RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy/upbeat-employment-report-underscores-us-economic-strength-idUSKCN1OY0AU

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. employers hired the most workers in 10 months in December while boosting wages, pointing to sustained strength in the economy that could ease fears of a sharp slowdown in growth.

The upbeat employment report from the Labor Department on Friday stood in stark contrast with reports this week showing Chinese factory activity contracting for the first time in 19 months in December and weak manufacturing across much of Europe.

Concerns about the U.S. economy heightened following surveys showing sharp declines in consumer confidence and manufacturing activity last month, which roiled financial markets. Both were seen as more red flags that the economic expansion, now in its ninth year and the second longest on record, is losing steam.

“The jump in payrolls in December would seem to make a mockery of market fears of an impending recession,” said Paul Ashworth, chief economist at Capital Economics in Toronto. “This employment report suggests the U.S. economy still has considerable forward momentum.”

Nonfarm payrolls surged by 312,000 jobs last month, the largest gain since February, as employment at construction and leisure and hospitality locations snapped back after being restrained by unseasonably cold temperatures in November.

https://www.nationalreview.com/politics-policy/The special counsel is going to keep digging until Trump stops this.

I t’s a new year with a new Congress, but it’s the same question: When is Special Counsel Robert Mueller going to file his much-anticipated final report?

My 2018 answer was: When he’s good and ready.

I have a caveat for 2019, though: Maybe when President Trump stops giving him additional reasons to keep digging.

Don’t get me wrong. I am reasonably confident that the bottom line will be that there is no criminal collusion case. That is, the original rationale for the investigation that the FBI commenced during the 2016 presidential campaign and that Mueller inherited in 2017 — pretextually opened as a counterintelligence investigation but conducted as a criminal investigation in search of a crime — is a dry hole: There was no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to commit cyber-espionage against Democratic email accounts. Putin did not “hack the election.” If there had been a collusion conspiracy, the indictments Mueller has filed would look very different; the potential witnesses would have pleaded guilty to a collusion conspiracy — and they’d be preparing to testify against the president, not being sentenced for lying to the FBI.

Unjustified Appointment
It also remains true that there was no justification for Mueller’s appointment. The FBI was formally conducting a counterintelligence investigation. In the Justice Department, counterintelligence investigations do not have a prosecutor assigned; the point is not to prosecute but to collect information about a foreign power. In counterintelligence, if the FBI needs assistance in getting surveillance warrants from the FISA court, lawyers in the Justice Department’s National Security Division handle that. There is no need for a prosecutor — not just for a special counsel but for any prosecutor at all — unless concrete evidence emerges that gives rise to good-faith suspicion that a crime has been committed.

Moreover, there is no need for a special counsel (a creature of federal regulation) in the absence of a conflict of interest with respect to the suspected crime — a conflict so profound that DOJ is ethically incapable of investigating the matter. Here, there was no crime and no conflict. The FBI, aided by DOJ’s National Security Division, could easily have conducted an aggressive investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election — and were doing so before Mueller’s appointment, even after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself.

https://pjmedia.com/video/new-muslim-congresswoman-vows-to-impeach-the-motherfker/

Newly minted Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) had been a congresswoman for mere hours before declaring her intention to impeach President Donald Trump using vulgar language.

“People love you and you win. And when your son looks at you and says, ‘Momma, look you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘baby they don’t,'” Tlaib told a crowd Thursday night. “Because we’re going to go in there and impeach the motherf**ker!”

Video of the vulgar declaration drew a great deal of attention on Twitter.

.@RashidaTlaib saying it louder for the people in the back!! ???#116thCongress pic.twitter.com/VeUq0GwI5E
— UndocuNestor (@_NestorRuiz) January 4, 2019

This is far from the first time she has called for Trump’s impeachment. One of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, Tlaib had pledged to impeach Trump during the election. She published an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press urging impeachment on Thursday. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://newswithviews.com/economic-overview-for-2019/

As James Carville once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

As we enter 2019, the Federal Reserve is once again in the headlines for increasing interest rates. The Fed’s increase is what is responsible for the upsy-downsy stock market, not President Trump’s tariffs (though the fake media will tell you otherwise).

There are three important things to remember about the Federal Reserve System: 1) It is a private corporation and is not part of the government; 2) It is merely a wholesaler of financial services and does nothing that cannot be done by the United States Treasury Department; 3) American taxpayers are responsible for the unlawful debts accumulated by the Federal Reserve.

“Well,” you may say to yourself, “it’s only fair that we pay for Social Security and our highway system and all of the things that cause the national debt, isn’t it?”

You might want to take a look at the loans that have nothing to do with America and its well-being before being so generous with your forgiveness:

A 2006 audit showed that during the period from December 1, 2007 through July 21, 2010 the Fed made $16 trillion dollars in loans (our total national debt is $21 trillion) to US banks and corporations and to foreign banks.

Foreign banks? That’s right… foreign banks. The bank bailout of September 2008 was nothing compared to secret loans made by the Federal Reserve System about which the Congress was never informed.

Thanks to then-Congressman Ron Paul who kept pressure on the House of Representatives to pass legislation ordering the General Accounting Office audit of the Fed.

The loans were to cover up secret bank and corporate bailouts. They were made to prevent the banks and corporations who borrowed the money from bankruptcy. The money was loaned at nearly zero percent (.01%) interest – as in 1/10th of 1%.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272405/racist-anti-semitic-black-left-john-perazzo

In a recent interview on the popular radio show The Breakfast Club, Temple University professor and former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill affectionately referred to Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “my brother.” Moreover, Hill pushed back against whites who suggested that he and other black pundits should, in Hill’s words, “throw [Farrakhan] away wholesale” because of the latter’s long history of incendiary racial rhetoric. Noting that no one had ever urged him to similarly distance himself from what he describes as “extreme” conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter when he was a Fox News contributor years ago, Hill now asks: “Why is only one set of people untouchable? And why does every black leader have to ritually denounce Farrakhan in order to sustain a position?”

Hill’s professed bewilderment vis-à-vis this alleged double standard is wholly unsurprising, in light of the very obvious fact that he, like Farrakhan, has shown himself to be quite fluent in the vernacular of racism and anti-Semitism. During a January 2017 appearance on a CNN panel, for instance, Hill took issue with black celebrities like Ray Lewis, Jim Brown, and Steve Harvey for accepting President-elect Donald Trump’s invitation to meet with him at Trump Tower. After Bruce LeVell — an African American member of Trump’s diversity coalition — objected to Hill’s complaints, Hill characterized LeVell and all other nonwhites who were working on behalf of Trump’s agenda as “a bunch of mediocre Negroes.”

On Columbus Day 2012, Hill published an op-ed in which he listed the “15 Most Overrated White People” – a list that included such names as Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, William Shakespeare, and Babe Ruth. Hill’s motivation for writing this column, he explained, was his angst over the celebration of a national holiday honoring “an immoral treasure hunter” and “vicious conquistador.”

In stark contrast to his sneering derision of “overrated” whites, Hill has heaped mountains of glowing praise upon convicted black cop-killers like Mumia Abu Jamal (“one of the world’s most celebrated journalists, freedom fighters, and political prisoners”) and Assata Shakur (“an American hero and freedom fighter”).

In October 2015, Hill lauded Rasmea Odeh — the mastermind of a deadly 1969 terrorist bombing in Jerusalem — as a “Palestinian freedom fighter.” Viewing Israel as “an apartheid state” that deserves to be crushed economically by organized worldwide boycotts, Hill contends that violence is a wholly legitimate means of advancing the creation of “a free Palestine from the River to the Sea.” In other words, all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — precisely the territory that constitutes Israel — should henceforth be known as “Palestine.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/report-u-s-intel-community-kept-exculpatory-evidence-about-gen-flynns-trip-to-moscow-secret-for-years/

Remember the huge fuss the never-Trump media made out of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow? In articles written in 2016, 2017, and 2018 they suggested that the retired Army general was a “compromised” Russian stooge and that the trip bordered on treason. This has been a cornerstone of the Russia collusion narrative involving Flynn for several years now.

When Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley learned the truth in May 2017, he requested that the information be made public in fairness to Flynn, because it completely exonerated him of any wrongdoing in the affair.

“It appears the public release of this information would not pose any ongoing risk to national security. Moreover, the declassification would be in the public interest, and is in the interest of fairness to Lt. Gen. Flynn,” Grassley wrote in August 2017.

A year and a half later, the truth finally has come out: “Flynn’s attendance at the RT event was disclosed in advance to the intelligence community, he took proactive steps to ensure he could not be compromised by attendees and he then came back to the United States and reported intelligence designed to benefit America,” The Hill’s John Solomon reported on Wednesday.

Incredibly, the U.S. intelligence community has kept this exculpatory information secret for nearly two years, allowing the retired Army general’s name to be dragged through the mud.

According to Solomon’s sources:

Before Flynn made his infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow — as a retired general and then-adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — he alerted his former employer, the DIA.

He then attended a “defensive” or “protective” briefing before he ever sat alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Russia Today (RT) dinner, or before he talked with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

The briefing educated and sensitized Flynn to possible efforts by his Russian host to compromise the former high-ranking defense official and prepared him for conversations in which he could potentially extract intelligence for U.S. agencies such as the DIA.
When Flynn returned from Moscow, he spent time briefing intelligence officials on what he learned during the Moscow contacts. Between two and nine intelligence officials attended the various meetings with Flynn about the RT event, and the information was moderately useful, about what one would expect from a public event, according to my sources. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nation-of-islam-and-the-house-11546559607

Donald Trump has repeatedly faced calls to disavow anti-Semites, but Democrats have their own anti-Semitism problem. The new House majority leadership includes several lawmakers with ties to the nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan:

• James Clyburn of South Carolina. Mr. Clyburn, first elected in 1992, will hold the No. 3 post, majority whip, as he did in 2007-11. Mr. Clyburn is also a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which in September 1993 entered what then-CBC Chairman Kweisi Mfumecalled a “sacred covenant” with the Nation of Islam. The pact was ostensibly dissolved in February 1994, after it emerged that Farrakhan aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad had given a speech in which he called Jews the “bloodsuckers of the black nation.” But in July 2000, Mr. Clyburn, then CBC chairman, formed a partnership with Mr. Farrakhan’s Million Family March.

In 2005 Mr. Clyburn became chairman of the Democratic Caucus. The same year, photojournalist Askia Muhammad reported that “practically all 43 CBC members” (including then-Sen. Barack Obama) met Mr. Farrakhan in preparation for the 10th anniversary of the Million Man March. In 2011 Mr. Clyburn again joined Mr. Farrakhan, for a town-hall gathering in Pittsburgh titled “The Disappearing Black Community.” Mr. Clyburn told the Final Call, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper, that he was “not bothered in the least bit” by criticism of the appearance.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/congresswoman-hopes-reparations-bill-is-path-to-repair-some-of-the-damage-caused-by-slavery/

Rep. Lee is famous for booting seating passengers off flights with insults and tantrums, and demanding their seats; she has stated that the US Constitution is 400 years old; asked if the Pathfinder had succeeded in taking a picture of the flag planted on Mars by Neil Armstrong in 1969; in 2010 she stated“Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working.”not withstanding that there is no longer a South Vietnam. She graduated from Yale and the University of Virginia Law School….She should get reparations from those schools because she learned so little….rsk

WASHINGTON – Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) told PJM that the federal government should conduct a study of reparations for descendants of slaves to be able to determine the best way to “repair some of the damage” that slavery has caused to the African-American community.

Jackson Lee became the lead sponsor of H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, after Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) resigned from Congress.

The legislation seeks to “address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.”

“It’s a commission to study the issue of what was the economic impact of the work of slaves and how does it translate in the 21st century. And what we want to do is to build a narrative, a story of the facts and out of that be able to access how we repair some of the damage,” Jackson Lee said during a recent interview after her speech at the annual Legislative and Policy Conference organized by Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/2018-successful-year-for-american-economy/

Aside from the Washington hysterias, 2018 was a most successful year for Americans.

The year 2018 will be deplored by pundits as a bad year of more unpredictable Donald Trump, headlined by wild stock-market gyrations, the melodramas of the Robert Mueller investigation, and the musical-chair tenures of officials in the Trump administration.

A quarter of the government is still shut down. Talk of impeachment by the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is in the air. Seemingly every day there are sensational breakthroughs, scandals, and bombshells that race through social media and the Internet — only to be forgotten by the next day.

In truth, aside from the Washington hysterias, 2018 was a most successful year for Americans.

In December, the United States reached a staggering level of oil production, pumping some 11.6 million barrels per day. For the first time since 1973, America is now the world’s largest oil producer

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has increased its oil production by nearly 3 million barrels per day, largely as the result of fewer regulations, more federal leasing, and the continuing brilliance of American frackers and horizontal drillers. It appears that there is still far more oil beneath U.S. soil than has ever been taken out. American production could even soar higher in the months ahead.

In addition, the United States remains the largest producer of natural gas and the second-greatest producer of coal. The scary old energy-related phraseology of the last half-century — “energy crisis,” “peak oil,” “oil embargo” — no longer exists.