Spygate: “Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy —use informants — on a political campaign, especially one of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA. Nowadays they say that anyone questioning their good faith is unpatriotic.”
“Has an outgoing administration ever worked to delegitimize and dislodge its successor like this? We hear many complaints, some justified, about Donald Trump’s departure from standard political norms. But the greater and more dangerous departure from norms may be that of the Obama officials seeking to overturn the results of the 2016 election.”
Come on civil libertarians from the left and the right, this is an outrage that shouldn’t be permitted at ANY level of a free country!?!
Trump Wins in 2020: President Trump wins in 2020 with a narrowing and dangerous path to re-election assuming Republicans are able to motivate our traditional base and manage to turn out those “Trump voters” who were not traditional Republican voters in key battleground states. The “winner take all” rules used to send electors to the Electoral College puts 10 states at best into play for all practical purposes, electing the President of the Battleground States of America versus the President of the United States of America.
President Trump is America’s President. By expanding the battleground nationwide and campaigning to every American in every state, the Trump re-election would arguably be in a position to maximize turnout amongst his supporters nationwide. A strategy worth exploring.
Newsreel for This Week:
Joe Biden just had the worst week of his 2020 campaign
Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is having its worst week since launching in April.
4 Reasons You Should Rethink Your Social Security Strategy
When was the last time you rethought your Social Security strategy? Do you even have a social security strategy?
President Trump joins world leaders in marking 75th D-Day anniversary
Trump was spending Wednesday and Thursday with other world leaders commemorating the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied northern France by Allied forces.
Visit the newsreel!
-Saul Anuzis
Political Ad Spending Will Approach $10 Billion in 2020, New Forecast Predicts
Spending on political advertisements is projected to hit a new high in 2020, surging $3.6 billion above the most recent presidential campaign year.
Political ad spending will total $9.9 billion in 2020, according to the latest U.S. advertising forecast from WPP PLC’s ad-buying unit GroupM. That would be up from $8.7 billion in 2018, when midterm congressional elections were held, and from $6.3 billion in 2016, when President Trump was elected.
The growth between presidential campaign years is accelerating. Political ad spending rose by $2 billion between 2012 and 2016, according to GroupM, and by $1.1 billion between 2008 and 2012.
Political spending in 2018 was “shockingly high,” said Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence at GroupM. “There’s just generally more activity in a presidential year than a non-presidential year, so whatever the 2018 number was, 2020 was going to be bigger.”
John James Announces 2020 Senate Bid In Michigan
Republican politician John James will launch another bid for one of Michigan’s U.S. Senate seats in 2020, the combat veteran announced Thursday.
The 37-year-old Army veteran officially announced his intentions during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” Thursday morning. If he wins the Republican nomination, James will likely challenge Democratic Sen. Gary Peters for Michigan’s Class II Senate seat.
James lost a closer-than-anticipated race to long-time Democratic Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow in November 2018 for the state’s Class I seat and is considered a rising star on the Right. Now, James will look to become Stabenow’s colleague in the Senate. (RELATED: Combat Veteran John James Wins Michigan GOP Senate Primary)
“I would like to announce that I am running for U.S. Senate after careful deliberation and thoughtful prayer,” James said. “I still have a passion for service. I still have a clear vision.”
James added that his business acumen and experience as “a job creator” makes him well qualified to address the challenges facing the American economy. (RELATED: Fox News’ Ed Henry Says John James Could Be Leading In The Polls If The Media Wasn’t So Biased)
John James announces second run at U.S. Senate; challenging Sen. Gary Peters
After towing the line for months, John James has officially announced he will run for U.S. Senate again in 2020; this time challenging Democratic Sen. Gary Peters.
With a scheduled appearance on Fox News Thursday morning, James tweeted that he had a ‘special announcement’ planned for the spot. Hours before the appearance on the cable news network, James’s campaign website said he is officially running for Michigan’s junior senator position.
Republicans join Democrats to kill Rand Paul’s fiscally responsible Pennies Plan because no one cares about the debt crisis
That was a nice decade of Republicans pretending to care about our $22 trillion national debt and annual multitrillion-dollar deficit. But as of Monday, we can safely say the Tea Party is over.
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced about as reasonable an attempt to rein in our exploding deficit with his Pennies Plan, which would cut 2{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} from on-budget spending per year for the next five years. Additionally, Paul’s plan would expressly protect Social Security, include instructions to make the individual income tax reforms passed by President Trump permanent, and expand access to Health Savings Accounts.
It’s a modest but tangible step in the right direction. It wouldn’t solve our debt crisis, but it would ameliorate it somewhat. So naturally, a large bipartisan majority voted to block it from the Senate floor.
Just 22 Republicans proved themselves to be great American patriots. Sixty-nine senators, including a whopping 25 Republicans, voted not to bring the bill to a final vote.
Why Did The Obama Administration Ignore Reports Of Russian Meddling?
During her hour-long interview last week of Attorney General William Barr, “CBS This Morning” journalist Jan Crawford focused mainly on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump. She also, however, questioned Barr on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) efforts to ensure that Russian attempts to interfere in our elections are not repeated in 2020.
This revealed the attorney general is probing a second scandal of the Obama administration related to the 2016 presidential election. Or it would be regarded as a second scandal if it garnered more attention: Why the Obama administration failed to forcefully respond to intelligence of Russian interference in our elections.
The DOJ has “an increasingly robust program that is focusing on foreign influence in our election process, with the FBI obviously taking the lead,” Barr told Crawford. But not enough was done in 2016, Barr acknowledged.
“Bob Mueller did some impressive work in his investigation, you know, identifying some of the Russian hackers and their influence campaign and you sort of wonder if that kind of work had been done starting in 2016, things could have been a lot different,” he said. Crawford replied, “It’s just hard to understand why it wasn’t taken more seriously.” Barr agreed, saying he had no idea why it wasn’t. “That’s one of the things I’m interested in looking at as part of my review of the Russia collusion investigation,” Barr stressed.
Giuliani calls for Mueller to be investigated for destruction of FBI evidence
Rudy Giuliani has an unmistakable New Year’s message for special counsel Robert Mueller: It is time for the chief investigator in the Russia case to be investigated in 2019.
In wide-ranging interviews with Hill.TV’s Buck Sexton and me on Wednesday and Thursday, President Trump’s defense lawyer pointedly accused Mueller’s office of destroying evidence by allowing text messages from now-fired FBI official Peter Strzok and his FBI lover, Lisa Page, to be erased in the Russia probe.
“Mueller should be investigated for destruction of evidence for allowing those text messages from Strzok to be erased, messages that would show the state of mind and tactics of his lead anti-Trump FBI agent at the start of his probe,” Giuliani said.
The Justice Department inspector general (IG) reported this month that it found large gaps in the preservation of official government text messages between Strzok and Page, the two top FBI agents who helped to start the Russia probe in 2016, who were having an affair at the time, and who expressed disdain for Trump.
The report said a technical glitch was to blame for the FBI’s failure to save those text messages, but the IG was able to recover more than 19,000 from the early part of the Russia probe before Mueller was named special prosecutor.
Donald Trump 2020 reelection in jeopardy, battleground state polls suggest
President Trump is underwater in key battleground states that are likely to decide the 2020 election — and polling shows trouble for him even in the traditional Republican bastions of Texas and Arizona.
While allies of the president cautioned against reading into polls so far away from Election Day, they acknowledged Mr. Trump’s path to 270 Electoral College votes will be tight.
His 2016 victory was sealed in Rust Belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but the latest numbers show he will be hard-pressed for a repeat. The leading two Democratic candidates, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and Sen. Bernard Sanders, both hold double-digit leads over Mr. Trump in Michigan, according to a Glengariff Group poll released this week.
Just 36{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} of the state’s voters are firmly behind Mr. Trump. The majority said they are looking to vote for someone else.
“The Blue Wall seems to be real, and President Trump’s 2016 victory was an anomaly which will be tough to repeat,” Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, told The Washington Times.
Russia’s Twitter disinformation campaign far more extensive than previously known
Russia’s campaign to sway American public opinion on social media during the 2016 campaign was more calculated, far-reaching and sophisticated than previously known, according to a study released Wednesday.
U.S. cybersecurity firm Symantec says the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm with links to the Kremlin, carried out “a highly professional campaign” that was “incredibly successful at pushing out and amplifying its messages.”
“While this propaganda campaign has often been referred to as the work of trolls, the release of the dataset makes it obvious that it was far more than that,” the firm wrote. “It was planned months in advance and the operators had the resources to create and manage a vast disinformation network.”
Researchers reviewed almost 4,000 accounts and 10 million tweets that Twitter released last year amid scrutiny of Moscow’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential race.
The study concluded that the Internet Research Agency conducted a carefully calculated operation that sought to inflame tensions on both sides of the ideological divide, rather than the previous assumptions that its posts were targeting just one side of the political spectrum.
Policing Noncitizen Voting: What We Have Here Is a Failure of Data
The downfall of Texas Secretary of State David Whitley began in January with the blockbuster announcement that tens of thousands of non-citizens might have voted illegally in recent Texas elections.
President Trump immediately amped up this story by tweeting: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!”
Suddenly, Whitley, a Republican appointee, was embroiled in a controversy over illegal immigration that brought into stark relief a seemingly unbridgeable partisan divide: between Republicans concerned about voter fraud and Democrats who accuse the GOP of trying to suppress minority turnout.
As evidence emerged that Whitley had overstated the problem, a firestorm erupted. By the time he resigned on May 28, Texas Democrats considered it a vindication, and even Republicans breathed a sigh of relief.
Obama’s spying scandal is starting to look a lot like Watergate
“F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18. “The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” read a story in the May 21 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparat have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.
It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives had burglarized and wiretapped the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in June 1972.
Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy — er, use informants — on a political campaign, especially one of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA. Nowadays they say that anyone questioning their good faith is unpatriotic.
Isis claims it could buy its first nuclear weapon from Pakistan within a year
Isis has used the latest issue of its propaganda magazine Dabiq to suggest the group is expanding so rapidly it could buy its first nuclear weapon within a year.
The hyperbolic article, which the group attributes to the British hostage John Cantlie, claims Isis has transcended its roots as “the most explosive Islamic ‘group’ in the modern world” to evolve into “the most explosive Islamic movement the modern world has ever seen” in less than twelve months.
Photojournalist Cantlie is regularly used in the terror group’s propaganda and has appeared in a number of videos, including a YouTube series called “Lend Me Your Ears”. He has been held a hostage by Isis for more than two years.
A Russian ‘troll slayer’ went undercover at a troll factory and found that hundreds of Russians were working as paid trolls in rotating shifts
When a journalist heard a bot organization was hiring writers, she went for it.
Slaying online trolls can be a lonely business. Just ask Russia’s Lyudmila Savchuk, who first exposed the story of Russia’s disinformation campaign back in 2014.
The journalist and 33-year-old mother of two, Savchuk started noticing websites and social media accounts attacking local opposition activists in her hometown of Saint Petersburg with a frequency she hadn’t seen before.
The posts were all too similar. The verbal assaults too coordinated. So, when Savchuk later heard that an organization rumored to be behind the campaign — the Internet Research Agency or IRA — was hiring writers, she went for it.
100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids
From fostering creativity and freedom to providing impressive educational outcomes, homeschooling is an increasingly appealing option.
This is my 100th article at FEE.org, so here are 100 reasons to homeschool your kids!
Homeschoolers perform well academically.
Your kids may be happier.
Issues like ADHD might disappear or become less problematic.
It doesn’t matter if they fidget.
YOU may be happier!
All that time spent on your kids’ homework can now be used more productively for family learning and living.
You can still work and homeschool.
And even grow a successful business while homeschooling your kids.
Remembering Tiananmen Square, 30 Years Later
“One free man will say with truth what he thinks and feels amongst thousands of men who by their acts and words attest exactly the opposite. It would seem that he who sincerely expressed his thought must remain alone, whereas it generally happens that everyone else, or the majority at least, have been thinking and feeling the same things but without expressing them. And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority. And as soon as this opinion is established, immediately by imperceptible degrees, but beyond power of frustration, the conduct of mankind begins to alter.” —Leo Tolstoy
30th Anniversary of Tiananmen Square
Thirty years ago this week, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese government launched a brutal military crackdown on student-led demonstrations assembled in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. For seven weeks prior, protestors swelled into the hundreds of thousands (over a million at the height of the protests, according to some reports) and called for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, government accountability, and an end to cronyism and corruption. Although the fledgling Chinese Democracy Movement was composed of many factions with many different agendas, broadly speaking, it aimed for liberal reforms.
It takes only a single act of courage from one freethinking individual to create a ripple that will become a tidal wave.
Dissension permeated the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), and even some of the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party sympathized with protestors, but in the end, hardliners won out. Orders were given to use military force to clear the square. To this day, government censorship, obfuscation, and denial have made details of the resulting massacre’s death toll difficult to verify, with some estimates as low as 200 to others over 10,000 (according to a British government cable that was declassified in 2017).
One of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, “Tank Man,” was taken during the military crackdown and has since become an enduring symbol of the individual versus state oppression.
