Saturday, November 25, 2017

op ed review 11/26



President Trump is making welfare reform a major priority and will sign an executive order laying out the administration’s goals while also urging action by Congress

FBI and Justice Department officials have told congressional investigators in recent days that they have not been able to verify or corroborate the substantive allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign outlined in the Trump dossier.
Here are some of the biggest myths of the Russian-collusion story

The New York Times suggests in an op-ed that recently deceased mass murder Charles Manson was the harbinger for alt-right and white supremacists. A Newsweek piece compared the charismatic nature of Manson to President Donald Trump. In reality, Manson was a counter-culture hippie anti-hero who later embraced environmentalism as a justification for his insane actions. During a series of interviews, Manson preached about the need to wipe out large numbers of humans to solve overpopulation and global warming, a mantra that was then adopted by the far-left.

Europe's Merkel, Macron and May have lower approval ratings than Trump
The issue of unfettered immigration has collapsed any hope for German Chancellor Angela Merkel to be able to form a government.

Media Ignores Key Alabama Witness Reports That Refute Roy Moore Accuser…
New poll shows Roy Moore and Doug Jones in statistical tie
Doug Jones, the Democrat running against Roy Moore, says he loves to hunt but the Second Amendment has “limitations.”

CNN Fails To Report These 24 Democrat Sex Scandals (here’s the list)
Pennsylvania Democrat Rep. Bob Brady is a ranking member of the Committee on House Administration which oversees settlements paid by Congress for sexual discrimination and harassment complaints.   The FBI has reason to believe Brady unlawfully concealed a $90,000 payment made by his campaign to get an opponent to quit a 2012 primary race.
Another woman accuses Sen. Franken of inappropriate grabbing during his time as senator...
Former President Bill Clinton continues to remain silent about the 26 flights he took aboard convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the “Lolita Express,”.
Bill Clinton faces NEW accusations of sexual assault by four women while the former president was working with a billionaire playboy and flying on his private jet nicknamed Air F*** One.   “The women were in their late teens at the time……Hillary allegedly offered to hire private detectives to find dirt on the new accusers, but Clinton's legal team advised against it…”
New York Times journalist suspended following sexual misconduct allegations. “One of the very nastiest of the #NeverEverTrumpers”
Michigan Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat and the longest-serving member of the House of Representatives, settled a wrongful dismissal complaint in 2015 with a former employee who alleged she was fired because she would not “succumb to [his] sexual advances.”
But Rep Maxine Waters explains that he should be forgiven because he “has impeccable integrity on our issues´”

Illegal Aliens Murdered US Border Patrol Agent by Crushing His Skull with Rocks

Mark Levin set for a weekly TV show on FOXNEWS.

Judge Orrick again:  (Obama appointed 2012)   Federal judge permanently blocks Trump's executive order to cut funding to sanctuary cities
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COLUMN OF THE WEEK
John Hawkins  11/25
“15 Things Far Too Many Americans Are Foolishly Taking For Granted”

Too many Americans have become like the spoiled trust fund kids running the family business. Grandpa built it and knew it top to bottom. Dad learned from him and kept it going. Now they’re taking over and unfortunately, they never really bothered to learn the ins and outs of how the company works. They just look at it as a place where they can have a fancy title and get money to finance their lifestyle.

Many Americans don’t know why this country is so successful, don’t understand the long-term ramifications of the things they advocate politically and don’t get how lucky we are.

Knowledgeable conservatives know better. We know that we are fortunate enough to live in what Reagan called a “shining city on a hill” and that eternal flame that sets us apart from other nations can easily dim. Americans should consider that many of the things they take for granted are not necessarily so.

You see, far too many of us take it for granted that….
1) ….We can not only refuse to teach patriotism to our kids, but teach our kids in schools that our country is a horrible place…….and it won’t produce people who are disloyal to our nation.
2)….Black and Hispanic Americans can be incessantly encouraged to create and nurture racial grudges, white people can constantly be put down, degraded and discriminated against via programs like Affirmative Action……..but Caucasians won’t increasingly adopt the same racist attitudes liberals encourage minorities to hold.
3) …We can accuse a man of rape if the woman he has sex with has been drinking, weirdly demand verbal consent for every stage of a make-out session and accuse a man of sexual harassment if a woman claims he grabbed her butt 30 years ago…….but it won’t have any ramifications for male/female relationships.
4)….We can hamstring our military with ridiculous rules of engagement, have soldiers on the battlefield call lawyers before they can shoot targets and have politicians make military decisions based on how it will play in the press………yet our troops will still win wars.  
5)…We can smear the Christian church at every opportunity, tar every decent person as a secret hypocrite and write morality off as old timey……but the people in our country will continue to be good over the long haul.
6)…. Social Security and Medicare will always be available for the enormous number of Americans that depend on it…….even though we have no money set aside for either program and we have an unsustainable debt that we are adding to every year.
7) ….We can ignore lawbreaking by illegal aliens while playing political games with our justice system based on whether a Republican or Democrat is being targeted…….without ordinary Americans losing respect for the rule of law. 
8) ….We can put men with poor character in office…….yet they’ll still do the right thing for the country, instead of themselves, when they’re elected.
9) ….We can run up an astronomical debt that we never intend to fully pay off, large parts of which are held by nations hostile to us…….but they will never choose to crash our economy by refusing to lend us more money that we may not pay back one day.
10) ….We can shut down speakers we disagree with on college campuses; the police can charge exorbitant fees to allow someone to publicly exercise his 2nd Amendment rights and social media giants can quiet anyone they want without consequence…….but the rest of us will continue to have our right to free speech honored.
11) …We can trash the police at every opportunity and give the benefit of the doubt to the criminals they arrest instead of to them……..while they’ll still be willing and able to effectively do their jobs.  
12) …We can abandon the pure capitalism that made our country so rich, pile regulation on top of regulation and exorbitantly tax the most productive members of society………without it slowing down the economic growth, jobs and opportunity for everyone.
13) ….We can coddle our best and brightest college students so much that they get “triggered” by hearing things they don’t like, expose them to professors that are Communists, bombers and radicals………and then expect them to be tough, competent and capable enough to keep the country running one day.
14) …We can bring in enormous numbers of immigrants from non-Western, socialistic and often backward countries, immerse them in a culture that strongly discourages assimilation……..and they, or at least their kids will fare as well as anyone here.
15) …We have clean water, decent roads, full supermarkets, Internet access, non-corrupt cops, shoes, free speech and a hospital that will fix a broken leg whether you have money to pay or not. Compared to the MAJORITY of people on Earth, Americans live in a utopia. Yet, all we ever hear are complaints and endless kvetching about how horrible it is to live in such a rich, powerful country that has done so much for the world. Part of that is human nature. It’s easy to focus on what you lack instead of what you have…until you don’t have it any more.

More Americans need to start thinking about preserving this nation for our children. Of all the terrible things we could do as a people, the worst would be to squander the incredible opportunity we’ve had and to leave future generations of Americans with nothing but a shallow husk of what this country is today.

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OTHER COLUMNS
 “Harvard and Yale combined sit on a nest egg of almost $60 billion, enough to give every student free tuition at these schools from now until forever. Instead these university endowments act like giant financial trading dynasties, with very little of the largesse going to help students pay tuition. The GOP plan would put a small tax on the unspent money in the endowments if they don’t start spending the money down. My only complaint is that the tax is way too low. But the first shot against the university-industrial complex has finally been fired.”
            -Stephen Moore

“Why is it that men would ever presume to take what is not theirs to take? What is it that women would be too afraid to speak up? Could it be that the expectations of the culture have forced both men and women into a desensitization against any kind of respect for the other? Could it be that we’ve been breathing an air that has us believing that the other exists for gratification rather than for awe and reverence?”
            -Kathryn Jean Lopez
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LEFTIST WATCH
Wealthy leftists gathered for a secretive conference at the posh La Costa Resort in Carlsbad, California. The event was titled “Beyond #Resistance: Reclaiming our Progressive Future.” The high-dollar fundraising event had donors pledge to give at least $200,000 to approved leftist groups, all for the purpose of opposing Liberty at every turn. Not surprisingly, billionaire George Soros was headlined as one of the featured speakers.
Documents show how Soros will be meeting with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and scores of rich liberals to plot the future of the opposition To President Donald Trump.

CNN and Media Matters Trying Tag Team Takedown on Sean Hannity
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ARTICLES
“The Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon”

Conrad Black:  Hillary’s book is an “astonishing display of rage….idealism, and myth-making. It is a sobering and a disturbing read.
But Time magazine loved it, declaring it the top "Non-Fiction" book of the year.

Lifson:  Now that the FBI’s informant on the Uranium One deal has been outed and the nondisclosure agreement formerly muzzling him abrogated, it is possible to see the outlines of the devastating case to be made against not just Hillary Clinton, but the entire Obama administration.
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WISE WORDS
“As riches increase and accumulate in few hands, as luxury prevails in society, virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard.”
           -Alexander Hamilton

Saturday, November 18, 2017

op ed review 11/19



President Trump returned from one of the longest and most successful overseas trips by a president since President Reagan returned from Reykjavik without giving Gorbachev a treaty in 1986. So what dominated the Sunday morning talk shows on "national news" outlets? Judge Roy Moore.
The mainstream media freaked out over a fake story about President Trump overfeeding fish in Japan and criticized him for not taking questions during a press conference in China, but several of Trump’s achievements from his Asia trip were underreported. In other words, the anti-Trump media are, as usual, picking and choosing what to focus on based on their usual narrative.
Trump approval jumps to 46%.
All leading economic forecasters said it would be impossible for President Trump’s MAGAnomic plans to generate 3% GDP growth in the first year. President Obama said it was impossible and Trump would need a “magic wand, or something“. Well, three months after taking office (April-June), it was Quarter 2, and the U.S. GDP began growing over three percent. Again in Quarter 3 (July-Sept), the same benchmark was exceeded. And now Q4 (Oct-Dec) the New York Fed says, yes, GDP growth is 3.2%.

A new poll shows Democrat Doug Jones leading by 8 points in the Alabama Senate race in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations against his opponent, GOP candidate Roy Moore.
Washington Post Offered $1000 cash to Roy Moore accusers while getting “Tips” From Mitch McConnell
It is hard not to look upon the Roy Moore imbroglio as another well-timed hit-job from a familiar and well-practiced source — the same people who thought they had destroyed the Trump campaign by releasing the Billy Bush tape from eleven years before, and, when that didn’t finish Mr. Trump off, tried the nuclear option late in the campaign by shopping to the press the Steele dossier, which the Clinton campaign had commissioned, with its salacious and seditious elements.

The stepson of one accuser claims that his stepmother’s accusations are “one hundred percent a lie.”
Washington Post failed to mention:    One of Moore’s accusers worked as a sign language interpreter for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
??Roy Moore Signature Inside Accuser’s Yearbook Is Written in Two Different Color Inks
6 scenarios for GOP disaster in Roy Moore Senate race

Senator Al Franken’s past jokes about rape and other forms of inappropriate sexual conduct resurfaced Thursday after a radio anchor accused him of forcefully kissing her during a rehearsal and of groping her breasts while she slept on a flight from Afghanistan following a USO tour in December 2006.  This is a sitting Democrat Senator.
Do Democrat Senators get one free grope, or will Senate move to expel Franken as is talked about with Roy Moore?
A Democratic state senator who accused President Donald Trump of sexual harassment is now facing calls to resign after facing multiple sexual harassment allegations of his own.

Broadway Stars Honor Hillary Clinton At Planned Parenthood Fundraiser
Colin Kaepernick Is GQ´s  2017 Citizen of the Year

More than 100,000 convicted felons or other “prohibited persons” tried to buy guns each year during President Barack Obama’s administration by lying on their applications, but the Justice Department only considered prosecuting about 30 to 40 people each year.
Good news:  The Army´s top officer said Wednesday that the service had "rescinded" a controversial memo permitting people with a history of severe mental illness to seek waivers allowing them to join up.
Bad news:  The Pentagon has paid for an infantry soldier to undergo gender transition surgery after a federal judge blocked President Trump´s ban on transgender service members last month.

CNN continued its pattern of reporting ridiculous factoids about President Donald Trump on Thursday when the liberal news network gave over two minutes of airtime to a segment about the inside of a dog’s ear that looks like Trump’s face.

Thanks to Republican dysfunction in Congress, Cook Political Report predicts Democratic ´wave´ in 2018

Most California sheriffs fiercely opposed the ´sanctuary state´ law. Soon they´ll have to implement it

Former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom unloaded on James Comey, Robert Mueller, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama Thursday, charging that major crimes "20 times bigger than Watergate" are being swept under the rug while Attorney General Jeff Sessions "is in a coma."

Alibaba has set another single day record after the e-commerce giant sold over $25 billion of products on the Chinese biggest online shopping site.
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COLUMN OF THE WEEK
IBD 11/15
As Zimbabwe locked down following a military coup this week, Venezuela defaulted on its debt. On the surface, these events in these two countries — one African, the other South American — seem to have little in common. But, in fact, they share two very big things: Both are socialist, and both are failed states.

Indeed, both nations are near collapse, suffering from hyperinflation, economic contraction and widespread hunger. What's most alarming about this is that both countries have been, in the recent past, highly successful as capitalist economies. Today they are basket cases, Marxist-inspired dictatorships that were systematically run into the ground by their socialist leaders.

In Zimbabwe's case, just 40 years ago it was the richest and most productive country in Africa. Today, it is an utter disaster. This week, after 93-year-old Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe who has led the country since its independence in 1980 tried to position his wife to be his eventual successor, the military stepped in, removing Mugabe from power and putting him under house arrest. Mugabe's wife has fled the country. "What is clear is that Zimbabwe's economy has collapsed under Robert Mugabe," noted the Sky News website.

Yes, the case against Mugabe's special brand of African socialism is convincing. Food output fell by half during the 1990s as Mugabe drove European farmers from their lands and gave the farms to his supporters who largely lacked any farming experience. Alarmed by the collapse of the economy and soaring inflation, Mugabe simply declared inflation illegal. And he cracked down on anyone who spoke up in opposition to his insane Marxist policies.

Meanwhile, a needless war in the Congo led to massive indebtedness and soaring interest rates and hyperinflation. Inflation rose from roughly 59% in 2000 to a peak of 80 billion percent at the end of 2008. No that's not a misprint: 80,000,000,000%. In addition to freezing prices, the government froze wages. To enforce its edict, it arrested business owners who were caught charging more than the law allowed. The result: GDP fell from $6.78 billion in 2001 to $4.4 billion in 2008, World Bank data show. Following the global financial crisis, Mugabe was forced to back off some of his worst policies, leading to a rebound in the economy in recent years. But Zimbabwe remains one of the poorest and worst run nations on the planet.

Venezuela's socialist path has been slightly different, but the results have been the same. Just like Zimbabwe, Venezuela once thrived with a large middle class and a strong, oil-based economy. But starting in 1999 under socialist military dictator Hugo Chavez, major swathes of the economy were seized and put under government control and ownership. Venezuela's massive oil reserves were likewise taken over by the government. Today, its state-run oil monopoly barely pumps any crude at all. The economy is in a free fall.

"It's defaulted on its sovereign debt, run out of money ... has widespread hunger, mass poverty, and the wreck of its medical system," wrote Monica Showalter, a former IBD writer, in the American Thinker. "The electrical company is bankrupt, the water isn't running, the bridges are falling apart, and now even the Caracas subway seems to be shutting down."

Under first Chavez and, since 2013, his hand-picked successor Nicolas Maduro, the economy's once hardy private sector has been strangled into submission. By piling up massive amounts of debt, the government hid its incompetence and the inevitable economic decline. But now, faced with nearly $200 billion in outstanding loans that it can't pay, Venezuela will soon be cut off from private-sector lending — and its economy will get even worse, if that's possible. "The government, meanwhile, has failed for years to ship in enough food and medicine for its citizens," noted a CNN report. "As a result, Venezuelans are waiting hours in line to buy food and dying in hospitals that lack basic resources."

What's both surprising and disappointing is that there are many prominent Americans, some of them elected officials, who have lauded these governments and the socialism they represent. Even after the recent 100 year anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, which began the world's failed experiment in Marxist-socialism, there are those who maintain socialism could work, given the right conditions.

But the record is very clear: Each year, the Heritage Foundation issues its Index of Economic Freedom — essentially, a sliding-scale that measures the degree of economic freedom vs. socialism across all major countries. Heritage's index correlates very nicely with economic success, wealth and citizens' well-being. So you probably won't be surprised to know that out of 180 ranked nations, Zimbabwe is No. 175 and Venezuela is No. 179. And, like those two, all the other bottom-performing countries are socialist, one-party states.

Based on this, here's a little thought experiment: Suppose there was a company that made airplanes, and every one of the airplanes it ever made, all of them, crashed and burned. Would you fly in one of that company's planes?

Of course not. And that's precisely the case with socialism. Everywhere it's been tried — everywhere— it has brought economic failure, human misery, want, hunger, strife, even mass death. There are no socialist "success stories." None.

So Zimbabwe and Venezuela aren't so different after all. Just two more socialist success stories. And those that have for years lauded Mugabe, Chavez, Maduro and others of their ilk, should hang their heads in shame.

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OTHER COLUMNS
"If a senator drove a car into a river and left a woman there to drown and didn’t notify the police, would that be considered resignation-worthy now? Or are we still not to that point?”
                      -Frank Fleming
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LEFTIST WATCH
The Trump administration marked this week’s 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by declaring a National Day for the Victims of Communism. The New York Times marked the same anniversary in a different way: by running a series of articles extolling the virtues of communism.

Do Trump's liberal critics seem increasingly unhinged? New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, in a column last week headlined “Anniversary of the Apocalypse,” lamented the “terror-struck and vertiginous days” after Trump’s win and the ongoing “metaphysical whiplash” and “hideous interregnum,” which leaves her “poleaxed by grief at the destruction of our civic inheritance.” Professor Henry Giroux of McMaster University frothed that Trump’s “ascendancy in American politics has made visible a culture of cruelty, a contempt for civic literacy, a corrupt mode of governance and a disdain for informed judgment that has been decades in the making.”

Is the Star Spangled Banner Racist?

More social engineering:  GLAAD is pleased that the number of lesbian, gay and transgender characters on U.S. television shows have reached record highs: 329 regular and recurring LGBTQ characters across all broadcast, cable and streaming TV platforms, including the first asexual and non-binary characters.”

Yes, there have been stories about young people turning to socialism. One of the latest polls shows that a majority of millenials would prefer to live under a socialist, fascist or communist system rather than a capitalist one. But things are getting a bit more disturbing now that elections have been happening. Turns out one of the Virginia Democrats elected in last week´s special election. Lee Carter, is a young unreconstructed socialist, and a member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America. That organization has seen a fivefold increase in its membership, from about 6,000 to now 30,000.
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GLOBALONEY
Good news is hard to find at this year’s United Nations climate conference in Bonn, Germany. Diplomats from nearly 200 countries have gathered to review progress made on the “historic” Paris climate accords, signed two years ago. But as the champagne-fueled self-congratulation of Paris recedes into memory, the agreement’s underlying fraud is becoming obvious

This week, thousands of scientists issued a bleak and terrifying "second notice" to mankind about how we will destroy the planet unless we take "urgent" action. If this warning is as reliable as the first notice these scientists issued in 1992, we have nothing to worry about.
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ARTICLES
Ann Coulter:  “Hey, Republicans! Did you enjoy Election Night last week? Get ready for a lot more nights like that as immigration turns every last corner of the country blue. What happened was: Democrats brought in new voters. In 1970, only one out of every 100 Virginians was foreign-born. By 2012, one in nine Virginians was foreign-born…..The foreign-born vote overwhelmingly, by about 80 percent, for Democrats. They always have and they always will -- especially now that our immigration policies aggressively discriminate in favor of the poorest, least-educated, most unskilled people on Earth. They arrive in need of a LOT of government services…..”

No shortage of opinions on Judge Roy Moore.   West Point graduate, Vietnam vet, here’s his family: Moore is the married father of four. He is also a grandfather. His wife, Kayla, has been outspoken on public issues.
“In Defense of Judge Roy Moore”
“The GOP Prepares to Die, as the Alabama Republicans Stick by Judge Roy Moore”
?? “The Roy Moore Mess…….the GOP will be better off if Mr. Moore loses, despite the blow to its Senate majority. Democrats and the media will make Mr. Moore the running mate of every Republican in 2018.”
So far, there has not been much holding of Bill Clinton to account by progressives, despite the change in zeitgeist for sexual predation by the powerful. But the inevitable is happening.

 “Jeff Sessions continues to prove he’s Trump’s biggest mistake…….Jeff Sessions is a man in search of a banana peel. When he can’t find one to step on, he supplies his own. Sessions is not a bad man, but he is a bad attorney general, as he demonstrated again Tuesday….”
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VIDEOS
Video: Vietnam War Veteran Cries on President Trump’s Shoulder During Vietnam Speech.  Moment wasn’t deemed newsworthy by media.
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WISE WORDS
“What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
               -James Madison

 “Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive.”
              -Ayn Rand