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Ruth King

Theresa May survives confidence vote

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-46547246

Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.

Mrs May is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.

But the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said the result was “not at all comfortable” for the prime minister and a “real blow” to her authority.

Mrs May won the confidence vote with a majority of 83, with 63% of Conservative MPs backing her and 37% voting against her.

The confidence vote was triggered by 48 of her MPs angry at her Brexit policy, which they say betrays the 2016 referendum result.

Jacob Rees-Mogg, who led calls for the confidence vote, said it was a “terrible result for the prime minister” and called on her to resign.

The result was greeted by cheers and applause from Tory MPs as it was announced by backbench Tory chairman Sir Graham Brady.

The prime minister still faces a battle to get the Brexit deal she agreed with the EU through the UK Parliament, with all opposition parties and dozens of her own MPs against it.

Mrs May earlier vowed to fight on to deliver her Brexit deal, which she argues is the only option for leaving the EU in an orderly way on 29 March.

But in a last-minute pitch to her MPs before the vote she promised to stand down as leader before the next scheduled election in 2022.

Cohen’s ‘Appointment in Prague’ Was Dossier Bunk, Mueller Files Indicate by Paul Sperry

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/12/11/mueller_files_undercut_cohens_infamous_appointment_in_prague.html

It was one of the most incendiary allegations included in the Clinton-financed opposition research known as the Steele dossier – that Donald Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen met with “Kremlin officials” in Prague in 2016 to arrange payments to operatives hacking Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Despite strong denials from Cohen, the claim has shadowed the president, inspiring and coloring the Russia investigation ever since. McClatchy reported in April that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had obtained evidence of the Prague trip and likely confirmed the secret meeting.

But a flurry of court filings by Mueller last week suggests that this story is false, a damaging piece of disinformation that has roiled the nation for two years.

Officials familiar with the case said the proof is in the lack of evidence in the 25 pages of court papers Mueller has filed on Cohen over the past two weeks. The alleged Prague visit is not evident in the plea agreement, the criminal information statement or the sentencing memorandum, none of which contain redactions.

In fact, language in the filings strongly indicates prosecutors have not found evidence to authenticate the Prague rumor, according to people familiar with the case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information.

They point to the sentencing memo filed Friday, for starters. On page 5, Mueller stated that Cohen “has provided relevant and truthful information” about “his own contacts with Russian interests during the campaign” to prosecutors in their investigation of Russian election interference. Though Mueller details contacts Cohen made with various Russians, he offers no evidence he contacted Kremlin officials in Prague, as described in the dossier. The Czech city, in fact, is not cited in any of his filings, though Moscow, St. Petersburg, Davos and other cities are.

MY SAY: CONTEMPORARY QUESTIONS ASKED IN 1855

https://readgreatliterature.com/trollopes-the-warden-empathy-v-the-media

What famous novelist attacked false news and the unbalanced power of a money-driven mainstream media, and in what novel?
What famous novelist, in this same novel, faulted popular storytellers for creating blind emotion and simplistic portrayals of “good” or “bad” people?
What famous novelist attacked a famous public intellectual for his bombastic cynicism about everything in the modern world?
What novelist thought the central character of a work should be neither a faultless victim nor a morally pristine super-person, but rather an ordinary man, weak but well-meaning, a “mixed” character with good and bad, noble and foolish characteristics all mixed together?

Answer: My favorite novelist Anthony Trollope, in the first of the Barchester Chronicles “The Warden” in 1855. rsk

Trump-Haters Smell Blood Over Cohen’s Charges But where is a true smoking gun, exactly? Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272204/trump-haters-smell-blood-over-cohens-charges-joseph-klein

The chorus of Trump-haters rushing to brand President Trump a criminal has gotten considerably louder since last Friday. That was the day prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office separately filed their sentencing recommendations against ex-Trump personal lawyer Michael Cohen. Cohen had pleaded guilty to a variety of charges, including of lying to Congress. The Mueller sentencing memo contained some teasers on the Russian collusion investigation. However, the teasers seem to have fallen flat, including the Moscow tower project promoted by Cohen, which never got off the ground, and a cryptic reference to “political synergy” offered by a Russian official as early as 2015 that Cohen apparently did not pursue. Instead, the Trump-haters have turned their attention to the portion of the New York prosecutors’ sentencing memorandum regarding Cohen’s admitted federal election campaign finance law violations, which the Trump-haters are counting on to spell trouble for the president.

The prosecutors in New York accepted as true in their sentencing memorandum Cohen’s claim that he had arranged for the payment of hush money to two past alleged Trump paramours in violation of federal election campaign finance laws, doing so “in coordination with and at the direction of” President Trump (referred to as “Individual #1” in their sentencing memo). That is all the Trump-haters had to hear before declaring that it was curtains for the president. Smelling blood in the water, they are looking beyond impeachment to possible jail time once the president leaves office.

On Sunday morning’s edition of CNN’s Reliable Sources, for example, Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, still living on his reputation from that decades-old scandal, said, “There’s something much more important than just impeachment going on, and that is the fact that Donald Trump for the first time in his life is cornered.”

The Obama administration’s former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal said on CNN: “Even if a sitting president can’t be indicted, he’s got to know his future looks like it’s behind bars unless he cuts some sort of deal with the prosecutors.”

Kevin Hart and the Politics of Comedy What we are really talking about is tyranny. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272193/kevin-hart-and-politics-comedy-bruce-thornton

For a few days last week it seemed we might witness a rare example of integrity, independence, and courage in Hollywood, that herd of independent minds. Comedian Kevin Hart was slated to host the Oscars, but some tweets insulting to gays from several years ago surfaced, and the Salemite usual suspects began clamoring for the stake.

At first Hart refused to go through the social-media show-trial of groveling apologies. He gave common-sense response that even The New York Times accepted: “Guys, I’m almost 40,” he said. “If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you.” Faced with an ultimatum from the Academy to apologize, Hart “passed” on the Academy’s demand.

For a brief moment, champions of free speech and moral courage were heartened. In an industry famous for cutthroat careerism and ruthless ambition checked only by orthodoxy and conformity, for Hart to give up a gig as prestigious and lucrative as hosting the Oscars is unheard of.

But soon it was business as usual. Hart caved, and announced, “I sincerely apologize to the LGBTQ community for my insensitive words from my past . . . I’m sorry that I hurt people. I am evolving and want to continue to do so.” The wolves, however, weren’t satisfied. Hart is now being attacked because his apology was “botched” and “insincere.” He needed to grovel more and show true contrition and evidence he’s “changed.” The p.c. police weren’t done yet with making an example of him to warn any other celebrity who dares stray from the identity-politics plantation.

The censorship of comedians for their content, however, has implications far beyond one comedian or form of entertainment. Controlling criticism of any group because something is deemed offensive or inappropriate ultimately privileges one point of view over another, and weakens everybody’s free-speech rights.

Comedy especially is linked to free speech. Formal comedy arose 2500 years ago at the same time as political free speech, democratic freedom, and equality, and has always had a political purpose––affirming our political equality by satirizing and mocking any group or faction that claims at the expense of other groups a right to more power than it deserves.

Transgender Men Announce They’re Raising a Gender-Neutral Child By Faith Moore

https://pjmedia.com/trending/transgender-men-announce-theyre-raising-a-gender-neutral-child/

“When asked if Zo is a boy or a girl, Zo’s parents reply, “We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for Zo to tell us.”

Zo is an adorable 22-month-old baby whose gender is a mystery. Well, not a mystery exactly. Zo’s parents know what sex Zo is (meaning, what genitalia he/she has) but they refuse to reveal it. This is because they have chosen to raise Zo “gender neutral.” Zo is referred to as “they” and, when asked if Zo is a boy or a girl, Zo’s parents reply, “We don’t know yet. We’re waiting for Zo to tell us.”

Zo’s parents are both transgender men, meaning they were born women but identify as men. So it seems fairly clear (to me at least) that their decision stems from their own feelings of being “assigned” the wrong gender. But with fewer than one percent of the American population identifying as transgender, the likelihood that Zo will face the same issues his/her parents did is highly unlikely. Assuming that Zo will grow up to identify with the gender that matches his/her genitalia, surely raising her “gender-neutral” is just as damaging or confusing for Zo as being raised as the “wrong” gender was for his/her parents.

In a video for TicToc by Bloomberg, Nathan Levitt, one of Zo’s parents, explains his decision to raise Zo “gender-neutral” by saying, “We felt like there are so many gender stereotypes that get put on kids… and then so many decisions are made from that.” Levitt and his husband are waiting for Zo “to identify as whatever gender they want to whenever they feel that’s right for them” and they are open to the idea that “that might change at some point.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Mueller’s Collusion Hoax Collapses By Conrad Black

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/11/muellers-co

The sudden death of the unutterable nonsense of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, announced as it was in the hand-off to the Southern New York U.S. Attorney of the shabby fruit of Michael Cohen’s plea bargaining, has divided onlookers into three communities of opinion.

The true believers in the collusion canard are left slack-jawed, like the international Left after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: an immense fervor of faith is instantly destroyed; it is the stillness of a sudden and immense evaporation.

The professional Trump-haters, the Democratic Party assassination squads in the Congress and media, like disciplined soldiers, have swiveled with parade ground precision and resumed firing after a mere second to reload, at the equally fatuous nonsense about illegal campaign contributions. Disreputable, contemptible myth-makers and smear-jobbers though they are, they deserve credit for fanaticism, improvisation, and managing in unison to sound half plausible in the face of the crushing defeat they have suffered and the piffle and pottage they are left to moralize about.

Third, and slowest to respond, so sudden has been the change of the whole Trump-hate narrative, are those who never wavered from the requirement of real evidence of something before they would endorse the drastic act of impeaching and removing the nation’s leader. Some feel betrayed and some vindicated, but sensing no need for instant response, unlike the Trump-haters who are scrambling to try to cooper up some credibility for continuing their assault on the president, the third group is preparing with only deliberate speed to counter-attack the assassins-by-impeachment with their full and now overpowering armament of facts and law.

The Trump-haters can make a strong case that the president is an obnoxious public personality—that he is boastful, exaggerates constantly, sends out silly tweets with grade two typographical errors in them and gets into ill-tempered slanging matches with half the people with whom he comes into contact. To a great many, he is just refreshingly puncturing official self-importance.

But whatever anyone thinks of Trump, there are two points his enemies will have to face: he won the 2016 election and that can only be undone by the 2020 election, and high office-holders can only be impeached and removed from office by high crimes and misdemeanors as prescribed by the Constitution.

James and the Giant Impeachment By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/11/james-and-the-giant-impeachment/
For those concerned that former FBI Director James Comey is suffering from early dementia, have no fear: His memory returned with a vengeance during a Sunday night interview with MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace.

On Friday, under questioning by House Judiciary Committee members, Comey answered, “I don’t know,” “I don’t recall,” or “I don’t remember” nearly 250 times during a six-hour closed-door hearing. His memory lapse included critical details like how the infamous Steele dossier reached his agency; who at the FBI drafted the initiation document to investigate the Trump campaign; who at the FBI had authority to open a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign; and his own comments about the tarmac meeting between his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and former president Bill Clinton. He said he didn’t know what the word “insidious” meant and couldn’t explain the difference between collusion and conspiracy.

But perhaps Comey loaded up on ginseng over the weekend because his vague and convenient memory miraculously returned when he was questioned by a fawning Wallace at a 92nd Street Y event just two days later. Tiny details about dates, locations, meeting participants and a funny moment during a briefing with President Obama in early January 2017 were recalled with ease. He knew enough about the recent Michael Cohen plea deal to suggest the president is an unindicted co-conspirator, and even recalled how Trump “lied” about the inauguration attendance. He claimed that it’s possible the Russians have tapes of Trump “engaged in unusual activities in Moscow.”

But perhaps his most explosive revelation was when Comey smugly revealed how he exploited the disarray during the Trump administration’s first weeks to corner National Security Advisor Michael Flynn about his monitored calls with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016. Flynn, who already was under investigation by the FBI for his alleged ties to the Kremlin, had denied to senior administration officials that he discussed recently-imposed sanctions with the Russian diplomat.

Israeli Mom and Premature Infant Battle for Their Lives after Palestinian Attack Drive-by shooting underscores reason why Palestinian statehood is a bad idea. Ari Lieberman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272203/israeli-mom-and-premature-infant-battle-their-ari-lieberman

On Sunday, seven Israeli civilians were wounded after Palestinian terrorists in a white sedan sprayed a group of people waiting at a bus stop with automatic machinegun fire. The attack occurred near the community of Ofra, which is situated north of Jerusalem in the Samaria district.

The injured included a pregnant woman, identified as Shira Ish-Ran, who was hit in the abdomen and was initially listed as critical, though her condition has improved somewhat. Her unborn child, who was 30-35 weeks old, was delivered by emergency cesarean section and placed in the neo-natal intensive care unit. His condition is listed as critical and doctors fear he may have incurred a brain injury as a result of the attack. He is currently in a medically induced coma. Both mother and son are at Shaarei Zedek Medical center in Jerusalem.

The attack was captured on CCTV and Israeli security officials believe that there were at least two perpetrators. The Israel Defense Forces in combination with the General Security Service have launched an intensive dragnet for the terrorists, conducting sweeps of nearby hostile villages, including Silwad and al-Bireh. The Palestinian Authority-controlled Wafa propaganda outlet in the nearby city of Ramallah was also raided.

When I saw the headline, I was naturally shocked by the indiscriminate heinous nature of the attack and saddened for the fates of Mrs. Ish-Ran and her newborn baby boy, who were among the most seriously wounded. This bestial act of violence perpetrated by lowly cowards, was praised by Hamas, who referred to the attack as “heroic.” The Palestinian Authority has yet to issue a statement condemning the attack but judging by their past actions, they will likely name streets and squares after the perpetrators and issue hefty stipends for their families, a repulsive practice known as pay for slay. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the United States has curtailed aid to the Palestinians, citing among other things, the Palestinian practice of pay for slay. The Europeans seem oblivious to this practice and are still lavishly funding the Palestinian Authority, courtesy of EU taxpayer.

France: A Revolt against Europe’s Elites? by Bruce Bawer

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13401/france-revolt-elites

Maybe this is it — the start of the Western European public’s pushback against the elites’ disastrous multicultural and globalist project.

For years, those of us who write and worry about the rise of Islam in Western Europe have known that eventually, if the governments of these countries did not change course dramatically, something had to give. So far, the natives had, for the most part, been remarkably tame. They had swallowed a lot. Their leaders had filled their countries with huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, a disproportionate number of whom were making it clear that they had no intention of fully joining or contributing to their host societies but, rather, were content to take, to harm, to damage, and to destroy, and were determined, in the long run, to conquer and rule.

No one had ever asked the citizens of Western Europe whether they wanted their countries radically transformed in this manner. This transformation, moreover, was intensifying by the year. At some point, surely, the native peoples of Western Europe would react.

But what form would it take? Those of us who are professionally preoccupied with these topics spent untold hours pondering this question. We asked one another: what do you think will happen? Some prophesied Balkanization. Already there were no-go zones – enclaves in and around major cities where “infidels” were unwelcome and where police and fire personnel were routinely pelted with rocks if they dared to intrude. It was easy enough to imagine those areas expanding, their de facto sovereignty under sharia law officially recognized and some kind of relatively stability established. Other observers forecast riots by natives — not the elites whose personal lives were minimally affected by the Muslim presence in their countries, but the less privileged types whose neighborhoods and schools had become danger zones, whose taxes had been raised repeatedly to bankroll massive payouts to immigrant-group members, and whose doctors and hospitals had been so overburdened by the newcomers that vital treatments were increasingly rationed and waiting times increasingly long.

In 2016, the British shocked the world by voting for Brexit, and later the same year Americans pulled off an even bigger stunner by electing Donald Trump to the presidency. Some commentators expected that elections in France, Sweden, and the Netherlands would also yield sensational results, but although there were advances for parties that favor immigration controls, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (formerly National Front), the Sweden Democrats, and Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party and Thierry Baudet’s Forum for Democracy, both in the Netherlands, those gains were smaller than expected. On the other hand, last year the Austrians elected as their Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, a vocal opponent of EU-imposed asylum quotas, and this year the Italian premiership went to Giuseppe Conte, who takes a strong stance against illegal immigrants and has barred migrant ships from Italian ports.