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Lawfare Against Trump Is Running Out of Gas Prosecutors are discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these proceedings, the more he rises in the polls. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/15/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/

We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.

The prosecutors began accelerating their indictments only once Trump started to lead incumbent Joe Biden by sizable margins in head-to-head polls. Moreover, had Trump not run for the presidency, or had he been of the same party as most of the four prosecutors, he would have never been indicted by any of them.

Yet now they are in a doom loop of discovering that the more they seek to rush to judgment before the election and gag Trump from speaking publicly about these star-chamber proceedings, the more he rises in the polls.

In truth, each succeeding cycle of corrupt leftwing lawfare that ends in failure—the Russian collusion hoax, the weaponized first impeachment, trying ex-president Trump in the Senate as a private citizen, the laptop disinformation set-up, the Alfa bank ping caper, the pathetic attempt to erase Trump from state ballots, and the unfolding Fani Willis moral debacle—does not return things to zero.

Rather, they serve as force multipliers for each other. Each overreach geometrically increases the dangers to democracy, ever more turns the public off, and ironically cascades sympathy and poll numbers for the very target of their paranoias.

Some of the prosecutors have colluded with White House lawyers and congressional liaisons. Some had run for office, offering campaign promises to get Trump convicted for something or other.

Now, after years of delays and deadends, all four are rushing to synchronize their trial dates to ensure that the front-running Trump is on the docket daily and not out on the 2024 campaign trail.

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Today’s Journalists Seek Power, Not Truth By J.B. Shurk

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/01/todays_journalists_seek_power_not_truth.html

NPR, The New York Times, and other leftist propaganda organs parading as reliable news publications wrapped up 2023 by jeering House Republicans for passing only twenty-seven bills that became laws.  Hyperventilating like out-of-shape Chris Christie clones perpetually catching their breath, the Fourth Estate’s most prestigious windbags could not hide their priggish condescension: Republican legislators simply cannot legislate, they huffed in unison.  

I know the “Yes, Daddy, govern me harder!” crowd gets goosebumps every time the ignoramuses and perverts in D.C. create a new rule that comes with the threat of a good spanking, but it still amazes me how desperately today’s “journalists” desire for the government to tell them what they can and cannot do.  

The United States of America has been around for two and a half centuries.  During that time, tens of thousands of federal laws, rules, regulations, and executive orders have been created to squash and squeeze Americans’ natural liberties into smaller and smaller sanctioned containers suitable for TSA inspection.  It would be interesting to know just how many more decades of legislating and how many thousands of additional recorded laws it would take before the masochists at The New York Times finally feel as if they have been sufficiently governed!

Mr. Edward Holman commented recently that the creepy JournoList community of leftist “reporters” who collaborated to push narratives and news coverage favorable to Barack Obama during his rise to power crippled the profession permanently: “A free press cannot secretly conspire to rig elections by coordinating to destroy candidates, movements (TEA Party, MAGA, etc) they dislike with false accusations by anonymous sources.”  I heartily agree.  The propaganda “journalism” legitimized by the JournoList cabal was as loud of a death knell for objective reporting (and the enduring independence of the press) as they come.  

Equally demonstrative of journalism’s demise has been the corporate domestication of reporters and their lamentable transformation from an unruly gang of rebellious muckrakers and misfits who naturally despised the status quo into a docile pack of housebroken and primped-up poodles all desperate to service the “ruling class.”  You don’t get anything as noxious as a JournoList to eat through the body politic like a parasite through its host without first initiating a widespread campaign to spay and neuter those journalists in the profession packing cojones as well as brains.  

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Is This The Beginning Of The End Of The $2 Trillion Administrative State?

Posted By on January 15th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/01/15/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-2-trillion-administrative-state/

Last week, a federal appeals court overturned a Biden administration rule governing dishwashers. This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case involving the regulation of commercial fishing.

Both are seemingly minor regulatory scuffles that normally would attract little public attention.

But they could mark the beginning of the end of the bloated, unaccountable, extra-constitutional “administrative state” – which today imposes $2 trillion in costs on businesses and consumers and every day eats away at our freedom.

The dishwasher story began during the previous administration when President Donald Trump pushed regulators to allow consumers to buy dishwashers that, well, wash dishes.

As we noted in this space at the time, federal efficiency mandates had become so strict that it took more than three hours for a dishwasher to do (poorly) what older models did in an hour. Under Trump, the Energy Department allowed for a new class of appliance that could do the job in an hour.

The left freaked. It called Trump’s decision “senseless” and “appalling” and claimed it “hurts consumers.”

On President Joe Biden’s first day in office, he signed an executive order calling on regulators to undo that Trump rule.

They did. And it’s the Biden rule that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned.

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Trump’s Resurgence Draws Parallels to Reagan’s 1980 Upset Victory Roger Kimball

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/trumps-resurgence-draws-parallels-to-reagans-1980-upset-victory/

It’s hard to recapture the contempt with which Reagan was excoriated by the best and the brightest, but it was just as visceral and widespread as the animus against Trump in 2016 and today.

The 2024 presidential election is still more than 10 months away, but already there is a lot of déjà vu all over again about the festivity.

The smart money—which does not, I hasten to add, mean that it will turn out to be the most accurate money—has been telling us for months that wily Democrats have engineered Trump’s nomination because, clever chaps that they are, they know he cannot possibly win the election.

The main reason adduced is that Trump is not sufficiently popular to win.  How do said pundits know this?  Some point to the polls, though the polls have not been cooperating on that front of late. Trump is ahead in all or nearly all the swing states, and more and more polls put him ahead of Biden in the general election.  Some adduce Trump’s “character,” his behavior after the 2020 election, and the cornucopia of indictments he faces in four separate jurisdictions.  Back in December, Byron York summed up the state of play with this headline: “As Trump lead widens, prosecutors step up pursuit.”

What do you suppose most people think of that? What, I mean, do they think of a situation in which one political candidate is targeted by the opposing political party—which party, it may almost go without saying, totally controls the coercive instruments of state power?  I believe most people don’t like it.  They don’t like it because it reeks of basic unfairness and totalitarian overreach.

But that’s where we are now.  Who knows, perhaps Jack Smith, Fani Willis, or Letitia James will finally nab Trump on one charge or another.  After all, the net designed to capture the former president has been spread far and wide. But I would not be so sure.  Everywhere one looks, the cases against him have come more and more to resemble the House of Usher. Fani Willis put her boyfriend on the payroll and ordered him to get Trump. Unfortunately, that secret intimacy is making headlines everywhere. The news threatens to collapse the case against Trump in Georgia.

Prosecutors in New York and Washington can rely on biased judges and juries. But I suspect that even if Trump is convicted of something in one or both places, he will win on appeal. The cases against him long ago took on the slightly comical aspect of a vendetta.

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CHAPTER 1: What Is Reality?: Space Is No Longer the Final Frontier—Reality Is

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://goudsmit.pundicity.com/27460/chapter-1-what-is-reality

 goudsmit.pundicity.com  and website: lindagoudsmit.com 

Globalism is a replacement ideology that seeks to reorder the world into one singular, planetary Unistate, ruled by the globalist elite themselves. The globalist war on nation-states cannot succeed without collapsing the United States of America. The long-term strategic attack plan moves America incrementally from constitutional republic to socialism to globalism to feudalism. The tactical attack plan uses psychological, informational, asymmetric warfare to destabilize Americans and drive society out of objective reality into the madness of subjective reality. The primary target of the globalist predators is America’s children.

What is reality? Objective reality is the world of facts. Subjective reality is the world of feelings. Objective reality is the fulcrum of human sanity, the foundation of ordered liberty in our constitutional republic. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Opinions are based on feelings; facts are based on actuality. Feelings are not facts.

The ideological moorings of ordered liberty require consensus on what is real. This is no small matter. Language is based on such consensus. Laws are based on such consensus. Without agreement on what is real, there is no societal order, only chaos. It is for this reason that globalists support the leftist Culture War on America and its attack strategy to replace factual, objective reality with subjective multiple realities based on feelings.

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Examining the Incessant Flow of Qatari Money into American Academia: Unintended Consequences on Campus

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://thejewishvoice.com/2024/01/examining-the-incessant-flow-of-qatari-money-into-american-academia-unintended-consequences-on-campus/

Until recently, the issue of foreign donations influencing American academia remained unnoticed. However, a study published in 2022 by the National Association of Academics in the United States sheds light on a significant flow of Qatari money to universities in the country, particularly in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. According to an in depth report that appeared on the Calcalistech.com web site in October 2023,the study reveals that between 2001 and 2021, Qatar donated a staggering $4.7 billion to American universities, making it the largest foreign donor during this period. What initially seemed like harmless financial support has sparked a series of events, raising concerns about the influence on academic institutions.

The study highlights that a considerable portion of the funds received by American universities from Qatar went unreported, violating legal requirements, according to the Calcalisteceh.com report.  This revelation adds a layer of complexity to the already controversial issue. The Qatari financial support, ostensibly meant to foster academic growth, has now come under scrutiny for potential undisclosed motives.

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MY SAY: IS GLENN LOURY NOW AN ISRAEL BASHER?RSK

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

What could explain his recent posting?  He has been eloquent in denouncing racists, libelers and rioters. Why this abhorrent posting?

Omer Bartov – Israel’s Hard Right Turn

My guest this week is the Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov, who is the Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown. Over 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war, most of them civilians. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Food, water, and adequate medical services are in short supply. Still, grim as those facts are, Omer does not think they amount to genocide. At least not yet. He does worry that, with right-wing hardliners holding sway in Israel’s government, genocide is a distinct possibility.

In this conversation, Omer tells me about some of the history that led up to the current war before delving into the political pressures that he believes are driving the campaign forward. He believes that Benjamin Netanyahu has pieced together a hard right coalition that he protects because, among other reasons, it keeps him in power and out of court, where he is embroiled in an ongoing corruption trial that could lead to jail time. In the meantime, according to Omer, Netanyahu’s coalition functions as a “mirror image of Hamas” that encourages violence against Palestinians and threatens democracy in Israel. Omer believes that Israel’s current government is neither capable of nor interested in addressing humanitarian concerns in Gaza and finding a political solution to the conflict. That will require a US-led international effort.

Omer knows whereof he speaks—he’s a noted scholar in the field and a passionate public advocate. That’s why I wanted to hear from him. You may disagree with his read on the situation, but he can’t simply be shrugged off.

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These accusations of ‘genocide’ bring shame on humanity South Africa’s case against Israel is the most absurd and sinister spectacle of the 21st century so far. Brendan O’Neill

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/13/these-accusations-of-genocide-bring-shame-on-humanity/

The more you think about the genocide case against Israel, the more horrendous it becomes. First there’s the hypocrisy. It is an orgy of cant. Turkey has noisily joined the ranks of shameless governments pointing a collective finger at Israel. This is the same Turkish government that denies that its nation carried out the Armenian Genocide of 1915, when a million people were wiped from the face of the Earth. As part of a programme of tyrannical Islamisation, Armenian Christians were forced on to death marches in the desert during which unimaginable numbers perished. Now the genocide deniers are genocide judges. It would be funny if it were not so repulsive.

Turkey is providing ‘documents’ for South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice this week. ‘I believe that Israel will be convicted’, says Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This is the same Erdoğan who locks people up for speaking of the Armenian Genocide. Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which forbids ‘insulting Turkishness’, has been used to prosecute people who mention 1915. Writers and publishers have been banged up for the sin of saying ‘Armenia’ and ‘genocide’ in the same breath. Now this tyrant who ruthlessly punishes discussion of his own nation’s genocide loudly accuses Israel of genocide. These are Kafkaesque levels of moral fraud.

The Organisation of Islamic Countries has likewise joined the genocide chorus against Israel. This includes Saudi Arabia. Fresh from its slaughter of thousands in Yemen. Surely it will be a cold day in hell before any nation takes lectures on violence from these fanatics who whip and kill their own citizens for such crimes as apostasy, homosexuality and being a woman who wants rights.

Iran has lined up with South Africa, too. It’s getting ridiculous now. Vastly more people have perished in Iran’s wars of the past 40 years than in the wars Israel has been involved in since 1948. Just last year Iran slaughtered hundreds of its own citizens for the crime of believing women are human beings. Kurds in particular got it in the neck. Masses were murdered. ‘They tried to wipe us out’, said one Kurd. For Iran to sit in judgment on any nation is a nauseating spectacle, an inversion of morality of Orwellian proportions.

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Is ‘Trump is Hitler’ the best Biden’s got? Three years into his presidency, Joe Biden has nothing to offer voters apart from anti-Trump hysteria. Sean Collins

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/01/14/is-trump-is-hitler-the-best-bidens-got/

With the US presidential election approaching later this year, Joe Biden faces serious headwinds in his attempt to secure a second term.

Most Americans disapprove of his performance, with 54 per cent deeming the 81-year-old too old for the job. Even among Democrats, there is a palpable lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy – 40 per cent don’t even want him to run. Perhaps most damning of all, the current polling shows him consistently trailing Donald Trump, a man accused of 91 felonies.

Biden’s response to Trump’s current lead is now becoming clear. He has decided to frame the 2024 election as a choice between democracy and tyranny. Biden’s rhetoric during this week’s two campaign-launch speeches was end-of-days stuff. ‘Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time’, he said in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, ‘and it’s what the 2024 election is all about’. He claimed that Trump is ‘willing to sacrifice our democracy, put himself in power’ and establish a ‘dictatorship’.

Biden is likely to double down on this message in the weeks ahead. His campaign aides told CNN that Biden will be ‘ratcheting up the intensity’ against Trump in the coming months. The only question apparently is when to go ‘full Hitler’ and directly compare Trump to the Nazi leader. Judging by Biden’s Valley Forge speech, he’s pretty much at ‘full Hitler’ already – he accused Trump of ‘echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany’.

Biden has been justifying the Nazi analogies by pointing to Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election results, and his involvement in the ‘January 6’ Capitol riot in 2021. At one of his campaign launch speeches, Biden told a largely black audience in the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina that January 6 was ‘one of the darkest days in American history’, before adding: ‘We saw something on January 6 we’d never seen before, even during the Civil War. Insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress built by enslaved Americans.’ In Valley Forge, he called the Capitol riot a day when ‘we nearly lost America – lost it all’.

MEDIA Comments turned off

Good Riddance to Mehdi Hasan By Becket Adams

Posted By on January 14th, 2024

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/01/good-riddance-to-mehdi-hasan/

The MSNBC host’s fact-challenged invective won’t be missed.

MSNBC has bid farewell to yet another anchor whose penchant for insipid demagoguery far outstrips any actual talent.

Mehdi Hasan, who slanders conservatives nearly as much as he slanders “Zionists” (wink, wink), announced last week his intention to quit MSNBC. The news came not long after the network axed his weekend show that nobody watched.

“With this show going away,” Hasan told those who happened to tune in that evening, “I’ve decided that it’s time for me to look for a new challenge.”

Attracting viewers seemed plenty enough of a challenge, but okay.

MSNBC last November announced a weekend reshuffling, citing as chief among its reasons the looming 2024 presidential election. And among those to get the cut was none other than the British-born Al Jazeera English and Intercept alumnus. In response to the news, a member of the House of Representatives famous for her antisemitic remarks demanded that the network reverse its decision, suggesting that Hasan’s loss of his show, which launched in 2021, was somehow an affront to “free expression.”

“Mehdi is one of the most brilliant and most prominent Muslim journalists in the U.S.,” said Minnesota Democrat Ilhan Omar. “It is deeply troubling that MSNBC is canceling his show amid a rampant rise of anti-Muslim bigotry and suppression of Muslim voices. Anyone who cares about free expression should be concerned.”