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Strange Claims about Britain’s European Elections By Douglas Murray

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/strange-claims-about-britains-european-elections/

After the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump, an awful lot of bad articles and books poured forth. Among the worst were those that claimed we had entered a “post truth” era. Oxford Dictionaries — never missing an opportunity to look like the cheapest publicity hounds — declared “post truth” to be their Word of the Year for 2016.

In fact, as I have pointed out here before, it is more true to say that we have entered an era in which (to borrow a phrase from the Irish writer Kevin Myers) the truth becomes “whatever you’re having yourself.”

The aftermath of the European Elections in Britain has provided a fine example of this. Of course the fact that Britain had European Elections this year is in itself something to marvel at. Three years ago the British people voted to leave the European Union. But thanks to the ineptitude and malfeasance of nearly an entire political class there we were again last week, invited to the polls to vote on who we would like to represent us at a body the majority of the public voted three years ago to leave.

But what a response. By any honest analysis the night belonged to Nigel Farage’s newly formed Brexit party, which won 31.6 percent of the overall vote, winning 29 seats. The next-largest party was the Liberal Democrats, just over 20 percent of the vote and 16 seats, which is quite a lead for Farage. The runners-up of Labour (ten seats), the Greens (seven seats), and the Conservatives (four seats) struggled to make their performance look like a success. But the most striking thing about the reaction to the results was the effort to claim them as evidence that Britain wants to remain in the EU.

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‘Not Exonerated’ Is Not a Standard Any Free Country Should Accept By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/not-exonerated-is-not-a-standard-any-free-country-should-accept/

I’m sorry to be a broken record on this, but this line from Robert Mueller infuriates me:

“If we had had confidence that the president had clearly not committed a crime we would have said so.” Mueller

— David M. Drucker (@DavidMDrucker) May 29, 2019

That’s not how it works in America. Investigators are supposed to look for evidence that a crime was committed, and, if they don’t find enough to contend that a crime was a committed, they are supposed to say “We didn’t find enough to contend that a crime was committed.” They are not supposed to look for evidence that a crime was not committed and then say, “We couldn’t find evidence of innocence.”

  

I understand that Mueller was in an odd position. I understand, too, that this wasn’t a criminal trial. But I don’t think those norms are rendered any less important by those facts. By asking the executive to investigate itself, it was guaranteed — yes, guaranteed — that we’d have a fight over “obstruction of justice.” For the architect of that investigation to keep saying “We aren’t exonerating our target” is extraordinary. Innocence is the default position in this country. If a person doesn’t have enough evidence that someone committed a crime to contend that a crime was committed, he is obliged to presume his innocence. “Not exonerated” is not a standard in our system, and it shouldn’t be one in our culture, either.

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Was Brennan’s ‘Intelligence Bombshell’ the Steele Dossier? By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/john-brennan-steele-dossier-trump-russia-investigation/

Signs point to yes.

I n a prior column, I addressed the public debate over Bill Barr’s authority to declassify intelligence regarding the Obama administration’s Trump-Russia investigation. Lurking behind this debate, we should understand, is that administration’s handling of the Steele dossier: a compilation of faux intelligence reports.

The dossier was, of course, generated by the Fusion GPS firm — principally, by British spy–turned–hack-for-hire Christopher Steele and journalist-turned-fabulist Glenn Simpson. The dossier is a slipshod, unverified opposition-research screed, sponsored by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Its sensational allegations of a Trump-Putin conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election (including by hacking and disseminating Democratic emails) were never verified. Nor was its salacious claim that the Kremlin possessed a video recording of Trump engaging in sexual hijinks, and thus could blackmail him into doing Russia’s bidding if he were elected.

Suffice it to say that the Obama-administration officials involved in pushing the dossier are running for the hills to distance themselves from it, particularly after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report effectively rejected it. Most prominent in this regard is former CIA director John Brennan.

Brennan is as hyper-political an intelligence official as we have ever had. And when called on his excesses, such as the CIA’s spying on the Senate during his watch, his default mode is to misrepresent what was done and then frustrate the investigative process. On the dossier, he is playing to type.

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Why can’t you price compare the cost of a medical procedure? 

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://us20.campaign-archive.com/?u=2cf2a73e6220e59e3c1c4a60c&id=7e453c34e9&e=0c8ccf8e98

The healthcare industry is broken.Both parties want to change the way our nation approaches healthcare… the question is, how?
Here’s the heart of the issue: the industry needs a transparency revolution.

Why is it that you can’t cost compare the price of healthcare services the same way you’d compare any other major financial decision? It’s illogical at best and corrupt at worst. 

Our Honorary Chairman, Dr. Tom Coburn, appeared on Fox & Friends to discuss this exact issue.
He lays out a recommended national policy that could change everything.

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Jurisprudence and the Failed Coup By Stephen B. Presser

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/28/jurisprudence-and-the-failed-coup/

The indispensable Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, “Real coups against democracies rarely are pulled off by jack-booted thugs in sunglasses or fanatical mobs storming the presidential palace. More often, they are the insidious work of supercilious bureaucrats, bought intellectuals, toady journalists, and political activists who falsely project that their target might at some future date do precisely what they are currently planning and doing—and that they are noble patriots, risking their lives, careers, and reputations for all of us, and thus must strike first.”

He was discussing what we are now beginning to understand was the attempt to oust Donald Trump begun by officials in the Obama Administration, including certainly former FBI Director James Comey, assistant director Andrew McCabe, former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok, former FBI attorney Lisa Page, and quite possibly President Obama himself.

This will, in the long light of history, be regarded as the greatest misuse of governmental power ever to appear in our politics, and yet there has been very little attention paid to how this could occur and why at this particular time in our political development.

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Trump Dominates the Opposition By Taking Them Seriously By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/28/trump-dominates-the-opposition-by-taking-them-seriously/

When our nephew was 9 years old, he posed an unending series of questions: who would win in a fight, a lion or a crocodile? A gorilla or a shark? Those questions come to mind as we watch President Trump face off against his political opponents. On one side, President Trump, on the other, the entire Democratic Party-media complex, and their enablers among the GOP establishment. It is President Trump who comes out on top in each major battle.

Do not underestimate the president’s opponents, however. They are not giving up and returning to civic norms of civil bipartisanship. Democrats have had tremendous success in getting out their twisted message that Trump is a menace to the nation. It is everywhere in the mainstream media, on Google and Yahoo, on Facebook and Twitter. They have suppressed President Trump’s popularity despite the fantastic job he is doing on jobs, the economy, trade and geopolitics.

After the collapse of the attempted Russia-collusion coup, and the arrival of Attorney General William Barr, that three-year dynamic has shifted to President Trump’s favor.

Yet the Democrats have hardly missed a beat. They have pivoted to a multitude of personal investigations, to weird accusations that Barr and Trump are suppressing evidence, while also protesting the declassification of documents. Democrats are still screaming “constitutional crisis” and talking of impeachment—all meant to taint Trump’s image with no-information voters.

Do not mistake the Democrats for a joke, no matter how ludicrous their actions look from this side of the reality divide.

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The Palestinian War on the Trump Peace Plan by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14298/palestinians-vs-trump-peace-plan

In the past few days, the Gaza-based groups have issued several statements hinting that they would use all means, including terrorism, to foil the US peace plan.

What is perhaps most worrying for the Arab leaders are the threats coming from Iran’s puppets — Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. It now remains to be seen whether the Arab heads of state will be deterred by these threats or ignore them at the risk of becoming the Palestinians’ terror targets.

Clearly, the very Palestinians who are boycotting a conference — whose aim is to help them move beyond their leadership-imposed economic devastation — will wind up the big losers in this spiteful scenario of hate. This time, however, it also seems that the Palestinians will not only deprive themselves of billions of dollars, but will also damage — perhaps irrevocably — their relations with influential Arab countries. By all accounts, the Palestinians appear to be heading toward another “nakba” (catastrophe).

The Palestinians seem to be moving on two fronts to thwart US President Donald Trump’s plan for peace in the Middle East, also known as the “Deal of the Century.”

The Palestinian Authority and its political allies in the West Bank have launched a diplomatic and media campaign to rally worldwide support for their rejection of Trump’s upcoming plan. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other Palestinian extremist groups, for their part, are already hinting that they will resort to violence in an effort to thwart the “Deal of the Century.”

Last week, Hamas called on Bahrain not to allow the “Zionist enemy to defile its lands” by attending the economic conference.

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Turning the Tables on “Global Zero” by Peter Huessy and David A. Deptula

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14268/global-zero-nuclear-modernization

As it turns out, the modernization of America’s nuclear deterrent would require, at most, only around 3% of the annual defense budget.

“International arms control relies on adherence to reciprocal obligations and nations should not be required to subject themselves to unilateral observance of them. Arms control more generally is undermined by violations going unchallenged.” — Forces Network, UK, April 4, 2019.

“Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping continue to expand and modernize their nuclear arsenals. Future arms-control agreements must take into account both the Russian and Chinese threats, while ensuring we don’t place one-sided nuclear restrictions on ourselves.” — Senator Tom Cotton; May 13, 2019.

“We must… realize that America will not be able to achieve the necessary changes to New START unless it is negotiating from a position of strength. That means Congress must invest in the modernization of our nuclear triad and the additional low-yield capabilities called for in the 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. These investments are critical to America’s ability to rein in China and Russia.” — Representative Liz Cheney; May 13, 2019.

Two narratives that provided justification for cutting America’s defense budget in the 1970s and 1990s — détente and the “end of history” — had a key component in common: Both were based on the assumption that existential national-security threats to the United States were either exaggerated or a thing of the past.

In each narrative, this assumption proved to be false.

Détente favored the Soviet Union so markedly in terms of its “correlation of forces” — the balance of conventional and nuclear power — that victory over the U.S. was in sight. Détente also fueled U.S.S.R. expansionism. More than 20 countries were subjected to Soviet aggression, coups, revolutions or wars of national liberation.

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Climate Change is a Political Loser When voters catch on to being insulted and scorned. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273850/climate-change-political-loser-bruce-thornton

First came Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, after a campaign in which he rejected the “scientific consensus” on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), and proved true to his rhetoric by withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accords. Then a few years later, France was rocked by the “yellow vests” movement that started with protests against a tax on fuel that President Emmanuel Macron, in true globalist technocratic fashion, proposed as a way to “nudge” the masses into using less of the carbon-based energy allegedly heating the planet. And now comes Australia, where contrary to the predictions of the globalist elite, the anti-carbon progressive who had proposed job-killing regulations to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, failed to defeat the conservative incumbent who would rather save jobs than “save the planet.”

Climate change is looking like a losing election issue.

The global technocrats, for whom Climate Change has been one of those “crises” that progressives “never let go to waste,” no doubt are wishing they could “dissolve the people” rather than change the government through democratic elections. Persuading free citizens with arguments based on fact, or with appeals to their interests, is difficult when your “crisis” is nothing more than a politicized hypothesis based on appeals to authority, rigged computer simulations, and apocalyptic predictions laced with insults to the skeptics’ intelligence and morals.

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EU Elections Usher In New Era But Tommy Robinson won’t be a part of it. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on May 29th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273873/eu-elections-usher-new-era-bruce-bawer

Not only was the turnout in last week’s European Parliament elections the highest in at least 20 years; the results themselves were nothing less than spectacular. In Italy, Matteo Salvini pronounced: “A new Europe is born.” Writing in De Volkskrant, Dutch journalist Marc Peeperkorn declared that the vote tallies marked the end of the “omnipotence” in Brussels of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, a significant step forward for Green parties, and a “modest” advance for “Euroskeptic populists.”

“Modest” strikes me as a classic example of calculated mass-media understatement. In fact, to judge by the results, the main reason that millions of Europeans flocked to the polls was to tell Brussels that they’re sick of being ruled by Brussels. Almost everywhere on the continent, results for Euroskeptic parties were, at the very least, encouraging, and at most downright stunning: in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came in first; ditto Salvini’s Northern League in Italy and the Freedom Party in Austria (whose leader, chancellor Sebastian Kurz, has just been ousted as a result of a scandal); in Germany, Alternative for Germany finished a strong fourth place; in Sweden, the Sweden Democrats almost tied for third with the Moderates; in the Netherlands, Thierry Baudet’s fledgling Forum for Democracy secured a promising fourth. (Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party came in eighth.)  

But the biggest news of all was in Britain, where the ruling Tories dropped to fifth place and Nigel Farage’s just-founded Brexit Party topped them all, securing 28 MEPs to the Liberal Democrats’ 15, Labour’s 10, the Greens’ 7, and the Conservatives’ 3. It was the first time in British history that so new a party had won such a sensational victory. Brexit will now have the largest delegation of any party in the European Parliament. It triumphed even in cities that had voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum, suggesting that former Remainers, perhaps in reaction to Brussels’ arrogant response to Brexit, have changed their mind about the EU – and/or that Remainers, despite their views on EU membership, resent their Tory-led Parliament’s failure to carry out the electorate’s clearly stated will.