I worked in. The losing cities will drown in deficits, and
their union pensions will face insolvency. Maybe we will be lucky and there
will finally be legislative actions to redo pensions which are now
unsustainable. Under Biden the changes needed are very unlikely. Government
pensions is the next financial crisis, and it is coming soon to a blue state
near you. There will be a massive political battle as we have seen these past
few weeks in DC over funding for states and cities. That fight is really all
about pension bailouts, and if the Republicans hold the Senate, it will get
even uglier. Blue states need to cut their wasteful budgets, and revise their
giveaway pension plans and health retirement programs, or there is no end to
the crisis. With Biden in the White House there will be no good solution unless
McConnell is leader. Biden has rehired the failed Obama cabinet and
agency heads, plus some others who happened to be black, Latino, or gay, but
with no other particular talents for their new roles. The appointment of Gina
McCarthy as head of environmental policy is a coming disaster. Combined with
his Interior Secy pick, fracking and pipelines are going to be under constant
attack, and US energy independence will be severely compromised. Areas of NY
and New England that are insufficiently supplied with gas will remain so to the
detriment of consumers. There is one saving grace. The 223 district and appeals
judges and SCOTUS judges will stop some of what the radicals will try to do
with fracking and other regulatory constraints. Hopefully there will be
injunctions preventing the worst things. Buttigieg could not manage a small
town and maintain roads, and now is Secy of
Transportation purely because he is gay. He has zero knowledge of
transportation. And now he is considering Iger as
ambassador to China. Iger is completely compromised by China. His appointment
would be a disaster for US policy re China. This entire group of Obama retreads, and
politically correct choices, will make many of the same mistakes they
made last time on foreign affairs and the economy in the belief that all they
need to do is talk nice to China, Russia, the EU and Iran, and rejoin various
organizations like Paris and the WTO, and all will be OK in the world. The
definition of an idiot is to do the same mistakes twice. This crew is obviously
unable to learn from the past, and will think they can just redo the Iran deal
and they will behave properly. As to China they already are saying we need to
“cooperate”, despite the revelations of the past couple of weeks of how China
has infiltrated universities, and influenced Wall St, the press, and even
Congress. The constant complaints that Trump destroyed
alliances and we all need to just get together again and deal with China as a
group, are naïve in my view. Sometimes I wonder, am I the only one paying
attention to what is really happening. China is buying influencers all over,
and dangling dollars and a huge consumer market, and many are jumping at the
bait. The EU has no foreign policy as a group, and they act individually when
it suits their purpose regardless of what the US wishes. Examples: Germany is
trying to go ahead with the Nordstream pipeline despite everyone else saying
don’t do it. They are now about to allow Huawei to provide equipment to
its 5G system despite the US saying it will compromise all German
communications and needs to be barred. There had been no real attention paid to NATO
all through the Obama administration, and NATO became a paper military force
unable to do much of anything. They let the US fund it all, until Trump said no
more. That is what group think and alliances result in- no concerted action until
it is too late, or until someone like Trump says -this makes no sense for the
US. This is not the fifties and sixties any more when Europe needed us, and the
cold war was at its height. Asian countries live off of trade with China. Do
you really think they will jointly do things to pushback on China and lose
their main trade partner. No, they will do more in
order to do more trade with China. These nations have a very different
agenda from the US. China is an existential threat to the US now, and we need
to continue to confront them, not to play nice. If the EU and the UN and WTO have all failed
to act against China thus far given the virus, Hong Kong, concentration camps,
South China Sea, and threats against Taiwan, what makes anyone think they will
suddenly do anything when a China appeaser like Biden is president ,
and we rejoin these organizations that concede to China on many fronts. Just
recall that they all thought when China joined the WTO they would play by the
rules. China just used WTO to cheat even more. China will continue to con the
world, and use cash to bribe capitulation made to look like cooperation. China
used the WHO to convince the world the virus was no problem until they were
able to spread it across the globe and change the outcome of the US election.
But Biden wants to immediately rejoin these organizations. Don’t believe any numbers Stacy Abrams puts
out, or that you hear or read. Karl Rove went thru the real numbers, and Abrams
and the press are lying again, by huge amounts. There are not a lot of new
signups for Dems this election, and a bunch are Republicans. In addition, the
Republicans have hired 4,000 poll watchers and an army of lawyers to be present
at all moments on election day checking for duplicate voters, and doing
signature verification, and to stay with machines and ballots all night.
This time they are getting new rules for voting specified now, and if not good
and set now, they will be in court by next week. There will not be any chance
for the games Abrams was playing, especially in Fulton county where most of the
problems occurred. The Secy of state seems to be being left out of all this, or
is not being paid attention to as he has not prosecuted any of the over 1700
people caught cheating on Nov 3, nor Stacy Abrams group which was caught
registering dead people. This time Republicans will be on every vote and they
will win. Janet Yellen just met with the leaders of the
Defund Police movement and BLM, and pledged to make racial issues the
“centerpiece” of the recovery efforts. She also agreed to “pursue long term
systemic racial issues and structural issues causing the wealth disparity.”
Translation: instead of focus on rebuilding the economy itself, and growth in
GDP, they will instead create all sorts of new racial quota rules for lenders,
employers, and landlords, and new subsidy programs. As we saw starting in Q2
2017, the best way to help minorities is to create a robust economy where there
are a lot less regulations and lower taxes, resulting in more jobs than
workers. Low income wages were rising at 9%, and family income was finally
growing again after ten years of no growth. In early 2020 we had record low
unemployment and record high wages for minorities, and no new regulations,
subsidies and entitlements. Q1 had very low gas prices, which is like a wage
increase for low income workers, which will go away as they try to shut down
fracking through new regulation, and pressure on banks not to lend to the oil
industry by pushing through higher capital reserve requirements on oil industry
loans. With the Biden/Yellen policies, unemployment will be higher than it
needs to be for minorities, and gas prices will rise. But they will look good
to the radicals. They simply never learn anything from history. This is the
first step in how they will hold back growth, just as they did in 2009-2016.
Same people doing the same idiotic, counterproductive things. How did China pick out an ordinary city
council guy in CA to be a target, and then help him get elected. How did Pelosi
decide to take this novice and put him on Intel plus the committee that
oversees CIA. Who of her friends in San Fran pushed Swalwell to get these
assignments. Why was Swalwell’s father and sister still in touch with the spy
until two weeks ago when the story broke, and why is Pelosi refusing to remove
him from these committees. What was drug addict, totally unqualified
Hunter getting paid for if not access to Joe. And if Joe never knew anything
about Hunter selling access to him, what was Hunter and his partners selling
for millions of dollars. What did Joe think was going on in the office he got
keys to. Did he ever ask Hunter what was he doing on Airforce II flying to
China with him for 14 hours. Why did Joe get the Ukraine prosecutor fired soon
after Hunter starting getting paid by Burisma. And the press refuses to ask
these questions. Why not just ask do you know Tony Bobalinsky, and did you ever
meet him. And now Joe says Hunter is “the smartest guy I know”. Wow. For all my Republican readers who still think
the election is not over, or that there will be some sort of maneuver on Jan 6
to elect Trump: I try to deal in reality, not hope. I have no doubt there was
real fraud, and that the MI audit of Dominion has uncovered major issues, and
1700 people voted twice in GA, 1100 dead people and 4,000 illegal aliens voted
in NV, etc. However, the SCOTUS and other judges have made it clear this
is a political issue, and not a legal one in their view- they just do not want
to be involved in overturning the election. You can disagree all you want, but
that is reality now. I try to just deal in reality, and the implications
flowing from that, not wishes or other concepts that are never happening. If Republicans hold the Senate, they
will conduct a major investigation and report on all the fraud, and work to
prevent any rerun of that in GA, and in 2022 when they can get complete control
of Congress. McConnell said it is over, and that makes it so. We need to move
on and learn what really happened, and prevent it from happening again. Mail in
balloting was the disaster that was predicted and led to fraud. 2020 will go
down in history as the worst political fraud and abuse of power by Congress in
decades, or maybe in history. Between the Biden crimes, what Durham is going
to announce, and this voting situation, and the whole Russia hoax and Ukraine
impeachment, there has been extraordinary criminality on a massive scale by the
Dems. And the press has covered it all up, and helped push the false
narratives, which is a major scandal of its own that must change, or we lose
democracy. Between universities, the press, and other institutions pushing
identity politics, and a cancel culture, democracy is at major risk right now.
Here are some interesting numbers. Trump
actually won a higher percent of voters in cities than in 2016. He actually
went up 3.7% in Philadelphia in share of voters despite the apparent cheating.
The problem for Trump was in the suburbs. There he lost support by a wide
margin. The further the suburb was from the city the better he did, but his
margins still declined. The interesting thing was, Republicans down ballot did
better than Trump in these same suburbs. Republicans won Congressional
races where Trump lost in these suburbs. This implies Trump lost based on his
personality, and the burbs are still centrist. Important data for 2022.
Biden did worse in working class and Hispanic counties. In all, the suburbs is
where the battles will be fought, and the Republicans did not do so badly as
the press would have you believe. Trump lost the election due to his own
personality and tweets, and the all out attacks by the press and Silicon
Valley, and not due to his policies, or his achievements. Republicans can
win control in 22, and Nicky Haley could win the suburbs easily in 24. +++ Livelihoods and liberty left in the lurch |
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