Never forget to sacrifices so many made for our precious freedoms!
God Bless America!
Obama Must Be Scared: As President Trump promised to declassify information about the politicized Russian Collusion Investigation, Speaker Pelosi declared: “We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States”.
The Obama Administration is about to enter into the “who knew what, when” mode!
Newsreel for This Week:
Trump: Not possible for Democrats to ‘investigate and legislate at the same time’
Trump’s comments came one day after he abruptly ended an infrastructure meeting with Democratic leaders.
Collins offering bill to boost battery research as GOP pushes energy ‘innovation’
Senator Collins’s bill looks to provide $60 million annually for five years toward developing batteries and other types of next-generation storage as a backstop for intermittent generation.
59{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} of Retirees Use Social Security as a Major Source of Income — and That’s a Problem.
If you’re planning to rely heavily on Social Security when your career comes to an end, you should know that in doing so, you’ll risk falling short on retirement income.
Visit the Newsreel!
–Saul Anuzis
If You Believe Pelosi and Schumer, I Want to Sell You a Bridge
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she’s praying for the president. Well, so am I, the difference being that I really am, whereas she’s cynically pretending to, to show her mock concern over his mental state.
Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the rest of the congressional Democratic cabal have treated President Trump abominably, and it’s getting old. Do they assume Americans have endless patience for their ongoing investigation charade?
Consider the latest brouhaha between Trump and the Democratic leaders. They were scheduled to meet at the White House on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan when Pelosi decided to poison the punch bowl.
Ahead of the meeting, Pelosi and five investigative committee leaders spoke with other Democrats who had called for an impeachment inquiry. Afterward, she made an unsolicited public statement.
“We do believe it’s important to follow the facts,” she told reporters. “We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States, and we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up.”
And she feigns outrage that Trump cut the meeting short?
Trump Unveils Sweeping New Immigration Plan
President Donald Trump unveiled his new immigration plan Thursday, which will focus on border security and a merit-based legal immigration system.
“Our proposal is pro-American, pro-immigrant, and pro-worker,” the president said during an event in the White House Rose Garden. “It’s just common sense.”
To secure the border, Trump’s plan calls for infrastructure, or a wall, at 33 strategic locations, modernized ports of entry, and expediting immigration court proceedings and removal processes. Trump said the plan will also create a self-sustaining “border security trust fund,” generated from funds collected from border crossings.
The president promised that asylum claims will be expedited, stating “if you have a proper claim you will be quickly admitted … If you don’t, you will promptly be returned home,” but he did not offer explicit details as to how he plans to speed up the process.
The administration also hopes to revamp the visa system to reward highly-skilled immigrants, although the plan does not reduce the overall levels of legal immigration to the United States.
More visas will be awarded to immigrants who are younger workers, have valuable skills, have an offer of employment, have an advanced education, and earn higher wages. Applicants will also be required to be financially self-sufficient, speak English, and pass a civics exam. Trump described the new program as an “easy-to-navigate points-based system.”
Far from border, US cities feel effect of migrant releases
A surge of asylum-seeking families has been straining cities along the southern U.S. border for months, but now the issue is flowing into cities far from Mexico, where immigrants are being housed in an airplane hangar and rodeo fairgrounds and local authorities are struggling to keep up with the influx.
U.S. immigration officials have eyed spots in states like Florida, Michigan and New York, to help process the migrants before they move on to their destination, which could be anywhere in the U.S.
And in border states, cities that are several hours’ drive from Mexico are already seeing sometimes hundreds of migrants a day.
The Steele Dossier and the ‘VERIFIED APPLICATION’ That Wasn’t
Former officials are fighting over who deserves blame.
Here’s what you need to know: In rushing out their assessment of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Obama-administration officials chose not to include the risible Steele-dossier allegations that they had put in their “VERIFIED APPLICATION” for warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) because . . . wait for it . . . the allegations weren’t verified.
And now, the officials are squabbling over who pushed the dossier. Why? Because the dossier — a Clinton-campaign opposition-research screed, based on anonymous Russian sources peddling farcical hearsay, compiled by a well-paid foreign operative (former British spy Christopher Steele) — is crumbling by the day.
As I write, we mark the two-year anniversary of Robert Mueller’s appointment to take over the Russiagate probe — which is fast transforming into the Spygate probe. Special Counsel Mueller inherited the investigation seven months after the Obama Justice Department and FBI sought a FISC warrant to monitor former Trump-campaign adviser Carter Page. By then, it was already acknowledged that dossier information was “salacious and unverified,” to quote congressional testimony by former FBI director James Comey.
That was problematic on a number of levels.
Schiff Wanted Obama To Declassify Russia Docs — If Trump Does It, He’s ‘Un-American’
Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff said Thursday that President Donald Trump’s decision to declassify information related to the origins of the Russia probe was “un-American.” Just more than two years ago, however, Schiff called on then-President Barack Obama to declassify some of the very same information.
On the heels of Trump’s decision to give Barr wide latitude with regard to declassifying the pertinent information, Schiff tweeted, “While Trump stonewalls the public from learning the truth about his obstruction of justice, Trump and Barr conspire to weaponize law enforcement and classified information against their political enemies.
The coverup has entered a new and dangerous phase. This is un-American.”
But in December 2016, just a month prior to Trump’s inauguration, Schiff called on Obama to declassify as much information as possible, arguing that Trump would not allow it once he was in office
Both Comey And Brennan Voted Communist
Both Comey And Brennan Voted Communist While Cold Journalist Paul Sperry noted on Wednesday that former FBI Director James Comey admitted in a 2003 interview to having voted Communist before casting his ballot for Jimmy Carter in 1980.
The heads of Obama’s FBI and CIA both voted for Communists during the Cold War, yet were somehow able to move up the ranks within the same US intelligence community that had spent decades fighting that very ideology.
“In college, I was left of center,” Comey told New York Magazine, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”
Of note, Comey’s wife and four daughters were all giant Hillary Clinton supporters who wanted her to win “really badly.”
Former CIA Director John Brennan, meanwhile, admitted in 2016 to voting Communist in the 1970s. When asked at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference whether past activism would create a barrier for diverse candidates who want to enter the intelligence community, Brennan said that he was forced to admit to voting for Communist Gus Hall for president in 1976, according to CNN.
DNA tests reveal 30{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} of suspected fraudulent migrant families were unrelated
Some of the migrant families arrested at the southern border weren’t actually families.
In a pilot program, approximately 30{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} of rapid DNA tests of immigrant adults who were suspected of arriving at the southern border with children who weren’t theirs revealed the adults were not related to the children, an official involved in the system’s temporary rollout who asked to be anonymous in order to speak freely told the Washington Examiner Friday.
“There’s been some concern about, ‘Are they stepfathers or adopted fathers?’” the official said. “Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members.”
In some incidents where Immigration and Customs Enforcement told the adults they would have to take a cheek swab to verify a relationship with a minor, several admitted the child was not related and did not take the DNA test, which was designed by a U.S. company.
Russia’s Powerful Economic Policies
Last year Russians across the country protested against legislation that raised the retirement age from 55 to 60 for women and 60 to 65 for men, but President Vladimir Putin still signed the bill into law in October. In response to these pension changes, the president went from winning 77 percent of the vote in the March 2018 presidential election to having a 64 percent approval rating now. For many in the United States who only notice Russia when the old Cold War adversary meddles in elections or asserts itself in places like Ukraine or Syria, this commotion over domestic policy came as a surprise.
Fortunately, for those who don’t follow these issues regularly, Chris Miller—an assistant professor of international history at Tufts University—provides a superb review of Russia’s economic policies in Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia. This book helps readers understand why Putin addressed pension policies and why citizens protested, and it also offers a slightly different perspective from writers who emphasize Russian kleptocracy. While affirming corruption is problematic, Miller strives to demonstrate how the country is much more complex as competent technocrats and corrupt oligarchs compete for influence. Those technocrats, according to Putinomics, prevented the country from collapsing economically and allowed Moscow to exert influence globally. Putin’s Russia still has numerous challenges today, but Miller argues the federation should be compared to fellow petrostate Venezuela since both were similar in the late 1990s. Venezuela even had a better credit rating and a higher per-capita income when Putin came to power. By this standard, “Putinomics” has been unexpectedly successful.
Attorney General Barr puts former intel bosses on notice
Things seem to be moving quickly now. It has been a remarkable few weeks in American history. Momentum is building toward uncovering the distasteful possibility that the targeting of a U.S. presidential campaign was actually a political operation, fostered at the highest levels of government, masquerading as an FBI counterintelligence investigation.
Attorney General William Barr has signaled that his interest in examining the origins of the investigation into the Trump campaign extends beyond whether the FBI operated “by the book,” as former FBI Director James Comey asserts. Barr also wants to understand the role that the larger intelligence community, or IC, may have played in all of this.
Barr has thrown punches that have left an interesting mix of characters with a standing eight count. Certain eyes around D.C. are a little glassy right now.
Maps: Sanctuary Cities, Counties, and States
The sanctuary jurisdictions are listed below. These cities, counties, and states have laws, ordinances, regulations, resolutions, policies, or other practices that obstruct immigration enforcement and shield criminals from ICE — either by refusing to or prohibiting agencies from complying with ICE detainers, imposing unreasonable conditions on detainer acceptance, denying ICE access to interview incarcerated aliens, or otherwise impeding communication or information exchanges between their personnel and federal immigration officers.
A detainer is the primary tool used by ICE to gain custody of criminal aliens for deportation. It is a notice to another law enforcement agency that ICE intends to assume custody of an alien and includes information on the alien’s previous criminal history, immigration violations, and potential threat to public safety or security.
