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Keep Digging Dems! You’ll Find that Pony Somewhere in the Manure Pile Known as the Mueller Report By Rick Moran

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/trending/keep-digging-dems-youll-find-that-pony-somewhere-in-the-manure-pile-known-as-the-mueller-report/

Somewhere buried deep in the Mueller report is incontrovertible evidence that the president of the United States is a Russian spy. I know it. I just know it. It has to be there.

And I just know that Trump is guilty of obstruction of justice. How can he not be? He’s guilty of so much that the obstruction is, I’m sure, just the tip of the iceberg.

How do I know? Ask any Democrat.

I can’t decide whether it’s amusing or pathetic, this desperate desire by Democrats to will the Mueller report to say something it isn’t saying. An appropriate cultural reference might be that Democrats are searching for Captain Queeg’s missing strawberries even after they know the fruit has been eaten and the culprit found.

Classical? How about Democrat’s tearing the castle apart to find the emperor’s new clothes?

All of those “flipped” witnesses who Democrats believed would turn on their boss and dish the “real” dirt apparently had little to say. Kind of makes you wonder what Mueller got from these cooperating witnesses. Like Bullwinkle pulling a rabbit out of a hat: “Nothin’ up my sleeve…Presto!” (Wrong hat).

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Airbnb’s Anti-West Bank Policy Shows Why Laws Against BDS Matter In another year, finding 21 Democrats willing to support pro-Israel legislation should have been a cakewalk. However, 2019 is not any old year. By Melissa Langsam Braunstein

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/18/airbnbs-anti-west-bank-policy-shows-laws-bds-matter/

Want to fight The Man? If you’re too young to have fought for civil rights, you’ve got the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS).

BDSers wrap themselves in the cloak of justice, but their high-minded rhetoric quickly devolves into hate, because at bottom, stigmatizing democratic Israel isn’t hopeful. BDS is a high-stakes game of pressure that affects individual students, performing artists, and corporations, as the movement pursues a long game of destroying Israel. As Airbnb learned when they sided with the BDS bullies last year, it’s not necessarily a wise business decision.
Airbnb’s Politicized Decision about West Bank

Last November, Airbnb made headlines when they announced that, after consulting with various experts, they would de-list approximately 200 properties in Jewish communities within Israel’s Judea and Samaria regions, better known stateside as the West Bank. The company’s rationale was that these locations “are at the core of the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

On its face, this was an odd move for a business. An American for-profit corporation that serves private, paying customers went out of its way to take sides in one of the world’s most sensitive and emotional political disputes. In response, lawsuits were filed on behalf of affected hosts, would-be hosts, and travelers.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘No Evidence’ Trump Was Aware of Don Jr.’s Meeting With Russian Lawyer By Jack Crowe

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/no-evidence-trump-was-aware-of-don-jr-s-meeting-with-russian-lawyer/

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month investigation failed to produce evidence that then-candidate Trump was aware that his son, Donald Trump Jr., and other high-ranking campaign officials met with a Russian lawyer offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton in June 2016, according to the special counsel’s report released Thursday.

Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and at least five other people met with Kremlin-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in Manhattan in order to obtain damaging information on Hillary Clinton from Veselnitskaya.

After news of the meeting broke in July 2017, Trump dictated a statement to be released on Trump Jr.’s behalf in which he falsely claimed the meeting was held to discuss sanctions that restricted the U.S. adoption of Russian children.

“The president then dictated a statement to Hicks that said the meeting was about Russian adoption (which the president had twice been told was discussed at the meeting). The statement dictated by the president did not mention the offer of derogatory information about Clinton,” the report reads.

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Barr Press Conference: No Obstruction on the Facts of the Case By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/william-barr-press-conference-no-obstruction-on-the-facts-of-the-case/

The most interesting new disclosure to come out of Attorney General William Barr’s press conference on the Mueller report was about obstruction of justice.

As I pointed out in a Fox News column this morning, the obstruction issue was one of the main reasons why the media-Democrat complex’s caterwauling about Barr’s unremarkable decision to hold a press conference was ludicrous. Special Counsel Mueller declined to render a prosecutorial judgment on whether obstruction charges should be brought against the president. Since it is the attorney general who made the judgment, for that reason alone it was worth hearing from him this morning.

The attorney general stated that the special counsel evaluated ten incidents with an eye toward whether they amounted to an obstruction offense. Barr elaborated that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed with Mueller on whether these incidents even could have amounted to obstruction as a matter of law.

It is important to grasp what that means, and what it doesn’t, because I’ve heard some inaccurate commentary. Barr was not saying that Mueller found one or more of these incidents to constitute obstruction; Mueller was saying that the incidents involved actions that could theoretically have amounted to obstruction.

MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

Adam Schiff: The Media’s Pin-Up Doll By Julie Kelly

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/04/17/adam-schiff-the-medias-pin-up-doll/

There are times that even The Onion—the popular satirical newspaper—can’t compete with the outlandish coverage produced by allegedly legitimate news publications. Newsweek magazine’s front-cover swoon over Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) this week is one such example.

The interview portrays Schiff as a warrior-martyr, fighting the evil Trump regime for the good of the country. He blasts Attorney General Bill Barr; regurgitates long-disproven allegations of Trump-Russia collusion; and again insists many of his Republican colleagues have private misgivings about President Trump but refuse to air those grievances in public for fear of retribution.

For anyone even remotely aware of Schiff’s congenital dishonesty and malfeasance, the Newsweek profile is as comical and ironic as any Onion parody could dream to be. Except one can assume the author and editors want the article to be taken seriously by its unserious readership.

Newsweek’s cover photo appears tweaked to bulk up his thin neck, which the president and some of Schiff’s Republican colleagues in the House have mocked with glee. (Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida last week introduced a bill entitled the PENCIL Act that demands Schiff be removed as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. President Trump recently called the California congressman, “little pencil-necked Adam Schiff.”) In an attempt to transform the geeky gadfly into a bad-ass, Newsweek accompanied the photo with a Schiff quote: “No one escapes the law.” Scary.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Red Joan Joins a Rogues’ Gallery of Resisters By Armond White

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/red-joan-joins-a-rogues-gallery-of-resisters/

Judi Dench in a guess-the-genre political sob story

Red Joan is a love story, a political thriller, a woman’s coming-of-age sexual memoir, and a history of British espionage just before and after World War II. It is also a crock. Based on real-life KGB spy Melita Norwood, Red Joan’s sentimental exoneration of one woman’s treason and sedition fits with how today’s media pay tribute to the kaffeeklatsch of political resisters.

Judi Dench plays title character Joan Stanley as a kindly widow suddenly exposed by the British government for her activities, 60 years earlier, relaying wartime bomb secrets to Russia. Crone Joan’s mummified on-trial look (Dench’s facial wattles, a padded, thick rump, and flabby legs with an ankle monitor) dissolves into flashbacks played by pouty Sophie Cookson, who beams a girlish complexion and period hairdos as a student at Cambridge University. Cookson never locates her character’s sexual-political tension, which was the key to every characterization in the film version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, because that complexity isn’t part of this film’s reverential concept.

Young Joan is seduced by a pair of sexy Jewish radicals, Sonya (Tereza Srbova), who teaches her espionage tricks, and firebrand Leo (Tom Hughes), who talks of religion when he has politics in mind. Their exoticism, flaunting past political persecution, is meant to excuse WASP Joan’s uncritical fascination.

Asked, “Who politicized you then?” Old Joan’s response, “That’s a strange way to put it,” epitomizes the disingenuousness of red-diaper-baby filmmaking that dodges political intent and refuses to admit its Communist sympathies. This is where Red Joan stops being entertainment and becomes romanticized indoctrination. Leftist attitudes are dramatized as the norm.

Joan defends her romantic intrigues and professional deceptions that include blackmailing her Cambridge colleagues. She prevaricates: “I have also been accused of deceiving my country. I am not a spy. I’m not a traitor. I wanted everyone to share the same knowledge. Because only that way could the horror of another world war be averted and I think if you look back at history, you’ll see I was right.”

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Foul Play to Silence Patton ? By Janet Levy

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/foul_play_to_silence_patton.html

U.S. Army general George S. Patton, renowned for strategic military prowess and leadership, led World War II troops into Casablanca, Sicily, and France; relieved Allied forces at the Battle of the Bulge; and drove deep into Nazi Germany. Patton was equally renowned for his no-holds-barred opinions, colorful attire, profanity-laced speeches, and disregard for orders he thought ineffective, all of which did not sit well with the Allied high command.

The new “must see” film, Silence Patton, suggests that the general’s premature death in a mysterious auto accident may have been orchestrated to silence this oversized, historic personality. Written and directed by Robert Orlando, the film uses documentary footage, direct quotes, and interviews with historians to ask whether Patton’s forthrightness, outspoken judgments, and criticism of battlefield leadership may have led to assassination. Robert Wilcox, an investigative and military reporter, voiced the same theory in this 2008 book, Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton.

In Silence Patton, Orlando presents a non-lionized, realistic portrayal of a consummate yet flawed warrior, whose personal qualities often hindered him from obtaining the necessary orders to execute his desired military strategies. The film opens with a re-enactment of the accident in which an Army truck struck the car Patton was riding in, leaving him paralyzed and near death. The image of a dying Patton looms large throughout the film, which examines his impressive yet controversial military career and the suspicions surrounding his end.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Things That Can’t Go on Forever Simply Don’t By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/things-that-cant-go-on-forever-simply-dont/

Economist Herbert Stein’s old adage — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” — still holds.

Take illegal immigration.

There are currently somewhere from 11 million to 15 million immigrants living in the United States without legal authorization. Last month, nearly 100,000 people were apprehended or turned away while trying to illegally cross the southern border. Some experts suggest that at least that number made it across without arrest. At that rate, the United States would be gaining a fairly large city of undocumented arrivals each month.

Most of the people who enter the United States illegally arrive without fluency in English, a high-school diploma, competitive job skills or money. The majority will require support subsidies, and collectively they will require increased legal and law-enforcement investments.

At some point, American social services will be so taxed that the system will be rendered dysfunctional — as is already occurring in areas of the American Southwest. Or, some regions of America will so resemble the countries undocumented immigrants abandoned that there will be little point in heading north.

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Reparations and the Weaponization of Slavery A vile political stunt. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273445/reparations-and-weaponization-slavery-bruce-thornton

The Democrats who have announced their candidacy for the presidential primary have all declared their support for paying reparations to the descendants of slaves, after they kissed the ring of notorious race-baiter, tax cheat, and liar Al Sharpton. None has a clue exactly how such a policy would be implemented, and it’s clear their support is nothing more than virtue-signaling and pandering to the racialist left. Nor is it likely such a policy will come to pass.

But this political stunt is still useful for exposing just how dishonest is the left’s use of slavery in our public discourse. Once a universal evil now existing only in the global shadows, slavery has been weaponized by the left and identity politics tribunes in order to attack the West, especially the United States, and caricature both as unique evils responsible for all the world’s ills.

First, this focus on the West ignores the fact that all peoples everywhere kept slaves. Slavery was as unexceptional as the domestication of animals. Nor were Europeans the biggest slave-owners and slave-traders. Eight centuries before the Europeans began importing slaves from Africa, the Islamic Middle East had been exporting or kidnapping slaves––an estimated 17 million Africans, over one-and-a-half times the estimated 10 million purchased by Europeans. Millions were forced-march across the Sahara to coastal ports. The males were brutally castrated––all the genitals, not just the testicles–– to provide eunuchs for harems and service to rulers. Thousands died along the way from their wounds, their bones littering the desert sands. And don’t forget the millions of white Europeans kidnapped and sold into slavery by privateers serving the Muslim Barbary states in North Africa, or the Balkan Christian boys, perhaps as many as one million, taken from their parents, forcibly converted, and made to serve the Ottoman regime as janissaries.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Life in the Biodome: Capitalism for All Its Shortcomings Has Found a Way to Work with Human Nature By David Solway

Posted By on April 18th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/life-in-the-biodome-capitalism-for-all-its-shortcomings-has-found-a-way-to-work-with-human-nature/

The Bloedel Conservatory, a triodetic biodome located in Queen Elizabeth Park at the highest point in Vancouver, Canada, houses more than 120 free-flying birds and 500 exotic plants and flowers in a temperature-controlled environment. It was financed by a lavish gift from timber industrialist Prentice Bloedel in the mid-20th century and built by the ten Van Vliet brothers, founders of the Double V Construction Company. The donor and builders of the impressive biodome were inspired by a sense of civic duty and love for the city; however, the biodome’s continued existence was by no means underwritten. It was nearly demolished when the Vancouver Park Board voted to close it due to “declining attendance and growing repair and maintenance costs,” but was saved by the Friends of Bloedel Association and other groups that lobbied to preserve the heritage landmark, bolstered by a providentially sharp increase in attendance numbers.

When my wife and I visited a few months back, I was astonished by the avian proliferation, innumerable species of colorful birds—Java finches, lavender waxbills, Senegal doves, reedings, parrots, mannikins, Guinea turacos, Napolean weavers—picking seed and twigs on the labyrinth of paths indifferent to the crowds that shuffled past. Mice scurried back and forth as if they owned the place, harmless and safe. Cockatoos orated on their soapboxes. The purling of the saffron finch was indescribably lovely. Receptacles for food and vessels for water were constantly being re-filled by volunteer attendants; others swept the paths and removed the droppings. The air was redolent with the rich scent of exotic perfumes. Nature had been civilized.

The Bloedel Conservatory, a triodetic biodome located in Queen Elizabeth Park at the highest point in Vancouver, Canada, houses more than 120 free-flying birds and 500 exotic plants and flowers in a temperature-controlled environment. It was financed by a lavish gift from timber industrialist Prentice Bloedel in the mid-20th century and built by the ten Van Vliet brothers, founders of the Double V Construction Company. The donor and builders of the impressive biodome were inspired by a sense of civic duty and love for the city; however, the biodome’s continued existence was by no means underwritten. It was nearly demolished when the Vancouver Park Board voted to close it due to “declining attendance and growing repair and maintenance costs,” but was saved by the Friends of Bloedel Association and other groups that lobbied to preserve the heritage landmark, bolstered by a providentially sharp increase in attendance numbers.