At The Hill, Sharyl Attkisson asks, Whatever happened to the 'unmaskings' probe?

She explains,

...An official who is a bad actor may want to monitor a U.S. citizen — say, a political enemy or a journalist — but knows he could never get wiretap approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). So he develops a pretext to wiretap a foreigner or a target in contact with that citizen. He then “incidentally” captures the citizen’s information, too. Later, he builds a case for “unmasking” the U.S. citizen’s name, supposedly for national security or other crucial reasons.

Here’s the best part — for the bad actors. The U.S. citizens are usually none the wiser. The surveillance isn’t intended to build a criminal case; it’s to collect dirt or political intel or blackmail material. So the corrupt process is never scrutinized in a U.S. court.

...In 2016, very real questions were raised about whether reverse engineering of intel was widely deployed in an unethical manner. A red flag waved when we got a sense of how many Americans are “incidentally” surveilled — so many, that near-daily unmasking requests were said to be made in 2016 under the name of a single official: United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power.

Who else was involved? Then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates, national security adviser Susan Rice, and Director of National Intelligence Clapper. Clapper said he requested unmasking of American names “every couple of weeks.” Apparently, it became so common that Clapper told Congress he probably made some requests on his way out the door before Trump’s inauguration, but couldn’t recall the specifics.

Rice initially claimed she knew nothing about the unmasking of surveilled Trump associates. Later, she admitted on MSNBC that she had asked for names of U.S. citizens previously masked in intelligence reports.

...The good news would seem to be that there’s documentary evidence of all this ... if anyone wants to discover it. There are names of who requested what and when, information as to where unmasked intel was sent, names of those who searched the NSA database and under what auspices. Unlike a lot of facets of the Trump-Russia-intel controversy, this trail should be easily traceable.

Read more here.

Protests continue in Iran

Nikoo Amini reports at Tsarizm.com,

Hundreds of people are demonstrating in the Amir-Kabir industrial (New Shapour) complex

The people of Iran have had enough with horrific economic conditions and the collapse of their currency. Demonstrations have broken out across the country.

Hundreds of people are demonstrating now in the Amir-Kabir industrial complex (Shapour) of Isfahan, central Iran, protesting skyrocketing prices and continuous power outages.

Protesters are chanting:

“Death to high prices”

“Proud bazaar merchants, support, support”

“No to Gaza, no to Lebanon, my life for Iran”

All store owners in this area have closed their shops and are on strike.

Read more and watch videos here.

Let's hear it for civil liberties!

The Left supplies Andrew with an endless supply of fools to help him with his opening monolog. Today it is Dan Rather and Brian Williams.

Alan Dershowitz is Andrew's guest. Dershowitz is one liberal who won't put you to sleep. He is a civil libertarian first and foremost. He is also a liberal Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton. He calls himself a centrist.

The ACLU went from a budget of $30 million to $130 million upon the election of Trump, because so many people wanted them to get Trump. To be a civil libertarian means to defend the free speech of people you disagree with. Dershowitz says he refuses to be paid by any networks he appears on. He cares about legal and constitutional rights for all Americans, even Trump!

Dershowitz, a long time Harvard professor, admits we are educating young students who are going to be our future leaders not to tolerate different ideas.

“There was no talk about going to the police or anything like that, because it was obvious that it would be career suicide.”

In the New Yorker, Ronan Farrow has once again broken a huge story of sexual harassment. It opens:

For more than twenty years, Leslie Moonves has been one of the most powerful media executives in America. As the chairman and C.E.O. of CBS Corporation, he oversees shows ranging from “60 Minutes” to “The Big Bang Theory.” His portfolio includes the premium cable channel Showtime, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, and a streaming service, CBS All Access. Moonves, who is sixty-eight, has a reputation for canny hiring and project selection. The Wall Street Journal recently called him a “TV programming wizard”; the Hollywood Reporter dubbed him a “Wall Street Hero.” In the tumultuous field of network television, he has enjoyed rare longevity as a leader. Last year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, he earned nearly seventy million dollars, making him one of the highest-paid corporate executives in the world.

In recent months, Moonves has become a prominent voice in Hollywood’s #MeToo movement. In December, he helped found the Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, which is chaired by Anita Hill. “It’s a watershed moment,” Moonves said at a conference in November. “I think it’s important that a company’s culture will not allow for this. And that’s the thing that’s far-reaching. There’s a lot we’re learning. There’s a lot we didn’t know.”

But Moonves’s private actions belie his public statements. Six women who had professional dealings with him told me that, between the nineteen-eighties and the late aughts, Moonves sexually harassed them. Four described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, in what they said appeared to be a practiced routine. Two told me that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers. All said that he became cold or hostile after they rejected his advances, and that they believed their careers suffered as a result. “What happened to me was a sexual assault, and then I was fired for not participating,” the actress and writer Illeana Douglas told me. All the women said they still feared that speaking out would lead to retaliation from Moonves, who is known in the industry for his ability to make or break careers. “He has gotten away with it for decades,” the writer Janet Jones, who alleges that she had to shove Moonves off her after he forcibly kissed her at a work meeting, told me. “And it’s just not O.K.”

Thirty current and former employees of CBS told me that such behavior extended from Moonves to important parts of the corporation, including CBS News and “60 Minutes,” one of the network’s most esteemed programs. During Moonves’s tenure, men at CBS News who were accused of sexual misconduct were promoted, even as the company paid settlements to women with complaints. It isn’t clear whether Moonves himself knew of the allegations, but he has a reputation for being closely involved in management decisions across the network. Some of the allegations, such as those against the former anchor Charlie Rose, as reported by the Washington Post, have already become public. Other claims are being reported here for the first time. Nineteen current and former employees told me that Jeff Fager, the former chairman of CBS News and the current executive producer of “60 Minutes,” allowed harassment in the division. “It’s top down, this culture of older men who have all this power and you are nothing,” one veteran producer told me. “The company is shielding lots of bad behavior.”

Excerpts from later in the article:

BS is a multibillion-dollar corporation, with dozens of divisions, and Moonves is only indirectly involved with many of them. However, experts on sexual harassment told me that misconduct by a chief executive can reverberate across aspects of even the largest companies. “If you have a company with an abuser on the top, they typically surround themselves with people like them, who engage in similar behavior,” Debra Katz, a lawyer specializing in sexual harassment, told me. “It can put a set of enablers in place, who protect powerful people when they get challenged for misconduct, and who work to discredit and manage out women who come forward with allegations.”

Thirty current and former CBS employees described harassment, gender discrimination, or retaliation at the network. Many said that men accused of misconduct were promoted, even after the company was made aware of those allegations.

...For the women who have made claims against Les Moonves, his public stance as a supporter of the #MeToo movement and his role in the Commission on Eliminating Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace have been unnerving. Janet Jones told me that, when she heard that he was on the commission, “I thought, Oh, for God’s sake, he has no shame.” The commission is made up of, and funded by, industry leaders, and its members are not vetted. Illeana Douglas knew people who were associated with the commission, and considered telling them her story, until she saw that Moonves was also a member. “I don’t think that the fox should be guarding the henhouse,” she said.

Read more here.

Maybe we need to pay a bit more attention to China

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

While Russia's role in the 2016 election dominates the news, China's spying and alarming influence within our borders is too little noticed.

...Every nation, of course, does its best to spy on rivals and to influence other nations that are important to it. But as we worry about the Russians, maybe we need to pay a bit more attention to China, a country that is likely to be a more serious rival in the coming decade.

Go here to read the examples he cites of Chinese activities in the U.S.

We'll see

Well, is it?

Our present dangerous trajectory

In National Review, Victor Davis Hanson writes another superb analysis of where we are in 2018. I will excerpt it in a bare-bones fashion, but I recommend you read the whole thing here.

How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Globalization
Globalization had an unfortunate effect of undermining national unity. It created new iconic billionaires in high tech and finance, and their subsidiaries of coastal elites, while hollowing out the muscular jobs largely in the American interior.

High Tech
The mass production of cheap consumer goods, most assembled abroad, redefined wealth or, rather, disguised poverty. Suddenly the lower middle classes and the poor had in their palms the telecommunications power of the Pentagon of the 1970s, the computing force of IBM in the 1980s, and the entertainment diversity of the rich of the 1990s. They could purchase big screens for a fraction of what their grandparents paid for black-and-white televisions and with a computer be entertained just as well cocooning in their basement as by going out to a concert, movie, or football game.

The Campus
Higher education surely helped split the country in two. In the 1980s, the universities embraced two antithetical agendas, both costly and reliant on borrowed money. On the one hand, campuses competed for scarcer students by styling themselves as Club Med–type resorts with costly upscale dorms, tony student-union centers, lavish gyms, and an array of in loco parentis social services. The net effect was to make colleges responsible not so much for education, but more for shielding now-fragile youth from the supposed reactionary forces that would buffet them after graduation.

Illegal Immigration
Immigration was recalibrated hand-in-glove by progressives who wanted a new demographic to vote for leftist politicians and by Chamber of Commerce conservatives who wished an unlimited pool of cheap unskilled labor. The result was waves of illegal, non-diverse immigrants who arrived at precisely the moment when the old melting pot was under cultural assault.

The Obama Project
We forget especially the role of Barack Obama. He ran as a Biden Democrat renouncing gay marriage, saying, “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.” Then he “evolved” on the question and created a climate in which to agree with this position could get one fired. He promised to close the border and reduce illegal immigration: “We will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws.” Then he institutionalized the idea that to agree with that now-abandoned agenda was a career-ender.

What Might Bring the United States Together Again?
A steady 3 to 4 percent growth in annual GDP would trim a lot of cultural rhetoric. Four percent unemployment will make more Americans valuable and give them advantages with employers. Measured, meritocratic, diverse, and legal immigration would help to restore the melting pot.

Reforming the university would help too, mostly by abolishing tenure, requiring an exit competence exam for the BA degree (a sort of reverse, back-end SAT or ACT exam), and ending government-subsidized student loans that promote campus fiscal irresponsibility and a curriculum that ensures future unemployment for too many students.

Religious and spiritual reawakening is crucial. The masters of the universe of Silicon Valley did not, as promised, bring us new-age tranquility, but rather only greater speed and intensity to do what we always do. Trolling, doxing, and phishing were just new versions of what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount. Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life; technology is simply the delivery pump. We confused the two. That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence. High tech has become the great delusion.

Finally, we need to develop a new racial sense that we are so intermarried and assimilated that cardboard racial cutouts are irrelevant. Our new racialism must be seen as a reactionary and dangerous return to 19th-century norm of judging our appearance on the outside as more valuable than who we are on the inside.

Whether we all take a deep breath, and understand our present dangerous trajectory, will determine whether 2019 becomes 1861.

Why we should support Jim Jordan for Speaker of the House

At Conservative Review, Daniel Horowitz explains why we should support Jim Jordan as Speaker of the House. Read it here.

Enough about legal ethics; Anderson Cooper wants to get down and dirty!

Alan Dershowitz to Stormy Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenetti: "You may have to answer questions of an ethics committee" (of the American Bar Association).

Avenetti: "I had Michael Cohen's permission."
Dershowitz: "That's not enough!"

Anderson Cooper then changes the subject and asks Avenetti if he has information about Trump paying three additional women hush money. Is he representing these whores, too, or just Stormy? C'mon guys, let's talk some sex here, not all this legal ethics stuff! Please, please, lets get racy! Were these women sexy? Naughty? Entertaining? Raunchy?

National Introverts' Conference

Are you feeling a bit introverted? The Babylon Bee has just the conference for you!

INDIANAPOLIS, IN—The Gospel Coalition has announced a new annual Bible conference specifically targeted at introverted believers, a conference which will just ask everyone to stay home instead of getting packed into a big room with a bunch of other people.

Conference organizers have reportedly rented out the Indiana Convention Center, which will remain completely empty during the entire convention.

Passes cost $120.00 during the early bird pre-order period, and allow a person to stay home throughout the entire conference and not interact with anyone. Purchasers of a deluxe VIP pass will also receive special perks like pepper spray and a taser gun which they can use to fend off any attempts by friends or family members to interact with them throughout the three days of the conference.

“Our conferences have typically been targeted at people that want to go be around thousands of other people for a few days,” Tim Keller told reporters Friday. “Now, at our TGC National Introverts’ Conference, we’re reaching out to the other half. Stay home, read a book, play a video game, watch some sermons. Whatever. We don’t care.”

The conference immediately sold out, sources confirmed.

Who is inciting violence?

Could the press in America become objective truth tellers? Andrew's recommendation to them is to hire some conservatives. What Andrew hears now is self-deception. If you have three pundits on a panel, shouldn't one of them come from a conservative perspective?

The press worries that Trump may incite a crazy person to violence against the press. Okay, then what about the outrage against Trump being drummed up by the biased media? Can they tone it down? Not happening.

"It's 100 percent up to us where we finish!"

Mike: "Whatever it is, it can't be our fault. We're the sun in our solar system. We are the center of our universe. How do we realize that we're not?"

Ben: "There is a dramatic lack of central values in people's lives. If you are really pissed off, that means you are an authentic human being (in this outrage culture)."

Mike: "My philosophy has a lot to do with being suspicious of anything that feels easy, being wary of all earnestness, a ton of gratitude, and some honest, intellectual curiosity. It is so much more interesting to understand why you believe what you believe than to hear what you believe. Mobs are boring. The country is starved for authenticity!

Mike claims that at least two weeks before the election, he knew Trump was going to win. For twelve years he had been in places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump understands who is watching. He understands what is happening. Mike tells an interesting story of how he ended up getting a signed Trump bathrobe and auctioning it off for several thousand dollars which he gave to his jobs foundation.

Hollywood leads the charge against honest blue collar work. If there is a plumber on the show, he's 300 pounds with a giant butt crack! The same stereotypes are perpetrated in advertising.

Success doesn't look like the version we've been sold!

Happiness is a terrific symptom, but it's a terrible goal!

6.3 million jobs are sitting there vacant in America right now!

Rand Paul all in for Kavanaugh

At Twitchy Sarah D. reports that Rand Paul has confirmed that he will vote yea on Kavanaugh.

"Why does reality have to be adjusted to cater to progressive delusions?"

Oregon Muse at Ace of Spades:

"So it used to be that maybe when a girl hit the age of 8 or 9, she'd start to exhibit boyish mannerisms, wearing pants all the time, playing baseball, getting into fights, etc. There was a name for this. I'm old enough to remember that such girls were called "tomboys" and everyone understood that this was just a stage some girls went through and nobody thought anything of it because it would only last a couple three years, maybe not even that, puberty would hit, and that would be that. And nobody made a big deal over it.

Well, now the activists have pounced on this innocent phenomenon and twisted into something dangerous and malignant. Instead of letting the tomboy phase run its course, the girls are told that they need to act on their feelings and actually turn themselves into the other gender. So they're pumped full of propaganda about how they're born into the wrong body and given chemicals that block the onset of puberty and male hormones and eventually even surgery. It is the goal of the trans activists to find even the mildest cases of gender dysphoria and make sure it gets inflamed into a full-fledged psychosis, like picking at a simple cut until it's all red and infected.

You'd think the medical establishment would be up in arms against the flagrant misuse of the drugs and hormones, but they're not. Do the parents know of the high suicide rates of transsexuals and the frequency of other mental illnesses that accompany gender dysphoria? How would it be if psychiatrists started encouraging anorexics to lose weight because they feel they're too "fat", and then prescribed weight-loss pills to help them accomplish this? Why does reality have to be adjusted to cater to progressive delusions?"

Anyone?

A fomenter of hate!

"While promoting itself as a monitor of hate groups, the SPLC has become a fomenter of hate! What keeps them going? The establishment media constantly quote them. Alarmism is a great fundraising technique. Last year they hustled 50 million dollars out of frightened liberal donors, adding to the 368 million dollars they were already sitting on."

You think a cop's job is easy?

"I want to make a deal!" "I want to make a deal!"

"Getting along is a good thing, not a bad thing! ...If that doesn't work out, I'll be the worst enemy he's ever had!

I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Does Trump know what he is doing? It certainly appears that way to me! Does he know economics? It certainly appears that way to me!

Southern strategy? Not so much!

Dinesh D'Souz writes in American Greatness some excerpts from his new book.

Democrats have never publicly admitted their role over nearly two centuries of being the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, the Ku Klux Klan, and also fascism and Nazism. Yet when pushed up against the wall with the mountain of evidence I provide in my book, how can they deny it?

...Now we turn to a second question: why did blacks become Democrats? They were once at home in the Republican Party. As Frederick Douglass put it, “The Republican Party is the deck; all else is the sea.” How different things are now. After the Civil War nine out of 10 blacks voted Republican; now nine out of 10 blacks votes Democratic. So something happened to cause blacks to switch their allegiance. But what?

...Why would blacks leave the party of emancipation and resistance to segregation and lynching and join the party of bigotry and white supremacy? The depressing answer is that blacks did it in exchange for the crumbs that they got from FDR’s New Deal. We have seen earlier how FDR designed the New Deal to exclude African-Americans and preserve Jim Crow. How delighted and amused FDR must have been to see blacks coming over to his camp even as his administration worked closely with racist Democrats to screw them over.

It should be noted, in mitigation of this horrible decision on the part of African Americans—and it was a horrible decision—that conditions for blacks during the Great Depression were almost inconceivably bad. Historian Ira Katznelson points out that median black family income was around $500 a month, which means most blacks lived at subsistence level without electricity, hot water, refrigeration, adequate plumbing or gas for cooking. “Under these circumstances,” Katznelson writes, New Deal benefits “limited though they were” and “however discriminatory” still offered some relief and solace to a “desperate population.”

So FDR bought off the African American vote at a bargain-basement price in the 1930s. Yet this secured the Democrats a decisive, but not unanimous, black vote. Democrats had around 75 percent, and they remained in that range from the 1930s through the 1960s. Then LBJ consciously directed a large portion of his Great Society benefits to blacks, and bought off another big chunk of the black vote for the Democratic Party.

Since LBJ, blacks have voted for Democrats in the 90 percent range. This second generation of blacks in overwhelming numbers gave their electoral consent to becoming part of LBJ’s Democratic plantation. Note that this generation of African-Americans did this by abandoning the party that had stood up for them for more than a century and joining the one that had enslaved them, lynched them, installed systems of discrimination against them, and was even then the main source of resistance to the enactment of their civil rights.

...The first problem with this Southern Strategy tale is that progressives have never been able to provide a single example of an explicitly racist pitch by Richard Nixon at any time in his long career. One might expect that a racist appeal to Deep South racists would actually have to be made and to be understood as such. Yet quite evidently none was.

Nixon had an excellent record on civil rights. Unlike Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nixon supported it. He also supported the Voting Rights Act the following year. When Nixon was elected in 1968, nearly 70 percent of African-American children attended all-black schools. When he left, in 1974, that figure was down to 8 percent.

Tom Wicker, the progressive columnist for the New York Times, gave his appraisal of Nixon’s desegregation efforts. “There’s no doubt about it—the Nixon administration accomplished more in 1970 to desegregate Southern school systems than had been done in the 16 previous years or probably since. There’s no doubt either that it was Richard Nixon personally who conceived, orchestrated and led the administration’s desegregation effort . . . .That effort resulted in probably the outstanding domestic achievement of his administration.”

The Nixon Administration went even further, putting into effect the nation’s first affirmative action program. Dubbed the Philadelphia Plan, it imposed racial goals and timetables on the building trade unions first in Philadelphia and then throughout the country. Basically, Nixon moved to kick in the closed union door and to force racist Democratic unions to admit blacks. The progressive legal scholar Neal Devins admits that Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan is “the genesis of affirmative action in government contracting and arguably all federal affirmative action programs.”

Moreover, Nixon lost the Deep South. Goldwater won five Deep South states in 1964, the only states he carried other than his native Arizona. Not that Goldwater was a racist—he was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP and had pushed to integrate the Arizona National Guard and the Phoenix public schools. He had supported the Civil Rights Act of 1957 which established a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, as well as another civil rights bill in 1960.

Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater’s principled stand was misunderstood by many African-Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.

These sensitivities on the part of blacks were, of course, understandable. Unfortunately for the GOP they cost the party dearly. Previously, Martin Luther King, Jr., had maintained his independence from both parties; now he joined the Democratic camp. And Goldwater paid not only with a disastrous election loss but also with the loss of his reputation: the characterization of Goldwater as a racist, although false, has endured as a staple among today’s progressives.

These sensitivities on the part of blacks were, of course, understandable. Unfortunately for the GOP they cost the party dearly. Previously, Martin Luther King, Jr., had maintained his independence from both parties; now he joined the Democratic camp. And Goldwater paid not only with a disastrous election loss but also with the loss of his reputation: the characterization of Goldwater as a racist, although false, has endured as a staple among today’s progressives.

Nixon appealed to these Peripheral South voters not on the basis of race but rather on the basis of Republican policies of entrepreneurial capitalism and economic success. In other words, he went after the Peripheral South’s nonracist, upwardly mobile voters, leaving the Deep South racists to the Democratic Party. And sure enough, in 1968 Nixon won Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida in the Peripheral South and the entire Deep South went to the racist Dixiecrat George Wallace.

...Reagan’s success, however, was made possible by the sharp leftward move by the Democratic Party starting with the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and continuing through the 1970s. This swing to the left, especially on social and cultural issues like school prayer, pornography, recreational drugs and abortion, receives virtually no mention by progressive scholars because it disrupts their thesis that the trend in the South to the GOP was motivated primarily by race.

Read more here.

Here is the trailer for the movie based on D'Souza's new book.

2009? Oh yeah, that was when Obama was president, wasn't it?

Tucker Carlson fearlessly calls the Southern Poverty Law Center what it is: "A left-wing hate group! They are totally dishonest!" Shockingly, the FBI has a long history of collaborating with the SPLC! He quotes an FBI statement from 2009.

One of the few good guys in Congress, Matt Gaetz of Florida has written a letter to the FBI asking them to explain their relationship with the SPLC.

Watch Tucker interview this Muslim man targeted by the SPLC. He sued them and was recently awarded over three million dollars in a settlement.



Read more here.

"To get golden ticket access to the U.S. market, those multinationals are going to have to agree to President Trump’s terms."

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports,

Interestingly Reuters uses the narrative from an anonymous Canadian “official” to frame an article about how global car manufacturers are coming together next week in Geneva to coordinate their strategy against the United States and President Trump.

Just let that part sink in for a moment…

Behind that context we can clearly see: 1) the economic importance of the Auto industry to the countries that are assembling; 2) their multinational corporate interest in retaining unlimited access to the U.S. market; and 3) the absolute need of all assembling corporations to find a way to keep their investments in NAFTA’s fatal flaw viable.

Who is gathering? Canada, Mexico, the EU (ie. Germany), Japan and South Korea.

Where are they going? To visit Geneva, Switzerland. Why Geneva? Because that way China can attend (see Volvo/Sweden) without being on the official roster. ::nudge, nudge:: ::wink, wink:: ::say-no-more Panda boy, say-no-more:: Additionally, Cecelia Malmström (EU Trade Minister), is the person Canada is relying upon to cover their anti-Trump position:

...Here’s where I will repeat the funniest aspect that seems continually missed by all of the international smart-set:

President Trump doesn’t care !
President Trump doesn’t care what the opinion of the Auto industry is.

President Trump is not beholden to the interests of the corporate auto industry.

President Trump doesn’t give a flip about what international leaders gather to discuss.

President Trump will do what is in the best interests of the United States and the workers within it. Period; end-of-story. Done.

...The multinational corporate leaders can assemble and strategize until they are blue-in-the-face. It matters not.

Seriously. They might just as easily attend a Swiss pancake tossing contest. POTUS Trump doesn’t care. Eventually they are going to have to ask, beg, plead and grovel to retain their position. When they accept the one constant in an ever changing universe, and finally realize the question is not “if” they will lose, but rather “how much”, then, and only then, will POTUS Trump enter the room with his golden tickets.

To get golden ticket access to the U.S. market, those multinationals are going to have to agree to President Trump’s terms. Trump doesn’t care about their feelings; Trump doesn’t give a flip about their statements; Trump has one prism to consider any deal, negotiation or result: is it better for the United States of America?

Read more here.

Credibility? What's that?

Rudy Giuliani was a busy guy today. Here he is on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. Did you catch his oh by the way comment that he has prosecuted 5000 cases?

Giuliani goes after Cohen's attorney, long-time Clinton lawyer, Lanny Davis, whom Giuliani refers to as being "almost as bad as Cohen." Davis said Cohen "did not intend to deceive." Then, Giuliani notes that Cohen surreptitiously taped a two-hour conversation with CNN's Chris Cuomo, after telling Cuomo he was not recording him. Telling "Clinton-like lies; lies that can be contradicted by tape recorders."

Cohen "goin' rogue"; Giuliani being relaxed

I think Rudy Giuliani is an affable character. Jovial, even. He seems always ready to break out in laughter or at least a smile. I love how he raises his eyebrows and his pupils seem to be popping out. How often do we see someone so relaxed when being grilled on a national press Sunday show?

The interviewer asks, "Have you advised the president not to tweet?" Giuliani laughs and says, "Good luck!"

"To my surprise, this guy Cohen turns out to be almost an instinctual liar!"

"We know of 183 unique conversations Cohen has taped." Only one is with President Trump, and it is three minutes long. He is mentioned on twelve others.

Dancing Lessons

Re-Lincolnize the GOP?

Dinesh D'Souza writes in Town Hall,

...Trump is the only Republican on the scene today who actually has a chance to finish off the Democratic plantation. To do this he must re-Lincolnize the GOP. This means going further than opposing racial preferences and affirmative action. He must eliminate racial categories from the Census and promote a new civil rights act that outlaws using those categories to discriminate against any ethnic group, black, white, brown or yellow. Republicans have been talking color-blindness for a long time; it’s time to implement it.

Second, Trump must invade the Democratic plantation with creative policies that restore entrepreneurship, jobs, and opportunity to America’s barrios, ghettoes and native American reservations. Surely there are blacks, Latinos and native Americans in these godforsaken communities who would welcome a chance to learn, to improve themselves, and to prosper there....

This article is excerpted from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book Death of a Nation, out July 31. His movie of the same title opens nationwide on Friday, August 3.
Read more here.

Fantasy may not be the best way to go

At ati, Kara Goldfarb reports,

German serial killer Egidius Schiffer murdered five female hitchhikers between 1983 and 1990 — but he’s now become his own final victim.

Schiffer was found dead in his prison cell on July 23 after accidentally electrocuting himself while performing an unusual solo sex act.

Read more here.

Oh Happy Day!

Guest post by Suzann Darnell

Next week my husband, Pete, and I will celebrate 41 years of marriage. It has been a good life together and I look forward to the next decades with great anticipation.

It has been quite an adventure with some interesting twists and turns. A bit quirky at times, but always working out for the best in the end. We have had good times, hard times, sad times, and glad times. All in all we have counted more blessings than we have numbered our troubles.

We have raised two daughters. We have welcomed seven grandchildren into our lives. We have two fine sons-in-law. We have had innumerable pets. Met friends all around the world. Just managed to find companionship, in many forms, all over the place.

I am blessed greatly by this wonderful man in my life. He is my eternal sweetheart, my best friend, my partner in trouble, and my life’s helpmeet. We live, laugh, love, and learn together. He is there for me in happiness or sorrow. He rejoices with me or comforts me, depending on my need. I could not have asked for anyone more perfect for all of time and eternity.

Don’t yet know what we will do to celebrate, but I know we will have a good time doing it. Whatever it is. We usually enjoy ourselves no matter what we are doing. So, I am definitely counting down the days until our anniversary. Looking forward to a romantic homage to our 41 years of loving one another as husband and wife. Wow! Truly a happy day!!!

Shadow ban? We never should have let conservatives on the platform in the first place!

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey

The satirical Babylon Bee takes aim at Twitter.

U.S.—In response to criticism of the alleged shadow ban of certain right-leaning accounts on the platform, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologized Friday for allowing conservatives on the platform in the first place.

The visibly distraught CEO openly wept as he expressed his great remorse for ever having allowed conservatives to open accounts and let their worldview “just hang out there for the whole world to see.”

“Twitter has always been a welcoming, accepting place, so there’s obviously no room for anyone even slightly right of center,” Dorsey said. “I see that now. I’ve learned and grown from my experiences, and I hope the far-left mobs can find it in their hearts to forgive me rather than demanding I be fired on the spot.”

“I’m so, so sorry.”

Representatives for the teeming horde of angry liberals on the platform confirmed they would accept Dorsey’s apology, so long as he vows to “do better” and support the firing and public lynching of any person found to have espoused conservative views on his platform at any point in the past.

He annoyed the email scammers so much they begged him to stop emailing!

Here is another very funny Ted Talk by James Veitch. He set up a fake email account and then carried on correspondence with email scammers.

Any time they are spending with me is time they are not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings!

James Veitch got one of those spam emails. His hand was hovering on the delete button. But, instead, he decided to carry on a correspondence with the scammer and other scammers for three years!

When facts are uncongenial, take refuge in fantasy!.

Robert Gore writes at Straight Line Logic,

Somewhere along the line Democrats quit caring, or even asking, whether government worked. The first Mayor Richard Daley may have been a distasteful autocrat, but Chicago during his reign called itself the city that worked. Democrats have had lengthy tenures over cities that manifestly don’t work—Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, Cleveland, New Orleans, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and now Chicago—in some cases they’re crumbling. Governance has become an exercise in patronage, payola, and making excuses, the effectiveness of city-provided services not even on the list of concerns.

...The Democrats’ academic branch office and intellectual vanguard has gone farthest off the deep end. Socialists in training demand free (to them) higher education, and free (to them) housing and medical care plus a guaranteed income once they’re out of school. Who pays for all this in a country carrying $200 trillion plus in debt and unfunded obligations? Not their problem—they issue demands, not solutions.

The Democrats’ academic branch office and intellectual vanguard has gone farthest off the deep end. Socialists in training demand free (to them) higher education, and free (to them) housing and medical care plus a guaranteed income once they’re out of school. Who pays for all this in a country carrying $200 trillion plus in debt and unfunded obligations? Not their problem—they issue demands, not solutions.

From once illustrious institutions has come an exciting panoply of newly discovered gender variations—with matching pronouns—and sexual deviancies. No minority group claiming victimhood and mouthing the required pieties is too small for the solicitous concern of campus social justice warriors. Anyone who questions socialism, identity politics, or mandated tolerance is met with an intolerant storm of vitriol that increasingly transmutes into violence.

The left’s signature issues resonate with perhaps 30 percent of the electorate. Russiagate gets a rise out of even less. Yet these burning issues are the horses the Democrat will ride come November.

...Washington broke into insane hysteria the night of November 6, 2016 not because Donald Trump said he’d seek better relations with Russia, but because of his catchphrase: “Drain the Swamp!”

Trump knows or suspects where some of the bodies are buried, and the powers that be fear he’ll go after them for everything from garden-variety graft, bribery, theft, and influence peddling to crimes as sordid as child molestation and murder.

Corruption and criminality have been a way of life in Washington for decades. Trump is clearly a threat.

This, not the fear that Trump will revise US policy towards Russia, is behind the Deep State’s cold sweat, motivating its hysterical—comical if wasn’t so serious—campaign to depose him. This is the first time it has faced an unfriendly in the White House, with presidential powers to investigate, expose, prosecute, scandalize, and ruin.

Taking Rand Paul’s suggestion and revoking the security clearances for some of those clowns—John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Susan Rice, Michael Hayden, and Andrew McCabe—would be a powerful first step. It signals that something more serious—indictment and prosecution—may be on the way. He would be moving against enemies who have so overplayed their weak hand they’ve actually increased his support. Although there would be plenty of flack, especially from the captured media, the majority of Americans would applaud the move.

It would send another, subtextual message as well. It turns the treason calumny against those who have so irresponsibly used it.

You take away security clearances from people who pose a security threat. These conspirators are part of a cabal trying to remove the legitimately elected president of the United States. They are using their Russiagate concoction to oppose at every turn any attempt by Trump to improve relations with the one country on the planet that has as many nuclear weapons as the US. This dangerous, arrogant, and corrupt cabal represents a grave threat to what remains of the rule of law, the institution of the presidency, and the life of every American.

They must be stopped. It’s time for Trump to stop them.

Read more here.

"Dark Money"

At the Washington Free Beacon, Paul Crookston takes a look at the fundraising for and against the Kavanaugh nomination.

Good news for Alzheimer's patients

In The New York Times, Pam Belluck reports,

The long, discouraging quest for a medication that works to treat Alzheimer’s reached a potentially promising milestone on Wednesday. For the first time in a large clinical trial, a drug was able to both reduce the plaques in the brains of patients and slow the progression of dementia.

Read more here.

Should we stop discriminating on the basis of race?

Stephen Asma explores the question at Quillette.

On July 3, the Trump administration rescinded the Obama approach to race-based college admissions. This returns the U.S. to the philosophy of George W. Bush’s White House, which argued that race should not be a significant factor. The Trump initiative may have no immediate impact since the Supreme Court upheld race-based admissions policies in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin in 2016. But an impact is surely coming. Consider that Justice Scalia died before he could vote against affirmative action in the Fisher case. Now Justice Kennedy is retiring and Trump’s Supreme Court will certainly tilt against the policy with dissenters like Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. Previously, Justice Thomas asserted that, “a State’s use of race in higher education admissions decisions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.” And Justice Roberts is on record as saying that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

...The end of affirmative action is a horrifying prospect for many liberals, but it may better reflect the actual views of Americans. A 2013 Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe college applicants should be admitted solely based on merit. A majority of whites and Latinos think race should not be a factor in admissions, and blacks are more evenly split, with a significant 44 percent saying admission should be based strictly on merit.

...Prejudice is not as uniform as it used to be, and now we have micro-prejudices that cannot be legislated away; Puerto Rican Americans stereotype Mexican Americans, who stereotype African Americans, who stereotype Korean Americans, who stereotype Japanese Americans, who stereotype Chinese Americans, who stereotype Pakistani Americans, who stereotype Indian Americans, and so on. Trying to mitigate this inevitable mess of tribalism with a preferential and zero-sum admissions policy seems like a fool’s errand.

The aftermath of the civil rights era saw huge U.S. immigration spikes for Asian and Latin American populations. In the 1960s most immigrants came from Europe, so the color question remained acute. But, starting in the 1970s, there has been a huge influx of color. In 1960, only 9 percent of immigrants were Latin American and 5 percent were Asian. Compare that with 2011 immigration, when 52 percent were Latin American and 28 percent Asian. The color question has changed in America and this has implications for the logic of affirmative action.

If diversity really is the goal when college campuses are being composed, then we’ll need a huge influx of under-represented conservative and libertarian students and faculty. Perhaps the one place where liberals are unlikely to win the diversity argument, broadly understood, is on college campuses where political correctness and ‘safe-space’ culture has narrowed the diversity of political viewpoints.

When Asians score their way into all the slots at the good schools, will whites argue that they were discriminated against? Actually, Asian scholastic excellence is already so powerful that Asians have to be discriminated against to keep them from overpopulating competitive programs. William M. Chace, in his 2011 “Affirmative Inaction” essay in the American Scholar, tells of a Princeton study that analyzed the records of more than 100,000 applicants to three highly selective private universities. “They found that being an African-American candidate was worth, on average, an additional 230 SAT points on the 1600-point scale and that being Hispanic was worth an additional 185 points, but that being an Asian-American candidate warranted the loss, on average, of 50 SAT points.”

... a recent study looks at why Asian kids from poor families score better than rich white kids, and concludes that Asian family culture makes the difference. It’s not some genetic or innate cognitive advantage, but the family insistence that achievement comes from extreme effort—a longstanding emphasis in Confucian cultures. Of course, this is unlikely to be the only cause of academic excellence, but it can’t be ignored or trivialized either.

We need to face reality. College admission and employment generally is a competitive zero-sum game. Affirmative action started as a well-intentioned way to redress inequalities, but it has become an ethical and practical quagmire. It is now effectively pitting races against each other, and rigging the results so that individual merit differences are discounted. Liberals are afraid that eliminating affirmative action is the same as turning away from those who are less fortunate, whereas conservatives and libertarians think that, when the State gets out of the way, individuals and families make themselves more prosperous. If the State must be involved in the redistribution of social outcomes through college admissions, then it should stick to a problem it can actually solve—namely, improving access for poor people of every race.

Read more here.

Is climate hysteria unraveling?

In Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton writes,

...you can tell from the recent substantial lack of news on the climate front from the mainstream media that climate hysteria, both in the U.S. and internationally, is unraveling with remarkable rapidity. Just since early 2016, world temperatures are down by about two-thirds of a degree C -- which is well more than half of the 20th century warming. Canadian and Australian voters are resoundingly repudiating carbon taxes. In the UK, after years of delay, the first horizontally-drilled wells using fracking technology are finally moving forward. Germany has conceded that it will come nowhere near its previous carbon-reduction goals, and has stopped making any serious attempt to reach same. The third world, led by China and India, proceeds with plans to build and deploy some 1600 new coal-fired power plants.

...The U.S., as the leader in fracking technology and with vast reserves of coal, oil and gas, seems poised for the energy dominance promised by the President. Can anything stop us now? Unfortunately, there is a significant remaining obstacle. It is a landmine of the legal variety, planted by the Obama administration with the intent to have it blow up any efforts to revert from fantasy schemes of non-functional intermittent energy back to a system of inexpensive energy that actually works.

I'm referring, of course, to the so-called Endangerment Finding (EF) of the EPA, issued in 2009, that found CO2 and other "greenhouse gases" constitute a "danger" to human health and safety through contributing to global warming. Burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) produces CO2. To stop the burning of fossil fuels, you would more or less need to shut down the economy. And yet, so far, in the various deregulatory energy initiatives of the Trump EPA and Energy Department, there has been no effort of any kind to take on the EF.

...As long as the EF remains in place, the administration foolishly concedes to environmental activists and random district judges the ability to delay, obstruct, and potentially stop the march to U.S. energy dominance. With the "science" backing up the EF now thoroughly discredited, there is no reason to make an such concession.

Read more here.

Taking a look at birth rates

At Real Clear Politics, Michael Barone, a writer who keeps a close eye on demographic trends, asks

WILL THE TREND OF LOW BIRTH RATES BE REVERSED?

Sometimes a society's values change sharply with almost no one noticing, much less anticipating the consequences. In 1968, according to a Gallup survey, 70 percent of American adults said that a family of three or more children was "ideal" -- about the same number as Gallup surveys starting in 1938. That number helps explain the explosive baby boom after Americans were no longer constrained by depression and world war.

Those values and numbers didn't last. By 1978, Gallup reported that only 39 percent considered three or more children "ideal." The numbers have hovered around there ever since, spiking to just 41 percent in the late-1990s tech boom.

...Native-born Hispanics and blacks used to have birth rates above the replacement rate (2.1 births per woman). Now they're below replacement, almost as low that of as native-born whites and Asians, which are down only a bit. The immigrant birth rate remains above replacement level among blacks, but only barely above among Hispanics, and below among whites and Asians.

...One possible consequence: Those often-gleeful predictions that whites will soon be a minority will not be realized so soon, or maybe ever. Nor is it clear, as sociologist Richard Alba has suggested, whether often-intermarrying Hispanics and Asians will see themselves as aggrieved minorities. They might just blend in, like Italians and Poles.

Also, the sharp drop in the Hispanic birth rate combined with the sharp drop of Hispanic (especially Mexican) immigration post-2007 means a lower proportion of low-skill immigrants competing for jobs with low-skill Americans. Asian immigrants may outnumber Hispanics and arrive with significantly higher skill levels. So may immigrants from African countries like Nigeria and Ghana. Their capacity for expanding the economy rather than competing for low-skill jobs may point to unexpected growth. And neither group arrives with grievances rooted in slavery and American racial segregation.

Barone notes there are some counter trends that may create more possibilities,

But since persistently low birth rates lead to population loss, economic stagnation and low creativity, let's hope some of them come true.

Thanks, Elizabeth. We didn't know that!

What shall we ban next?

Thales writes at The Declination,

If the harm of alcohol was eventually outweighed by freedom of choice, then how can we justify banning plastic straws? Many of the same Leftists arguing for banning straws are, in turn, proponents of the legalization of marijuana. Any substance, device, or creation of mankind will have costs, that is to say negative effects. This applies to every single thing man creates. Automobiles have negative effects. Cubicles have negative effects. Medicines have side effects, or can lead to addictions. Those ugly, tacky garden gnomes have negative effects (the sight of them used to drive my dog into a rage for reasons that are clear only to him).

The trick of the Left is to focus on those negative things in an arbitrary fashion. For the things they like, they speak only of the positives. Weed will save lives, reduce pain, relax people. For things they dislike, they speak only of the negatives. Straws will hurt turtles, and won’t degrade for decades. Animals might ingest them. Ban straws. Legalize weed. Ban guns. Legalize gay marriage. There is no principle here, no overriding guidance they are following, only arbitrary emotions. These are the whims of a mob. If 50% + 1 don’t like something that you like, ban it!

Read more here.

The media politicizes everything

At FrontPage Magazine, Daniel Greenfield writes,

the Huffington Post, owned by Verizon, exposed the identity of AmyMek, a Twitter user retweeted by Trump, getting her husband fired from his job and harassing members of her family. This type of opposition research directed at ordinary people who happen to be politically active, but without occupying any formal position beyond social media influencer, has become commonplace.

...But by creating its own definition of political power relationships, one in which everyone is vulnerable, the media is no longer refereeing a power relationship, it’s at the top of the power pyramid. It’s not overseeing a public trust. It isn’t performing a public service. It’s ruling over the public.

Read more here.

Well, not exactly!

It happened!

In The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway writes,

After a year of continuous and alarming revelations, the media are still more interested in proving the Trump campaign treasonously colluded with Russia than wrestling with the fact that the FBI spied on a presidential campaign, and used dubious partisan political research to justify their surveillance.

...On Saturday night, heavily redacted copies of the FBI’s application to wiretap Trump campaign affiliate Carter Page were released. The portion of the 412-page document that was not redacted supported the claims of Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), as well as those made by the majority of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The senators and the representatives had issued reports alleging that the FBI used an unverified Clinton campaign document to secure a wiretap against an American citizen, that the application for the wiretap used circular reporting and lacked verification for its central claims, and that it made materially false claims related to the source’s credibility.

...When the dossier first appeared on the scene, it was portrayed as a top-notch intelligence product put together by a top-notch intelligence official whose work history was credible.

It turned out to have been secretly bought and paid for by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. They took extreme care to cover their tracks by funneling the money through a law firm that hired the Democratic researchers to cook up the dossier. The research product was then funneled to the media and the federal government.

...The Dossier Was Used to Secure a Wiretap Against a Trump Affiliate

...Informants Were Run against the Trump Campaign

...You can, along with the partisan and gaslighting media, claim it’s not a big deal to run human informants or secretly gather intelligence against a presidential campaign. But you can not deny it happened.

Read more here.

GDP up 4.1% in second quarter!

At The New American, Bob Adlemann reports

During President Trump’s celebration of the second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) report in the Rose Garden on Friday morning, he said that “We’re on track to hit the highest annual growth rate in over 13 years. And I will say this right now and I will say it strongly: As the [trade] deals come in one by one, we’re going to go a lot higher than these numbers, and these are great numbers.”

Bob tells us what the nay-sayers are saying and also gives the other side here.

Diversity costs!

From Barrister at Maggie's Farm:

Diversity And Other Administrative Monstrosities: The Case Of The University Of Michigan

It begins:

Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan at Flint and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, recently calculated that his university has nearly 100 diversity administrators, more than 25 of them earning over $100,000 a year. Collectively, they cost the University of Michigan, with fringe benefits, about $11 million annually. Adding in other costs such as travel and office space expenses, the total cost rises to perhaps $14 million, or $300 for every enrolled student at the U of M in the fall semester 2017...

"Science me that!"

What a happy surprise! Scott Ott is back doing his Scrappleface satires!

By turning off a genetic mutation in mice, scientists at the University of Alabama say they’ve reversed age-associated wrinkles, balding and gray hair, finally offering hope to elderly people that they might someday have smooth skin, dark hair and a full, thick pelt, just like younger mice.

“This is revolutionary news in our selfie-driven society, enamored as we are of cute animal videos,” said an unnamed researcher in Birmingham. “It means that your social media likes and shares can finally increase as you age, because you’ll look perpetually young, cute and furry.”

For the study, scientists altered a mouse gene to cause mitochondrial dysfunction, creating premature hair loss, graying and skin wrinkling. Then they flipped the genetic switch, reversing the apparent aging.

A spokesman for the International Geriatric Rodent Defense League (IGRDL), a non-profit advocacy group, protested the “cruel use of mouse subjects,” and questioned the importance of the research, noting that scientists had merely reversed aging that they had also induced.

“To reverse real wrinkles, gray hair and balding in humans,” the IGRDL source said, “they’d have to put my kid into rehab, pay off my credit cards, fire my boss, and get my third wife off my back. Science me that!”

New York Times and AP go after Kavanaugh's wife

John Hinderaker asks at PowerLine,

When Stephen Breyer, Ruth Ginsburg, Sonia Sotamayor and Elena Kagan were appointed to the Court, did the Times, or the Associated Press, try to investigate documents sent or received by their family members?

Read more here.

Congratulations, Facebook?

Matt Levine writes at Bloomberg about Facebook's big day this week.

It’s not every day that you see “ the largest ever loss of value in one day for a U.S.-traded company,” but if yesterday’s post-close trading reflects today’s closing price, then Facebook Inc., which lost as much as $151 billion of market capitalization at one point after the close yesterday after announcing disappointing growth numbers and guidance, will claim that record. (As of 10 a.m. today the stock was down about 19 percent, about a $120 billion drop in market cap, well on target for the record.) The current holder is Intel Corp., which “lost about $91 billion on one September day in 2000.” There at least there was a tech bubble bursting all around them. Here, “before the results were announced, Facebook’s shares had closed in New York at $217.50, a record high, and had gained 23 percent this year.”

Read more analysis here.

Trump was a populist nemesis visited upon the hubris of the coastal culture.

At The New Criterion, Victor Davis Hanson writes about the good populism and the bad populism. He gives examples from history, then focuses on the present day.

Today, Occupy Wall Street, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon all stand in the same current. Often, urban intellectuals, aristocrats, and elites—from the patrician Roman Republican street agitator Publius Clodius Pulcher and the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, to present-day billionaires like George Soros and Tom Steyer—have sought to assist the urban protesters. Perhaps these gentleman-agitators thought they could offer money, prestige, or greater wisdom, thereby channeling and elevating shared populist agendas.

The antithesis to such radical populism was likely thought by ancient conservative historians to be the “good” populism of the past—and what the contemporary media might call the “bad” populism of the present: the push-back of small property owners and the middle classes against the power of oppressive government, steep taxation, and internationalism, coupled with unhappiness over imperialism and foreign wars and a preference for liberty rather than mandated equality. Think of the second century B.C. Gracchi brothers rather than Juvenal’s “bread-and-circuses” imperial Roman underclass, the American rather than the French Revolution, or the Tea Party versus Occupy Wall Street.

...the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his Democracy in America, saw America’s unique strength in the populist influence of a nation of small agrarians. Such property owners were suspicious of both hereditary aristocracy and monarchy, and yet were economically autonomous enough to resist radical calls for government-enforced equality.

Many Republicans, foolishly, either wished for cheap labor or deluded themselves into thinking that amnestied impoverished illegal immigrants would soon vote for family-values conservatives. Neither party worried much about the insidious destruction of immigration law, much less how federal laws that were otherwise applicable to most Americans could be arbitrarily ignored by a select few or how wages of entry-level workers were driven down by imported labor. Few conservatives raised the objection that mass influxes of illegal aliens, mostly non-diverse, poorly educated, and without skills, were difficult enough to assimilate quickly under the old culture of the melting pot, but even more so now, given the current paradigm of the tribal salad bowl.

There was a similar consensus across party lines to embrace globalization. It was seen not just as an inevitable result of Western cultural dominance and technological supremacy, but rather as something almost morally and culturally enriching. Internationalism and open borders would give way to a positive globalized sameness—even as such homogenization left millions of Americans between the coasts with stagnant wages, or lost jobs, or a sense of alienation from the centers of power in bi-coastal America.

...When, during the 2016 campaign, a crass Manhattan billionaire real estate developer began campaigning in terms of the first personal plural pronoun—our miners, our workers, our farmers—few emulated him. Most rivals were convinced apparently that he would prove as irrelevant as those to whom he appealed. Yet, again in Burkean terms, assembly-line workers, clerks, miners, loggers, fabricators, welders, and builders had been the traditional bulwarks of thousands of American communities. Their loss of viable livelihoods—at a time when their products were often highly coveted—was a radical prescription for cultural suicide.

...So Trump was a populist nemesis visited upon the hubris of the coastal culture. When he took on “fake news,” when he tweeted over the “crooked” media, when he railed about “globalists,” when he caricatured Washington politicians—and ranted non-stop, shrilly, and crudely—a third of the country felt that at last they had a world-beater who wished to win ugly rather than, as in the case of John McCain or Mitt Romney, lose nobly. As a neighbor put it to me of Trump’s opponents, “They all have it coming.”

All had forgotten that there was also another populist tradition, lying dormant. It was a quieter but far more potent bomb just waiting to blow up—if someone ever would be so uncouth and angry enough to detonate it.

Read more here.

"Stand down!"

Staff at The Geller Report informs us that

Michael Daniel, who served as cybersecurity chief under Barack Obama’s administration, said that Susan Rice, then-national security director, specifically ordered him to “stand down” and back off any investigations into Russia meddling in the 2016 election.

Read more here.

"Crazy People Are Dangerous!"

At The Other McCain, Robert Stacy McCain reminds us that crazy people are dangerous and he gives several examples here.

Obama gave designated terrorist group hundreds of thousands of dollars

Ryan Saavedra reports at The Daily Wire,

A new report released on Wednesday revealed that the Obama administration knowingly provided an Islamic terrorist-financing organization with hundreds of thousands of dollars despite the fact that the group had been designated as a terrorist-financing organization for a decade by the U.S. government.

Obama officials approved the release of well over $100,000 even after they were informed that the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA) was affiliated with Osama bin Laden and Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), which eventually became al-Qaeda.

While the Trump administration has focused on destroying Islamic terrorism, those groups thrived under the Obama administration.

"[In 2014], when the U.S. first began its campaign against the terror group, ISIS had a presence in seven countries," The Hill reported in 2016. "That figure rose to 13 in 2015, and today the White House document shows that ISIS is operating in 18 countries."

The Obama administration also killed a massive investigation into Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist group, allowing them to "become one of the biggest transnational organized crime groups in the world," veteran DEA supervisory agent Jack Kelly told Politico.

Read more here.

Does your race fit into a box? Finding the joy of life!

Andrew points to a victory for Donald Trump in the negotiations with the European Union. Trump's stated goal was zero tariffs on both sides. The EU leaders first howled their displeasure, but now have told the White House they are ready to negotiate with that goal in mind!

Andrew's guest is the son of a black father and a Jewish mother. His ex-wife was Mexican. His name is Eli Steele. He is deaf, but communicates using a hearing device. He goes into a public school in L.A. to enroll his son, Jack, and they ask him to designate a primary race. He went to five different schools and got five different answers why he had to check a box. He produced a movie entitled How Jack Became Black. We have people from 180 countries living in America. How do you fit all of them into 5 race boxes?

You can't have God and a sense of your own worth and individuality and then say the state owns everything you make and the state has the power to disburse your wealth. Why do civilizations like Europe die without God? Meaning goes out of life! With God you believe an action can have meaning or it can be actually good or evil. If you feel life is meaningless is it because you have stepped outside and created a meaningless life?
If you are like Richard the third, you will be haunted by conscience. If you are like Lady MacBeth, you will find a world that is meaningless. What happens when you act within the moral universe? Andrew argues that that is where you find the joy of life.

What is the future of the two centers of Western civilization?

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

Europe will remain a friend of the United States. Even after the failure of the Obama administration to fundamentally transform the United States into a European social democracy, and the similar inability of the European Union to create robust economic and demographic growth, political federalism, and military readiness, it is simplistic to say that the two centers of Western civilization will merely drift further apart.

More likely, the power of the United States will grow and the global influence of Europe will continue to wane — reawakening ancient dangers that are all too familiar to Americans.

Read more here.

Some basic concepts of physics

At Euan Mearns.com, Geo writes about Entropy, Energy, and Order in the Universe. Here are some questions he answers.

What is entropy?

What is order?

Why is atomic energy so much more powerful than all other forms of energy?

Why is geothermal lumped with fission and fusion?

What does it take to turn antimatter into energy?

Read more here.

Government spying on journalists

Someone in the Department of Justice or FBI broke into the computer of journalist Sharyl Atkisson. She explains it in this YouTube tape at the 1:37 and 1:57 marks on the tape.

Trump wins trade concessions from Europe

Hot Air reports,

President Donald Trump on Wednesday secured concessions from Europe, averting a trade war, the Dow Jones News Wire reported, citing a European Union official. The report came shortly before Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker were scheduled to brief the press at a joint conference in the White House Rose Garden.

The market rallied on the news. The Dow Jones Industrial Average popped Wednesday afternoon, rising about half a percent.

The Europeans agreed to lower industrial tariffs and import more U.S. soybeans, Dow Jones reported.

Trump said earlier on Wednesday said he hoped “to work something out on a fair trade deal with Europe.”

Jim Jordan announces run for Speaker!

Here is an announcement I applaud! Jim Jordan has formally announced his intention to run for Speaker of the House! Read more here.

Those are the plans!

The worst president in American history

Why will Barack Obama go down as the worst president in American history? Matt Margolis lists six reasons at PJ Media.

6. Weaponizing the government against his enemies

5. Obama’s surveillance state

4. Purging Gitmo

3. Obamacare

2. The worst economic recovery

1. The largest deficits in history

Read his explanation of each here.

Space Force roadblocks

At Military.com, Richard Sisk reports,

On the same day he touted the "Space Force" to veterans, President Donald Trump's plan to create a sixth military branch hit a roadblock in Congress.

A House-Senate conference committee working on the $716 billion defense budget for fiscal 2019, which begins Oct. 1, left out money to start building the Space Force.

Earlier Tuesday, in address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Kansas City, Trump cited the Space Force as part of an unrivaled military buildup under his administration.

"My thinking is always on military and military strength. That is why I'm proud to report that we are now undertaking the greatest rebuilding of our United States military in its history. We have secured $700 billion for defense this year, and $716 billion next year -- approved," he said to applause.

Related content:

Creation of Trump's 'Space Force' May Take Years, Experts Say
After Trump Comments, Air Force Punts Again on Space Force
'Space Force' Study to Be Ready by August: DoD Official
"And I've directed the Pentagon to begin the process of creating the sixth branch of our military. It's called the Space Force," Trump said to more applause. "We are living in a different world, and we have to be able to adapt, and that's what it is. A lot of very important things are going to be taking place in space.

"And I just don't mean going up to the moon and going up to Mars, where we'll be going very soon," he added. "We'll be going to Mars very soon. But from a military standpoint, space is becoming every day more and more important."

However, the conference report of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees left out funding for the Space Force in the National Defense Authorization Act. The conference report must still be approved by the full House and Senate.

Instead, the report directs Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to come up with a plan for how the Defense Department would organize for warfighting in space.

The House version of the conference report was also leery of Trump's vision for the creation of a new military branch for space, instead calling for the establishment of "a subunified command for Space under United States Strategic Command for carrying out joint Space warfighting."

Last month, Trump appeared to give the job of creating a Space Force as a separate military branch to Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford.

At a White House meeting of the National Space Council, the president said, "I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces."

"We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force -- separate but equal. It's going to be something," he said.

Trump then looked around the room to find Dunford and said, "General Dunford, if you would carry that assignment out, I would be very greatly honored."

Trump, freedom, character assassination

Andrew takes some time to expound a little bit more than normal on the subject of freedom.

People are attacking Trump's character. Andrew says, "You can't attack Trump's character, He has a terrible character! His crappy character protects my freedom. Why? Because every time someone does something to protect freedom, the Left assassinates him. But, Trump is bulletproof. He has been the same man all his life. We already know who he is.

The Left doesn't care about character (Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton).

Why does it take a man of Trump's character to do all the fantastic things Trump has been doing? Because the stuff the news media tries to get him on just rolls off his back, because we already know it. None of the revelations about bad behavior stick! Donald Trump is the creation of the corrupt press.

If Trump is just buying time with tariffs, doesn't China realize that? Won't they just wait him out?

Andrew opens the mailbag. He tells us that to be true to what we believe we must also be willing to pay the price.

Uplifting!

At Ace of Spades, Oregon Muse brings us this:

Your guide to understanding today's news

The cynical leftists of the Democrat-Media-Entertainment-Academia Complex who repulsively manipulate the Holocaust to make their every argument.

Dov Fischer writes at The American Spectator,

...Nary a day goes by without some idiot on MSNBC or CNN comparing something American to the Holocaust or the Nazis. The latest idiot on the horizon, Jill Wine-Banks, recently compared President Trump’s press conference in Helsinki with not only the Holocaust but also Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Consider the leftist media fools who see the human challenges posed at our southern border, as aliens try to enter the United States illegally rather than at ports of entry, and then bring children — maybe their own, maybe kidnapped, maybe rented, maybe purchased — as media shields. Inasmuch as a liberal Ninth Circuit federal court of appeals imposed a Flores Settlement that requires the Government to separate the children from the parents if the Illegals still are locked up after twenty days, suddenly the Democrats and their media mouthpieces are comparing the President and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Hitler.

It even is so crazy that a wild leftist who made his career by advocating for gay marriage in New Jersey got himself positioned to manipulate the name of Holocaust victim Anne Frank to smear the President and his Administration as “anti-Semitic.” And whom did he call an anti-Semite? A President whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew, married to his son-in-law who is an Orthodox Jew, and several of whose other children have married Jews. A President with Jewish grandchildren — something that many leading American Jewish community leaders, to their everlasting shame, cannot claim. A President who moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. A President who walked out of the corrupt and myopic Iran Deal. A President who walked out of the anti-Semitic United Nations “Human Rights” Council. A President whose Education Secretary visits yeshivas and praises them. A President whose Vice President rolled up his sleeves at a desecrated Jewish cemetery in Missouri and personally helped physically restore the cemetery grounds. (And, yes, even Mike Pence could be called a “Nazi” or otherwise anti-Semitic by the cynical leftists of the Democrat-Media-Entertainment-Academia Complex who repulsively manipulate the Holocaust to make their every argument.)

It not only is repulsive. It is sacrilege. The Shoah is not a surrogate retort to be leveraged by idiots otherwise incapable of constructing cogent arguments. Rather, it is for personal mourning and respectful contemplation. It is for Armenians, too, as they remember and mourn the 1.5 million Armenians whom the Turks murdered during the Hayots tseghaspanutyun — the Armenian Holocaust — of 1915-1918. To this day, a century later, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey will not admit that crime against humanity. (By the way, America is obligated under the terms of NATO to go to war alongside that dictatorial madman if Turkey invokes NATO Article 5.) Likewise, the Holocaust is for the victims of Pol Pot, who murdered between 1.5 million and 3 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979. It is for the 500,000 to one million Tutsis murdered in Rwanda by the Hutus during the span of only 100 days in 1994. It is for the Ukrainian victims of Stalin’s Golodomor who were murdered in their millions from 1932-1933 by Communist Russia’s worst villain, every bit as evil as Hitler, even as the New York Times white-washed and covered up that Genocide as their Moscow-based reporter, Walter Duranty, got the Pulitzer Prize for two years of Fake News that he published praising Stalin during the height of the mass murders.

Those were Holocausts. And the most enormous of them all: from 1958-1962 Mao Tse-tung murdered 45 million Chinese. History’s worst mass murderer called that the “Great Leap Forward.” Yet no one ever hears of those Holocausts because, in most cases, they were massive crimes against humanity perpetrated by the political Left — primarily Communist — or in the Third World. Consequently, dead Rwandans merit one entertaining box-office film. And the millions of Ukrainian victims of Stalinist Russia, the tens of millions of victims of Communist China, the millions of victims of Communist Cambodia, the millions of victims of Turkey — nitchoho, meiyo, kmeanoavei, vochinch… in other words: nothing. In the face of such staggering crimes against humanity, Fidel Castro’s mass murder of 30,000 or more political opponents within his Cuban population of seven million — equivalent to murdering 680,000 people in the United States or even more — seems not to merit being termed a “Holocaust.” Nor, apparently, are all the other mass murders in their many millions perpetrated throughout the Communist world.

But Trump’s press conference alongside Putin does. Oh — and don’t forget to throw in Kristallnacht, Pearl Harbor (and how did they forget to add John Wayne Gacy, Albert DeSalvo, and Ted Bundy?). Among Democrats and other Liberals and Socialists — in tandem with their Media-Entertainment-Academia complex — it seems that there is no business like Shoah business.

...By contrast, contemplate that, in his every speech — going back to his Inaugural Address and his State of the Union — President Donald J. Trump regularly speaks of all colors bleeding the same color blood. Hitler? Really? And that he publicly takes personal pride that he has brought African-American unemployment and Hispanic/Latino unemployment to the lowest numbers ever recorded. Nuremberg laws? Does not the entire Nazi-Hitler-Kristallnacht line of comparisons truly extend beyond insane — and into the sphere of the objectively demented? Trump Derangement Syndrome indeed.

The message needs to go forth to the Democrat-Liberal-Media-Entertainment-Academia complex — from unbiased ethicists, any remaining honest historians, and theologians: Keep your damned hands off the Holocaust — and off 9-11 and off Pearl Harbor — and just seal your lips shut the next time you have the uncontrollably gurgling urge to vomit a metaphor comparing those crimes-against-humanity or the crime of treason to our American democracy and to a President who faithfully complies daily with the Constitutional restraints that limit his options in dealing with a Congress whose Democrats are sworn to perpetual “Resistance,” while a Deep State devoted to his impeachment and downfall now is revealed to exist within the deepest bowels of the intelligence apparatus. He even faces an unbalanced recent CIA director who voted in the 1976 Presidential election for the Communist Party’s Marxist pro-Soviet Gus Hall. (Talk about collusion with Russia!) President Trump likewise consistently has honored the Constitutional boundaries as he endures wild overreaching by Obama-appointed judges who legislate from the bench and then impose their rulings beyond their legitimate jurisdictions onto the entire nation.

Likewise, the expression “Never Again” does not belong to others, even if Holocaust Survivors failed to trademark it. Let others find their own slogan. Imagine if racists, ethanol farmers, or flip-phone users started marching behind the banner of “We Shall Overcome.” It really is time to demand that CNN and MSNBC anchors and analysts cease and desist from hurling Holocaust metaphors and likewise stop desecrating the martyrs of Pearl Harbor and 9-11. The joke has worn thin, and the Left Media-Entertainment-Academia complex have bestowed on Hitler a posthumous victory because the terms “Nazi” and “Holocaust” have been stripped of their meanings and now are just two more synonyms for CNN’s use of “Stormy Daniels” and Maniacal Maxine’s “Impeach 45.”

Read more here.

Time to get the eggs!

Backyard poultry has been linked to 212 salmonella infections in 44 states across the U.S. since February, the CDC said. File photo The Kansas City Star
Kaitlyn Alanis reports in the Miami Herald,

f you’re really loving your backyard chickens and all those fresh eggs, you might be giving your flock a little bit of extra attention — and some snuggles and kisses.

Well, you had better stop, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning.

You might be putting yourself at risk for a salmonella infection, the department said, and you wouldn’t be alone.

There is currently a multistate outbreak of salmonella infections linked to people touching backyard poultry, the CDC said on Monday.

Read more here.