Run John, Run! John James for the U.S. Senate in Michigan! A great candidate who ran an impressive race in a very tough year last time around. With President Trump at the top of the ticket, John James could very easily be Michigan’s next United States Senator!
House Democrat’s Absurd Contempt Ploy: Pure politics!!! As Congressional Democrats prepare to hold attorney general William Barr in contempt over his supposed lack of transparency, it’s worth remembering that he has made available to top Democrats the entirety of volume II of the Mueller report, save for two full and seven partial lines, which were redacted to protect grand jury secrecy in keeping with federal law. I hope America pays attention!
Tax Returns: Call me crazy, but I really don’t care about what tax breaks or business strategy Trump used to get rich. HOWEVER… I would really love to see the tax returns for Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden who entered office with NO wealth and get rich while in office and retire as rich multi-millionaires?!? Just saying.
60 Plus Weekly Newsreel: A great, short and easy to listen summary of the week’s news in a short video who just don’t want to read it all:) Please enjoy and share with friends.
Visit the newsreel!
Here is the summary:
Older Americans are relying too much on Social Security as a main source of income
Many older Americans view Social Security as a financial workhorse for their golden years. Yet the program provides far less income than they think, partly because they tap the entitlement before reaching retirement age, a new survey shows.
‘Medicare for All’: Bernie Sanders’ political pipe dream
Berniecare proposal has no mechanics (and no hope) for leaping from today’s fragmented health care system to single-payer.
McConnell on 2020: ‘I can’t wait’ to debate Dems on ‘Medicare for None’
“It’s not just Bernie Sanders, McConnell said “There are four other credible colleagues of mine running for president saying they’re signed up for the ‘Medicare for None’ idea and they’ve also signed up for the Green New Deal. So we’re happy to have that debate.
-Saul Anuzis
Maybe It’s Time To Cut The Federal Government In Half
I think the time is coming for an idea that is so old that it is new again: cutting the Federal government in half.
The idea is: cancel all Federal welfare-type programs, including all means-tested welfare programs (apparently there are over 150 of them), all healthcare-related programs including Medicare and Medicaid, all education-related, arts-related and housing-related programs, and anything else of this sort — in short, most everything except for the military, national parks, and maybe some public works. Social Security could eventually be reformed to a system of private retirement accounts, known as a “provident fund” system and in use today in over thirty countries.
No “block grants” or other such schemes. Just terminate the programs. This would make State governments responsible for all such welfare-type programs, to do as they see fit, and to impose taxes appropriately to pay for them. Give them twelve months to get ready. States like California and Massachusetts would be free to introduce the single-payer healthcare system of their dreams, while other states, like Utah or Texas, might have more private-sector-based solutions. States are active in all of these spheres already.
Top Dems Now Have Access to All But Two Full, Seven Partial Lines of Mueller’s Obstruction Report
As Congressional Democrats prepare to hold attorney general William Barr in contempt over his supposed lack of transparency, it’s worth remembering that he has made available to top Democrats the entirety of volume II of the Mueller report, save for two full and seven partial lines, which were redacted to protect grand jury secrecy in keeping with federal law.
In order to provide lawmakers with greater transparency into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, the Department of Justice placed a less-redacted version of his report in a secure room on Capitol Hill, and granted access to that room to congressional leaders of both parties, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of intelligence and judiciary committees in the House and Senate.
As of this writing, not one of the six Democrats granted access to what amounts to 99.9 percent of volume II of the Mueller report, which details the president’s behavior as it relates to obstruction of justice, have taken the opportunity to examine it. If they had, they could have viewed the entirety of Mueller’s obstruction case against Trump except for the following seven redactions, two of which are applied to footnotes.
Devastating: Liberal Law Professor Clinically Dismantles Democrats’ Contempt Case Against Barr
Left-leaning law professor Jonathan Turley — who has stood out in recent years as a rare legal analyst unwilling to allow his political views to cloud his constitutional judgments — has written an absolutely devastating column addressing House Democrats’ efforts to hold Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt of Congress. Anti-Trump partisans have compiled a list of grievances against Barr, many of them specious, but House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler has chosen to focus the contempt charge on the Attorney General’s unwillingness to release a tiny redacted fraction of the Mueller report. Turley says this is “the weakest possible contempt claim,” warning that pursuing it will damage the House, not the administration. Here’s the core of his argument on the redactions-based contempt complaint:
The problem is that the contempt action against Barr is long on action and short on contempt. Indeed, with a superficial charge, the House could seriously undermine its credibility in the ongoing conflicts with the White House…As someone who has represented the House of Representatives, my concern is that this one violates a legal version of the Hippocratic oath to “first do no harm.†This could do great harm, not to Barr, but to the House. It is the weakest possible case to bring against the administration, and likely to be an example of a bad case making bad law for the House…Barr promised to release as much of the report as possible, and he has delivered. Indeed, he is not expressly given the authority to release the confidential report. Yet, he not only released it but declared executive privilege waived on its content. The key obstruction portion of the report is virtually unredacted. Just 8 percent of the public report was redacted, largely to remove material that could undermine ongoing investigations. The sealed version of the report given to Congress only had 2 percent redacted. Democrats are therefore seeking a contempt sanction on a report that is 98 percent disclosed and only lacks grand jury material.
Barr restricted access to the 98 percent disclosed report, as opposed to the 92 percent public report, due to the inclusion of evidence impacting ongoing prosecutions. He has offered to expand the number of members and staff to review that material but insists on it remaining protected. But this has nothing to do with the redactions. It is the 2 percent solution to a major political dilemma of the left. Faced with a report that rejected the collusion theories of their running narrative, Democrats want to focus on those 2 percent of redactions rather than over 400 pages of findings. So Congress now will ask a court to find civil contempt for Barr refusing to release grand jury information. The District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected a district court claim to have the “inherent supervisory authority†to disclose grand jury matters because of great public interest. To make matters worse, the Justice Department has now said the president has invoked executive privilege over the entire report, making this contempt claim even less likely to prevail over the long run.
FBI’s Steele story falls apart: False intel and media contacts were flagged before FISA
The FBI’s sworn story to a federal court about its asset, Christopher Steele, is fraying faster than a $5 souvenir T-shirt bought at a tourist trap.
Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.
The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.
Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.
It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings†and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable†and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining†to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.
Mark Meadows: FBI ‘Well Aware the Dossier Was a Lie’ Before Moving to Spy on Trump Campaign
A newly-uncovered document suggests that the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ), including the FBI, was “well aware†that foreign agent Christopher Steele was trying to interfere in the 2016 presidential election with disinformation — and yet still used his materials to spy on American citizens and the Trump campaign, according to Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC).
“[O]fficials at the FBI and (Department of Justice) DOJ were well aware the dossier was a lie — from very early on in the process all the way to when they made the conscious decision to include it in a FISA application,†Meadows said Tuesday in a statement to The Hill’s John Solomon. “The fact that Christopher Steele and his partisan research document were treated in any way seriously by our Intelligence Community leaders amounts to malpractice.â€
Meadows’ statement came in response to a federal document recently unveiled by a Citizens United lawsuit — an email from Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec, who met with Steele in October 2016 and recounted his desire to spread the lurid allegations of his since-debunked dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump. Solomon wrote on Tuesday:
John James meets with Trump as GOP recruits him for Michigan run
Republicans are recruiting John James to run for Congress in Michigan in 2020. It’s just not clear which side of the Capitol will land him.
Both House and Senate GOP leadership are encouraging James, a military veteran and businessman, to run for office for a second time next year after losing to Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow in 2018. Senate Republicans believe he has the best chance of making the next Michigan Senate race competitive and help protect their majority, while House Republicans hope he’ll run to flip a swing district the GOP lost in 2018.
James, who is close with the Trump administration and was floated earlier this year as a potential United Nations ambassador, has spoken with party leaders in recent weeks. President Donald Trump met with James at the White House on Tuesday, according to four people familiar with the meeting. Vice President Mike Pence, meanwhile, met with James last week during a trip to Michigan.
Data Disprove the ‘Voter Suppression’ Myth
It has long been an article of faith on the political left that Republicans win elections by disenfranchising certain voting blocs. We are told that requiring voters to present photo identification at polling places not only depresses minority turnout but is tantamount to racial discrimination. The evidence challenging these assumptions gets stronger with every passing election, but Democrats and most of the political press don’t seem to have noticed.
At an NAACP dinner in Detroit on Sunday, Sen. Kamala Harris told the audience that “voter suppression†in Georgia and Florida cost Democrats gubernatorial races in the 2018 midterm elections. “Let’s say this loud and clear,†said Ms. Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate. “Without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia. Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida.â€
California Dems Legalizing Soviet-Style Reporting of Legal Gun-Owning Co-Workers
A little over a year ago I left one of the most beautiful places on Earth — California — because the Democrats running the state were even worse than the Democrats ruining various other states and municipalities throughout America.
I wrote a farewell post here titled “Dear California: Call Me When the Commies Leave” in which I chronicled many of my problems with the Democratic supermajority in the California legislature.
Many think I use the term “commie” flippantly, but I assure you that is not the case. When I call someone a commie, he or she is acting like a commie.
One thing I never doubted for a moment was that the Democrats running the Golden State would continue to prove worthy of the description:
How NATO Could Solve the Suwalki Gap Challenge
Sebastien Roblin recently wrote a good summary of the increasingly popular narrative on the Suwalki Gap and—unintentionally—an equally good representation of the glaring gaps in it. Roblin notes that the forty-mile (more common measurement is sixty miles) corridor squeezed between Kaliningrad Oblast of Russia and Belarus represents a “natural chokepoint Russia could potentially assail from multiple directions to pinch off columns of NATO troops attempting to reinforce the Baltics.†Russia’s ability to prevent reinforcements from arriving is expected to enable its forces to occupy the Baltic states in thirty-six to sixty hours, according to a RAND Corporation study. Referring to the 2018 CEPA study authored by retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, Roblin reiterates the solution to the conundrum: reinforce conventional deterrence by enhancing NATO military presence in the Baltic states and the ability to quickly amass troops on the Polish side of the corridor to keep it open.
The scenario sounds scary—and is intended to be scary—but leaves several important aspects of the dilemma without proper discussion. One aspect is the actual status of the Suwalki Gap and the other is the solutions, which could actually work. A closer look at these omissions casts the problem in a very different light.
For fairness, analysis of the situation should proceed from the same premises as all studies of the Suwalki dilemma—the worst-case scenario of Russia seeking to occupy the Baltic states. It should leave aside the bigger question of whether Russia would want to occupy the Baltic states (in case of war, Poland is a vastly more attractive target) or can reasonably hope that it could do so without triggering war with the entire NATO. That premise should be kept in mind because inclusion of in-depth analysis of Russian intentions could change the picture in quite dramatic ways.
