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August 2018

The Priorities of US Justice by Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8773/the-priorities-of-us-justice

News from the justice system:

Jakiv Palij, a 94-year-old concentration-camp guard, is in Germany tonight, having been arrested by ICE agents at his home in New York and deported from the United States. His deportation order was issued in 2004, so it only took twice as long to enforce it as the war in which he committed his crimes. And this for one of the few offenses specifically spelled out to this day in US immigration paperwork: “Between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?” If so, don’t worry, because we’ll take two years longer than the entire twelve years of Nazi rule to enforce the deportation order.

Also today, the body of poor, twenty-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was found in an Iowa cornfield. She went jogging in one of those small towns where everybody knows everybody and they leave their doors unlocked. But she ran into an “undocumented” immigrant and he killed her, and her parents will live with that hole in their hearts till the day they die. The AP’s Zeke Miller played it for laughs:

Likely coming to a Trump rally near you…. Investigators: Suspect in Mollie Tibbetts death is in custody, subject to immigration detainer

Funny. Or, per MSNBC, Mollie Tibbetts is “some girl in Iowa Fox News is talking about”. Because, as the pajama boys at Mediaite will tell you, only “racist fearmongers” are boorish enough to make a fuss about homicidal illegal aliens. It’s no surprise that a bureaucracy that can’t deport a Nazi in fourteen years cannot reliably inform its citizens just how long Mollie Tibbetts’ killer has been in the country. He broke into a nation that has supposedly been on “orange alert” since September 12th 2001, but the authorities cannot tell us when he did it – except that he’s been here “between four and seven years”. Close enough for government work.

The bridge of desperation By Katy Watson

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Venezuela_bridge

The humanitarian crisis in Venezuela has led to one of the largest mass migrations in Latin America’s history.

President Nicolás Maduro blames “imperialists” – the likes of the US and Europe – for waging “economic war” against Venezuela and imposing sanctions on many members of his government.

But his critics say it is economic mismanagement – first by predecessor Hugo Chávez and now President Maduro himself – that has brought Venezuela to its knees.

The country has the largest proven oil reserves in the world. It was once so rich that Concorde used to fly from Caracas to Paris. Now, its economy is in tatters.

Four in five Venezuelans live in poverty. People queue for hours to buy food. Much of the time they go without. People are dying from a lack of medicines. Inflation is at 82,766% and there are warnings it could exceed one million per cent by the end of this year.

Venezuelans are trying to get out. The UN says 2.3 million people have fled the country – 7% of the population. More than a million have arrived in Colombia in the past 18 months.

Global-Warming Advocates Pressure Media to Silence Skeptics By Wesley J. Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/global-warming-alarmists-pressure-media-to-end-debate/

A bit ago, I wrote here that it is a huge advocacy mistake for global-warming alarmists to refuse debating their opponents. After all, if global catastrophe is really coming, one should accept any and every opportunity to persuade doubters.

Now, global-warming public intellectuals have warned the media that if they allow skeptics to have a voice in stories, they will boycott giving comment. From the open letter appearing in the Guardian:

Balance implies equal weight. But this then creates a false equivalence between an overwhelming scientific consensus and a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests, that exists simply to sow doubt to serve those interests. Yes, of course scientific consensus should be open to challenge — but with better science, not with spin and nonsense. We urgently need to move the debate on to how we address the causes and effects of dangerous climate change — because that’s where common sense demands our attention and efforts should be.

A Post-Trump World? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/donald-trump-impeachment-unlikely-unwise/

Removing him would only make things worse — for his opponents & the nation.

It has been quite a ride since Inauguration Day — or, rather, from Michael Wolff to Omarosa and Michael Cohen, or from the Emoluments Clause to the 25th Amendment, or from talk of decapitating Trump to talk of blowing up the White House.

Yet what might happen should Trump be removed from office, either by impeachment leading to conviction or resignation or by federal indictment from Robert Mueller?

Given the evidence so far, the results could be civil chaos, and for a variety of reasons:

The Trump Record
Had Trump misled his base and not fulfilled his campaign promises, he would have little popular support. Had he tanked the economy and started a war, he would be polling in the 20s rather than the mid to lower 40s.

Trump also polls about 85 percent among Republicans. He is even more popular among blue-collar “Trump voters,” largely because of efforts to equalize trade, restore U.S. deterrence, end illegal immigration, and jump-start the economy, as evidenced by a record-high stock market, near-record peacetime unemployment, and likely annualized GDP growth of 3 percent or more. Minority joblessness is also at a near-record low. The startling fact is that a so-called buffoonish real-estate developer hit upon a calculus to restore robust economic growth in a way that all the degreed experts of the prior administration had not.

His judicial picks belie predictions that Trump would not keep his vows to appoint strict constructionists. There have been no David Souter–like or Harriet Miers–like nominations to the Supreme Court. His national-security team at Defense, State, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the UN is better than any seen in prior postwar administrations. Mike Pompeo is not Hillary Clinton, H. R. McMaster and John Bolton have not been Susan Rice, and Jim Mattis is not Chuck Hagel. Nor is Nikki Haley playing the role of Samantha Power at the U.N., or sending in countless requests to unmask the names of those swept in FISA warrants.

Chicago 1968: The Night the Democratic Party Died By Arthur L. Herman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/1968-democratic-convention-riots-modern-party-established/

The riots that night set a political pattern that Democrats are still following today.

Fifty years ago tonight, a great American political party was murdered by its own children and closest friends.

The party in question was the Democratic party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and JFK, which perished during the riots in Grant Park, Chicago, on the night of Aug. 28, 1968, in the midst of the party’s national convention.

Its children in this case were the rioters from the anti–Vietnam War Left. After killing off the traditional liberal Democratic party they despised, they would go on to take over the corpse and make it the host of America’s radical Left, from Jerry Brown to Bernie Sanders — with George McGovern, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama as their front men.

The friends who joined in the kill were the mainstream media. Their coverage of the riots, that night and later, would make the SDS demonstrators and their violent cohorts — the predecessors of today’s antifa — into martyrs of “police brutality” and Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s “Gestapo tactics,” as one Democratic senator from Connecticut put it in a speech to the convention that night, when they had in fact been — like today’s antifa — the deliberate instigators of mayhem and bloodshed. Starting that night the New York Times, the Washington Post, and ABC and CBS News would become the enablers of America’s radical Left, even at its most violent — and in the process cut themselves off from the millions of ordinary working Americans who had made the Democratic party their political home.

Joe Biden’s got some dirty laundry stinking up his presidential ambitions By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/joe_bidens_got_some_dirty_laundry_stinking_up_his_presidential_ambitions.html

For Democrats, Joe Biden is the top seed in the race to unseat President Trump in 2020.

He’s come a long way from his nutty-uncle gaffe-a-thon persona, and with a slew of medals and honors from President Obama, he presents the very picture of the respectable modern statesman. He showed up at a lot of foreign funerals for heads of state. He milked the sympathy factor over his son’s death from cancer. He wore a suit. He projected gravitas. Yet he also manages to have a hard-hat appeal and a mainstream-Democratic-ideological image, which seems to be the right formula for Democrats winning in most of their races these days.

No surprise, he’s the Democratic frontrunner in polls among Democrats with a seven-point lead, campaigning even now with fire to burn, because he’s convinced he made a mistake in not running back in 2016.

Except there’s some dirty laundry now that’s getting some airing.

Biden, it turns out, is loaded with dirty deals spread out the “legal” way, among his family members, which has made his tribe immensely rich. What’s more, he’s doing it the swamp way, which keeps the long arm of the law out of the picture, based on deftly navigating the political loopholes, and a sharkily deft capacity to use advantages. According to the indefatigable investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, who’s written a book about this:

The New York Times’s slathering praise for John McCain rings false Try reading what they wrote about him in 2008, when he represented a threat to Democratic hegemony by Roger Kimball

https://spectator.us/2018/08/the-new-york-timess-slathering-praise-for-john-mccain-rings-false/

I am not going to comment directly on the passing of Senator John McCain. Although I voted for him in 2008, I thought him a deeply flawed candidate. His behaviour subsequently, especially after Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and then President, was in my judgment petty, self-aggrandising, and harmful to the country.

What interests me now, however, are the hallelujahs of praise and commendation that surrounded his passing. He has always been a hero to the neo-conservative faithful. But here we have The New York Times running a fawning obituary with the title ‘War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender.’ It was the full lion-of-the-Senate treatment: ‘proud naval aviator . . . climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power . . . two-time contender for the presidency,’ yada, believe me, yada.

Just how great was John McCain, according to the Times? This great: Despite his grave condition, he soon made a dramatic appearance in the Senate to cast a thumbs-down vote against his party’s drive to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Give the parrot another cracker!

Lanny Davis admits he was source for CNN’s Trump Tower story, lied about it on air

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/27/lanny-davis-admits-he-was-source-cnn-trump-tower-s/

Michael Cohen’s attorney has acknowledged being an anonymous source for the disputed CNN Trump Tower story and also admitted lying on TV about his involvement.

Lanny Davistold BuzzFeed News on Monday evening that he was a source for the story claiming that President Trump had personal prior knowledge of a controversial Trump Tower meeting with Russians — a story the Cohen camp has since repudiated.

China Hacked Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server Richard Pollock |

https://dailycaller.com/2018/08/27/china-hacked-clinton-server/

The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant “courtesy copy” for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company, according to the sources.

The Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) found that virtually all of Clinton’s emails were sent to a “foreign entity,” Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, said at a July 12 House Committee on the Judiciary hearing. He did not reveal the entity’s identity, but said it was unrelated to Russia.

Two officials with the ICIG, investigator Frank Rucker and attorney Janette McMillan, met repeatedly with FBI officials to warn them of the Chinese intrusion, according to a former intelligence officer with expertise in cybersecurity issues, who was briefed on the matter. He spoke anonymously, as he was not authorized to publicly address the Chinese’s role with Clinton’s server.

Among those FBI officials was Peter Strzok, who was then the bureau’s top counterintelligence official. Strzok was fired this month following the discovery he sent anti-Trump texts to his mistress and co-worker, Lisa Page. Strzok didn’t act on the information the ICIG provided him, according to Gohmert.

Gohmert mentioned in the Judiciary Committee hearing that ICIG officials told Strzok and three other top FBI officials that they found an “anomaly” on Clinton’s server.

The former intelligence officer TheDCNF spoke with said the ICIG “discovered the anomaly pretty early in 2015.”

Rep. Mark Meadows(R-N.C. District 11): “Hard Evidence” FBI Leaked Info To Press, Used Same Stories To Obtain FISA Warrants By Ian Schwartz

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/08/28/meadows_hard_evidence_fbi_leaked_info_to_press_used_same_stories_to_obtain_fisa_warrants.html

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) said Tuesday that the American people will be “appalled” at what happened within the FBI and DOJ to start the Trump campaign-Russian collusion probe. Meadows said the DOJ leaked information to the press and used those reported stories as evidence to get FISA warrants.

“I believe that they did. We know that some people at the Department of Justice and FBI actually gave information to the media and then the stories were reported, then they used those reports to justify further investigations,” he said.

Meadows asked why the FBI ignored evidence that pointed toward no collusion:

MEADOWS: There are three different lines of questioning. One, Congressman Issa talked about it. Will Bruce Ohr verify what we already know?