Displaying the most recent of 90914 posts written by

Ruth King

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Impeachment Fantasy By Rich Lowry

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/democrats-trump-impeachment-fantasy/

Impeachment has a long history in Anglo America, yet it is widely misunderstood.

The collusion fantasy has officially given way to the impeachment fantasy.

The passionate investment of the Left in the Mueller investigation had much to do with shock and disbelief at Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 and the hope of early deliverance — the special-counsel probe as delectable revenge and deus ex machina.

The expectation that Robert Mueller would blow Trump out of the White House with proof of collusion with Russia has, not surprisingly, come up empty. No worries. If Volume I of the Mueller report, on Russia, didn’t pan out, there’s always Volume II, on alleged obstruction.

When you are desperate to, in the memorable words of Democratic freshman congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, “impeach the motherf—–,” any rationale will do.

If House Democrats impeach Trump, though, they will be sorely disappointed. They will wake up the day afterward and, after all the drama and wall-to-wall coverage, he’ll still be president of the United States, tweeting per usual.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

The Democratic Presidential Primary Is An Arms Race In Crazy Let’s have a conversation! By David Harsanyi

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/23/the-democratic-presidential-primary-is-an-arms-race-in-crazy/

When asked at a CNN town hall this week if he believed that incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote, socialist presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders responded: “This is a democracy and we have got to expand that democracy, and I believe every single person does have the right to vote.”

What about someone like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber? “Yes,” Sanders went on, “even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, ‘Well, that guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote. Well, that person did that. Not going to let that person vote,’ you’re running down a slippery slope.”

Slippery slope, indeed.

After spending decades incessantly repeating the “America is a democracy” lie—liberals, of course, tend to scoff when you point out this jejune detail —the only logical conclusion, ideologically speaking, is terrorist suffrage, I guess. “Every vote” means every vote.

Now, there’s a rational argument to be made for allowing Americans who have served their time and paid their debt to society to fully participate in American political life. Certainly those who’ve never committed violent crimes shouldn’t have to surrender their civic rights forever. The notion that incarcerated murderers should be weighing in on gun laws or that child molesters should have a say on local school bond issues or that a terrorist’s vote should have an effect on American foreign policy, however, undercuts the liberal contention that casting a ballot is a sacred act.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS claims responsibility for Sri Lanka Easter bombings that killed over 300 By Morgan Winsor and Dragana Jovanovic

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://abcnews.go.com/International/isis-claims-responsibility-sri-lanka-easter-bombings-killed/story?id=

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for a wave of coordinated bombings at churches and high-end hotels across Sri Lanka.

The terrorist organization offered no evidence to support that assertion, which was initially announced in a statement in Arabic published by its Amaq news agency on Tuesday, saying the attackers were “among the fighters of the Islamic State,” according to a translation by SITE Intelligence Group, a company that tracks extremist groups.

ISIS later issued a longer, formal statement identifying the seven suicide bombers who detonated explosive-laden vests at the churches and hotels and a housing complex on Sunday.

Continue reading →
EDUCATION Comments turned off

Persistence and Political Correctness at Amherst By Richard Bernstein,

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/04/22/persistence_and_political_correctness_at_amherst.html

Sometimes in the culture wars, the identity-politics camp leans so far to a politically correct extreme that liberals and conservatives alike reject it. Or so it would seem. A recent episode at Amherst College is worth examining less as a defeat for political correctness than a tactical retreat illustrating that the cult of identity politics on campus shows little sign of weakening.
Withdrawn from circulation, but why?
www.scribd.com

What happened is this: Last month Amherst’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion sent all 1,850 or so students at the elite western Massachusetts school an attractively produced 36-page brochure called the Amherst Common Language Guide, with definitions of “key diversity and inclusion terms.” Its clear emphasis: “Marginalized groups” were being oppressed by what the document called the “cisheteropatriarchy” — a system of domination by straight white men – through racism, sexism, oppression, hegemony, and exploitation.

Within hours of the guide’s release, a member of the Amherst College Republicans leaked the brochure to the conservative Daily Wire website, which pronounced it “something out of ‘1984.’ ” A crescendo of ridicule from conservative websites and blogs followed.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

7 Glaring Omissions In The Mueller Report That Kill Its Credibility While there is much within the Mueller report that suggests skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted. Ben Weingarten

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/23/7-glaring-omissions-mueller-report-kill-credibility/

Robert Mueller’s special counsel was presented to the American public as unimpeachable. From its beginning, a distinct minority in politics and media, including several Federalist writers, were skeptical, citing the special counsel’s past prosecutorial abuses, the past alleged misconduct of its pivotal investigators, and the team’s peculiar partisan makeup.

Once in action, its seemingly limitless powers, heavy-handed usage of such powers, and more questionable if not dubious indictments, far removed from “collusion,” seemed to confirm our worst fears. While there is much within the Mueller report that further suggests this skepticism was well-founded, what is perhaps most probative is what the report omitted.

The following are seven of the most glaring omissions from the collusion section of the redacted Mueller report—since collusion, not obstruction, was the theory from which the investigation stemmed.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Democrats’ Relentless, Fruitless Hunt for the Great Orange Whale By Charles Lipson

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://amazingsaleonline.com/bibcntfas/?sxid=4zxvbykj4b41&c=0.0146875&siteid=3955&campaignid=35239&placementid=68179&channel=News&subchannel=Conservative+News&creative=

Democrats are trying to spin the Mueller Report as welcome news. Good luck with that. Legally, they’ve got no case left. Politically, they are making a serious mistake.

They do have some material to work with, especially the report’s second volume, which portrays a vulgar, deceitful president. The details are new, but the portrait itself is not. What’s new are some cases where the president came close to obstructing justice, according to the special counsel’s investigators. Even so, they did not say he crossed the line.

The most important news, of course, is the report’s basic findings. It clearly demonstrates Russia tried to influence the 2016 election and favored Trump, but it kills the assertion that Trump or his campaign cooperated with them. For two years, Democrats and the mainstream media said the opposite about Trump — repeatedly, loudly, insistently. To continue that attack now is ludicrous. That doesn’t mean they will retract, apologize, or return their Pulitzer Prizes. They prefer to change the subject.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Bob Woodward: FBI, CIA Reliance on ‘Garbage’ Steele Dossier ‘Needs to Be Investigated’ By Jack Crowe

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bob-woodward-fbi-cia-reliance-on-garbage-steele-dossier-needs-to-be-investigated/

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward said Monday that the intelligence community’s reliance on the infamous Steele dossier “needs to be investigated” in the wake of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s failure to corroborate many of the document’s key claims.

Woodward told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that he was disturbed to learn that the CIA cited information included in the Clinton-funded dossier in a rough draft of their January 2017 intelligence-community assessment detailing Russian election-interference efforts.

“What I found out recently, which was really quite surprising, the dossier, which really has got a lot of garbage in it and Mueller found that to be the case, early in building the intelligence-community assessment on Russian interference, in an early draft, they actually put the dossier on page two in kind of a breakout box,” Woodward said.

“I think it was the CIA pushing this. Real intelligence experts looked at this and said ‘No, this is not intelligence, this is garbage,’ and they took it out,” he continued. “But in this process, the idea that they would include something like that in one of the great stellar intelligence assessments, as Mueller also found out, is highly questionable. Needs to be investigated.”

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Goal for Iran’s Oil Exports: Zero American frackers can reduce the impact of higher crude prices.

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-goal-for-irans-oil-exports-zero-11555972882

President Trump wants to exert “maximum pressure” on Iran, which is why he is giving the sanctions screws another firm twist. Any country that imports Iranian oil will soon face U.S. penalties—with no exceptions. Last year seven nations and Taiwan were granted waivers through May 2, giving them time to adjust supply lines. These waivers won’t be extended, the State Department said Monday, helping to push the benchmark oil price to $74 a barrel, a nearly six-month high.

Italy, Greece and Taiwan have already ended their Iranian oil imports. That leaves five countries at risk of U.S. sanctions: China, India, Turkey, Japan and South Korea. Two are close allies, and no doubt their leaders will protest this stiff medicine. But the Trump Administration has given them enough warning, not to mention a six-month waiver. That’s plenty of time to make other arrangements.

By all accounts, Iran’s economy is in trouble. “To date, we estimate that our sanctions have denied the regime well north of $10 billion,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday. “The regime would have used that money to support terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and continue its missile development” and “it would have perpetuated the humanitarian crisis in Yemen.”

Mr. Pompeo reiterated the White House goal “to deprive the outlaw regime of the funds it has used to destabilize the Middle East for four decades, and incentivize Iran to behave like a normal country.” To that end, the U.S. intends to drive Iranian oil exports to zero.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Persecution of Palestinians No One Mentions by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14098/palestinians-persecution-saudi-arabia

In Lebanon, Palestinians have long been facing discriminatory and “Apartheid laws” that deny them basic rights, including access to dozens of skilled professions, health-care and education services. According to some reports, thousands of Palestinians have been fleeing Lebanon in recent years as a result of the dire economic conditions and government regulations that deny them basic rights.

In 2015, a Saudi court sentenced Palestinian artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh to death by beheading for “apostasy.” Later, however, the court overturned the death sentence and replaced it with an eight-year prison term and 800 lashes. The “evidence” against Fayadh was based on poems included in his book Instructions Within, as well as social media posts and conversations he had in a coffee shop in Saudi Arabia.

Palestinian leaders do not seem to care about the suffering of their people at the hands of Arabs. Yet, these same leaders are quick to condemn Israel on almost every occasion and available platform. Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are so busy fighting each other (and Israel) that they seem to have forgotten about the Palestinians in Arab countries, being killed, wounded and arrested every day.

Saudi Arabia appears to have joined the list of Arab countries that mistreat Palestinians.

In Syria, thousands of Palestinians have been wounded, murdered and arrested since the beginning of the civil war in 2011. The latest statistics show that nearly 4,000 Palestinians — 3,920 to be exact — have been killed in Syria in the past nine years, while 1,750 others are being held in various Syrian government prisons. Another 323 Palestinians have gone missing during the same period.

In Lebanon, Palestinians have long been facing discriminatory and “Apartheid laws” that deny them basic rights, including access to dozens of skilled professions, health-care and education services. According to some reports, thousands of Palestinians have been fleeing Lebanon in recent years as a result of the dire economic conditions and government regulations that deny them basic rights.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Unredact All of It By Julie Kelly

By on April 23rd, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/22/unredact-all-of-it/

The Mueller Report confirms what some of us have suspected from the beginning: There was no collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The investigation that monopolized the attention of the media, Capitol Hill, the White House, and the American public for two years is over.

Collusion truthers who’ve embarrassed themselves and misled the country about the existence of imaginary crimes are trying to move seamlessly from collusion to obstruction of justice claims. Demands for impeachment based on vague allegations of obstruction now contaminate the same cable news programs, political websites, and media outlets that falsely warned Americans for more than two years that Donald Trump was Vladimir Putin’s puppet. The self-immolation of our national news media continues.

This continuing trip with hyperbole serves one purpose: To obfuscate the real scandal, which is how the world’s most powerful law enforcement and intelligence apparatus was weaponized to sabotage a rival presidential campaign and then to try to oust the duly elected president of the United States.

Continue reading →