This is just starting to unfold. The Obama Administration was clearly in collusion, if not planned, orchestrated and approved “spygate†at the highest levels of the their Administration. A key question, as always, will be “what did President Obama know and when?â€
The idea that our intelligence services and law enforcement services were weaponized for political purposes against a fellow American, ANY fellow American, is outrageous.
We are a country based on the rule of law. If a President and his Administration are willing to “game†the system and allow this kind of activity to exist, we are in serious trouble.
We MUST get to the bottom of this and make sure it NEVER happens again.
Democrat Bob Kerry Gets It: Former Democratic Governor and U.S. Senator Bob Kerry asks the right question: How did Department of Justice get the Trump-Russia investigation so wrong?
See his op-ed below where he gets it right when he concludes: “Our democracy will survive the hostility of Vladimir Putin. What it may not survive is distrust of our system of justice. At the moment that distrust is deep and wide. We need a nonpartisan national commission to tell us what has just happened and to advise us on what we need to do to keep it from happening again.â€
Must Read About the Hate Crime Hoax: In a great op-ed below, Nolan Finley points out some facts that destroy the left’s favorite narrative of a country divided by hate. He concludes:
“Americans may be politically divided. But they aren’t taking their disagreements to the streets. Nor have they created a dangerous environment for certain groups of their fellow citizens.â€
Conservative Supreme Court: There is an interesting article below about “Conservatives’ takeover†that appears baffled to what is going on. Conservative by definition are NOT activists, they respect presidence, the Constitution and common sense.
The writer is shocked that with a new conservative majority the conservative justices are NOT activists and NOT acting like like liberal Democrats would.
I’m proud of the independence, judicial prudence and rule of law style judice prudence our conservative justices are exhibiting. There should be no surprise, no second guessing, they are being, acting and ruling like conservatives.
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.
-Saul Anuzis
35 Key People Involved In The Russia Hoax Who Need To Be Investigated
Funny how things change. The Washington Post couldn’t say a nice thing about congressional Republican efforts to investigate the Obama administration and FBI shenanigans that occurred before and after the 2016 election. That’s if they even covered these efforts at all.
But with Democrats controlling the House, and that legislative body’s subpoena power, the establishment media’s line has changed. Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee have just sent letters to 81 people, all associated with President Trump or the Russia probe, demanding answers on Russian election interference.
This is part of Democrats’ effort to continue their hunt for proof of Russia collusion—although they are already sure that Trump is guilty—as Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation appears to be winding down. To cover these events, the Post’s Philip Bump wrote an article titled: “The 81 people and organizations just looped into the Trump probe—and why they were included.†Of course, the article is totally unquestioning of the House Democrats’ desired narrative and motivations.
Obama Officials Spied on Trump Campaign Using at Least Five Methods
During the heat of the 2016 presidential elections, officials within the Obama administration, including cabinet-level officials who answered to Obama directly, extensively spied on the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump.
Both the Department of Justice inspector general and the House intelligence committee are currently probing the actions of the Obama officials and their motivations.
So far, at least five different ways that the officials spied on the Trump campaign have been uncovered.
These include the use of national security letters, a FISA warrant, an undercover informant, the unmasking of identities in intelligence reports, and spying conducted by foreign intelligence agencies.
Each of these methods provided the officials with sensitive information on the Trump campaign that could have been used for political purposes.
Bob Kerrey: How did Department of Justice get the Trump-Russia investigation so wrong?
Delusions fascinate me in part because I have so many of my own. Most often delusions are harmless. Sometimes they are not.
At the moment my fellow Democrats are suffering from two that are harmful. The first is that Americans long for a president who will ask us to pay more for the pleasure of increasing the role of the federal government in our lives. That this is a delusion can be seen in the promises made by six successful Democratic candidates in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan: three governors and three senators. Not one of them supported the Green New Deal, a tax on wealth or “Medicare for all.â€
The second Democratic delusion is that Americans were robbed of the truth when Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and Attorney General William Barr concluded that President Trump did not collude with Russia in 2016. All evidence indicates that the full report will not change the conclusion that Donald J. Trump did not collude with Vladimir Putin to secure his victory in 2016.
Rather than investigating the president further, Congress needs to investigate how the Department of Justice got this one so wrong. If the president of the United States is vulnerable to prosecutorial abuse, then God help all the rest of us. Members of Congress cannot do this themselves. We do not trust them enough with such a vital mission.
Congress should create a nonpartisan commission to find out what went wrong and to tell us what needs to be done to make certain it never happens again.
Barr Brings Accountability
The most inadvertently honest reaction to Attorney General William Barr’s congressional testimony this week came from former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Barr had bluntly called out the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “spying†on the Trump campaign in 2016. Mr. Clapper said that was both “stunning and scary.†Indeed.
No doubt a lot of former Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign officials, opposition guns for hire, and media members are stunned and scared that the Justice Department finally has a leader willing to address the FBI’s behavior in 2016. They worked very hard to make sure such an accounting never happened. Only in that context can we understand the frantic new Democratic-media campaign to tar the attorney general.
Mr. Barr told the Senate Wednesday that one question he wants answered is why nobody at the FBI briefed the Trump campaign about concerns that low-level aides might have had inappropriate contacts with Russians. That’s “normally†what happens, Mr. Barr said, and the Trump campaign had two obvious people to brief—Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, both former federal prosecutors.
It wasn’t only the Trump campaign that the FBI kept in the dark. The bureau routinely briefs Congress on sensitive counterintelligence operations. Yet former Director James Comey admits he deliberately hid his work from both the House and the Senate. And the FBI kept information from yet another overseer, the judicial branch, failing to tell the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee had paid for the dossier it presented as a basis for a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a U.S. citizen.
Why the secrecy?
Conservatives’ takeover of Supreme Court stalled by John Roberts-Brett Kavanaugh bromance
The conservative takeover of the Supreme Court that was anticipated following President Donald Trump’s two selections has been stalled by a budding bromance between the senior and junior justices.
Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s newest member, Brett Kavanaugh, have voted in tandem on nearly every case that’s come before them since Kavanaugh joined the court in October. They’ve been more likely to side with the court’s liberal justices than its other conservatives.
The two justices, both alumni of the same District of Columbia-based federal appeals court, have split publicly only once in 25 official decisions. Their partnership has extended, though less reliably, to orders the court has issued on abortion funding, immigration and the death penalty in the six months since Kavanaugh’s bitter Senate confirmation battle ended in a 50-48 vote.
Roberts and Kavanaugh have obvious reasons for their reluctance to join the court’s three other conservatives in ideological harmony. The chief justice has voiced concern about the court being viewed as just another political branch of government. Kavanaugh, a former top White House official under President George W. Bush who was accused of a 1980s sexual assault during his confirmation, may just be laying low.
America’s hate crime surge is a hoax
It’s been repeated so often it’s taken as fact: Hate crimes have soared over the past two years, and the blame rests with President Donald Trump and supporters inspired by his hateful rhetoric.
It’s a compelling story, supported by statistics that show an increase of 17{ef3b36ba7c11cac64d81b79cc51b0b7cc80daf5ccfa9ea032b2ab3ebe6b0c4c9} in the number of hate crimes reported to the FBI during the Trump presidency.
But it isn’t true. The surge has little to do with Trump and his red hat brigade. This according to Will Reilly, a Kentucky State University associate professor, who extensively researched hate-fueled violence in America for his book Hate Crime Hoax.
“Almost all of that surge is due to the simple fact that in 2017 the number of police departments reporting hate crimes to the FBI increased by 1,000,†says Reilly. “The surge narrative is pretty dishonest.â€
And destructive. The perception that hate-filled mobs are roaming the streets attacking minorities, gay and transgender people and other vulnerable citizens in the name of Donald Trump keeps us on edge and makes us distrustful of our neighbors.
Nuclear Power Can Save the World
As young people rightly demand real solutions to climate change, the question is not what to do — eliminate fossil fuels by 2050 — but how. Beyond decarbonizing today’s electric grid, we must use clean electricity to replace fossil fuels in transportation, industry and heating. We must provide for the fast-growing energy needs of poorer countries and extend the grid to a billion people who now lack electricity. And still more electricity will be needed to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by midcentury.
Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.
On the Putin System: How a Dictator Maintains His Power
About four years have passed since the first edition of The Putin System was written and first published in Russian. Looking back, I can see that its main ideas are still valid and actual, despite changes in Russian life and the political system. Some of the judgments I made back then may look too cautious in light of the realities of 2018; some, on the contrary, may seem premature. But on the whole, the situation seems to be progressing (or maybe “regressing†would be a better word) roughly along the lines described in this book. The Russian political system is increasingly developing all the symptoms and features of an anti-mainstream, retrograde authoritarianism that is indifferent to the long-term consequences of its rule, such as stumbling economic growth, outflow of intellect and capital, waste of valuable resources, burgeoning corruption, the oppressive atmosphere of militaristic and xenophobic propaganda, and so on.
Nor have I changed my mind about the reasons why this system has evolved over the years of postcommunist “transition†and has survived in spite of worsening overall conditions. I still believe that the specific type of capitalism that resulted from flawed and unsuccessful attempts to remold the Soviet economy after the system of arbitrary centralized planning collapsed in the late 1980s gradually developed a political system to match. This specific type of capitalism rests upon a rather simple economy based on the development and export of natural resources, the domination of large public and quasi-private corporations—managed by government-appointed managers and proxy owners dependent on the goodwill of the highest authorities—and on the capability of the top bureaucracy to extract and distribute various types of rent income resulting from administrative and direct control over major resources. For such a model, autocratic rule seems to be the only political solution, and that is exactly what happened to postcommunist Russia. In the 1990s and 2000s, the state transitioned from bogus competitive democracy to mature autocracy with unconstrained power for the supreme leader to command all levels and areas of government and to distribute privileges among various layers of bureaucracy.
The Slow Vindication of the Austrians
Every once in a while, I notice a truth, revealed long ago through reason by the Austrians, peeking through when a modern Keynesian happens to write about real-world effects that seemed to him counter-intuitive.
Followers of the Austrian economists (if you are at all sincere about understanding political economy, you should at least get familiar with their arguments) frequently lament that the Keynesian social-democrat mainstream not only disagrees with them but also never even bothers to argue against them, treating them instead as if they were invisible, or worse, attacking idiotic strawmen instead.
A Keynesian Catches On
But every once in a while, I notice a truth, revealed long ago through reason by the Austrians, peeking through when a modern Keynesian happens to write about real-world effects that seemed to him counter-intuitive. Several times in the past year or two, I’ve seen Austrian conclusions pop through the cracks of post-2008 Keynesianism, but they are justified on different grounds and expressed in different language.
Diocletian in Venezuela – Is America Next?!?
History has an extraordinary tendency to repeat itself time and again.
The same mistakes that rulers make in one era are repeated in subsequent eras. Political leaders have a nagging habit to want to grow governments to unmanageable proportions, invading other sovereign nations, whilst increasingly dominating the electorate at home.
Invariably, this proves extremely costly and the bill is always passed to the people, first in the form of taxation and, ultimately, in the form of confiscation. Eventually nations and empires collapse under the great weight of their own governments.
And, time after time, the same patterns are followed, particularly during the declining stages. Declining nations follow similar patterns with uncanny regularity.
Let’s have a look at just three – first, Rome – an ancient empire that collapsed, then Venezuela – a country that’s currently collapsing, then the US – a country that’s well along in the process, but is just now entering the final stages prior to collapse.
Shootout with human trafficking suspects send 4 ICE agents to hospital in Phoenix, 1 woman dead
Perhaps the most telling poll of the Democratic primary season hasn’t been about the Democratic primary at all — but about the fallout from a 35-year-old racist photo on a yearbook page. Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia was pummeled on social media after the revelation, and virtually every Democratic presidential candidate demanded his resignation.
Yet the majority of ordinary Democrats in Virginia said Mr. Northam should remain in office, according to a Washington Post/Schar School poll a week later. And black Democrats were likelier than white ones to say Mr. Northam should remain.
Today’s Democratic Party is increasingly perceived as dominated by its “woke†left wing. But the views of Democrats on social media often bear little resemblance to those of the wider Democratic electorate.
Why Aspirational Societies Are Better Than Envious Ones
become rich through hard work and self-improvement, you have an aspirational society. The United States could be classified by this term once upon a time, but in more recent years, it has morphed into an envious society instead.
Current aspirational societies include Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and Chile.
The Green-Eyed Monster
By contrast, France is a society consumed by envy. In France, it is all too common for neighbors to call authorities out of envy claiming their neighbor isn’t paying taxes because they installed a swimming pool or bought an expensive car. This envy stems from a mentality that the economy is a finite pie and inequality results if someone gets a bigger slice of the economic pie. Rather than focusing on improving themselves, the envious believe their path to happiness is tied to the fate of those they envy.
What many miss, however, is that the economy is not a finite pie, but thousands of pies, with inventors and entrepreneurs making new pies as they innovate, while obsolete pies fade away.
