Exceptions

The Babylon Bee reports,

After facing mounting criticism over apparent hypocrisy within its ranks, the movement using the hashtag #BelieveAllWomen has come out with an extensive list of exceptions to its directive to always believe all women no matter what.

While Americans from both sides of the aisle largely agree that women's stories shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, the far left's insistence that everyone always believe all women has gotten some pushback. This list of exceptions is designed to clarify the left's position, according to spokespeople.

Included in the list are the following:

Bill Clinton's accusers
Potiphar's wife
Delilah
Conservative women
Women who accuse Democratic candidates
Sarah Sanders
Any woman the left suddenly decides they don't like anymore
Nikki Haley
Dana Loesch
Women the Democrats no longer have a political need to exploit
Melania Trump
Cersei Baratheon
Any woman who argues for pro-life causes

The full list goes on for another 8,000 pages, explaining exactly which women the left doesn't believe while still proclaiming that everyone should "believe all women."

"This new list lets us be consistent with our rallying cry," said Hillary Clinton. "We can now simultaneously say that we believe all women, while conveniently ignoring or silencing women whose stories conflict with our narrative."

The list is available online in a 587 MB PDF download, or a hard copy of the binders full of women can be purchased from Hillary Clinton's official site.

What is Antifa all about?

Joseph D'Hippolito writes in The Federalist,

...On Saturday, Antifa will join other leftist groups in massive nationwide protests designed to force President Donald Trump’s administration out of office. Organizing those protests is “Refuse Fascism,” which declares that “in the name of humanity, we REFUSE to accept a Fascist America!”

Despite antiseptic portrayals throughout American media, Antifa are more than “anti-fascists.” Antifa represent the chaos of Germany’s Weimar Republic and provide the violent complement to academic neo-Marxism. Like their philosophical comrades, Antifa seek to destroy the American emphasis on liberty under law and to impose a revival of one of history’s most repressive ideologies.

Antifa Is Anti-West and Anti-Capitalist
Bernd Langer, whose “80 Years of Anti-Fascist Action” was published by Germany’s Association for the Promotion of Anti-Fascist Literature, succinctly defined the rhetorical subterfuge. “Anti-fascism is a strategy rather than an ideology,” wrote Langer, a former Antifa member, for “an anti-capitalist form of struggle.”

Short for the German phrase, “Antifaschistische Aktion,” Antifa served as the paramilitary arm of the German Communist Party (KPD), which the Soviet Union funded. In other words, Antifa became the German Communists’ version of the Nazis’ brown-shirted SA.

...Today’s Antifa embrace those roots. During February’s protest in Berkeley, masked Antifa agitators caused nearly $100,000 in damage by starting fires, breaking windows, assaulting bystanders with pepper spray and flagpoles, painting graffiti on nearby businesses, and destroying automatic teller machines. “Refuse Fascism,” the group organizing Saturday’s protests, is controlled by the Revolutionary Communist Party USA, which seeks to create a Marxist United States through violent revolution.

Read more here.

Did you know about these sites?

This was sent to my email today from Prager U., which promises that they are fighting back.

Brawl, fistfight, death

Mark Tapscott reports in Lifezette,

Jamal Khashoggi was killed by an unknown person when an argument became physical, and blows were exchanged in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, according to a state media report late Friday.

“Discussions between citizen Jamal Khashoggi and those who met him while he was in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul led to a brawl and a fistfight, which led to his death,” the report said, according to multiple U.S. media outlets.

The Saudi state media said the government’s investigation of Khashoggi’s death has resulted in the detention of 18 individuals who apparently had some role in the October 2 incident. The government’s investigation is not yet complete, so some or all of those detained could be released or charged.

Read more here.

In Defense of Goodness and Beauty

Guest post
by Suzann Darnall

I am sickened by what I see as the never-ending assaults on that which is beautiful and good. I realize that not all of us have the same definitions for beauty or good, but I think we often overlap more than we realize. At least, I find that with my conservative family, friends, and acquaintances. Not always so much with those I meet who are more liberal or otherwise different in their viewpoint.

One of the most egregious assaults I see on that which is beautiful and good, is the killing of our unborn children, quite often just ‘cause the child would be inconvenient if born. What is more beautiful than a baby? I fell in love with my children and grandchildren before they were even born. I thought my pregnant belly and the pregnant bellies of my daughters were truly amazing works of science and art that could house an unborn infant and aid in bringing a new life into the world. My father thinks every pregnant woman he sees is beautiful and they should all be treated like queens. My mother and I both think each and every child being born should be celebrated. So, it hurts to know that a segment of the world thinks it is okay to kill these wee treasures. A segment that find pregnancy something to be disdained and not cherished.

In a much less life-or-death situation, I am appalled by the abuse being heaped upon fairy tales in general and the Disney princesses in particular. I mean come on people, fairy tales and Disney princesses are make-believe. They are the stuff of childhood. They are about beautiful people, good overcomes evil, and happy endings. They are now being warped by feminists and their ilk into fictional accounts of rape, assault, patriarchal oppressions, child abuse, and much more. Sorry, not sorry, I do not view them that way at all. But, then again, I like the idea of being rescued by a knight in shining armor riding upon a magnificent steed. I liked playing with dolls. I always think of my husband when I hear the Snow White or Sleeping Beauty sing about their dream prince. I am lucky enough to be married to my Prince Charming, I guess.

The attack on the family is another effort I see to tear down that which is good and beautiful. Family is an integral part of a healthy society. Overreaching government and their minions are working overtime to destroy families. The welfare state, Planned Parenthood, and numerous government entities are directly in opposition to the building of a family and creation of a happy home. Some politicians even believe government should have more to say in the raising of children than parents.

While there are so many more examples of the destruction of beauty and goodness, the last one I am going to cover is the systematic erosion of our religious rights. Such an eating away of these rights directly impacts our ability to worship freely the Creator of all that is virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy. In other words, to celebrate God and the beauty of the world He gave us. We see this one being implemented on many levels, but one which concerns me is that some government entities are even curtailing the freedom of Christian artists to create only that which they wish to create.

We must stand up for that which is good and beautiful. We must fight against those who would impose their ugly views of humanity and the world upon us. Let us celebrate the light, the life, the love, and the laughter. And, along the way, let us elect those who will help us to protect not only the beautiful things in life, but our right to celebrate them as we will. Remember: Red, Right, and Republican are beautiful words when it comes to voting and protecting liberty!!!

"Everyone should embrace both due process and the presumption of innocence because everyone might need these themselves one day"

In Commentary, Christine Rosen writes,

...something unexpected happened on the way to his character assassination: Kavanaugh defended himself and was defended by others, including many women. Where feminists wanted women to see themselves in the seat Christine Blasey Ford occupied, many instead saw their sons or husbands or brothers sitting in the chair where Kavanaugh sat.

...What radical feminist theorists have long been arguing—that there is no such thing as true consent because of patriarchy and that all women are potential victims of men—has reached full flower.

...The answer isn’t reeducation in radical feminist notions of men’s innately violent natures. It’s raising boys and girls to treat one another with respect and to uphold gender-free values such as the presumption of innocence and due process and equal opportunity. Civil society relies on due process not only because it’s an objective good (though it is). Everyone should embrace both due process and the presumption of innocence because everyone might need these themselves one day, regardless of his or her gender.

Read more here.

Maybe we haven't been looking hard enough!

The Economist asks,

Why have humans never found aliens?

...“IF ALIENS are so likely, why have we never seen any?” That is the Fermi Paradox—named after Enrico Fermi, a physicist who posed it in 1950.

Fermi’s argument ran as follows. The laws of nature supported the emergence of intelligent life on Earth. Those laws are the same throughout the universe. The universe contains zillions of stars and planets. So, even if life is unlikely to arise on any particular astronomical body, the sheer abundance of creation suggests the night sky should be full of alien civilisations.

...In a paper published last month on arXiv, an online repository, a trio of astronomers at Pennsylvania State University have analysed the history of alien-hunting and come to a different conclusion. In effect, they reject one of the paradox’s main pillars. Astronomers have seen no sign of aliens, argue Jason Wright and his colleagues, because they have not been looking hard enough.

Dr Wright’s argument echoes that made by another astronomer, Jill Tarter, in 2010. Dr Tarter reckoned that decades of searching had amounted to the equivalent of dipping a drinking glass into Earth’s oceans at random to see if it contained a fish. Dr Wright and his colleagues built on Dr Tarter’s work to come up with a model that tries to estimate the amount of searching that alien-hunters have managed so far. They considered nine variables, including how distant any putative aliens are likely to be, the sensitivity of telescopes, how big a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum they are able to scan and the time spent doing so. Once the numbers had been crunched, the researchers reckoned humanity has done slightly better than Dr Tarter suggested. Rather than dipping a drinking glass into the ocean, they say, astronomers have dunked a bathtub. The upshot is that it is too early to assume no aliens exist. Fermi’s question is, for now at least, not a true paradox.

Read more here.

Is the Trump administration willing to support revolution in Iran?

Whenever I see that Michael Ledeen has written something about Iran I click to read it because he is the foremost expert on the subject. I wish Trump would hire him to develop policy on Iran. Anyway, here he writes at PJ Media. Ledeen writes that the central issue

is how to best promote the downfall of the Islamic Republic.

...If revolution were the consequence of misery, we’d see massive uprisings in North Korea and much of sub-Saharan Africa, as in Cuba. We’d expect Venezuela to join the heap of failed states most any day. But these revolutionary events are not taking place. Turmoil and misery abound, but the regimes hold fast.

Look at Iran today and you will see the streets full of protesters who want the end of the forty-year-old theocracy. Teachers, truck drivers, and bazaaris are all striking. Students, especially at universities, are leaving their classes to demonstrate against the regime. Even the Iranian Arabs in the oil-rich area near Basra are walking off the job, threatening natural gas and oil production. They are deliberately impoverishing themselves in order to promote revolution. It’s not a demand for higher income; it is mostly a revolt against a failed regime and in favor of greater freedom.

If you want to bring down the Islamic Republic, which should be the goal of a sensible Iran policy, you should actively support the strikers and demonstrators, rather than increase the misery of the people. How should you do that? First of all, by remembering how we did it to the Soviet Union. The dissidents needed better information about what was going on all over the empire. They needed to communicate with one another, and we enabled that by direct broadcasting via Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and Radio Liberty. Moreover, we provided them with fax machines, the technological breakthrough that created an active network throughout the Soviet bloc.

Today, we should actively strengthen our Farsi-language radio and television broadcasting, and provide the millions of Iranian dissidents with technology to thwart internet censorship and expose the myriad failures of the mullahcracy.

We have nothing approaching such a strategy, nor are we even in ongoing collaboration with the dissidents. This must be reckoned a significant failure.

If we could effectively support the relatively small number of anti-Soviet revolutionaries, we can surely do the same for the enormous number of anti-mullah Iranians.

Economic warfare and fierce speeches alone will not bring down the Islamic Republic. Our greatest weapon is political, as the Soviet example proved. But our strategists, administration after administration, are unwilling to support revolution in Tehran, and there is no sign a change is in the works. It will not “just happen” when some imagined economic/social tipping point is passed.

Obama wanted a strategic alliance with Iran, which he infamously accomplished. Trump and Pompeo don’t want that. But they have still not embraced a strategy to defeat Khamenei and his henchmen. They say they want a change in regime behavior, but they cannot have that without regime change. They can accomplish that, but only if they fight for it.

Read more here.

A visit to Japan

Bookworm has just returned from a visit to Japan. She writes about it and supplies some photos. Her last two paragraphs:

Japan is such a high functioning society. It’s clean, well-organized, hard-working, polite, beautiful, productive, safe, and harmonious. In each of those ways, it really is an apex of civilization.

There are downsides, of course: A stifling conformity (or at least stifling by American standards), a high suicide rate, the seemingly sad and almost desperate lives of salarymen, the weird sexlessness of Japanese life, and, perhaps as a consequence of that sexlessness, a dramatic population decline. Still, comparing these problems to the poverty, dirty, despair, crime, violence, etc., found in so many other parts of the world . . . well, I think Japan comes off looking pretty darn good.

Read the whole thing here.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Trump forces the media to cover issues they would rather avoid. They hate him so much.

Like me, Andrew is fascinated by the Khashoggi case. He quipped that Crown Prince MBS must have dropped out of Evil Dictator School because he isn't a very good evil dictator. On this issue Trump is being the grown up in the room, waiting to get facts. He also mentions, by the way, that the Saudis have agreed to purchase $450 billion in things from us and another contract for $110 billion. Then CNN and MSNBC throw their garbage at Trump in several videos Andrew plays, twisting every story to their Left-wing purposes, creating an atmosphere that something is terribly wrong when nothing is wrong! Setting the narrative, making it seem that everything is about Trump. We keep hearing there is a crisis in this country. There is a crisis, a crisis of insanity because of these media pundits controlling the narrative.

Facebook or Twitter has suspended Gay Patriot, not Louis Farrakhan. They only suspend people on the right. Let Americans talk it out! Don't censor us!

Eric Metaxas is Andrew's guest. He has co-written a children's book entitled Donald Drains the Swamp. He actually conceived the book as a humor book for adults.

Metaxas quotes Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living. (Then he went out and killed himself). Eric does Socrates in the City videos. Here is one called, If You Can Keep It.

Jesse Lee Peterson on spiritual battles

Earlier tonight I posted episode 595 of the Andrew Klavan podcasts. I neglected to write about what Jessie Lee Peterson had to say about racism. He says it is an illusion. He didn't hear the word racism growing up. He heard that it was a spiritual battle; warfare between good and evil. We should judge people based on character. You can resolve problems if you see them for what they are: right or wrong. Are there racists? No, there are haters. In your fallen spiritual state you have anger because you have fallen away from God. They are playing God by judging and hating their fellow man. See injustice but don't let it blind you. If it blinds you, you are now subject to it! Forgive whomever you are angry at. When you forgive them, God will forgive you! He will take that spirit of darkness away and allow you to see that it has nothing to do with color; it is either right or wrong, good or evil; it is spiritual!

His discussion of the spiritual battles begins at about the 17:45 mark and lasts for just a couple of minutes. He gives us a lot to think about!

The counterrevolution...of nature!

Michael Walsh writes in American Greatness,

Since November 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, the American Left has been engaged in one long crackup—a juvenile tantrum of epic proportions marked by hideous screams, rolling eyes, copious tears, foam-flecked lips, and flailing fists and feet that finally allows us to see them for what they really are: a giant 2-year-old in the midst of a frustrated, impotent meltdown.

...In public policy, the Left is obsessed (of course) with the Marxist categories of race, sex, and class, but those problems having largely been addressed, it must create new sub-categories of “underprivileged” in order to stoke and keep the home fires of resentment burning. So it’s easy for them to see bearded “women” winning female athletic competitions as both victims and heroes, who simultaneously need to be defended from the yahoos, and celebrated for their “bravery.”

...During the eight years of the Obama Administration, this sort of nuttiness was not only tolerated but advocated—mostly, one suspects, pour épater la bourgeoisie. Ascendant Leftists like nothing better than to rub their ideological opponents’ noses in their newly minted delusions, forcing the troglodytes to submit to their increasingly outré notions of normality. In politics, such manifestly absurd notions as “leading from behind” and “soft power” brought only disaster in the realm of foreign policy, emboldening opportunistic jackals like Vladimir Putin and the radical Islamists to whittle away at civilization’s edges, while costing American lives in a literally insane attempt to prove a counterfactual.

...And now the Left knows it, too; hence their inchoate rage. For leftists are not so much reacting to the gleeful rejection of their crackpot policies as they are to their own realization that their policies were, in fact, lunacy. Men are not women. Inaction is not action. History does not unfold in an “arc” that bends toward their definition of justice. Up is not down. Black is not white. Cultural traditions are not arbitrary impositions from authority, but the residue of millennia of experience. In short, definitions matter—names matter—and truth follows.

...just because some might call a man a “woman,” or a woman a “man,” doesn’t make it so. This infuriates those for whom the power of the transgressive fantasy is more potent and palatable than reality. But when the gap between what the Left believes to be true and what actually is true become unbridgeable—even by their febrile minds and hyperactive imaginations, and fueled by their satanic rage against the natural order of things—then they cannot help but tumble into the pit.

What’s happening right now is the counterrevolution—not of conservatives, or Republicans, or Trump, but of nature, which always reasserts itself, sometimes in very unpleasant but nonetheless instructive ways. The Greeks called the defiance of the gods and the natural order hubris,which inevitably sent folks like Icarus plunging to their doom. That screeching you hear is not the Left venting its anger at the heavens; it’s the sound of the sheer terror that now possesses them as they plummet to their doom—realizing, too late, that all along they have been dead wrong.

Read more here.

Do you know about Fabian Socialists?

Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse writes today about Fabian Socialists.

A tireless movement of Fabian Socialists with a history of long-term strategy were behind the rise of the EU as a collective union.

The Fabian’s come in a variety of sub-forms: Globalists, Socialists, Communists, Keynesians, The Open Border Crowd, et al. However, the central DNA which aligns them all is a general view of a Central Planning Authority with control over the individual.

Fabian’s generally support a principle that human activity is able to be controlled toward a “better outcome”. They believe central planning by a central body can create a fundamentally better society than if individuals were left to their own decisions.



Morocco, Tunisia and Libya were the primary migration gateways – the secondary Gateway was Turkey. However, when the EU economy could no longer afford the assimilation the EU national anxiety fomented as civil unrest.

After a few bad economic years you began to see visible strains inside the individual EU nations.

Eventually, the collapse of various EU currencies began an irreversible situation where socioeconomic stresses created real pressure and violence erupted. Eventually leading to political leaders beginning to outline the broad failure of multiculturalism.

Immigration had to be stopped – it was destroying the EU and worsening the civil unrest.

So the EU governing body made a strategic decision to payoff the gatekeepers to shut-down the immigration. By himself, Libyan leader Gadaffi was paid €5,000,000,000 (yes, billion) to stop the now considered “undesirables” from leaving North Africa.

Gaddaffi and Ben Ali (Tunisia) did just that. They shut the gates and stopped the immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean.

In North West Africa, Morocco, bowing to the demands of the EU, did the same.

But this created a serious bottleneck of African immigrants who were still flowing North from their initial homeland while escaping violence and bloodshed which had broken out throughout various countries in the African continent.

Read more here.

Free to monopolize and dominate

In this episode, Andrew's guest is Jesse Lee Peterson, a wise man and pastor. His comments on race are particularly worth hearing.

Andrew opens the mailbag to answer questions. A woman had a miscarriage, got depressed, started getting drunk regularly, and cheated on her boyfriend. To unfairly abbreviate what Andrew answered: dump her.

Another guy often feels anxious. He has finally found someone (at work) whom he really likes and he wants to get to know her better. Andrew tells him to deal with his anxiety, perhaps through psychotherapy, then let the woman know you are attracted to her.

A woman wanted to know how he developed characters in his screenplay for the Gosnell movie. He talked about seeing events through the eyes of the character.

In commenting on the news, Andrew talks about the monopoly of big tech. When they get this big they become socialists because that leaves them free to monopolize and dominate.

Mysterious polio-like illness leaving some children suffering from paralysis

Leslie Eastman reports at Legal Insurrection,

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now reporting that there are now more than 125 confirmed or suspected cases of acute flaccid myelitis, a condition affecting children across the nation and leaving them paralyzed.

Federal health officials released the updated numbers on Tuesday, and said they still had no idea what was causing the spike in AFM cases or why kids were getting it in the first place.

“We understand that people, particularly parents, are concerned,” said Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director for the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, during a teleconference call with reporters.

“There is a lot we don’t know about AFM, and I am frustrated that despite all of our efforts, we haven’t been able to identify the cause of this mystery."

...Symptoms include drooping face and eyelids, difficulty with eye movement and swallowing, and slurred speech. In severe cases, children might have trouble breathing and need a ventilator because of muscle weakness.

Read more here.

"Honestly, it's not for everyone!"

Jared Gilmour writes in the Wichita Eagle,

Potential tourists can’t say Nebraska didn’t warn them.

Nebraska’s tourism commission announced Wednesday that the tagline for its new tourism campaign is “Nebraska: Honestly, it’s not for everyone.”

It’s a concession — said with quirky, self-effacing charm — that Nebraska promoters hope will highlight what the state does provide to potential vacationers: Outdoor recreation, natural beauty, an escape from the city and a connection to the West.

“We discovered that we can’t offer something to everyone — but to those that we can, this campaign speaks to their sense of adventure and discovering what we as Nebraskans are all about,” Deb Loseke, chair of the Nebraska Tourism Commission, said in a statement.

A federal judge is amazed that State Department officials lied to him!

17 months after Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the State Department asking about Hillary Clinton's security clearance, he finally got a response from the State Department. Her security clearance has been revoked at her request! So reports Trace Gallagher at Fox News.

In related news, Gregg Re reports at Fox,

In a combative exchange at a hearing Friday in Washington, D.C., a federal judge unabashedly accused career State Department officials of lying and signing "clearly false" affidavits to derail a series of lawsuits seeking information about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private email server and her handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth said he was "shocked" and "dumbfounded" when he learned that FBI had granted immunity to former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills during its investigation into the use of Clinton's server, according to a court transcript of his remarks.

"I had myself found that Cheryl Mills had committed perjury and lied under oath in a published opinion I had issued in a Judicial Watch case where I found her unworthy of belief, and I was quite shocked to find out she had been given immunity in — by the Justice Department in the Hillary Clinton email case," Lamberth said during Friday's hearing.

...Four Americans were killed in the attack on the Benghazi embassy, and the Clinton State Department was faulted for ignoring security concerns in the run-up to the attack, contributing to the poor defense posture at the post.

Read more here.

Hitting a grand slam in the victimhood World Series

In Town Hall, Kurt Schlichter writes,

...it’s the liberal elite that actually imagines that we buy into the same bizarre constellation of racial weirdness that dominates their clique. They rank and rate everyone by their perceived position in the grand hierarchy of grievances. Warren gets 5 victim points for being a girl, and 20 points for being an Indian. If she only dug chicks, wore a burka, and had a limp, she would hit a grand slam in the victimhood World Series.

It’s all just so weird, basing your self-image on who your grandmother was. And in the Commie Squaw’s case, it’s her great-great-great-great-great-great grandma. It's even creepier basing your views of others on the same meaningless criteria.

But how are we supposed to react? Are we supposed to take them seriously? Nah. We look at people for who they are. Some guy used to call our criteria for evaluating others “the content of their character,” but our alleged betters now dismiss that crazy talk as the ravings of some Christian kook mansplaining away his privilege. We live in the real world, where this nuttiness doesn’t fly, as opposed to an elite that lives in the institutional nuthouses of academia, the media, and the Democrat Party where this nonsense is their secular religion. With them, it’s a constant struggle of the unoppressed oppressed bickering over the spoils of victimhood.

Read more here.

Our president does not like deals that are unfair to the U.S.!

Alexa Lardieri reports in USNews,

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that the United States will be withdrawing from the U.N. agency that oversees postal rates around the world out of frustration with the discounts given to China and some other countries that allow them to ship products to America at cheaper rates than those paid by U.S. companies to ship domestically.

The international agreement determines the rates that postal services can charge to deliver mail and packages that originate with foreign carriers. The disparity – which allows Chinese manufacturers to sell low-priced consumer goods at a competitive advantage – is because China is in a category for developing nations, and the union has allowed those nations to pay lower rates than wealthier nations.

A statement from the White House says President Donald Trump agrees with an August report by the State Department concluding that not enough progress had been made on reforming the Acts of the Universal Postal Union. The report outlined steps the U.S. could take to address the issues, and Trump backed the recommendation to enact self-declared rates by no later than Jan. 1, 2020.

...According to the statement, the State Department will attempt to negotiate agreements that address the issues highlighted in the report. If the negotiations are successful, the administration will remain in the union. If not, the U.S. will withdraw and the United States Postal Service will determine its own shipping rates for international goods.

The administration official told The Hill that the discrepancy in countries' rates has cost the United States $300 million a year, which is a "major economic distortion" that impacts U.S. companies and trade.

Read more here.

"What happened?"

How they do it

John Hudson reports in the Washington Post,

The United States received a payment of $100 million from Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, the same day Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Riyadh to discuss the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a State Department official confirmed Wednesday amid global calls for answers in the case.

Read more here.

Maxine Waters charged with ethics violations faces trial before a Congressional committee

Stephanie Condon reports in CBSNews,

The House ethics committee today released three charges of ethical wrongdoing against Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California.

Tom Murse reported in ThoughtCo,

Back-to-back charges against two veteran members of Congress in the summer of 2010 cast an unflattering light on the Washington establishment and its historic inability to mete out justice among members who stray beyond ethical boundaries they helped to draw.

In July of 2010, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct charged U.S. Representative. Charles B. Rangel, a Democrat from New York, with 13 violations, including failing to pay taxes on rental income he received from his villa in the Dominican Republic. Also in that year, the Office of Congressional Ethics charged U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California, with allegedly using her office to provide assistance to a bank in which her husband owned stock to ask for federal government bailout money.

The potential for highly publicized trials in both cases raised the question: How often has Congress expelled one its own? The answer is–not very.

Types of Punishment
There are several major types of punishment members of Congress can face:

Expulsion

The most serious of penalties is provided for in Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution, which states that "each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member." Such moves are considered matters of self-protection of the integrity of the institution.

Censure

A less severe form of discipline, censure does not remove representatives or senators from office. Instead, it is a formal statement of disapproval that can have a powerful psychological effect on a member and his relationships. The House, for example, requires members being censured to stand at the "well" of the chamber to receive a verbal rebuke and reading of the censure resolution by the Speaker of the House.

Reprimand

Used by the House, a reprimand is considered a lesser level of disapproval of the conduct of a member than that of a "censure," and is thus a less severe rebuke by the institution. A resolution of reprimand, unlike a censure, is adopted by a vote of the House with the member "standing in his place," according to House rules.

Suspension

Suspensions involve a prohibition on a member of the House from voting on or working on legislative or representational matters for a particular time. But according to congressional records, the House has in recent years questioned its authority to disqualify or mandatorily suspend a member.

Read more here.

This has been going on since 2010? They sure take their time!

4,000 now on their way to U.S. from Honduras and Guatamala

NBC is reporting,

A caravan of migrants fleeing Honduras has grown to 4,000, and the Mexican government has sent 500 additional federal police to its border with Guatemala in anticipation of their arrival, according to U.S. government documents obtained by NBC News.



Part of the caravan, which has split into two groups, is approaching the Mexico-Guatemala border amid a surge in border crossings on the U.S.-Mexico border.

...Trump has threatened to cut aid to Honduras and Guatemala if their governments do not stop the caravan. It remains to be seen what pressure the United States will put on Mexico, but a senior Homeland Security official said border agents were hopeful that State Department negotiations would significantly curb the numbers that reach the United States.

Read more here.

I believe the Democrats and/or Soros-type organizations are involved in this as a scheme to increase their voter turnout for the November 6 midterm elections. Remember how much hay they made with the press publicizing children being separated from their families by that mean Trump administration? It worked for them, nothing else has, so they are going back to it!

Time to Break Up Big Tech?

Scott Galloway has a best selling book entitled,

The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Chateau Heartiste quotes from it in writing about Amazon.

Here are some Galloway quotes.

Since the Great Recession, Amazon has paid just $1.4 billion in corporate taxes compared to Walmart’s $64 billion. ... In 2017, Amazon paid nothing in federal tax.

...Its ostensible search for the next city to house its second headquarters has become “the Olympics on steroids,” Galloway says, with state and local governments promising tax breaks that would starve funding for schools, police and fire departments. We have a new national holiday, Amazon Prime Day. Alexa and Echo, Amazon’s cloud-based voice-operated systems, sit in an estimated 40 million homes and spy on us, reporting our moods, tastes, wants, needs and fears back to HQ.

Yet we don’t fear Alexa.

CH writes,

(Bezos) hates President Trump, as evident by the daily TDS droppings of the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post-Op. If Bezos gets his greedy mitts on a monopolistic stranglehold of streaming video, you can just imagine the amount of anti-Trump, anti-White, anti-American bilge that would spill forth every minute of every day. “93% negative stories on Trump? We can hit 100%! (with no pee breaks)”

Galloway:

We have become equally complacent while technology mauls our economy, he says. “We seem to be comfortable, at least in tech, with the 8,000 people who work at headquarters splitting $80 billion in revenue,” while lower-wage workers struggle to get by. Business Insider reported that as of this year, Amazon was among the top companies whose employees relied on food stamps. And that $15 minimum wage? In exchange, the company quietly cut monthly bonuses and stock options.

...This complicated problem, he says, has a simple answer: Break up Big Tech.

“The key to competitive markets is that no one entity has too much control of the marketplace,” he says, adding that no other company has violated anti-trust over the past 100 years as Amazon and its ilk. Bezos’ recent support for a universal basic income is alarming, Galloway writes, because it means he sees a near future in which Big Tech permanently puts people out of work.

...“Ma Bell couldn’t have been easy to break up, and we unleashed 30 years of incredible innovation,” Galloway says. “Teddy Roosevelt broke up the railroads. If the Department of Justice hadn’t moved in on Microsoft [in 1998], do you think we would have Google? We don’t break companies up because they’re evil or take jobs or don’t pay taxes. We do it because it’s time.”

CH finishes the post:

Bezos is the villain who immiserates the “Forgotten Americans” Trump vowed to protect. So why isn’t Trump taking action? What’s staying his hand? It’s obvious Bezos fears an anti-trust suit; he’s busy paying off a small army of congressmen to do his bidding and cuck on cue before the almighty Amazon. Is the weak link Jeff Sessions?

Trump should make anti-trust and the Wall his defining issues in 2019 if he wants to lock up 2020.

Trump gives an interview to three AP journalists

Sundance at the Conservative Treehouse brings us a transcript of an interview President Trump gave to three Journalists from AP. Read more here.

Ain't it the truth?

The Coyote Principle
CALIFORNIA
• The Governor of California is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks the Governor's dog, then bites the Governor.
• The Governor starts to intervene, but reflects upon the movie "Bambi" and then realizes he should stop because the coyote is only doing what is natural.
• He calls animal control. Animal Control captures the coyote and bills the state $200 testing it for diseases and $500 for relocating it.
• He calls a veterinarian. The vet collects the dead dog and bills the State $200 testing it for diseases.
• The Governor goes to hospital and spends $3,500 getting checked for diseases from the coyote and on getting his bite wound bandaged.
• The running trail gets shut down for 6 months while Fish & Game conducts a $100,000 survey to make sure the area is now free of dangerous animals.
• The Governor spends $50,000 in state funds implementing a "coyote awareness program" for residents of the area.
• The State Legislature spends $2 million to study how to better treat rabies and how to permanently eradicate the disease throughout the world.
• The Governor's security agent is fired for not stopping the attack. The state spends $150,000 to hire and train a new agent with additional special training for the nature of coyotes.
• PETA protests the coyote's relocation and files a $5 million suit against the state.

TEXAS
• The Governor of Texas is jogging with his dog along a nature trail. A coyote jumps out and attacks his dog.
• The Governor shoots the coyote with his state-issued pistol and keeps jogging. The Governor has spent $.50 on a .45 ACP hollow point cartridge.
• The buzzards eat the dead coyote.

And that, my friends, is why California is broke and Texas is not.

Hat tip Bob Hicks

Believe in something

Yep!

Hat tip Oregon Muse

Hillary crashes her SUV.

Yes, she was driving! As Ace wrote, she had a mechanic assert that the car was suffering from Automotive Pneumonia.

LIVE LOOK at @HillaryClinton trying to save @SenatorMenendez. (Spoiler alert: she crashes.) #NJSen pic.twitter.com/7poUpIYxl6

— The Senate Majority (@NRSC) October 16, 2018

Exposing the Left's ferocious hate for blacks who dare to think for themselves

In FrontPage Magazine, Bruce Thornton exposes the Left's ferocious hate for blacks who dare to think for themselves. Read it here.

Ask her out!

Subscribers call into the Conversation. Here are some of the answers Andrew gave to some of the questions that subscribers asked.

If you act well in joy, then you will be an advertisement for virtue. If you are miserable but act virtuously you will not be a good advertisement for virtue.

Life is good. That is the greatest truth. Life is also suffering. If you choose to live, suffering will be a part of life that you will experience. "To be or not to be" is actually the question.

What makes the Gosnell movie about abortion? Because the media won't cover it because they think it is about abortion! They didn't cover the trial. They didn't cover the story (book). They won't cover the movie. Are they experiencing shame and guilt?

Who are Andrew's favorite writers? Number one is Shakespeare. He also mentions Dickens. But Andrew's favorites are American tough guy writers such as Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hamit. He believes in fast-moving American prose that gets you where you want to go, the American vernacular. Stories that have insight into human life.

Why sabotage yourself? God will give you insights into why you are sabotaging yourself if you go to Him in prayer. By talking to a psychotherapist you can avoid walking through a minefield. Instead, you can walk through a field of traps and see where they are. Ask God for help and follow His will instead of your will. Almost all of us want things for our lives that are actually not the things we should want.

Obama used political correctness and cultural issues to distract from his failing policies.

Andrew's favorite movie musical is Singin' In The Rain. Stage favorites: Sweeney Todd and Arcadia.

The government has the power to protect you from me, but it doesn't have the power to protect me from me!
Drugs steal the souls of users.

Saying you are afraid is fine, but acting on your fear is not so fine. Ask her out! Courage is not not having fear; it is having the fear and doing what you gotta do! The more you do it, the more you can do it!

Don't be careful about what you say; be careful about the way you say it! Don't confuse courage with rudeness.

Boys need to get outside! Boys deal with objects better than they deal with relationships. They relate to each other through objects (like sports). That is why science and technology are things boys naturally gravitate toward.

Trump warns Honduras to stop caravan of migrants or lose US aid.

S.A. Miller reports in the Washington Times,

President Trump on Tuesday said he warned Honduras to stop a caravan of more than 1,000 migrants headed for the United States or else lose American aid.

“The United States has strongly informed the President of Honduras that if the large Caravan of people heading to the U.S. is not stopped and brought back to Honduras, no more money or aid will be given to Honduras, effective immediately!” Mr. Trumptweeted.

The caravan of at least 1,600 crossed Monday into Guatemala, chanting “yes we can” as they defied the Guatemalan governments orders to stop.

Mr. Trump made a similar threat in April when a caravan of more than 1,200 migrants left Honduras for the U.S. That time, the caravan dwindled as it approached the U.S. border, thanks in part to Mexico granting refugee status to some participants.

On Monday, about 250 police at the Guatemalan border stopped the caravan for about three hours Monday before relenting and allowing the migrants to pass.

The caravan began as about 160 people who first gathered early Friday to depart from San Pedro Sula, one of Honduras‘ most dangerous places, figuring that traveling as a group would make them less vulnerable to robbery, assault and other dangers common on the migratory path through Central America and Mexico.

Local media coverage prompted hundreds more to join, and Dunia Montoya, a volunteer assisting the migrants, estimated Sunday that the group had grown to at least 1,600 people. Police gave their own estimate of around 2,000 on Monday.

• This article is based in part on wire service reports.

There's hope for us!

Can you believe it? This tech expert who calls himself "the most connected man in the world" predicts that we will no longer be looking at the screens of smartphones in ten years. Screenless AI will take their place. Read more here.

Amazon to help the Pentagon, while Google helps the Communist Chinese

Have you noticed that Google backed out of doing work to aid the US Department of Defense, but is moving forward with plans to help China censor its own people?

At the same time Jeff Bezos plans to go forward with Amazon's project to help the Pentagon with cloud services. "If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the US Department of Defense this country is going to be in trouble."

Khashoggi's connections

JJ Sefton wrote yesterday in the of Ace of Spades blog,

The other big story continues to be the fallout with this Jamal Khashoggi Washington Post correspondent who went missing in Istanbul and has been presumed to have been assassinated by the Saudis. While the media here and abroad is desperate to use this as some sort of cudgel to beat the President with and perhaps split our alliance with the KSA, some interesting developments have come to light. It turns out that Khashoggi is not only vehemently opposed to the reform-minded young Saudi Prince and his agenda, he is/was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, has a connection to Osama Bin Laden and, surprise-surprise! the mullahs in Iran.

Questions about the Khashoggi affair

In The Federalist, Lee Smith has ten questions that need to be answered before buying the press narrative on the disappearance of Khashoggi.

. Is There Evidence Khashoggi Was Murdered?
...In one of the few leaks from the U.S. government, an intelligence official told CNN there is no hard evidence as to whether Khashoggi is dead or alive.

Why Has Turkey Asked Saudi Arabia to Join Its Khashoggi Investigative Team? ...This makes no sense. If Saudi Arabia is suspected of abducting or killing Khashoggi, its involvement in the investigation would compromise the probe, even giving a potential suspect opportunity to tamper with evidence. Further, if there is audio and video evidence that a Saudi team killed Khashoggi, as Turkish and U.S. media report, there is no need for an investigation—the case has already been solved.

Are Internal Turkish Issues a Factor in the Khashoggi Affair? ...The discipline shown in the messaging campaign—accuse Riyadh through leaks and reveal nothing in public—suggests Erdogan is managing the Khashoggi file directly.

What Does the Khashoggi Affair Have to Do with the Gulf Cooperation Council Cold War? ...it’s clear that Erdogan sees the Khashoggi affair as an opportunity to advance Turkish interests against Qatar’s rivals.

Is the Release of Pastor Brunson Related to the Khashoggi Affair? ...There were rumors in July of a deal to free Brunson. The United States helped win the release of a Turkish terror suspect held by Israel, but instead of releasing Brunson, Ankara put him under house arrest. The Trump administration sanctioned Turkish officials, and warned that an already damaged Turkish economy was vulnerable to more sanctions. ...The fact that Ankara is bargaining with Riyadh suggests that the Turks were looking to improve their position by giving the Trump administration something it wanted. Thus the release of Brunson is almost certainly related to the Khashoggi affair.

Did U.S. Intelligence Know the Saudis Were Planning an Operation Targeting Khashoggi?

How Did a Man with Extensive Ties to Intelligence Services as Well as Extremist Groups Get a Green Card?...Khashoggi was an adviser to former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal when he was ambassador to London, then Washington. Khashoggi reportedly joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and continues to advocate for political Islam. He called the late Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden a friend and mourned his death. It appears that Khasshogi may have been something like Riyadh’s back channel to al-Qaeda, at least prior to 9/11. ...So how did a former Saudi official with ties to intelligence services, connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a long history with a terrorist responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on U.S. soil obtain permanent resident status?

Khashoggi must have important American patrons, because even though he reportedly moved to the United States in 2017, he already had a green card. According to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius: “Friends helped Khashoggi obtain a visa that allowed him to stay in the United States as a permanent resident.” So who vouched for him and why? ...It might be useful to put these questions to former CIA director John Brennan. He was station chief in Riyadh from 1996-1999, when Khashoggi’s patron Turki al-Faisal was head of Saudi’s general intelligence directorate.

How Much of U.S. Press Coverage and Expert Opinion Is Shaped by the Pro-Iran ‘Echo Chamber’? ...Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative was not only or even primarily an arms control deal. Rather, the JCPOA was purposed to realign U.S. interests in the Middle East, with Iran as the favored partner and traditional American allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, downgraded.

Obama-era officials rightly saw the Trump administration as a threat to undo Obama’s policies. Trump not only got out of the Iran deal but also underscored the centrality of America’s traditional alliances. He made his first foreign visit to Saudi Arabia and moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. ...How much is U.S. reporting and opinion regarding the Khashoggi affair shaped by the pro-Iran echo chamber? Nearly all of it.

Why Are Some DC Public Relations Firms Now Worried about Representing the Saudis? ...Since Trump looks with favor on Saudi and the UAE, the media considers them enemies, too.

Why Are Conservative Policy Analysts and Journalists Advising Trump to Go Hard on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman? ...A meltdown in the Persian Gulf may affect global stability in ways that no one can fathom—including the experts, analysts, and pundits who now counsel punishing MBS, even though they, like virtually everyone else, have no idea what is at the bottom of the Khashoggi affair....

Read more here.

"They flew in an expert in bone-sawing!"

Mark Steyn: Saudi Arabia is basically ISIS with diplomatic recognition! There are no good guys in this (Khashoggi) story.

We got one!

Ralph Z. Hallow reports in the Washington Times,

In what might rightly be seen as a gigantic feather in President Trump’s MAGA cap, the U.S. will bring to trial a Chinese government intelligence agent accused of trying to steal trade secrets from American aviation firms.

This is possible because the feds have under lock and key, for the first time ever, an accused intellectual-property thief and espionage agent for the People’s Republic of China.

Yes, it’s the very same country that, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump accused of “raping” the U.S. on economics.

More recently, Vice President Mike Pence accused China’s intelligence agencies of the “wholesale theft of American technology.”

Long before the current administration, lots of economic, trade and intellectual property rapists who hail from Beijing and its environs had been indicted in U.S. courts.

Indicted and that was it. None had been nabbed, let alone tried in open court in the U.S.

Now, we got one.

Tricked by U.S. federal agents into showing up in Belgium, Yanjun Xu, a senior officer in China’s Ministry of State Security, found himself in handcuffs on a plane to the U.S. and then thrown in the slammer.

He will face prosecution in, yes, open court on charges of conspiring to steal trade secrets from American aviation firms, U.S. officials said on Wednesday.

...Mr. Trump has itched to see U.S. law enforcement crack down on such thefts by the government of Xi Jinping, the man who while dining with the U.S. president, learned that, under orders from Mr. Trump, the U.S. military was bombing the hell out of a Syrian military airbase as punishment for Syrian use of chemical weapons against civilians.

Even with all his official titles that include general secretary of the Communist Party of China and president for life of the nation of 1.4 billion people, Mr. Xi was impressed. Here beside him sat an American president willing to show off his military power — and his willingness to use it — over dinner.

The U.S. long has accused China of waging a stealthy and highly successful campaign to grab U.S. military technology, top secret information and the trade secrets of U.S. companies, some of which have had to partner with Chinese firms as the price of doing business in China.

Read more here.

“Here we go again”

We all say that to ourselves.

The question is: when do you say it?

Do you say it when you're being rejected, failing, stuck, panicked, overwhelmed or alone?

Or do you say it when you're engaged, winning, changing things and in the groove?

Because the more you rehearse this feeling, the more it's going to happen.

We get what we expect.

And we expect what we get.

The easiest way to change this cycle is to alter the scale we play in. If you keep failing at the big stuff, it's worth honing the habit of succeeding at the small stuff first. And if you're finding yourself in a rut, a cycle of failure, walk away from that series of projects and find a new field to plant your seeds in.

From Seth Godin's blog

Boston Globe admits inaccurately calculating the percentage of Native American ancestry in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA.

Amber Athey reports in the Boston Globe,

The Boston Globe issued a correction Monday after inaccurately calculating the percentage of Native American ancestry in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s DNA.

After years of skepticism about Warren’s claim that she is at least part Cherokee, the Democratic Sen. from Massachusetts recently released the results of a DNA test. The test provided “strong evidence” that Warren has a Native American ancestor dating back six to 10 generations.

The Boston Globe originally claimed that this put Warren at somewhere between 1/32 and 1/512 Native American.

However, the Globe admitted in a correction that the upper bound of Warren’s Native American ancestry is actually 1/1024. This would make Warren somewhere between .09 and 3 percent Native American.

...According to a New York Times article cited by the Republican National Committee’s Michael Ahrens, the average European-American has 0.18 percent Native American DNA.

In 1996, the Harvard Crimson referred to Warren as a Native American, and in 1997, a Fordham Law Review article described her as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.”

According to previous reporting by The Daily Caller, “Warren later acknowledged that Harvard had singled her out as a Native American professor because she identified herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory from 1986-1994. She stopped listing herself as such when she gained tenure at Harvard.”

...Warren also used her “high cheekbones” and an old story about her parents eloping over “issues” relating to her mother’s Cherokee ancestry as proof of her ancestral claims.

The Cherokee tribe does not accept DNA tests as proof of ancestry.

Read more here.

Gosnell opening weekend breaks into top ten at box office.

Kerry Picket reports in the Daily Caller,

The Kermit Gosnell movie managed to break into the top 10 on its opening weekend at the box office according to Box Office Mojo, despite a menagerie of hurdles to get the film made, released and marketed.

That is a surprise to me. When my family attended on opening day, we went to the 5:15 p.m. showing and there was only one other person in attendance.

Did you know Facebook even disallowed ads for the film!
Read more here.

"Yet again, the party of Jim Crow has sought to stymie the freedom of a black man to express his own political opinion."

Brandon J. Weichert writes in American Greatness,

The Democratic Party is a group of tricksters. Consider this: the party of Jim Crow managed to recast themselves as the paragon of racial equality during the tumultuous 1960s, while still supporting the economic programs that impoverished minorities. They then convinced a majority of African-Americans that Republicans were their true oppressors! It is no wonder, then, that Michael Walsh has determined that Democrats today are aligned with the “Satanic Left.”

Lies, deceit, manipulation, these are the ways of Satan—and the Democratic Party.

...Yet again, the party of Jim Crow has sought to stymie the freedom of a black man to express his own political opinion. In this case, Kanye’s declaration of support for Trump has prompted the self-styled “guardians” of race in America (the most vanilla group of people imaginable) to brand Kanye’s actions as those of a mentally unstable person. Interestingly, the Soviets used to claim political dissidents were mentally ill, too.

...Republicans are finally competing for the hearts-and-minds of black Americans in a meaningful way. Seen that way, the Trump-Kanye meeting is only strange if one is a racist left-winger, who views black Americans as a class to be kept pacified with dreary government handouts in heavily policed inner cities.

Read more here.

Maybe AI isn't so good at telling employers whom to hire!

In Business Insider, Isobel Asher Hamilton reports,

Amazon built an AI tool to hire people but had to shut it down because it was discriminating against women!

...This was apparently because the AI combed through predominantly male résumés submitted to Amazon over a 10-year period to accrue data about whom to hire.

Read more here.

"It is a threat to the privacy of every American."

Thomas Brewster writes in Forbes,

On a June day last year, a skinny, dreadlocked 29-year-old rapper known as Tony Da Boss lay in bed in a redbrick apartment on a tree-lined street in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was not the kind of place you’d associate with a million-dollar criminal conspiracy. But Da Boss (real name Damonte Withers) was a leader of the FreeBandz Gang, an amateur hip-hop crew of twentysomethings who were into much more nefarious activities than laying down tracks.

There were warning signs that things were going to get real. Alerts on Da Boss’ iPhone warned that his Google Nest surveillance cameras with views into and outside the apartment had picked up movement. Outside, a full cast of law enforcement personnel from the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and the local police department were primed to swoop in.

Inside, they found piles of marijuana and multiple firearms. More intriguing, there were bundles of cash alongside fake-ID-card printers, 36 credit card blanks and reams of printouts containing American citizens’ personal data. Investigators spotted the Nest cameras and would soon make the first publicly known federal government demand for customer information and surveillance footage from Google’s smart home division.

From January to June 2018, seven members of Da Boss’ gang pleaded guilty to various identity theft charges. In total they had caused about $1.2 million in damage, using stolen identities to buy luxury cars and iPhones and to lease apartments in Charlotte. Both they and their crimes would have been quickly forgotten as garden variety larceny were it not for the way they stole those identities.

Cops alleged Da Boss and his co-conspirators had access to the Holy Grail for any Internet-age scam artist: a surveillance technology that police and debt collectors use to track most of the United States’ 325 million inhabitants via their Social Security numbers, license plates, address histories, names and dates of birth. The mass-monitoring tech, called TLO, is a product of the Chicago-based credit reporting giant TransUnion, which last year had revenues of nearly $1.9 billion. One brochure for the service promises access to a startling amount of personal data drawn from myriad sources: more than 350 million Social Security numbers of dead and living Americans, 225 million employment histories and four billion address records. Add to that billions of vehicle registrations and call records and you have one of the largest commercial surveillance databases in existence.

It’s used not just by cops but also by debt collectors and private companies carrying out background checks. Private investigators use it to track cheating spouses. But in the wrong hands it can be used to steal the identity of almost anyone in America. And Da Boss and his crew got access to it.

Writing in support of the court order to use the Nest camera footage in its investigation, U.S. Postal Service investigator Randall Berkland said TLO allowed users to research virtually anyone in the United States. Berkland would know: He’d used the tool extensively to investigate several crimes. And, he added, “Users would have unlimited access and resources to commit identity theft and fraud.”

...It’s unclear if their Nest cameras were bought with illicit funds. But the purchase backfired. Just as the crooks turned the turbo-powered TLO software on its head, cops used the Nests against their owners. In June last year, Postal Service investigator Berkland obtained a warrant ordering Google to hand over all the data related to those cameras. The company complied, shipping surveillance footage back, along with personal details of its owners. It’s the first known case in the United States in which a federal law enforcement agency has demanded information from a Nest provider, and it has obvious implications for anyone who has purchased a smart home appliance that contains a camera or a microphone. The DOJ declined to comment.

...The various members of Da Boss’ gang pleaded guilty in July and are awaiting sentencing. It’s the first publicly known fraudulent use of TLO, but it has happened before. TransUnion says that while breaches like the one perpetrated by the FreeBandz Gang members are rare, it wasn’t the first time criminals have gained access to its databases. TransUnion declined to provide any specific detail on other incidents.

Average citizens have little recourse. There’s no easy way to have their information removed from TLO. “As long as such a database exists,” says the EFF’s Quintin, “it is a threat to the privacy of every American.”

Read more here.

Lack of civility? It's not a new phenomenon! ..."Their endgame is clear: the effective abolition of the states for all national political purposes."

Michael Walsh writes in American Greatness,

Hillary Clinton, the most vengeful, spiteful loser in the history of American electoral politics, has abandoned the Left’s always deceptive, now evanescent call for “civility.” She insists there can be no civility between the parties until the Democrats are restored to power—and, by extension, the Republicans are vanquished.

...Battling between the parties is almost as old as the republic itself, but the vast majority of the actual violence has always come from the Democrats. Aaron Burr, the proto-Democrat and founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. In 1856, on the eve of the Civil War, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was nearly beaten to death by Democrat Preston Brooks of South Carolina, presaging the bloody events to come. John Wilkes Booth, an ardent Southern Democrat, assassinated Abraham Lincoln just days after Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. Even after the war ended, the Democrats waged a long rearguard action against the Union, including creating the Ku Klux Klan to beat and murder newly freed black Americans.

...Short of civil war, there’s a clear solution to this two-state problem, and it’s been available from the beginning: federalism. The Left’s drive to diminish the power of the states and to consolidate power at the federal level is the reason why it hates the Senate and the Electoral College. The bulk of Hillary’s popular-vote margin came in California, where every vote for her beyond a one-vote majority in a winner-take-all state was wasted. The irony is that as long as Democrats flock together along the coasts, they’ll continue losing.

So their endgame is clear: the effective abolition of the states for all national political purposes. Talk about “fundamental change.” Because when you cut away all the boilerplate and the verbiage, the mock-piety and pretend horror, and strip the battle down to its essentials, what’s left is this: will the United States remain, as its founders intended, a federal republic, or will it become something more akin to a plebiscitary democracy, in which all important questions are decided in the heat and passion of the moment?

If the Democrats really want to see a breakdown in “civility,” this is precisely the way to go: to threaten the essential nature of the republic with an eye to transforming it into something completely different. They tried that once before, and it didn’t end well.

Are we going to cower in fear?

"Manufactured geopolitical propaganda"?

Sundance writes in the Conservative Treehouse,

Everything surrounding the “disappearance”, perhaps “murder”, of Saudi critic/journalist Jamal Khashoggi screams manufactured geopolitical propaganda. All current narrative indications are pushing in one direction. Here are the warning flags:
♦Flag #1 – Jamal Khashoggi in self-exile, worked for The Washington Post, and was hiding behind ‘residency’ in the U.S. WaPo is a notorious left-wing intelligence propaganda outlet for the most politicized elements within the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

♦Flag #2 – Turkey (Recep Erdogan) pushing the narrative. Erdogan is a notorious liar when it comes to his interests, and a master manipulator. Turkey/Erdogan is the most openly staunch supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and has a self-interest in distracting/deflecting U.S. economic pressure from their ongoing relationship with Iran.

♦Flag #3 – Saudi Arabia [Mohamed Bin Salman (MbS)] has been instituting political and cultural reforms that are antithetical to the advanced objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood, Recep Erdogan (wants new Ottoman Empire), and extreme Islam.


♦Flag #4 – The voices behind the U.S. push to promote the Jamal Khashoggi story are all aligned in one purposeful and ideological direction. Former Obama officials including: John Brennan, Samantha Power, Valerie Jarrett et al, are all pushing the story in a transparent effort to create division between the U.S. and KSA and by extension benefit their Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian allies.

♦Flag #5 – The left-wing, highly political, intelligence apparatus – and all DC interests are joined by the notorious right-wing members of the UniParty war machine. [Rubio, Sasse, Flake, Schumer, Menendez, et al] Together with the exact same left-wing media voices (right and left), and all the political ‘think-tanks’, who advance the DC drumbeat. Yes, the gang is all back together again in their high-brow pontification of ‘muh values‘.

♦Flag #6 – The story is being pushed into U.S. media outlets by a notorious Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece, Khaled Saffuri:

[I]n the past 24 hours we now have a glimpse of exactly who is feeding the establishment media reporting on the Khashoggi matter — including at least one source who was tied to a joint Libyan intelligence and al-Qaeda plot to assassinate the Saudi crown prince.

Khaled Saffuri is the protege of al-Qaeda fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi, who is currently serving a 17-year sentence in federal prison for his role as bagman for the Libyan/Al-Qaeda assassination plot.

Those last two paragraphs are from Patrick Poole, writing in PJ Media.

Is the Left scared they are going to lose black votes?

Judge Jeanine seems amazed that Turkey gave up the Christian pastor who has been imprisoned there for two years. Nobody seems to have the heart to tell her it was economic sanctions that did the trick. Or do you want to believe Erdogan is suddenly a good guy cooperating with Trump because he is fond of him?

Chris Hahn seems to want war with Saudi Arabia over their alleged killing of a Washington Post reporter.

Charlie Kirk alleges that the Left is scared they might lose black votes, which is why they are attacking Kanye West so severely for his comments with President Trump at the White House.

"He's sort of a Democrat."

I knew it! President Trump said James Mattis "is sort of a Democrat," and "may be leaving." We on the right are supposed to be so proud to have Mattis as Secretary of Defense, but for a long time I have noticed he leans to the Left. Brett Samuels has more on this story at The Hill.

What kind of blog would accept funding from the Communist Chinese?

Warner Todd Huston breaks a big story at Godfather Politics.

Left-Wing ‘Explainer’ Blog Vox Revealed to Be Funded By Communist Chinese

When it first opened for business in 2014, the website Vox was hailed as the first website that would “explain” the news in an unbiased manner. Now it has been discovered that the site is heavily funded by the communist Chinese government.

Read more here.

He made news!

Misanthropic Humanitarian brings us The Biker:

THE BIKER

A little girl was leaning into a lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the collar of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, all under the eyes of her screaming parents.

A biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl and the biker brings the girl to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter has watched the whole event.

The reporter addressing the Harley rider says, "Sir, this was the most gallant and bravest thing I've seen a man do in my whole life."

The Harley rider replies, "Why, it was nothing, really. The lion was behind bars. I just saw this little kid in danger, and acted as I felt right."

The reporter says, "Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, and tomorrow's paper will have this story on the front page.

So, what do you do for a living, and what political affiliation do you have?" The biker replies "I'm a U.S. Marine, a Republican and I voted for Trump". The journalist leaves.

The following morning the biker buys the paper to see if it indeed brings news of his actions, and reads, on the front page:

** U.S. MARINE ASSAULTS AFRICAN IMMIGRANT & STEALS HIS LUNCH.

What he did on his first week on the Supreme Court

Read more here.

"Thank you, Dr. King. Screw you, Eric Holder"

From the highest to the lowest. Thank you, Dr. King. Screw you, Eric Holder. pic.twitter.com/JsxlZD9KcZ

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) October 12, 2018

How is that for a leap?

Spitfire jumps a distance of over 31 feet to create a new world record for the farthest leap by a dog pic.twitter.com/EtdDtogZzl

— 𝔑𝔞𝔱𝔥𝔞𝔫 𝔎𝔯𝔞𝔢𝔪𝔢𝔯 (@AnimalVibes1234) October 11, 2018

Keep Republicans in the majority!

Sarah Carter: "It looks like the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC were the only ones colluding! Colluding with Fusion GPS, colluding with a British foreign intelligence asset, who was then colluding with the Russians. The entire Special Counsel was based on false premises!"

Gregg Jarrett: "The rats are trapped in a cage. They are going to turn each other in and sing like canaries!"

Representative Jim Jordan: "If the Democrats win the midterm elections, we'll never get the answers for the American people. That's their goal!"

Prepare to defend ourselves!

Guest post by Suzann Darnall

Folks, let us not be fooled, we are facing a fight to defend our way of life. Our rights, our freedoms, our way of government, and our future are on the line with the upcoming midterm elections and the 2020 presidential race. We had better keep things Republican Red, otherwise we may become mired in Communist Red or at least the deep pink of Socialism that will soon darken to be as red as anything Marx ever imagined!

Everything I am reading about the new “darlings” of the Democratic Party shows them to be of the same vein as their elders, Socialists at the very least and truly leaning much more Communist. Although they are often defining themselves as Democratic Socialists, they really would like to move things wholly to Socialism at the least and Communism as the ideal. That means freedom dies. That means our Republic is no more. Than means we lose ALL rights and liberties.

So, we must fight and fight hard to defend our liberty. This may not be a war of independence such as we fought in 1776, but it is a war FOR independence. The independence of the individual. We are going to have to fight to keep our Republic and our rights. We have already let some of our freedom be frittered away by those within our borders and our government who would enslave us bit by bit through the encroaching restrictions they impose with manipulation of the government and putting in ever increasing regulations.

Yes, I know the Republicans are not perfect. I know some of them are RINOs and others are Democrats who just keep the “R” after their name on the ballots so they can win in the Red states. But, by and large the Republicans are at least the lesser of two evils. And, even the traitorous Republicans give us the majorities in House, Senate, Governors, and other government entities. And, majorities matter! A lot!!!

So, let’s get out the vote. Vote Republican. Do not even elect a Democrat to be the local dogcatcher! ‘Cause one foothold at the bottom rung of the political ladder allows them to start climbing. We must do our best to eradicate Democrats in office. Let’s turn not just Texas as red as the sky at sunset, but let’s spread that red across America like a Republican rainbow in shades of scarlet and crimson.

Red, Right, Republican! We “R” going to win! We must win! Vote! Vote a straight Republican ticket. Give President Trump the tools he requires to continue to make American great and keep America great. Defend our nation from those within our borders who would do us harm. Protect our future as well as the future of our children and grandchildren. Let’s be sure to pass along freedom to those who follow in our footsteps! God bless America!!!

Democrat shenanigans, Communist collaborators

Greg Jarrett is on top of the Democrat shenanigans to try to frame Trump with collusion with the Russians. He is onto Glenn Simpson, too. Simpson lied about his contacts with Bruce Ohr and is now pleading the Fifth. And then there is Rod Rosenstein who likes to claim that his words were just misinterpreted. He has been suppressing documents to cover up his own wrongdoing.

How about Eric "When they go low, we kick 'em" Holder, Cory "get up in the face of your Congresspeople" Booker and HIllary "We can't be civil" Clinton? Let's not forget Maxine "If you see anybody from that cabinet let them know they are not welcome" Waters?

So, our friends the Saudis murdered a dissident while he was in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Did you know the Saudis buy twice as much defense materials from us as does Israel?

Communist collaborators at Google are going to help the Chinese Communists spy on their people. Apple, too, but Apple is not willing to help the FBI look into someone's iPhone (San Bernardino). China's currency is down ten percent over the last six months. Trump does not differentiate trade policy from foreign policy.

A whole lot of nothing? Scott doesn't thinks so!

This was podcasted the afternoon of Kanye's meeting with President Trump. Scott realized we had just witnessed something significant.

Was Donald Trump persuaded by Kanye West to put a stop to "Stop and Frisk?" Name another celebrity who changed a policy this year, who made a difference. Kim Kardashian got a woman released from prison. Taylor Swift convinced thousands of people to register to vote. Kanye was productive, persuasive, creative, using a love-based approach.

Take an American; lose your economy!

Scott explains why he thinks Kanye's contribution was "pure genius." Before Kanye, who has brought forth ideas to fix the inner cities? Nobody! What were the ideas Kanye brought forth in conceptual terms? You need energy, tax breaks, investment, ideas, racism will not hold me back.

What did CNN do? Don Lemon mocked Kanye as being a minstrel act.

Kanye wants the 13th Amendment to be abolished Scott looked it up. It says that you can enslave a person if they have committed a crime! Kanye is doing a Trump thing; being so provocative that you can't look away!

Turkey takes an American pastor and puts him in jail. Trump put sanctions on Turkey. Scott has an investment in a Turkish cell phone company. Scott's investment got crushed! Trump was willing to crush the Turkish economy for one Christian! One American! Trump has Scott's total support!

Kanye rips the mask off the Left

Donna Brazille says Kanye West has set us back 155 years. Andrew: "Of course, she's right, because now it is just like slavery days when billionaire black men used to hug their friend the president in the oval office who had just finished improving the lives of all African Americans by virtually eliminating unemployment!"

Mailbag questions: What if Republicans win the mid-term elections?

What are some red flags to look out for when choosing a man?

What do you think of Jordan Peterson's idea that Kavanaugh should step down after being confirmed?

Have you ever had to seriously combat feelings of self-doubt?

My boss treats me like I am an inferior.

Go see the Gosnell movie!

Tonight was the premiere of the Gosnell movie. Colleen and I went to the 5:15 p.m. showing and we took our two teens who are still living here. Only one other person was in the theater! I talked to him after the movie. He was born in Germany and is now a priest here in New Mexico. He pointed out that in order to approve of abortion, first it must be alleged that the baby is not human. That is what the Nazis did. They dehumanized Jews, gypsies, and gays, thereby making it okay to kill them.

Is the movie any good? Definitely! My three favorite actors were the woman who played the Assistant D.A. who was the prosecutor, the man who played the defense attorney for Gosnell, and the man who played Gosnell. A blogger named Molly Mulhaney was also portrayed in the movie. She is the one who took pictures in the courtroom showing the empty rows of seats reserved for the press, which put pressure on the media to cover the trial they had been covering up.

CNS News has a review of the movie by Dr. Elise Rose here. Rush Limbaugh reviews it here today.

As the trailer below reveals, the feds under Obama and Holder did not want to touch the abortion issue. To them, it was a case of illegal drug trafficking. But once the Philadelphia cops investigated, the discovery of dead babies meant that Gosnell's abortion practices were revealed. Not only his abortion practices but babies born alive that were left to die on shelves.

"He don't have ADD...School is boring!

Someone in the press asks President Trump if Kanye West is a future presidential candidate. Trump answers, "Could well be!" But then Kanye says, "Let's stop worrying about the future. All we have is today! Trump is on his hero's journey right now. He might not have expected a crazy mother-fucker like Kanye West run up support, but we are going to Make America Great!

Breaking free? The Left cannot allow it!