What You Missed If You Were Watching Mainstream Media

On Saturday, Newsbusters posted an article contrasting the news coverage of the impeachment inquiry of President Trump and the pre-indictment coverage with the media coverage of the impeachment inquiry of President Biden.

The article includes the following Tweet:

That really says it all.

The article notes:

That media outlets in America have been partisan in one way or another is ancient news.  While attention in today’s world has tended to focus on Rupert Murdoch and the rise of conservative media, recall in history that in the 19th and 20th centuries their were serious press Lords with names like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

But there was a distinct difference between biased press outlets then and now. In the old days long gone by, the press may have been biased but it didn’t hesitate to acknowledge that a news event had happened. 

The fact that the USS Maine had blown up in Havana, Cuba in 1898 led to demands for war with Spain, with some opposing the idea. Wikipedia records today that after the news of the Maine’s sinking “The cause of the accident was immediately debated.” Debated it may have been – was it an accident or deliberate sabotage? – but that it had happened was not debated or withheld from Americans by the journals of the day.

The article concludes:

Whatever is going to unfold in this latest impeachment saga – the fourth in American history following impeachment charges in their day against Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump – is at this moment unknown.

But that it is in fact happening to Joe Biden as the fifth president to suffer this fate is both important news and, not to mention, history.

And the fact that five left-leaning networks of today have decided to black out the news has all the finesse of state-run press outlets in a dictatorship.

An informed public is one of the cornerstones of a democratic republic. If you remove that cornerstone, the republic is in danger of collapsing.

Some Words Of Wisdom From A Man Who Is Missed

This was posted on Facebook today. I think it is important.

Before his death Charles Krauthammer wrote the following article and it’s well worth reading today!!
The Enemy Amongst Us!!
By Charles Krauthammer,
March 6,2018
An article from the New York Post:
I do not understand how living in a country with its democracy established over 200 years ago, and now, for the first time in history, suddenly we have one of our former presidents set up a group called “Organizing for Action” (OFA).
OFA is 30,000+ strong and working to disrupt everything that our current president’s administration is trying to do. This organization goes against our Democracy, and it is an operation that will destroy our way of governing. It goes against our Constitution, our laws, and the processes established over 200 years ago. If it is allowed to proceed then we will be living in chaos very much like third world countries are run What good is it to have an established government if it is not going to be respected and allowed to follow our laws?
If you had an army some 30,000 strong and a court system stacked over the decades with judges who would allow you to break the laws, how much damage could you do to a country? We are about to find out in America!
Our ex-president said he was going to stay involved through community organizing and speak out on the issues and that appears to be one post-administration promise he intends to keep. He has moved many of his administration’s top dogs over to Organizing for Action.
OFA is behind the strategic and tactical implementation of the resistance to the Trump Administration that we are seeing across America, and politically active courts are providing the leverage for this revolution.
OFA is dedicated to organizing communities for “progressive” change… Its issues are gun control, socialist healthcare, abortion, sexual equality, climate change, and of course, immigration reform.
OFA members were propped up by the ex-president’s message from the shadows: “Organizing is the building block of everything great we have accomplished Organizers around the country are fighting for change in their communities and OFA is one of the groups on the front lines. Commit to this work in 2017 and beyond.” OFA’s website says it obtained its “digital” assets from the ex-president’s re-election effort and that he inspired the movement. In short, it is the shadow government organization aimed at resisting and tearing down the Constitutional Republic we know as AMERICA.
Paul Sperry, writing for the New York Post, says, “The OFA will fight President Donald Trump at every turn of his presidency and the ex-president will command them from a bunker less than two miles from the White House.” Sperry writes that, “The ex-president is setting up a shadow government to sabotage the Trump administration through a network of non-profits led by OFA, which is growing its war chest (more than $40 million) and has some 250 offices nationwide.
The OFA IRS filings, according to Sperry, indicate that the OFA has 32,525 (and growing) volunteers nationwide. The ex-president and his ‘wife’ will oversee the operation from their home /office in Washington DC.
Think about how this works. For example: Trump issues an immigration executive order; the OFA signals for protests and statements from pro-immigrant groups; the ACLU lawyers file lawsuits in jurisdictions where activist judges obstruct the laws; volunteers are called to protest at airports and Congressional town hall meetings; the leftist media springs to action in support of these activities; the twitter sphere lights up with social media; and violence follows. All of this happens from the ex-president’s signal that he is heartened by the protests.
If Barack Obama did not do enough to destroy this country in the 8 years he was in office, it appears his future plans are to destroy the foundation on which this country has operated on for the last 241 years.
If this does not scare you, then we are in worse trouble than you know.
So, do your part.. You have read it, so at least pass this on so others will know what we are up against. We are losing our country and we are so compliant. We are becoming a “PERFECT TARGET” for our enemy!
Editor’s comments: Krauthammer is about the best and brightest journalist and political analyst we have, in my opinion. His words of warning in the below message should be taken seriously and spread throughout the country so as many of our citizens as possible are made aware of what is happening right under our noses!

Pulling Back The Curtain On Over-The-Top Investigation Tactics

On June 6, Real Clear Investigations posted an article by Paul Sperry about the tactics used by the people working with Robert Mueller in the Mueller Investigation. Now that the investigation is complete, some of the people who were investigated feel free to speak out about the extreme tactics used in dealing with witnesses and suspects in this investigation.

The article first deals with general misbehavior by the Mueller team:

Veteran journalist Art Moore was editing a story on the Trump-Russia probe last October when he heard a knock at the door. He saw a couple of men in suits on the front porch of his suburban Seattle home and thought they were Jehovah’s Witnesses making the rounds. But they weren’t missionaries there to convert him; they were FBI agents there to interrogate him, sent by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The G-men wanted to talk about WikiLeaks, specifically whether the Trump campaign had any connection to the hacktivist group’s release of thousands of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 election.

Art Moore: “They were clearly on a fishing expedition.”

The two FBI agents – cyber-crimes experts Jared Brown and Aleks Kobzanets, the latter of whom had a Russian accent – grilled Moore, an editor for the news site WND.com, for about 90 minutes. Among other things, they asked about former WND correspondent Jerome Corsi and whether he had any advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ dumps of Clinton campaign emails. Corsi, who is friendly with the president, had used Trump confidante Roger Stone as a source during the campaign.

“They were clearly on a fishing expedition,” Moore said, recounting the incident to RealClearInvestigations publicly for the first time.

“They seemed desperate to find something to hang onto the narrative” of Russian collusion, he said.

The article notes that the accounts of the people interviewed are similar:

Their firsthand accounts pull back the curtain on the secret inner workings of the Mueller probe, revealing how the special counsel’s nearly two dozen prosecutors and 40 FBI agents used harshly aggressive tactics to pressure individuals to either cop to crimes or implicate others in felonies involving collusion.

Although they interacted with Mueller’s team at different times and in different places, the witnesses and targets often echoed each other. Almost all decried what they called Mueller’s “scorched earth” methods that affected their physical, mental and financial health. Most said they were forced to retain high-priced Washington lawyers to protect them from falling into “perjury traps” for alleged lying, which became the special counsel’s charge of last resort. In the end, Mueller convicted four Trump associates for this so-called process crime, and investigated an additional five individuals for allegedly making false statements – including former Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Some subjects of investigation said Mueller’s agents and prosecutors tried to pressure them into admitting things to give the appearance of collusion. They demanded to know if they had spoken to anyone with a “Russian accent.” They threatened to jail them “for life” and to drag their wives or girlfriends into the investigation.

Former special prosecutors say the tactics used by Mueller’s team appear excessive.

The article then goes on to tell the stories of people specifically targeted during the investigation. I strongly suggest that you follow the link above to read those stories. Investigations in America should not be handled this way.

The article concludes with a statement by former Pentagon inspector general who worked on the Trump campaign, Joseph Schmitz:

Schmitz said Mueller’s investigation was a costly and terrible waste of time. Even federal law enforcement veterans say the probe was overkill.

“[He] put the country through two years of divisive trauma based on an investigation that he knew was baseless,” former FBI agent and lawyer Mark Wauck said.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Biasello said, he was one of 10 FBI agents selected to serve on Mueller’s team to investigate and research the hijackers assigned to American Airlines Flight 77.

“In this case,” he said, referring to the Trump-Russia probe, “he obviously was corrupted by his personal relationship with [former FBI Director James] Comey and politics. The glaring failure to produce a thread of a case against the president caused him and his office to resort to unethical investigative and prosecutorial methods.”

Ex-Trump campaign official Michael Caputo, who went public earlier, complaining he had to remortgage his house after having to hire expensive Washington lawyers, wants Mueller and his team investigated for “prosecutorial abuses.” “Ruining lives was blood sport for them,” he said.

Moore (veteran journalist Art Moore) agreed: “You look at the lives ruined — Corsi, Michael Flynn and others. That alone is enough to warrant a special investigation.”

A New Face

The Washington Times reported on Thursday that Kathy Kraninger has been confirmed as the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and will serve for the next five years.

The article concludes:

Meanwhile the CFPB is still facing major legal hurdles.

Some federal judges have ruled that by placing so much power — including an independent budget that Congress doesn’t control — in a single director, the CFPB violates the Constitution. But a ruling earlier this year by the full U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the singe-director structure.

Let’s take a look at the inception of the CFPB. The CFPB is the brainchild of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. It was passed as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. The Dodd-Frank Act was Congress’ way of dealing with the housing bubble that caused the recession of 2008. However, the congressional solution was aimed at banks and Wall Street. It made no mention of the role that Congress had played in creating the housing crisis and made no effort to take responsibility for their actions or prevent a repeat of the problem.

In 1995 The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was changed, allowing Fannie Mae to purchase $2 billion of “My Community Mortgage” Loans, pilot vendors to customize affordable products for low and moderate income borrowers. Some of the things done to make the loans more affordable were low (or no) down payments and variable interest rates. Fannie Mae guarantees mortgages and then sells them to banks and investors. Banks were forced to issue sub-prime mortgages or pay large penalties. As more people took out mortgages, the price of houses rose quickly.  In 2005, 91 percent of Fannie Mae loans were variable rate loans. In 2004, 92 percent of Fannie Mae subprime loans were variable rate loans. Interest rates rose, gas prices increased, and people could not pay their mortgages. The subprime market collapsed, and foreclosures increased rapidly. Banks stopped making mortgage loans.

There were efforts made to stop this train. On September 11, 2003, The New York Times reported:

Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.

…a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision  on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry.

The Democrats opposed the reform. Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said that it would mean less affordable housing. Melvin Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, said that it would limit the ability of poor families to get affordable housing.

In 2005, John McCain warned of a coming mortgage collapse. He sponsored S.190 (109th), Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005. The Democrats blocked it. It was again brought up and blocked in 2007.

Opensecrets.org lists campaign contributions to politicians. Fannie Mae gave generously to insure that it would not be regulated. Some Democrats and Fannie Mae executives had ‘sweetheart’ loans from mortgage companies that were heavily involved in sub-prime mortgages.

So where am I going with this? The housing bubble was created by bad legislation. Bad legislation continues. In August 2016, The New York Post reported:

The Obama administration is doing its best to give the nation another mortgage meltdown.

As Paul Sperry recently noted in The Post, Team Obama has pushed mortgage lenders to offer home loans to folks with shaky credit, setting up conditions for another housing-market collapse.

Wasn’t the last one bad enough?

Credit scores of approved borrowers, for example, have been trending down, even as their debt levels have grown.

The Federal Housing Administration and government-sponsored “independent” lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been demanding lower credit standards — just as the feds did starting under President Bill Clinton, in pursuit of the same “affordable housing” goal.

Some borrowers need only put 3 percent down to get a Fannie Mae loan — even if the downpayment is a gift. Fannie also has started up a new subprime lending program.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency recently warned that mortgage underwriting standards have slipped and now reflect “broad trends similar to those experienced from 2005 through 2007, before the most recent financial crisis.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Board (and Dodd-Frank) were not related to the cause of the 2008 recession–the recession was the result of bad laws. Both the CFPB and Dodd-Frank need to go away. They are nothing but a blatant example of government overreach.

Theoretically The Same Rules Should Apply To Everyone

As Robert Mueller begins to wind down his investigation (hopefully), it is not unreasonable to expect some effort by conservative news sources to discredit his work. However, in view of the people he chose to do his investigating and some of the tactics used, some discrediting may be in order.

The Gateway Pundit posted an article today stating the following:

A new report by journalist Paul Sperry says conflicted Robert Mueller withheld evidence from the court that would exonerate President Trump from the latest accusations of Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Mueller withheld information to the court that would exonerate President Trump.
Will Mueller be tossed in prison for lying?
Or do only Trump associates got to jail for lying to the court?

In an article posted at Real Clear Investigations, Paul Sperry reported the following:

Contrary to media speculation that Robert Mueller is closing in on President Trump, the special prosecutor’s plea deal with Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen offers further evidence that the Trump campaign did not collude with Russians during the 2016 election, according to congressional investigators and former prosecutors.

Cohen pleaded guilty last week to making false statements in 2017 to the Senate intelligence committee about the Trump Organization’s failed efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Discussions about the so-called Moscow Project continued five months longer in 2016 than Cohen had initially stated under oath.

The nine-page charging document filed with the plea deal suggests that the special counsel is using the Moscow tower talks to connect Trump to Russia. But congressional investigators with House and Senate committees leading inquiries on the Russia question told RealClearInvestigations that it looks like Mueller withheld from the court details that would exonerate the president. They made this assessment in light of the charging document, known as a statement of “criminal information” (filed in lieu of an indictment when a defendant agrees to plead guilty); a fuller accounting of Cohen’s emails and text messages that Capitol Hill sources have seen; and the still-secret transcripts of closed-door testimony provided by a business associate of Cohen.

The article at Real Clear Investigations concludes:

Though Mueller has now, in his 18-month probe, nabbed several Trump associates for process crimes, such as making false statements, and other felonies, such as tax fraud, no evidence has surfaced in any of the cases indicating that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election.

FBI agents raided Cohen’s office early this spring to seize evidence, and prosecutors have spent the last several months sifting through his emails, texts and phone and travel records, as well as audio recordings he allegedly made of conservations with Trump.

Notably absent from the criminal-information document is any corroboration of the highly inflammatory, though oft-cited allegation made in the so-called Steele dossier, funded by the Clinton campaign, that Cohen visited Prague to clandestinely meet with Kremlin officials in August 2016 to arrange “deniable cash payments to hackers who had worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.”

Cohen has strenuously denied the allegation and offered his passport to show “I have never been to Prague in my life.”

The Mueller investigation is going to go down in history as one of the biggest financial boondoggles in American history. The really sad aspect of this is the unequal justice that is currently being applied. Hopefully that is about to change.

The Cost Of The Wall

One of the recent talking points used against those people who actually want to control our borders is the cost of building a wall. Obviously, Mexico will not directly pay for a wall–they enjoy having people come here illegally and send money back to Mexico. There is no incentive for them to put a stop to that behavior. So how do we pay for the wall?

Paul Sperry posted an article at The New York Post on Saturday that offers one possible solution.

The article reports:

Mexico won’t have to pay for the wall, after all. US taxpayers won’t have to pick up the tab, either. The controversial barrier, rather, will cover its own cost just by closing the border to illegal immigrants who tend to go on the federal dole.

That’s the finding of recent immigration studies showing the $18 billion wall President Trump plans to build along the southern border will pay for itself by curbing the importation of not only crime and drugs, but poverty.

“The wall could pay for itself even if it only modestly reduced illegal crossings and drug smuggling,” Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Post.

Federal data shows that a wall would work. A two-story corrugated metal fence in El Paso, Texas, first erected under the Bush administration has already curtailed illegal border crossings there by more than 89 percent over the five-year period during which it was built.

The problem is not only illegal immigrants–it’s drug smuggling. How much money and how many lives do the illegal drugs coming into America cost?

The article concludes:

While Democrats complain the $18 billion price tag for the Trump wall is too high, the “Dreamers” amnesty bill they want Trump and Republicans to pass in exchange for funding the wall (or ideally in spite of the wall) would cost US taxpayers even more than the construction of the border partition over 10 years.

“The cost of the DREAM Act has been estimated as very large — a $26 billion net cost in the first 10 years,” Camarota noted.

Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that 3 million DREAM Act recipients would receive an estimated $12 billion-plus in ObamaCare subsidies, more than $5.5 billion in Medicaid benefits, $5.5 billion in earned-income and child-tax credits and more than $2 billion in food stamps.

A bipartisan bill incorporating the deal was defeated in the Senate last month by a vote of 54-45. Trump rejected the proposal in favor of a tougher border bill introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), which limits the number of DACA beneficiaries to 1.8 million, curbs family visas, or so-called chain migration, and phases out the diversity visa lottery, while earmarking $25 billion in funding for the wall and other border security.

The problem is not the money–the problem is the spending priorities.

The First Amendment Under Fire

The Center for Security Policy posted an article earlier this month about a court case in Washington, D. C., regarding the book, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America. The book, published by Dave and Chris Gaubatz, is an exposé on CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations).

The article tells the story of the book:

In 2008, Dave Gaubatz, an experienced federal investigator, was hired as an independent contractor to assist with a field research documentary.  As part of this research, Dave Gaubatz trained his son, Chris Gaubatz, to work undercover as an intern with CAIR, which required Chris to wear an audio-video recorder on his clothing to obtain recordings of the routine activities of a CAIR intern.  During this internship, it became clear that both a major fraud occurred within the organization and that CAIR officials were attempting to cover it up.

Subsequently, Dave Gaubatz published a book entitled, Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America, which was an exposé on CAIR.  Shortly after the book was published, CAIR filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., against Dave and Chris Gaubatz.  CAIR then amended its lawsuit to add CSP (Center for Security Policy) and several of its employees, who were involved in the production of the documentary.  CAIR’s lawsuit alleges violations of various federal wiretap and hacking statutes as well as several common law torts, such as breach of fiduciary duty and trespass, among others.

CAIR has requested to extend the discovery period, which had been ongoing for over thirteen months in order to depose Mr. Paul Sperry, David Gaubatz’s co-author of the book, and World Net Daily, which published the book.

The Court denied CAIR’s motion, and will soon set a schedule for motions that could bring this case to a close by ruling in favor of Defendants and exposing CAIR as the center of a Muslim Brotherhood, mafia-like organization.

The thing to learn here is that CAIR (which promotes the introduction of Sharia Law into the American legal system) is not a benign organization. CAIR is well aware that Sharia Law is incompatible with democratic freedom and is working to end the freedom of Americans to speak freely. Under Sharia Law, anything that is unflattering to Islam or Mohammad is considered slander, whether or not it is true. Slander can be punishable by death. This is not something we want to enter America’s legal system.

Enhanced by Zemanta