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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Is Obama’s Long History of Playing Dirty Finally Catching Up With Him? Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/11/is-obamas-long-history-of-playing-dirty-finally-catching-up-with-him/

The unraveling of the Michael Flynn case and ongoing investigation into Obama’s Justice Department should put an end to the preposterous claim that his administration was “scandal-free.”

As it became clear Mitt Romney would be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, the Obama campaign fired up its Chicago-style machine to attack the incumbent president’s election foe. Team Obama identified several Romney donors to smear publicly; one was a wealthy businessman from Idaho.

A former Democratic Senate staffer, according to a 2012 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, contacted an Idaho courthouse seeking the divorce records of Frank VanderSloot, who had donated $1 million to Romney’s campaign. The operative was traced to a professional opposition research shop based in Washington, D.C.

The name of the outfit? Fusion GPS. “Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn’t say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a ‘legitimate’ target because of ‘his record on gay issues,’” the Journal wrote.

As we now know, that would not be the last time Obama loyalists would hire Fusion GPS to oversee its dirt-digging operation. Nor was it the first time Obama sought to unseal divorce records to ruin a political opponent.

Obama’s pathway to winning the Illinois U.S. Senate seat in 2004 was cleared after divorce records of his Democratic primary opponent, who had been in the lead, were made public just weeks before the election. After Obama won the primary, the Chicago Tribune sued to get the divorce settlement of Jack Ryan, Obama’s Republican opponent, unsealed. (Many suspect at the behest of Obama advisor and longtime Tribune columnist David Axelrod.) Embarrassing details sank Ryan’s candidacy and he dropped out of the race. Obama won the seat with 70 percent of the vote.

Uh-Oh. Podesta Says Hillary Knew About Trump Oppo Research That Ended Up in Steele Dossier By Matt Margolis

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/05/11/hillary-knew-about-trump-opposition-research-in-2016-according-to-podesta-testimony-n389856

According to recently unsealed testimony, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s former campaign chairman, told the House Intelligence Committee in December 2017 that both he and Hillary Clinton were aware that her campaign had purchased opposition research on Donald Trump, hoping to uncover ties between him and Russia during the 2016 election.

Podesta’s testimony is “the most direct acknowledgment about what Donald Trump’s opponent knew in real-time about the effort that ultimately became known as the Steele dossier,” notes John Solomon of Just The News. According to Podesta, Hillary likely didn’t know specifically that Fusion GPS or former British spy Christopher Steele were involved in the opposition research effort, but they were both aware of the effort.

The Supreme Court and Trump’s Tax Returns The stakes are bigger than the political fate of this President.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-and-trumps-tax-returns-11589238780?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

“In short, there’s no legal precedent for the Democratic subpoenas. And the Justices will have to consider the damage that upholding the subpoenas would do to the separation of powers that would outlive the Trump Presidency.”

It will be a full online house on Tuesday when the Supreme Court hears a legal double-header over President Trump’s tax returns. Mr. Trump has broken political norms by refusing to release his returns, but the Court will have to consider whether letting Democrats subpoena them will do more lasting damage to the country’s law and institutions.

Trump v. Mazars concerns whether House Democrats can subpoena the President’s financial records. We’ve urged Mr. Trump to release his tax returns, and his refusal has let Democrats claim they are a Rosetta stone to a Russian money-laundering conspiracy, or something. An IRS audit probably would have turned up any tax fraud, and no law obliges a President to release his returns.

Medical Lockdown Will Cause a Disease Surge Patients who are sick with conditions other than Covid-19 aren’t seeking screening and treatment. By Jeff LeBenger and Mike Meyer

https://www.wsj.com/articles/medical-lockdown-will-cause-a-disease-surge-11589235129?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Dr. LeBenger is CEO of Summit Medical Group/City MD. Mr. Meyer is president of Meyer Consulting and founder of CCX Cancer Summit.

With most of the nation still on lockdown, many people are missing regular screenings and checkups with their doctors. Some may be experiencing early symptoms of illness, yet aren’t seeking treatment. The effects of a six-week delay are surmountable in most cases, but a six-month delay would lead to much sicker patients and dramatic increases in death rates for major illnesses such as cancer. The number of people who die as a result of these delays could end up rivaling or exceeding deaths due to Covid-19. Adding to this potential crisis is that health systems and medical providers are incurring substantial losses, which will impede their ability to provide care.

Much is being written about the potential of Covid-19 to return aggressively in the fall, assuming it recedes during the summer. But there may be a major aftershock that could throw the health system into further crisis: a flood of patients with other illnesses who are much sicker than they would be had they not delayed visits to their doctors for fear of coronavirus exposure. Health-care executives and policy experts should focus on serving this potential “third wave” of sick patients or the good feelings from having flattened the Covid-19 curve may be short-lived.

We have experienced the trauma and collateral damage of Covid-19. One of us (Mr. Meyer) is based in Scottsdale, Ariz., and recently suffered the death of his father because of delayed diagnosis and treatment. Dr. LeBenger, based in New York City, has seen thousands of patients with Covid-19 while dealing with delayed treatment for many others. We both face uncertainty about the future of our practices; one runs a small business whose revenues have plunged, and the other a large medical group with million-dollar losses.

What Did Obama Know — and When Did He Know It?

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/what-did-obama-know-and-when-did-he-know-it/91127/

What did President Obama know and when did he know it? That famous formulation is emerging as the question in the wake of new disclosures in respect of a meeting that took place inside the Oval Office in the closing days of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The meeting included not only his national security adviser, Susan Rice, and the head of the FBI, James Comey, but also Vice President Biden, now the prospective Democratic nominee.

This is laid out in, among other places, a dispatch by Mollie Hemingway in the Federalist. Ms. Hemingway reckons the meeting is turning out to be, as her headline puts it, “key” to the “entire anti-Trump operation” launched two weeks before the end of the Obama administration. She’s not the only one laying this out; a veteran of the Sun, Eli Lake, now of Bloomberg, has been all over the story; the Wall Street Journal, as well.

The Real Center of the Pandemic Saving nursing homes from Covid-19 Chris Pope

https://www.city-journal.org/coronavirus-super-spreaders-nursing-homes

The Trump administration has called nursing homes “ground zero for Covid-19,” and the analogy is apt—one New York City facility has seen 98 residents die from the disease, while more than two-thirds of Massachusetts nursing homes have reported infections. Though the link to long-term care facilities from deaths after hospitalization is not always recorded, 19 percent of those dying from the virus in Hungary, 51 percent in France, and 62 percent of those in Canada were identified as nursing-home residents.

The population in nursing facilities is vulnerable, and the disease is easily transmitted through extensive personal care in crowded quarters from staff who travel back and forth from the wider community. Several innovative senior homes have secured their facilities by paying bonuses to staff to stay on-site during the most hazardous phase of the crisis. Many lives could be saved if Congress were to support expanding these efforts. Indeed, preventing nursing homes from acting as super-spreaders might help broader communities more swiftly return to normal, too.

In 2016, nursing homes housed 1.3 million Americans, 39 percent aged 85 or over; 800,000 more lived in assisted-living facilities. Nursing-home residents are extremely vulnerable to the coronavirus due to multiple comorbidities: 72 percent have hypertension, 38 percent heart disease, and 32 percent diabetes. Even under normal circumstances, this population faces disproportionately high mortality risks: in 2016, while nursing-home residents made up just 0.4 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for 19 percent of deaths.

Why Did Obama Tell The FBI To Hide Its Activities From The Trump Administration? Margot Cleveland

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/11/why-did-obama-tell-the-fbi-to-hide-its-activities-from-the-trump-administration/

Even after Barack Obama had left office and James Comey had a new commander-in-chief to report to, Comey obeyed Obama by withholding intel from President Trump.

In 1980, a teenage Amy Carter left a burnt cake in the oven of the White House’s family quarters in a reflex of childish revenge for her father’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan. In 2017, Barack Obama and Joe Biden avenged Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton by leaving what they claim was a Russian agent in the West Wing.

That conclusion inevitably follows if one accepts as credible the FBI’s supposed predicates for launching the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign and the four related probes into George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened the Crossfire Hurricane counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign, purportedly to learn if members of the Trump team were “coordinating or cooperating” with the Russian government to influence or interfere with the 2016 elections. By August 16, 2016, the FBI had opened four subsidiary investigations on individuals connected to the campaign, claiming their connections to Russian businesses, pro-Russian factions, or Russian-owned entities “reasonably indicated” they “may wittingly or unwittingly be involved in activity on behalf of the Russian Federation which may constitute a federal crime or threat to the national security.”

Obama Laments Flynn Dismissal . . . after Granting Clemency to FALN Terrorist Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/obama-laments-flynn-dismissal-after-granting

” He recruited and trained a small army of terrorists to murder his fellow Americans. He built bomb factories. He taught the young and impressionable how to make devices that would kill and maim. . . . When he was put on trial, he admitted to doing all he had been accused of — he showed no remorse.”

The best defense is a good offense. That was my first thought on learning that former president Barack Obama has decided to make himself heard on the dismissal of the prosecution of Michael Flynn. As I’ve been noting for years, notwithstanding his pretensions about never interfering in FBI investigations, Mr. Obama was smack in the middle of his administration’s investigation of the Trump campaign. This week, in the exhibits appended to the Justice Department’s Flynn dismissal motion, it was revealed that Obama was neck-deep in the investigation of Flynn, concocted into a collusion caper by his intel advisers and the FBI. It is not a spotlight the former president covets, so he’s lashing out . . . and the usual wagons are circling.

My friend Joe Connor, whose father was killed by FALN, reminds me that in one of his last official acts, Obama granted clemency to Oscar Lopez Rivera, one of that Marxist terrorist organization’s front-men. Ben Domenech put it well at the time:

” He recruited and trained a small army of terrorists to murder his fellow Americans. He built bomb factories. He taught the young and impressionable how to make devices that would kill and maim. . . . When he was put on trial, he admitted to doing all he had been accused of — he showed no remorse.”

Why dismiss the Flynn case? Because the FBI can’t prove it Andrew McCarthy

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/497064-why-dismiss-the-flynn-case-because

The guiding tenet of the criminal justice system is that the government bears the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. All of the system’s rules are rooted in this principle. These include the prosecutor’s ethical obligation to dismiss a charge in the absence of a good-faith belief that a rational jury could convict the accused based on the government’s evidence.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) last week dismissed the prosecution of Michael Flynn, who fleetingly served as President Trump’s first national security adviser. In all the heated commentary over this decision, scant attention has been paid to the most compelling reason for vacating Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea to one count of making false statements to FBI agents: The government wouldn’t have a prayer of convicting Flynn at trial.

Allowing the conviction to stand would have been a travesty. This basic fact, this utter lack of sufficient evidence, is obscured by the DOJ’s heavy reliance on a legal rationale for dropping the case. In its 20-page memorandum in support of dismissal, the DOJ contends that any false statements by Flynn could not have been material because there was no legitimate basis to investigate or interview him. Federal law makes materiality an essential element of a false-statements charge.

The sky is falling, run for your life, shelter in place – you fools! Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/the-sky-is-falling-run-for-your-life-shelter-in-place-you-fools/

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. ~ T.S Eliot

Two men and one Global organization managed to accomplish what two world wars could not, the near destruction of Western culture and the end of freedom. With the flick of a switch, millions of people peacefully gave up their freedom; yes, sir, no sir, anything you say, sir, because of a paralyzing fear of an invisible enemy, an enemy not clearly understood nor defined.

Our actions demean, denigrate and disrespect the sacrifice of millions of men and women who sacrificed their lives for our right to live freely and free from government overreach.

There is a reason for the statement in the Bible “Do not fear, for I am with you,” because fear takes away individual moral agency; free will, allowing others to rule over us. And it can take years to recover from that fear.

We allowed two men, Ferguson and Fauci, aided and abetted by the WHO, the propaganda arm of the Chinese government, who brought forth the Chinese Virus, to frighten all of us, especially our leaders, to shut down our economies and end our freedom of movement. Except for one country, Sweden.

There had been predictions that 2.2 million would die in America, alone!  As of May 9, 2020, the GLOBAL death toll is 275,000. In a world of 7.8 billion.

Who are these two men?