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Roger Stone indictment isn’t good news for those seeking Trump impeachment Jonathan Turley

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/01/25/roger-stone-charges-indictment-richard-nixon-what-do-politician-column/2678017002/
Collusion isn’t one of the charges against Richard Nixon-loving political trickster Roger Stone.

The arrest of Roger Stone by Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not have been more dramatically presented. The pre-dawn raid of Stone’s house by a contingent of heavily armed, body-armored agents could easily have fit the arrest of El Chapo rather than an elderly crank with a Nixon fetish.

Despite the breathless media accounts, the actual indictment of Stone is most notable for what it does not include. This was supposed to be the long-rumored linchpin to Russian collusion: The Russians fed information to Wikileaks which fed the information to Stone who fed the information to the Trump campaign.

The raid on Stone’s home clearly made for great television, but the Stone indictment hardly makes for a great collusion case. Let’s be honest. After more than a year of investigation, Mueller nailed a gadfly on false statements, witness tampering and obstruction rather than illegal collusion with Russia.

That’s what has been happening all along. Mueller has almost exclusively charged non-Russian defendants with either false statements or other process crimes.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

How to Lose a Culture War By Tom McCaffrey

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://canadafreepress.com/article/how-to-lose-a-culture-war

The owner of a gym in Troy, Missouri recently asked army vet Jake Talbot not to wear his “Trump 2016” shirt to her gym in the future. The owner did so in response to complaints from other customers that the shirt made them feel “uncomfortable.”

It is all too common nowadays for graduates of our finer colleges to accord moral significance to their feelings, regardless of whether those feelings are objectively reasonable. You’re uncomfortable? Then clearly someone needs to alter his behavior. Reports say that some customers found the shirt “offensive” or “racist.” That such judgments are preposterous is irrelevant in our brave new world of political correctness.
The culture warriors at Ms. Drew’s gym have won a small victory over President Trump’s America

What about the discomfort of Mr. Talbot at having to alter his dress at the whim of anonymous complainers? Also irrelevant. As a white male, Mr. Talbot has no say in the matter. Gym owner Liz Drew texted that she just wants “to ensure that all my members feel safe and unthreatened.” Threatened? By a shirt with our president’s name on it? Ms. Drew is well schooled in the lingo of the Left.

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Time to end Washington’s Use and Abuse Policy towards the Kurds… by Gerald A. Honigman

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

President Trump’s recent decision to withdraw forces from Syria, along with a 21st century would-be Turkish Sultan, President Erdogan’s, apparent aim to re-create part of the Ottoman Empire, have quickly led to disturbing consequences. More are sure to follow…

Over a dozen Americans and allies were killed by ISIS on January 17th in response to President Trump’s plan. The aim was to further demoralize our troops and Kurds who’ve done most of the fighting and dying for us for a half century now.

The arena is largely part ofgeographical Kurdistan, mostly mountainous regions of Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, where Kurds–as the Bible’s Hurrians; Gutian conquerors of Babylon; (probably) Medes; and others–pre-date Arab and Turkish imperial conquerors by millennia.

Kurds have had their language and culture outlawed by Arabs and Turks, while hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered.

In the wake of the collapse of empires in the early 20th century, while Arabs wound up with almost two dozen states (most forcibly Arabized from non-Arabpeoples), some 38 million Kurds remain stateless to date–frequently at others’ mercy.On September 9, 2018, The Jerusalem Post reported a precision Iranian ballistic missile strike on Iraqi Kurds. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was sending a message to others besides Kurds with this attack.

Like Tehran’s centuries’ old rivals–Turks and Arabs–the one thing all agree upon is denial of political (even basic human) rights to millions of Kurds who pre-date the latter two in their region by millennia.

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Stone Indictment Underscores That There Was No Trump-Russia Conspiracy By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/roger-stone-indictment-underscores-no-trump-russia-conspiracy/

Will the Justice Department ever correct the record?

R oger Stone is the shiny object. The obstruction charges in his long-anticipated indictment, made public on Friday, are not the matter of consequence for the United States.

Nor is the critical thing the indictment’s implicit confirmation that there was no criminal “collusion” conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.

What matters is this: The indictment is just the latest blatant demonstration that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office, the Department of Justice, and the FBI have known for many months that there was no such conspiracy. And yet, fully aware that the Obama administration, the Justice Department, and the FBI had assiduously crafted a public narrative that Trump may have been in cahoots with the Russian regime, they have allowed that cloud of suspicion to hover over the presidency — over the Trump administration’s efforts to govern — heedless of the damage to the country.

The rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation — namely, the notion that the Trump campaign had “coordinated” in the Kremlin’s cyber-espionage operation to meddle in the 2016 campaign — has been nothing more than a suspicion harbored by political, law-enforcement, and intelligence officials who loathed Donald Trump. That there may be a thousand good reasons to dislike Donald Trump is irrelevant, for we are talking about investigations, not politics. Investigative suspicions must be rooted in fact, not contempt.

Not only was the suggestion of a Trump-Russia conspiracy not founded on fact. The officials calling the shots had reason to know that the premise was factually false. In truth, there was no evidence of Trump-campaign complicity in Russian espionage — nothing but the Clinton-campaign generated, unverified Steele dossier. The months-in-the-making Stone indictment is just the latest proof of that.

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Media’s Selective Curiosity By Carson Holloway

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/25/the-medias-

Members of the mainstream media understandably resent President Trump’s description of them as purveyors of “fake news.” After all, they do the public a service by reporting a great deal of true and relevant information. And when they get the facts wrong, they usually correct the record.

Nevertheless, the president’s criticisms of the media resonate with many Americans. For them, the “news” industry is “fake” not in the sense that it tells nothing but falsehoods, but rather in the sense that its self-presentation is fake or phony. The media claim to be disinterested reporters of the facts, but their behavior shows they are far more interested in some facts than in others. This suggests that their main concern is not in uncovering the truth but in telling a certain kind of story.

The “fake news” charge sticks not because of the media’s mendacity but because of their selective curiosity.

Nowhere has that selective curiosity been more evident than in the coverage of the biggest news story of the last two years: the supposed complicity of Trump and his campaign in Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election. From top to bottom, this story has been shaped powerfully by mainstream news organizations’ extreme lack of interest in certain questions that objectively are interesting and important.

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Who Leaked the Bogus WikiLeaks Email About Don Jr.? By Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/25/who-leaked-the

The Trump presidential campaign’s alleged ties to WikiLeaks have been a pivotal piece of the Trump-Russia “collusion” story since the beginning. In order to mitigate the damage to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy after WikiLeaks in July 2016 released damning emails swiped from the Democratic National Committee’s server, Clinton’s team skillfully changed the subject by claiming Russia was behind the hack and suggested the Trump campaign had a hand in it, too.

WikiLeaks is back in the news for two reasons. First is the arrest on Friday of former Trump associate Roger Stone, who Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges made false statements about his communications with the group.

Second, and far more interesting, is renewed allegations by Donald Trump, Jr. that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) leaked details about Don Jr.’s contact with WikiLeaks during the campaign—information that was erroneous and resulted in major correction by CNN, the news organization that first reported the bogus story.

In an interview with Fox News last week, Don Jr. said “there’s a 99.9 percent chance” that Schiff was “the guy that was leaking my testimony as I was testifying.”

“I came out of testimony at about 8 o’clock looking [at my phone] and CNN is running quotes from noon on about my testimony . . . I would bet a lot of money it was him.”

For more than a year, the people who leaked unauthorized information about Don Jr.’s closed-door testimony to the House Intelligence Committee on December 6, 2017, have not been officially identified, let alone punished. It is just one more frustrating example of how government insiders, in collaboration with their accomplices in the press, escape accountability for their role in perpetuating a seditious plot to take down a presidency.

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Alan Dershowitz Slams ‘Typical Mueller Indictment,’ Says Crimes ‘Generated by the Investigation’ By Debra Heine

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://pjmedia.com/video/alan-dershowitz-slams-typical-mueller-indictment-says-crimes-generated-by-the-investigation/

“America’s Newsroom” Friday, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said the indictment of former Trump adviser Roger Stone is a “typical Mueller indictment,” full of “stories” of Russian collusion, but with actual charges being the result of the investigation.

Stone was arrested during an early morning FBI raid at his house in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and indicted on charges of obstruction, making false statements, and witness tampering as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

“This is typical of Mueller. He has found almost no crimes that occurred before he was appointed special counsel,” Dershowitz explained, adding that Mueller was appointed to find Russian collusion and has “virtually failed in that respect in every regard.”

“Almost all of his crimes that he’s indicted people for are crimes that resulted from his investigation — false statements, tampering with witnesses, obstruction of justice,” Dershowitz pointed out. “These are crimes that are generated by the investigation,” which, he noted, “doesn’t make them any less criminal.”

“But it really means that there’s been a failure to uncover the basic crimes for which he was appointed. Namely, before he was appointed, was there illegal collusion, illegal conspiracy with Russia?” Dersh asked.

“We don’t find that,” the professor declared. “In this indictment, he tells stories about alleged collusion, stories about WikiLeaks, but that’s not the basis for the indictment. The basis for the indictment are all events that occurred after he was appointed. That’s very significant.”

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Honoring Country (Music) By David Solway

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/01/honoring_country_music.html

Country music has almost always been counter-counter-culture. Country music honors ancestors and traditions, while hardcore rocker bands like Stick To Your Guns glorify felons Eric Garner, Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, the ludicrously named Prophets of Rage mock “the chosen whites” who “wear[ ] badges” (“Killing In The Name”), and Vampire Weekend and Foster the People shill for socialist retread Bernie Sanders.

Often featuring sharp and witty lyrics and hummable tunes, Country fosters a patriotic love of the land and its people, and displays a spirit of proud independence. As such, it is among the most engaging of musical idioms. It is at its purest an amalgam of swagger and humility. True, its subject matter can’t help but touch the world out there and can’t help but convey attitudes and beliefs, often of a patriotic nature, but it is certainly not an agenda-driven program for incendiary or subversive or revolutionary change. It purveys no drummingly sociopolitical message. Rather, Country in its essence expresses natural and universal feelings of love and home and basic human experience — “the basics of love,” as Waylon Jennings put it in “Luckenbach, Texas.” Anchored in everyday life, it does not hector or seek to persuade but treats of perennial themes while retaining a distinctive artistry in melody and lyric.

As Alan Jackson sings in his haunting 9/11 requiem, Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning, he is not “a real political man,” unlike the smug patricians of the reigning Western cultural elite. Jackson’s elegy for Hank Williams, “Midnight in Montgomery,” is unforgettably poignant and as unpolitical as it can get, very much like Williams’ signature “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Williams is reputed to have said: “God writes the songs. I just hold the pen” — a way of articulating a felt truth and a welcome antitoxin to the malignant spirit of decay and subversion that has permeated the cultural, political and institutional life of America today. Such cultural decadence is the reason why so much of its music is trash.

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Iran’s Kidnapping Industry British Mother Held in Prison by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13542/iran-kidnapping-hostages

This international breach of justice should be a lesson to the UK and other governments: It does not matter if the mullahs reach out their hands out in peace; the Islamist regime of Iran will continue to harm innocent victims on a daily basis.

In response to the snub, the British government should consider bringing to a halt its appeasement policies toward the ruling mullahs. The more they are appeased, the more emboldened and empowered they become to continue violating human rights.

It must be made clear to Iran that, apart from its unacceptable nuclear and ballistic missile build up, the UK — and every country — will also not stand for the capture, torture and imprisonment of the innocent. If the British government speaks in actions rather than words, perhaps these captives could be free to resume the life they deserve again, and the world could be free of a major nuclear threat.

“Sometimes when I come back from the visit with Gabriella, after saying goodbye to her, I feel as if I cannot live without her, I want to go back and hold her. She kisses me so hard. It is hard to say goodbye to her. She blows kisses all the way as she goes up the stairs, and everyone stands there watching.” These are the words of a grieving British mother, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, held in prison in the Islamic Republic of Iran, as she describes saying goodbye to her child.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Never Look Away – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on January 26th, 2019

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

If you happen to be a 6′9″ inch German man named Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck, it’s not surprising that you would be comfortable with an oversized movie that plays longer than Gone With the Wind. At over 3 hrs, the film needs editing and shortening but if you cut it to 2 1/2 hrs., you’d have a minor masterpiece. Even in its present frame, it’s a powerful and moving experience merging World War II with post-war communist Germany seen through the filter of a budding artist searching for his authentic and singular form of expression.

It begins with a visit to the Degenerate Art Exhibition organized by the Nazis against Jewish artists and others who defied classical standards. A beautiful young woman accompanies her very young nephew who loves to draw and we quickly learn of her quirkiness and his talent – two themes that are harbingers of his and her life stories. Hitler’s arm rapidly extends from art to disabled and mentally deficient people and the lovely but erratic Elisabeth is first hospitalized until more drastic measures are taken. As the young boy, Kurt, grows up, we see the further damage that Nazi control wreaks on his family, but he remains dedicated to becoming an artist and enrolls in a school in Dusseldorf where he is exposed to all the trendy aspects of the art world in the 60’s and 70’s, trying desperately to determine how he can contribute something original to a very crowded and chaotic scene.