Why AG Barr is right about not criminally prosecuting Obama or Biden By Rayn Random

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/why_ag_barr_is_right_about_not_criminally_prosecuting_obama_or_biden.html

A friend, who thinks politically as we do here, phoned this morning after just hearing Barr’s comments doubting that Obama or Biden would be criminally prosecuted.  We both would love to see it, but consider how destructive the Dems’ legal efforts to get Trump to testify so they could prosecute him have been for the past three years, and then imagine what could happen if the precedent were set to prosecute future presidents of either party.  Such a spectacle would draw worldwide attention and obliterate everything else our country needed to be doing that would have more impact on our country’s, and even the world’s, future.

If there were a trial, it would go on for years, and that wouldn’t even include all the appeals.  No matter how it concluded, whether it were an acquittal, a partial conviction, a hung jury, or a jury nullification, it would still be argued for decades.  Either way, Obama would be a hero to millions throughout the world, and he could go on another anti-American world tour as a victim of an unfair justice system.  The ones who actually did the crimes at his direction would be brushed aside in the frenzy and even forgotten.

Hubris and Miscalculation: The left’s bid to exploit the virus to defeat Trump By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/hubris_and_miscalculation_the_lefts_bid_to_exploit_the_virus_to_defeat_trump.html

Confident of their ability to defeat Trump with their radical, pro-illegal immigrant, pro-criminal, pro-socialist agenda, the left is badly overreaching.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposed $3 trillion monstrosity stimulus is a joke.  The trillions they pledged under the rubric of the COVID-19 disaster is trillions more added to our national debt.  The stimulus will be money printed, distributed, and spent as if it is grown on trees.  Irresponsible states such as California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois hope to use the virus to cheat the American taxpayers into rescuing them from their own profligacy.  

The more they can successfully blame the virus for their own gross mishandling of their states’ funds, the more they think they can cash in on their own catastrophic governmental errors in judgment.  For governors such as Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, Gretchen Whitmer, Tom Wolf, et al, the COVID-19 pandemic is a godsend, an opportunity, as so many Democrats have observed, to push for their radical socialist agenda.  The longer their blue states can keep up the lockdown that is impoverishing their citizens, the more they think those same citizens will blame President Trump and vote for a Joe Biden ticket in November.  Common sense is not one of the left’s intellectual strengths.  Sure, there is an army of virtue-signaling bullies who scornfully chastise anyone not sufficiently social-distancing or going outside maskless but it is precisely those “Karens,”  the people who think it is the government’s job to take care of them, who are appropriately the subjects of mockery by citizens sick to death of this outrageous lockdown and the blue states’ ridiculous edicts meant to control our behavior. 

Democrats Warning Trump Will Reject Election Results Should Look in the Mirror By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/2020-election-donald-trump-democrats-have-spent-four-years-relitigating-2016-loss/

Their party has spent the last four years relitigating a loss in 2016.

In a recent Washington Post column warning Americans to “prepare for the possibility of Trump rejecting election results” — one of media’s favorite projections — Brian Klaas asks a question:

If he loses, would it be more surprising if Trump graciously accepts defeat and congratulates his opponent or if he claimed to be the victim of a rigged election and a “deep state” plot?

Considering Trump’s temperament, it wouldn’t be surprising if he blamed the “deep state” for an election failure. Really, though, we have no need to speculate about what this kind of attack on sanctity of the electoral process would look like, since Democrats have be delegitimizing a valid election for the past four years.

Even as liberals make chilling predictions about Trump’s attack on democratic norms, they champion such politicians as Stacey Abrams, a middling Georgia state legislator whose national fame relies on a baseless contention that her gubernatorial seat was stolen in 2018. This weekend, that same Washington Post published a sycophantic feature story about Abrams (headline: “The Power of Stacey Abrams,”) that echoed her claims of voter suppression and put her in a superhero cape for good measure.

Andrew Cuomo’s Reckless Choices By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/coronavirus-crisis-andrew-cuomo-reckless-choices/

The media’s golden boy made three breathtakingly bad moves in March that in retrospect amounted to catastrophe.

Bill de Blasio made terrible decisions as mayor of New York City. But as more reporting emerges about the catastrophic decisions made by New York’s governor, it’s possible Andrew Cuomo deserves even more blame than de Blasio for what the coronavirus has done to the tri-state area and consequently the nation.

New York and New Jersey combined have suffered more COVID-19 deaths than any other country being tracked by researchers who run the Johns Hopkins crisis dashboard. Cuomo made three breathtakingly bad moves in March that in retrospect amounted to catastrophe. First, Cuomo failed to call for, and even actively discouraged, informal social-distancing measures in early March. Next was the delay in mid-March in ordering formal closures when the virus started rampaging through his state. Third was his March 25 edict to long-term care facilities that they must accept infected patients, which caused a mass deadly outbreak among helpless, trapped, elderly New Yorkers. Only in the last few days have some corners of the media begun to call attention to just how badly Cuomo has failed us.

Like de Blasio, who as late as March 10 was on MSNBC telling New Yorkers that most of us were at little to no risk and that the coronavirus was much like seasonal flu, Cuomo persisted with his don’t-scare-away-the-tourists happy talk well into March, the critical month.

Trump’s Baptism Scene By Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/trumps-baptism-scene

While the Corleone family of Godfather fame was the embodiment of mob life and the acquisition of money, power and prestige through criminal activity, the Trump family––in stark contrast––embodies the nose-to-the-grindstone, upward-mobility glory of the American Dream.

Nevertheless, when I think of the fanatical, maniacal and relentless persecution, accusations, vilification, and sabotage that President Trump has experienced for the past four years at the hands of crazed Democrats––both in and out of office––the infamously stunning Baptism Scene at the end of Godfather One comes immediately to mind. 

In that scene, Michael Corleone––who attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he met his future wife Kay, and who then left college to join the U.S. Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor––is featured in the baptism ceremony where he has been asked to be the godfather of Michael Rizzi, the infant son of his sister Connie and her husband Carlo Rizzi, in 1955.

The solemn ritual takes place in the splendiferous Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral––built in 1809––a Roman Catholic Church on Mulberry Street in New York City. It is held shortly after the funeral of Michael’s father, the powerful Don, Vito Corleone.

Before Don Vito’s death, however, he and Michael––the ordained heir to his father’s mafia fiefdom––concoct a complex plan to vanquish all their enemies.

The Unlearned ‘Nakba’ Lesson About Compromise avatar by Jonathan S. Tobin

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/05/18/the-unlearned-nakba-lesson-about-compromise/

Palestinian Arabs continue to learn the wrong history lesson. On May 15, as they do every year, they relive the sorrow of 1948, when they remind themselves of all the terrible things that happened to them as a result of the creation of modern-day Israel. Their narrative of a martyred people who were driven from their homes and made stateless victims is more than a political statement; it’s a faith that is integral to their identity. The yearly vow to “return” to all that they lost 72 years ago — to reverse the verdict of history — is so deeply embedded in their consciousness that it has made it impossible for any of their leaders to even consider formally giving it up.

This is an old story that has been retold so many times that even many of those who sympathize with the Palestinian cause have grown bored with it. Indeed, although talk of the nakba — the “disaster” or “catastrophe” of 1948 — is still enough to fire up radical foes of the Jewish state in the West, much of the Arab world has changed the channel and is more interested in cooperation with Israel than in relitigating the events of the war in which it won its independence.

But it is of particular importance in 2020 because with the debate about Israel extending its law to some settlements in the West Bank, the Palestinians are once repeating the mistakes that led to the nakba in the first place.

Feds Find al-Qaeda Ties in Pensacola Shooting After Breaking Encryption on Gunman’s Phones By Janita Kan

https://www.theepochtimes.com/feds-find-al-qaeda-link-in-pensacola-shooting-after-breaking-encryption-on-gunmans-phones_3355014.html

Federal authorities said the Saudi military trainee who killed three people and wounded others at a U.S. naval base in a terror attack last year was in touch with a suspected al-Qaeda operative.

The association between the shooter and the terrorist group was uncovered from the shooter’s locked iPhones. The FBI made the discovery after the bureau successfully broke through the encryption of the shooter’s two phones over four months after the attack, Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray announced at a press conference on Monday.

The officials’ update comes about five months after the Dec. 6, 2019, shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station in Florida, which killed three U.S. sailors and wounded eight other Americans.

The gunman, Royal Saudi Air Force 2nd Lt. Mohammed Alshamrani, 21, opened fire at the naval base before he was fatally shot by police. Alshamrani was a flight student at Pensacola, where members of foreign militaries are routinely trained by the United States.

In January, Barr described the attack as an act of terrorism and had publicly pressured Apple to help the FBI access the contents of the two locked iPhones belonging to Alshamrani.

Forget About Seeing Any Justice For Obamagate Kurt Schlichter

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2020/05/18/forget-about-seeing-any-justice-for-obamagate-n2568924?

Allow me to disabuse you of your naïve delusion that we still live in a country with a justice system and break it to you that no one is going to jail for what was done to Flynn, or for the unmasking business, or for the Russia hoax or, for that matter, for any of the corrupt Dem/foreigner collaborations exemplified by the payoffs received by stripperphile and Bolivian folk medicine enthusiast Hoover Biden.

No one.

Well, maybe Mike Flynn himself will. Since his judge is now making up the law as he goes along – in law school they taught us that the judicial branch didn’t prosecute, but that was before the Trump Exception™ to existing principles – I actually expect that the next time the General shows up in court the judge will sentence him on his coerced plea to a “crime” that never happened and order the marshals to immediately take him into custody. And, as we have seen far too often since the advent of the bat biter blues, too many LEOs simply obey, apparently never having got the 411 on how the Nuremburg defense of “just following orders” is unsat. Flynn will get pardoned instead of exonerated, so he’ll get sprung from stir, but he will have no civil recourse for resurrecting his reputation or savings, which is the plan.

 

We have two justice systems, one for them and one for us, meaning we have no justice system at all.

How Blind Faith In Scientific Expertise Wrecked The Economy One British scientist, a severely flawed model, and a thousand braying imbeciles on social media ordering everyone to ‘have faith in science’ led to the next economic crisis. By Sumantra Maitra

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/18/how-blind-faith-in-scientific-expertise-wrecked-the-economy/

Greta Thunberg, of all people, was asked to opine about coronavirus for a CNN panel in the latest episode of our bizarre purgatory. Everyone can imagine what she said: “People are starting to realize that we are actually depending on science and that we need to listen to scientists and experts.”

This is the perfect representation of the Twitter take artist: totally out of her element, with banal and worthless takes, but still trying to be provocative and relevant. In the late 1930s she would have reminded us there’s a global scientific consensus that intelligence can be measured by skull shape and different parts of brains have different emotional locators.

The phrase “settled science” is a classic oxymoron. There can never be science that is settled, and science cannot or should not be the only determinant of policy, especially on things related to the economic direction of the planet.

This is important due to two observable phenomena. One, this pandemic has highlighted how much of our public and social media are full of mindless drones. Two, it has highlighted just how much of our scientific consensus is flawed, and still worshipped as if it consists of matters of faith instead of evidence.

Consider the first one. One of the most important noticeable recent phenomena has been the mushrooming of take artists. They are not scientists, or qualified in matters of economics, history, strategy, or policy. They are random individuals whose sole purpose is to remind us that we should have faith in “science and data.”

Obviously, they don’t understand having “faith” in science is in itself a fallacy of scientism. Scientism is a faith in the idea that all social problems have only one answer, through the process of science. It is a fallacy because scientists are humans and have their own biases, as well as flawed methodologies, which is why science is constantly scrutinized and measured alongside historical and economic questions.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis Slams CDC For Inaccurate Reporting On COVID Deaths By Chrissy Clark

https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/18/jared-polis-slams-cdc-inaccurate-reporting-on-covid-deaths/

Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis is pushing back against data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), disputing how the agency counts death from COVID-19.

According to the CDC, anyone who tested positive for the coronavirus during their time of death is counted as a COVID-19 death. Polis claims people want to know who died directly from coronavirus instead of those who happened to test positive after another cause of death.

Polis joined Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday after reports found 300 fewer people died in Colorado from the coronavirus than initially reported.

“One of the reasons we wanted to make sure we reported it out in a better way is to inspire confidence so that it wouldn’t be politicized, Chris. These are deaths that should not be politicized,” Polis said.

Polis explained how the CDC counts death by coronavirus in a different way than the state of Colorado.

“The CDC criteria include anyone who has died with COVID-19. What the people of Colorado, the people of the country, want to know how many people died of COVID-19. In our state about 900 have died from COVID-19 on their death certificate or from the attending physician. 1,100 have died with it. Those 200 in the middle might have been a contributing factor, but it wasn’t deemed the sole factor or the only factor in their death,” Polis said.