Any unbiased and objective person has to conclude several things:
a) The FBI and Justice Department were in cahoots for an extended period trying to support Hillary while pillorying Trump.
b) Some of the most senior officials of these agencies were engaged in employing a variety of methods from constructing and paying for false reports, making submission of these known false reports in order to obtain illegal FISA warrants, leaking material and lying in a variety of testimonies before Congressional Committees.
c) The Justice Department and The FBI have engaged in obstruction by refusing requests for documents they are legally obligated to provide constitutionally authorized Congressional Committees charged with oversight.
d) President Obama engaged various government agencies to violate constitutional rights of American citizens and then officials involved either lied and/or evaded telling the truth about their involvement. These agencies and departments were The Justice Department, The IRS, various agencies dispensing weapons to Mexican warlords and paying hostage cash in the billions to Iran among other matters involving breaking laws or failing to enforce laws.
History will record The Obama's Administration engaged in abuse of their constitutional responsibilities and engaged in illegal activities which reached historical proportions. No one in the mass media called their hands, Congress acted meekly and impotently though some ineffective protests came from The Republican Aisle.
The depth of the illegalities and their width makes anything pertaining to Watergate small by comparison.
While all of this was happening Trump haters and those in the mass media have been able to shift exposure of these abuses or cast doubt about them because of Trump's ability to offend and shoot himself in his own feet by reason of his own over the board conduct.
e) Finally, Mueller, apparently, has gone beyond investigating the allegation of Russian Collusion and now is in pursuit of Trump for obstruction while totally disregarding the various officials who have been engaged in activities noted in a,b and c above.
We will not know whether Trump's claim that Mueller is engaged in a "witch hunt"is factual until Mueller releases his final report but it is evident something is amiss at the very highest levels of our government and seems to have, at the very least, been instigated/condoned/known by Obama as well.
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This from a dear friend, fellow memo reader and strong supporter.
"What you do is both important and meaningful: Don't stop!!!!
Big Cousins are monitoring communications, but you must continue.
B--"
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Israel gains support as Turkey loses their's. (See 1 below.)
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This from an Aussie who refutes the previous posting from the alleged Australian police office:
"
Snopes says false. The gun buy backs were in 1996 & 2003 so the stuff is old.
However, I am continually amazed at the ingenious ways Aussies are killing each other. Hammer bludgeonings, pushing in front of trains and busses, snakes in socks come to mind. I suspect our murder rate is slightly lower but not much and the burglaries and robberies are probably higher."
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My dear friend and fellow memo reader got the message I was trying to convey in my previous memo.:
"The deep state.To see them listed was a shocking and horrifying nightmare.Thanks for posting. Too many Americans fail to see the liberty lost from ceding so many functions to government control [and funded by taxes taken from our income]. S------"
And:
Then a response from a friend and fellow memo reader pertaining to my comment about social media giants seeking to restrain conservative speech. (See 2 below.)
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Tobin reflects on NOvember and is prescient.. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)U.S. President Donald Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Monday, which includes a $550 million assistance package to Israel and temporarily halts the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Turkey.
This comes amid tensions between the United States and Ankara, which is currently holding an American pastor hostage, among other political moves.
The $717 billion measure includes a bipartisan measure honoring a decade-long memorandum of understanding between America and Israel, with the United States giving $3.8 billion annually to the Jewish state.
The NDAA, titled the “John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for 2019,” authorizes funds for research and development pertaining to weapon-defense systems, including the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 systems told help Israel defend against missile and rocket threats. Additionally, the law provides $50 million for joint U.S.-Israeli work on counter-tunnel technology, which has emerged as a major security threat to Israel in recent years from the Palestinian terror group Hamas.
The annual military blueprint also temporarily blocks the U.S. delivery of the F-35 fighter jets to Turkey in response to the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson, whom the country accuses of participating in the failed 2016 coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Earlier this month, the United States slapped sanctions on two top Turkish government officials involved in Brunson’s detention. The White House also placed aluminum and steel tariffs on Turkey, and Trump said last Friday that he approved a doubling of those tariffs. The tariffs and sanctions have caused Turkey’s currency, the lira, to crash.
Diliman Abdulkader, director of the Kurdish Project at the Endowment for Middle East Truth, helped advise lawmakers regarding the Turkey provision in the NDAA and supports the current U.S. measures against Turkey.
“The F-35 is a big step in basically telling Turkey you’re not too big to fail,” Abdulkader told JNS. “Yes, they are a NATO ally, but the United States is also concerned for its own national security interests, and based on the rhetoric coming from Erdoğan, he seems to be threatening not only NATO interests but the United States as well.”
“[The] United States must adapt to the reality that we are not dealing with the same Turkey as in the past. Turkey under Erdogan is aggressive and contradicts American interests both in Europe and in the Middle East,” said Abdulkader. “Therefore, we have to change our foreign policy accordingly that will further isolate and pressure Turkey. We have to keep in mind all of Turkey’s internal and external problems are the doing of the Turkish government themselves not the United States.”
Regarding U.S. sanctions and tariffs against Turkey, Abdulkader said that this pressure campaign cannot be limited to the country’s custody of Brunson.
“Erdoğan’s hostage-taking of Americans to gain diplomatic leverage is one of many violations he has committed,” he said. “There are countless of human-rights violations by Turkey that must be considered part of the equation, including Turkish threats against Americans in Syria, the Kurds and, most recently, an attempt to raid and arrest American officials in Incirlik Air Base” in the city of Adana, Turkey.
Aykan Erdemir, who served in the Turkish parliament from 2011 to 2015 and serves as a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told JNS that the relationship between America and Turkey goes beyond the F-35 jets.
The first issue on the U.S.-Turkish relationship is that as the bilateral crisis between the U.S. and Turkey deepens, the economic crisis gets worse,” he said.
“In the next few months to come, the more important question is Turkey’s bailout.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a bill last month that would block Turkish access to international financial resources, such as the International Monetary Fund.
Transferring the F-35s to Turkey would be “a concern,” Erdemir said, but it would be “a security matter, and the implications would not be immediate, whereas with the economic crisis and with access to international financial institutions, the consequences would be immediate because we’re talking week, if not, months.”
The NDAA will need an appropriations bill to fund it.
Such a measure already passed the Senate Appropriations Committee; its chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), has been trying to get it on the chamber floor for a full vote in order to get it to the president before the fiscal year deadline at the end of September.
The House of Representatives passed its appropriations bill last month. Any bill from the upper chamber would need to be reconciled with the House in conference committee negotiations
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2) "Dick, the problem with Google is a significant one, I, like you, have had several "warnings" form Google, because I regularly sent, to about 20 people, conservative material, including yours, I think they would find interesting.
I am not a fan of government intervention in a private sector business, but Google, (I don't use Tweeter or Face book) is a unique business, they claim to be "just a platform" for the "free exchange of ideas."We both know that is not true. They are clearly a liberal progressive business which suppresses Conservative sites whenever possible. Their response is that their "algorithms" are neutral and just "happen" to block Conservative sites under their "hate speech" guidelines.
My short term solution to the problem was to open a Yahoo account and take anything that I get from Conservative sites, like Heritage Foundation, or Bearing Arms or Washington Times etc., in my Google account, copy them to the Yahoo site and send them out to my correspondents from there.
My longer term solution to the problem is for the Federal Government to threaten these Internet companies with regulation under the FCC rules since they are clearly acting as purveyor's of "opinion news" that they agree with, much the same as Rush Limbaugh or Andrew Wilcow or CNN do, since their "Algorithms" clearly discriminate against free speech they don't agree with. If they don't change their "Algorithms," which they obviously can do, then Government regulation may be required. After all, Google seems perfectly happy to comply with Chinese government regulations so that they can operate in China, perhaps what we need is for the US Government to set the "guidelines" for their "Algorithms" so that they don't discriminate against Conservatives.
We could get this moving with a #me too" campaign of our own having thousands of Conservative bloggers, large and small writing to the FCC and their Congressman complaining about Google and urging Government intervention unless they agree to stop discriminating against Conservatives.
B-- D-----"
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3)
In this week’s gubernatorial primaries in Florida and last month’s in Georgia, both Republicans and Democrats picked certain losers. Or so would’ve gone the conventional wisdom in previous years.
In the past, had the GOP picked candidates for governor that were Donald Trump clones, the assumption would’ve been it had gone off the deep end and thrown away any chance for victory. By the same token, had the Democrats picked African-American “progressives” to run in these two southern states, pundits would have said they’d conceded any chance of victory in November.
It’s not just that all four are poorly positioned to claim the center. All of them are acting as if the center — the place where conventional wisdom has always told us that elections are won — no longer exists. And in a moment when President Trump is on one side and those dedicated to “resisting” and impeaching him are on the other, they may be right.
Both primaries demonstrated anew that Trump and his supporters now wholly own the Republican Party. Kemp and DeSantis won not only on the strength of presidential endorsements but also by campaigns that were self-consciously Trumpian.
Kemp’s campaign ads might have been an attempt at humor but his boasts of using his pickup truck to round up illegal immigrants and to threaten one of his daughter’s suitors with a firearm made (as his defeated primary opponent Lt. Governor Casey Cagle noted) the race seem to be about “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck and who could be the craziest.”
DeSantis’ ads featured him reading his children stories about the president firing people and “building a wall” with blocks in order to portray himself, albeit with tongue in cheek, as a Trump zealot.
That shouldn’t make sense in states that are trending purple due to demographic changes. But in both states Democrats haven’t taken advantage of the Republicans’ rush to identify with Trump. In the recent past, the party has won victories in the South by nominating so-called “blue dog” centrists. But neither Abrams nor Gillum can credibly appeal to the center. Instead, they are counting on distaste for Trump and the hope that their fellow African-Americans turn out in the same numbers they did for Obama in 2008 and 2012.
Abrams is not just interested in being the first African-American woman to be elected governor of a state. She’s running on a progressive platform that is in keeping with her identity as a member of her party’s liberal wing.
Gillum is even more closely identified with the left. He upset the party establishment’s preferred candidate with the help of an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders and with the financial assistance of left-wing sugar daddies George Soros and Tom Steyer.
What happens when the hard right collides with the hard left in the changing South? Early polling is inconclusive and understandably so since there have been no comparable elections like these in recent memory.
Yet there may be more at stake here than who governs these two states. Both Florida and Georgia appear to be perfect stand-ins for a national contest two years from now that will probably pit Trump against what will not only likely be a liberal but also possibly a woman and/or a minority — especially if Democrats pick a relative newcomer like Sens. Kamala Harris or Corey Booker.
If the political climate in Georgia and Florida has tilted far enough to the left to enable Abrams and Gillum to beat Trump wannabes like Kemp and DeSantis, than it may be safe to assume the president’s chances of re-election are doomed. But if Kemp and DeSantis win because of Trump’s lingering appeal and because the Democrats’ lurch to the left will have squandered their chances for victory, then despite the Manafort and Cohen verdicts and threats of impeachment, no one should write off Trump’s chance for a second term.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org and a contributor to National Review.
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