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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Candidate Clinton and the Foundation April 23, 2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s determination to reconnect with voters in localized, informative settings is commendable, but is in danger of being overshadowed by questions about the interplay of politics and wealthy foreign donors who support the Clinton Foundation.

Nothing illegal has been alleged about the foundation, the global philanthropic initiative founded by former President Bill Clinton. But no one knows better than Mrs. Clinton that this is the tooth-and-claw political season where accusations are going to fly for the next 19 months. And no one should know better than the former senator and first lady that they will fester if straightforward answers are not offered to the public.

The increasing scrutiny of the foundation has raised several points that need to be addressed by Mrs. Clinton and the former president. These relate most importantly to the flow of multimillions in donations from foreigners and others to the foundation, how Mrs. Clinton dealt with potential conflicts as secretary of state and how she intends to guard against such conflicts should she win the White House.

The only plausible answer is full and complete disclosure of all sources of money going to the foundation. And the foundation needs to reinstate the ban on donations from foreign governments for the rest of her campaign — the same prohibition that was in place when she was in the Obama administration.

The messiness of her connection with the foundation has been shown in a report by The Times on a complex business deal involving Canadian mining entrepreneurs who made donations to the foundation and were at the time selling their uranium company to the Russian state-owned nuclear energy company. That deal, which included uranium mining stakes in the United States, required approval by the federal government, including the State Department.

Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal April 23, 2015

The headline on the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

Sanctuary Cities: Where Hypocrisy Rules NYC’s Mayor Bill DeBlasio blocks the deportation of criminal aliens by ICE. March 31, 2017 Michael Cutler

It should be commonsense that a nation’s security begins and ends at its borders.

The primary mission of the military is to keep America’s enemies as far from its shores as possible.

There is a stirring Navy commercial “America’s Navy – The Shield” in which numerous members of the United States Navy from a wide array of divisions appear on screen and a voice says, “To get to you they’d have to get past us.”

Indeed, the valiant members of our armed forces from all five branches routinely go in harm’s way to defend America and Americans.

However, as we saw all too clearly on September 11, 2001, in this era of asymmetrical warfare, America’s enemies are likely to not come to our country in a warship but on an airliner.

Indeed, on that horrific day more than 15 years ago, 19 men from the Middle East carried out the deadliest terror attack ever mounted on American soil. The casualties of 9/11 surpassed the number of casualties that the Japanese fleet inflicted on the United States at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

The 9/11 Commission was convened to determine the vulnerabilities that the terrorists successfully exploited to attack the United States. Among the most fundamental vulnerabilities were those that pertain to the various components of the immigration system.

Michael Mann Embarrasses Himself before Congress If the climate-change evangelist can’t be bothered to take a House hearing seriously, why should anyone take him seriously? By Julie Kelly

In his testimony to the House Science Committee on Wednesday, Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, told the story of Trofim Lysenko, a plant scientist who worked for Stalinist Russia:

Lysenko was a Russian agronomist and it became Leninist doctrine to impose his views about heredity, which were crackpot theories, completely at odds with the world’s scientists. Under Stalin, scientists were being jailed if they disagreed with his theories about agriculture. And Russian agriculture actually suffered, scientists were jailed, many died in their jail cells and potentially millions of people suffered from the disastrous agriculture policies that followed from that.

The gist of Mann’s anecdote was that scientists who challenge the ruling government’s diktat on any given scientific issue are demonized and punished while innocent bystanders suffer. In the here and now, this would seemingly apply to the minority of scientists brave enough to question the reigning dogma of climate science. After all, these are the folks who have been threatened by top law-enforcement officials, personally and professionally attacked by their peers, and even driven out of their academic positions due to the harassment.

But astonishingly, Mann was not talking about those scientists: He was talking about himself. In his alternative universe, he and other climate scientists are the martyrs, oppressed and silenced by the Politburo. Never mind that Mann — a tenured professor at one of the country’s top public universities — opened his testimony by reciting a prodigious list of awards he has won, books he has authored, scientific organizations he leads. He is celebrated by the media and environmental groups around the world, and yet in front of Congress he talked like a guy on his way to the Gulag. It takes a special blend of hubris, juvenility, and dishonesty to portray yourself as a victim when you are really the bully.

It was quite a spectacle. Mann was joined on the panel by Judith Curry, John Christy, and Roger Pielke, Jr. — three scientists who have actually endured the kind of political witch-hunts Mann referred to. Rather than present data or debate the science, Mann mostly engaged in the sophistry that has gradually undermined the credibility of climate science. He repeatedly referred to a bogus “97 percent consensus” about man-made climate change, and accused the Heartland Institute of being a “climate-change denying, Koch brothers–funded outlet.” He engaged in one ad hominem attack after another against his fellow panelists and the committee’s chairman, Representative Lamar Smith. He questioned whether Smith really understood the scientific method and read a nasty quote about Smith from a smear piece in Science magazine

Devin Nunes and Washington’s Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery inside an Enigma The beleaguered Intelligence Committee chairman is the latest target in a partisan smear campaign. He must not step down. By Victor Davis Hanson

Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) will not step down from the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee. He is the new target in an already long line of those targeted by the media for forced resignations — Stephen Bannon, the purported anti-Semite; Sebastian Gorka, the alleged closet Nazi; Jeff Sessions, the supposed Russian patsy; and now Devin Nunes, the purported partisan naïf.

Nor should he resign — especially given the wider and bewildering landscape of the politicization and corruption of the intelligence community over the last months and the dangerous state in which we all find ourselves vis-à-vis the intelligence agencies and the transition of presidential power.

Some salient points, all of which have been reported in the media, need to be reemphasized with two caveats: First, the central question remains who leaked what classified information for what reasons; second, since when is it improper or even unwise for an apprehensive intelligence official to bring information of some importance to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee for external review — in a climate of endemic distrust of all intelligence agencies?

Sources

An unidentified intelligence official, possibly, it is now reported, attached in some role to the White House, apparently contacted Nunes. We have no idea whether the source did so because he did not completely trust high-ranking intelligence officials, or because he did not yet have confidence in the experience of the new Trump administration to digest such information, or because he was caught up in internal politics or wished himself to adjudicate the veracity of a prior Trump tweet. We do know that he did not in this case leak classified information to the press (as have higher-up officials). In any case, the source sought to have Nunes confirm the authenticity of his information — which purportedly suggestedimproperly handled intelligence-agency intercepts of the Trump transition team. Reporters several times have asked Nunes whether the information he’d read had anything to do with the investigation into possible connection between the Trump associates and Russia. Nunes several times said no, as he did most recently:

The information that I have seen has nothing to do with Russia or the Russian investigations. So bluntly put, everything that I was able to view did not involve Russia or any discussions with Russians or any Trump people or other Russians talking, or, so none of it has to do with Russia — that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means we don’t have it.

Nunes also said that the surveillance shown to him “was essentially a lot of information on the President-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.” Further, he suggested that the surveillance may have involved high-level Obama officials. When a reporter at Nunes’s second March 22 press conference asked, “Can you rule out the possibility that senior Obama-administration officials were involved in this?” Nunes replied, “No, we cannot.”

Ipso facto these are startling disclosures of historical proportions — if true, of an anti-constitutional magnitude comparable to Watergate. Given the stakes, we should expect hysteria to follow, and it has followed.

No Transparency Goes Unpunished

Amid the current shouting, we nonetheless know that Nunes did not hide the fact that he had sought to adjudicate the validity of those explosive documents (with the original sources in the secure possession of the executive branch). And he did not hide the fact that he was going to notify the president of the United States of the extraordinary information about which he had knowledge. At his morning press conference, he said, “I will be going to the White House this afternoon to share what I know with the president and his team.”

Nunes quite transparently informed the press and the nation about exactly what he had done and also what he would do.

Such a bombshell disclosure redirected the dominant narrative away from one solely about Russian collusion (itself the theme of daily and unsubstantiated leaks) to the possibly illegal means of seeking to substantiate that rumor. But it also is not the sort of thing that a conservative politician wishes to do in the current media and political climate in Washington.

In other words, it would have been far easier — and probably politically safer — for Nunes to have adopted the usual D.C. modus operandi.

In cynical terms, as we have learned the last year, this mode goes something like the following:

In Defense of the Freedom Caucus It’s wrong for Trump to blame the conservatives. By The Editors

The demise of the American Health Care Act, House speaker Paul Ryan and the White House’s ill-fated effort to reform Obamacare, has prompted a cascade of finger-pointing as Republicans try to assign blame for their recent embarrassment. The White House and much of the Republican establishment have settled on a familiar scapegoat: the famously stubborn 30 or so members of the House Freedom Caucus. On Thursday morning, President Trump tweeted: “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

We have been not infrequent critics of the Freedom Caucus, who often seem oblivious to Ronald Reagan’s observation that “my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.” There is no doubt that members of the caucus can be frustrating and prone to an unrealistic tactical maximalism.

Yet in this latest episode, the Freedom Caucus was mostly in the right (and it wasn’t just them — members from all corners of the House GOP found it impossible to back the bill). The American Health Care Act was a kludge of a health-care policy. Described as a way to simultaneously repeal key elements of the Affordable Care Act and replace them with market-oriented reforms, the bill in its final form managed to do little of either. Freedom Caucus members were particularly concerned about the willingness of House leaders to leave the vast majority of Obamacare’s regulations on the books — after Republicans spent seven years promising that the party would “repeal and replace Obamacare.” Even the rationale that the AHCA would be better than nothing was hard to justify; it probably would have further destabilized the individual market, while millions fewer would have been insured.

No wonder that strong-arming on behalf of the bill didn’t work. According to news reports, in the final hours, the White House sent adviser Steve Bannon to tell obstinate Freedom Caucus members that they “have no choice” but to vote for the bill. It’s hard to imagine a less effective pitch to a group that has long accused Republican leaders of trying to coerce conservatives into falling in line against their principles.

In any case, the now-or-never rhetoric around the bill has now been exposed as a convenient exaggeration. The House is exploring whether it can revive the repeal-and-replace effort, as it should. Some members of the Freedom Caucus are demanding an immediate, straight-up repeal of the Affordable Care Act, or at least of its taxes and spending, which is unrealistic. But for all their reputed rigidity, most of the Freedom Caucus had accepted the inclusion in the Ryan bill of tax credits for people without access to Medicare, Medicaid, or employer-provided insurance — a policy that they had previously tended to oppose.

That the president has decided to declare war, at least rhetorically, on this bloc of his own party’s congressional majority is a reminder of one of the other key elements of the AHCA collapse: For all of the praise heaped on the president’s negotiating acumen, he has yet to demonstrate it in his dealings with Congress. Trump’s tweet has all the hallmarks of ineffectually blowing off steam, since it’s hard to imagine the president and his supporters following through with the organizing and funding it would take to try to take out conservative members representing deep-red districts. If Trump wants to win over the Freedom Caucus — and all the other members — who opposed the health-care legislation, the first step should be obvious, if more difficult and less satisfying than popping off on Twitter: Get them a better bill.

Trump declares war on conservatives, cements one-term presidency By Ed Straker

President Trump officially declared war on conservatives yesterday. His ostensible target was the House Freedom Caucus, which declined to vote for the “Obamacare Lite” bill that Trump vigorously lobbied for. Trump tweeted:

The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast,” he wrote. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

Trump doesn’t care about ideology, or principles; he simply wants people to “get on the team.” Having lied to Republican primary voters about repealing Obamacare, he now wants conservative House members to go back on their promises to repeal Obamacare as well.

When Trump was running for president, he promised to repeal Obamacare. He didn’t promise to repeal part of it, and keep the worst half, the half that contained regulations which kept premiums sky-high and subsidies which are bankrupting the federal government, and soon state governments as well. But by embracing the House bill, that is exactly what President Trump has done. He never even tried to push for a full repeal; all he wanted was a “deal” he could take credit for.

Make no mistake, the viciousness of Trump’s attack on conservative House members is a direct attack on conservatives themselves. He used many of you to get elected and now wants you to shut up and toe the line. Whatever Trump says and does is brilliant, you can be sure. His contempt for the voters who nominated him in the primary is breathtaking.

Had they known that Trump never intended to repeal the worst parts of Obamacare, he never would have been nominated; and had they known that his immigration policy was remarkably similar to Jeb Bush’s (certainly when it comes to “Dreamers”), he also never would have secured the nomination. It was only by talking tough and outflanking the other conservatives on the right that Trump won the nomination. Remember when Trump talked about having all illegals go home to reapply for entry, and his repeated promised over and over to investigate Hillary Clinton? All lies.

Trump feels he no longer needs conservatives now, but he is wrong, unless he is committed to being a one-term president. Because the way he is going now, he will get a primary challenge for 2020 from someone who commits to repealing Obamacare and deporting all illegals. Even if he wins the primary challenge, enough conservatives will stay home to give a victory to whatever creature the Democrats put up.

The Freedom Caucus: Our last line of defense By Earick Ward ****

Unless Trump is coordinating an end-around, this is a huge (yuge) mistake. Here’s why.

While Donald Trump drew in countless new, historically Democrat voters, his base was and is the conservatives, formally defined as the Tea Party. The Tea Party came onto the scene at the outset of the Obamacare debate in Congress. They made the case (rightly) that Obamacare would inflate premiums, cause patients to lose their doctors and plans, decrease full-time jobs in favor of part-time employment, and add countless persons to the Medicare rolls. All of these cautions (and more) came to fruition.

“Repeal and replace” has been a rallying call for millions of Americans, including a large majority of those who voted for Donald Trump. Countless congressmen and senators won seats by affirming their support of the repeal and replace efforts.

Nothing, or very little, anyway, of last week’s debate – and, subsequently, the bill being “forced” on the Freedom Caucus – represented what anyone could seriously consider a repeal and replace of Obamacare.

There is an ideological war being waged between liberal progressives (from both parties) and conservatives. This war has been ongoing for at least a couple of decades (if not a century). While we (Republicans) have gained countless state and federal congressional seats, governorships, and now the presidency, at the federal level, we have seen little movement off the progressive agenda advanced by Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi.

The Freedom Caucus’s crime: standing on what they ran on in their districts. The horra.

Here’s Donald’s mistake: while he may truly be concerned about 2018 congressional seats being lost due to not passing a bill “reforming” Obamacare, if we’re not able to unwind dependency on government for health care, we’ll be forever chasing voters who will continue to vote for the Party of Santa Claus.

What Devin Nunes Knows Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration. Kimberley Strassel

California Rep. Adam Schiff may not offer much by way of substance, but give him marks for political flimflam. The ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee was so successful at ginning up fake outrage over his Republican counterpart that he successfully buried this week’s only real (and bombshell) news.

Mr. Schiff and fellow Democrats spent this week accusing Chairman Devin Nunes of carrying water for President Trump, undermining the committee’s Russia investigation, and hiding information. The press dutifully regurgitated the outrage, as well as Mr. Schiff’s calls for Mr. Nunes to recuse himself from the investigation into possible Russian electoral meddling.

All this engineered drama served to deep-six the important information Americans urgently deserve to know. Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administration—on subjects that had nothing to do with Russia—and that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This is goes far beyond a mere scandal. It’s a potential crime.

We’ve known since early February that a call by former national security adviser Mike Flynn to the Russian ambassador was monitored by U.S. intelligence. There’s nothing improper in tapping foreign officials. But it was improper that Mr. Flynn’s name was revealed and leaked to the press, along with the substance of his conversation. The media nonetheless excused all this by claiming one piece of Mr. Flynn’s conversation (sanctions) was relevant to the continuing investigation into Trump-Russia ties. CONTINUE AT SITE

Senate Republican Suicide A filibuster deal with Democrats over Gorsuch would be a judicial and political disaster.

House Republicans immolated themselves over health care last week, and now Democrats are hoping the Senate GOP will perform its own kamikaze turn over Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. If Republicans blink and tolerate Democratic filibusters of High Court nominees, they should hand over their majority to the Democrats now.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s strategy is transparent: Stage-manage an unprecedented filibuster against Judge Gorsuch, and then portray Republicans as radicals if they change Senate rules to break it. The gambit is to coax at least three of the 52 GOP Senators to cut a deal with Democrats that hands the minority political leverage over President Trump’s judicial nominees.

Mr. Schumer and other Democrats are trying to lure those Republicans into a deal by preaching a false institutionalism that claims to be acting for the good of the Senate. They want to scare the GOP into believing that breaking a filibuster would somehow break the Senate as a deliberative body that requires 60 votes and bipartisan consensus to act.

But the real radical act is a Supreme Court filibuster. Mr. Schumer wants to use the filibuster to defeat Judge Gorsuch outright, or negotiate a deal that gives the judge a confirmation pass of 60 votes in return for a guarantee that GOP Senators won’t break a filibuster on future nominees during the Trump Presidency.

Either result would do great harm to the Senate’s advice and consent role under the Constitution, tilt the Supreme Court to the left, reward the most partisan voices in the Senate on the left and right, further inflame grassroots conservative outrage against political elites, and deal a grievous wound to the Republican Party. Other than that, a great day at the office.

Start with the fact that there has never been a partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. The elevation of Justice Abe Fortas to become Chief Justice in 1968 failed amid bipartisan opposition due to his policy collaboration with the White House while he was a Justice.

The one cloture vote to end debate on that nomination failed 45-43, well short of the 67 votes required at the time. Nineteen Democrats and 24 Republicans voted against cloture in what was the last year of Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, and Fortas asked LBJ to withdraw his nomination.

Filibusters were mooted against William Rehnquist and Samuel Alito but never materialized. A cloture vote against Rehnquist failed in 1971, 52-42, but he was later confirmed 68-26. Justice Alito easily won a cloture vote and was confirmed 58-42. Republicans never even attempted to filibuster Bill Clinton or Barack Obama’s four nominees.