New York, April 17th, 2019 – UN ambassadors and senior diplomats from around the world came together at the UN headquarters in New York for a traditional mock Passover Seder to learn and reflect on the message of the “Exodus” as Jews around the world were preparing for Passover which begins on Friday. A mock Seder is an abbreviated version of the Seder which can be celebrated ahead of Passover.
At the event, which was co-hosted by the Israeli Mission to the UN and the Forum for Cultural Diplomacy, the diplomats were reminded of how the Jewish nation was born some 3500 years ago through what may be described as one of the most dramatic and fascinating stories of national liberation of all times ─ the “Exodus out of Egypt”. Despite two thousand years of dispersion, the Jewish people reconstituted the State of Israel in 1948 and became a member of the UN already the next year, 1949.
Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon explained: “The Passover story, told and retold each year, reminds us of where we came from and how far we have come. Before, we were building pyramids in Egypt. Now, we are building rockets to send into space. Then, we were thirsty for water. Now, we are creating water out of thin air. In the past, we were slaves. Today, we are free.”
In his brief remarks ECI Founding Director Tomas Sandell quoted from the Book of Exodus which records that “there arose a new king in Egypt who did not know Joseph”. “Today there are many people around the world, especially young people, who do not know their history or that of European Jewry during the Holocaust”, he said. “As Europe faces a rise of anti-Semitism and some even fear a future “Exodus out of Europe”, we have chosen to remember, appreciate and cherish our own Josephs, the Jewish people, who have helped make our nations what they are today”, he added.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/forget-trump-here-are-five-reasons-why-obama-should-have-been-impeached/
As Democrats privately admit to themselves that there was no Russian collusion, they’ve also shifted gears to focus on the question of obstruction of justice. Despite the Mueller investigation being loaded with anti-Trumpers, even they weren’t able to say that any obstruction occurred. If there’s anything the release of the Mueller report has exposed, it’s not criminal behavior or even impeachable offenses of President Trump, but rather the hypocrisy of Democrats who are willing to call anything an impeachable offense with Trump but pretended the corruption that occurred under Barack Obama was all above board. By any reasonable standard, Congress had multiple impeachable offenses they could have gone after Obama for, but didn’t. Their turning a blind eye to Obama’s corruption completely undermines their efforts today to scandalize Trump and proves that they see two standards of justice: one for Democrats, and one for Republicans. Here are five examples of impeachable offenses that Obama should have been held accountable for, but wasn’t.
5. Illegally creating new laws and entering treaties
Obama’s dictatorial approach to governing would manifest itself many times during his presidency, and any one of them should have had Congress using their check on executive overreach, the power to impeach, but for reasons that can’t be justified, it never happened. One such example is Obama’s unilateral writing of immigration law. It is quite clear that Congress has the power to write immigration law, but Obama decided that since Congress wouldn’t act (and by that, he meant to do exactly what he wanted) he’d simply create a law with his executive pen. When the DREAM Act failed to pass Congress he simply began enforcing it without Congress’s consent by issuing an executive order, known as DACA. It was unconstitutional (even Obama repeatedly admitted that he didn’t have to power to create immigration law) and his blatant disregard for the Constitution should have resulted in articles of impeachment being drafted immediately. Lack of accountability to Congress emboldened Obama to expand DACA, but that expansion was quickly fought and defeated in the courts.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/19/collusion-dream-dead-conspiracy-lives/
The President of the United States did not conspire with the Russians. Neither did his family. Neither did his friends. Neither did his campaign. At the end of the Robert Mueller investigation – now clearly staffed and advanced by partisans who loathe this president – not one single American, after all that, has been indicted or charged with any crime for conspiring with the Russians in any way, shape, or form to steal the 2016 election. That is now an indisputable fact. The uncomfortable reality is that we spent two years being fed the most irresponsible allegations advanced by an ignorant punditocracy gone savage for this idea, which should raise all sorts of questions about our political, intelligence, and media elites who sold us this crazy story and promised the American people the proof that never came.
The juiciest portion of the report from the perspective of the media yesterday was the president’s outburst upon being told of the appointment of Mueller as special counsel following Jeff Sessions’ recusal and the firing of James Comey – from the searchable report here:
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14082/greece-no-go-zone-athens
“[T]he neighborhood has… platoons, companies, battalions, Kalashnikovs. I don’t know any more if we, as a police force, have the political mandate to clear the area. This region is a matter for the army now.” — Stavros Balaskas, vice president of the Greek Federation of Police Officers, April 6, 2019.
“…[T]here are now too many illegal immigrants in Exarchia who are drug traffickers [and] gun traffickers… they have essentially taken over the whole place.” — Michalis Chrysochoidis, a former Greek Minister of Citizen Protection, who was responsible for the 2002 dismantling of the “November 17” domestic terrorist organization, April 8, 2019
In Exarchia, these groups — which conduct criminal activities and terrorize local residents — have, in effect, created a “no-go zone,” where even police are afraid to enter.
An assault on members of the Hellenic Coast Guard during a drug raid in Athens on April 4 highlights a growing problem in Greece. Some opponents of the far-left Syriza-led government attribute the increasing drug traffic in the country to a dangerous alliance between political anarchists and illegal immigrants. The anarchists might be considered the Greek equivalent of the “far left”. According to Reuters:
“Many self-proclaimed anarchists – the word stems from the Greek ‘anarchia’ or absence of authority – say they are pacifist, but certain groups have few qualms about using violence. Six years of recession have fuelled a new wave of left-wing militancy, according to officials, anarchists and court testimony.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/04/what_trump_is_guilty_of.html
Donald Trump, the President of the United States, behaved like any innocent man would behave having been framed by fabricated propaganda prepared by foreign intelligence agents, and paid for by his political enemies.
He behaved like any innocent man might when prosecutors hounding him were enabled and appointed by his political enemies. He behaved like any innocent man might when he realized that his prosecutors included the chief counsel of the Clinton Family Foundation and Barack Obama’s deputy assistant attorney general and that the chief witness against him was represented by Hillary Clinton’s longstanding lawyer whom the Washington Post called “The Ultimate Clinton Loyalist.”
He acted like any innocent man might who realized that his home, phone lines, offices, and associates were being spied on, wiretapped, surveilled, followed, photographed, and even infiltrated by paid spies and foreign agents sent by his domestic political enemies who deliberately set him and his family up in a sting operation. Meanwhile, the self-same people vehemently denied that the spying took place.
In other words, he acted against the blatant injustice by pushing back against criminal operatives conspiring to frame him.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/19/appeasement-in-the-academy/
At Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, a student club with the expressed purpose of “the preservation, dissemination and extension of the Western moral and philosophical Tradition” is currently struggling to achieve official recognition from the college administration. Why? Because for a small group of social terrorists on campus, Winston Churchill is a symbol of white supremacy. Also, because we live in hell.
The Churchill Institute is one of a few groups scattered across the American academy that sees Western Civilization under attack, by outsiders and insiders, and has organized itself around its preservation in response.
Trinity’s Churchill Institute (CI) was founded during the 2015 school year by Gregory Bruce Smith, a professor of political science and philosophy. For the past few years, the club has maintained a relatively low profile, operating for the most part as an off-campus organization.
The group occasionally brings speakers to campus, once in conjunction with Young Americans for Liberty, once the former governor of Massachusetts, Jane Swift, for lectures on the importance of free speech. CI publishes The Trinity Review, a student newspaper offering an alternative perspective to the progressive status quo. The paper is open to all students and faculty for submission, just as the Churchill Institute itself is open to all students and faculty for participation and inquiry. This year, CI established its first student reading group; they are reading Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-special-counsel-investigations/
So much for collusion. The media conversation has now officially moved on from the obsession of the last two years to obstruction of justice.
That’s because the first volume of the voluminous Mueller report, the half devoted to what was supposed to be the underlying crime of a Trump conspiracy with Russia, came up completely empty. It tells us very little that’s new. There’s no particularly sinister information about Carter Page, the bit player the FBI repeatedly told the FISA court was probably a Russian agent. The operators who portrayed themselves as closest to WikiLeaks or Russia were usually braggarts and liars exaggerating their importance. Nothing came of the infamous Trump Tower meeting. Paul Manafort wasn’t at the center of conspiracy between the campaign and Russia, but operating in his greedy self-interest.
The Trump campaign was amateurish and without scruple in exploiting the WikiLeaks disclosures, but we all could have agreed on that long ago, without a years-long special-counsel investigation. Indeed, given how unlikely collusion always was and how far the evidence gathered by Mueller is from showing it, one wonders why the special counsel couldn’t have issued an interim report long ago, dispelling the persistent — and poisonous — idea that Trump was about to be proven a traitor.
The business end of the Mueller report is the second volume, on obstruction. The investigation ended up following the typical pattern of special-counsel probes on a much larger scale — fixating on process crimes even when there is no underlying offense. Only in this case, the target was the president of the United States.
The report implicitly picks an argument with Attorney General William Barr over the question whether a president can obstruct justice in the course of exercising his lawful powers. We are inclined to Barr’s view that he can’t. Regardless, the case against Trump is ambiguous, as even Mueller acknowledges.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/inquisitio-requiescat-in-pace/
The variously dubbed dream team/all stars/hunter-killer/army of Mueller’s lawyers, after 22 months, $30 million, and 400 pages plus of legalese did not find “Russian collusion,” the original reason to be of their investigation. At what early point the team realized that fundamental truth is of importance, but will never be fully disclosed.
Nor did team Mueller find actionable “obstruction” efforts (promiscuous use of executive privilege, firings of Mueller team members, refusal to let high Trump staffers be questioned, etc.) to impede its investigation of a non-crime as lawyers went into every rumored Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, Jr. etc. cul de sac. In exasperation Mueller leveraged almost anyone peripherally related to the Trump campaign either to indict him on mostly process crimes, or to air their incriminating “Trump said this” versions of private conversations.
And because Mueller felt it necessary to include in his report suggestions of Trump’s mercurial talk, obfuscations, and shenanigans that did not constitute actual crimes as opposed to thought crimes (those falsely accused of a felony have a tendency to become furious and sound off), the question arises that, if Mueller felt it so necessary to include in his report any material he swept up as he vacuumed around, why not at least suggest that the FBI Director and members of DOJ did not honestly inform a FISA court of the true nature of the evidence for their writ — given the centrality of surveilled conversations within the Mueller report?
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/mueller-report-vindicates-william-barr/
Barr has provided Congress with the full, at times gory details drawn from Mueller’s aggressive investigation.
Democrats and their media partners owe Bill Barr an apology. He won’t get one, it goes without saying.
Just to recap, the attorney general was accused of misrepresenting Mueller’s report; of providing a false summary of the report; of plotting to use grand-jury law and other secrecy provisions as a pretext to redact most of the report; and of calling an extraordinary press conference in order to exculpate the president by projecting a fraudulent version of the report.
These accusations were slanderously false.
Barr made Mueller’s bottom-line findings available on a Sunday, March 24, less than two full days after receiving the report from Mueller late on a Friday. Now that the 448-page tome is public, it is easy to see that it could not possibly have been redacted, in keeping with federal law, without a weeks-long review process.
If Barr had issued nothing while that painstaking process went on, he’d have been vilified for a cover-up. Instead, he quickly and accurately reported Mueller’s findings . . . and was of course vilified for purportedly lying about what the report said — notwithstanding that Mueller, no wallflower, was cooperating in the redaction process and would obviously not have abided a fictional account of his work.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/cowardice-and-courage-at-middlebury-11555714489
Students at Middlebury College gave the school’s administrators a lesson this week in the difference between cowardice and courage when dealing with a controversial speaker.
Recall how in March 2017 protesters at the private Vermont liberal-arts college shut down a speech by Charles Murray, injuring professor Allison Stanger in the process. Partially in response to that fiasco, Middlebury’s political science department founded the Alexander Hamilton Forum, which promotes free speech. The forum planned to host a speech this week by Ryszard Legutko, a Polish member of the European Parliament.
Mr. Legutko has criticized multiculturalism and gay marriage and, following the usual pattern, some students launched a petition claiming he “has built his career off of homophobic, xenophobic, racist, misogynistic discourse.” They called for the political science department and Middlebury’s Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs to rescind co-sponsorship of the speech. They also planned to demonstrate.
But there was an unusual footnote to the protest. On a Facebook page to plan the demonstration, student organizer Taite Shomo wrote: “It is absolutely, unequivocally not the intent of this protest and those participating in this protest to prevent Legutko from speaking. Disruptive behavior of this nature will not be tolerated.”
