Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

This Is Disappointing

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When a President of the United States begins his term, he takes the following oath:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Theoretically the idea that he would defend the Constitution should follow him for life. I live in a community with a lot of military retirees. They will tell you that the oath they took when they joined the military has no expiration date. One would think that the Presidential Oath also has no expiration date. Which brings me to today’s news.

On Monday, American Greatness reported the following:

Three of the five former Presidents of the United States have started a new non-governmental organization (NGO) with the explicit purpose of chartering flights to import illegal aliens into the United States.

As reported by Just The News, the NGO Miles4Migrants, founded by former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, is teaming up with two other organizations, American Express Global Business Travel and Welcome.US, to expand upon a previous effort that focused solely on Afghan refugees following the disastrous withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in 2021.

Welcome.US was originally launched for the purpose of bringing in at least 85,000 Afghan refugees, and also has ties to the far-left billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. The new coalition between Welcome.US, Miles4Migrants, and American Express Global Business Travel will seek to raise money to import illegals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Ukraine.

It is very sad that these men, once elected by the American people, have formed a group to undermine the security and stability of the nation they once led. The supporting of illegal immigration is bad enough, but teaming up with George Soros is really beyond the pale. I have always been reluctant to believe in the new world order and the fact that many of our leading politicians support giving up American sovereignty, but stories like this make it hard to deny.

Things The Media Forgot To Share

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On Sunday, The Vigilant Fox at Substack posted a list of ten stories the media forgot to tell us this week.

This is the list:

10 – 97% of scientists don’t agree on ‘climate crisis.’

#9 – EU politician makes bold statements about Donald Trump.

#8 – Tucker Carlson declares, “The whole George Floyd story was a lie.”

#7 – Man gets dragged out of Hillary Clinton rally for asking about Bill Clinton’s trips to Epstein Island.

#6 – Big Pharma doesn’t want you to know that statin drugs are impairing brain function.

#5 – New research finds heart anomalies within 48 hours after the COVID-19 shot.

#4 – Florida Surgeon General drops eye-opening revelations on Biden admin’s booster push.

#3 – Swiss banker calls for arrest of Bill Gates and those responsible for “democide.”

#2 – Whistleblower reveals startling data linking tens of thousands of New Zealand deaths to the COVID jabs.

#1 – Pfizer hid nearly 80% of COVID-19 vaccine trial deaths from regulators in order to qualify for Emergency Use Authorization.

If you are still relying on the mainstream media for your news, some of this may be new to you.

 

There Was Some Interesting Information In The Durham Report

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On Thursday, Breitbart posted an article about some things in the Durham that have slipped under the radar.

The article reports:

Special Counsel John Durham’s highly-anticipated report on the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 revealed that top leaders at the Bureau shut down four criminal investigations into Hillary and Bill Clinton.

In 2014, the FBI investigated a “well-placed” confidential source’s claims that an unnamed foreign government intended to “contribute to Hillary Clinton’s anticipated presidential campaign, as a way to gain influence with Clinton should she win the presidency,” the report said.

The field office investigating these claims “almost immediately” sought a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant, but it remained “in limbo” for approximately four months, primarily due to Clinton’s then-expected presidential campaign.

As stated in Durham’s report:

According to another agent, the application lingered because “everyone was ‘super more careful’” and “scared with the big name [Clinton]” involved. 321 “[T]hey were pretty “tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President.”

Durham’s report also revealed that three separate FBI field offices in Washington, DC; Little Rock, Arkansas; and New York City, New York, opened investigations into “possibly criminal activity involving the Clinton Foundation” less than one year before the November 2016 presidential election.

Historically, people investigating the Clintons have a very high rate of suicide or accidental death.

The article concludes:

Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, who sits on the House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee, told the DailyMail that Durham’s report warrants “additional exposure and review.”

“The Clintons had a team of people at the FBI running interference for them to avoid criminal culpability,” Gaetz told the outlet. “These matters absolutely warrant additional exposure and review.”

Former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said the FBI’s investigations into the Clintons “were shut down by the higher-ups who had an obvious political desire to see Donald Trump lose and Hillary Clinton win.”

“It’s disgusting really. Absolutely these investigations should be revisited,” he told DailyMail. “There’s no reason why Congress can’t have a series of hearings with the field agents who were pursuing the Clinton Foundation, and public interviews with them as well.”

There have been problems with the FBI since J. Edgar Hoover. I wonder if we currently have enough elected officials willing to dig into the dirt and clean up the Bureau.

About That Uni-Party Concept…

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On Thursday, Breitbart posted the following headline:

Bush, Obama, Clinton Team Up with American Express to Fly Migrants into American Communities

The article reports:

A non-governmental organization (NGO) founded by former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama and backed by a litany of multinational corporations is teaming up with American Express to fly migrants into the United States.

The NGO, called Welcome.US, was initially launched to work with President Joe Biden’s administration in resettling some 85,000 Afghans across the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, as Breitbart News reported extensively at the time.

For its Afghan operation, the NGO helped fly close to 20,000 Afghans to American communities funded by millions raised from donations and supported by corporate backers like Walmart, Airbnb, the New York Times, the Business Roundtable, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Starbucks, the Washington Post, Goldman Sachs, Goodwill Industries, Microsoft, and Chobani.

The NGO also has ties to billionaire George Soros, as members of his Open Society Foundation sit on the group’s “National Welcome Council.”

The article concludes:

The NGO’s flights for migrants are meant to complement a program created by President Joe Biden’s administration this year where 360,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua will be admitted to the United States annually via an expansive parole pipeline which has already helped release about a million migrants into American communities from 2021 to 2022.

During a Senate committee hearing this week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) estimated that the Biden administration has welcomed close to five million border crossers and illegal aliens to the United States since taking office in early 2021. This figure includes those released into the U.S. interior, known got-aways, and unknown got-aways.

I will admit, when he was elected, I thought George W. Bush was one of the ‘good guys.’ Needless to say, I was wrong. He is part of the globalist group that wants to erase our borders and our national sovereignty. The combination of Bush, Clinton, and Obama has done serious damage to our nation, and they themselves will never pay a price for the damage they have done. Unfortunately, it will be we average Americans who will suffer the consequences of their actions. We definitely need to clean out the swamp that is Washington in the 2024 election.

Lessons Learned In Life That Apply In Politics

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On Tuesday, The American Thinker posted an article describing what you can learn about an employee by the way he spends his last few days before leaving your employ.

The article notes:

If you work in the business world long enough, you will notice that an employee reveals the most about his own personal work ethic, not when he starts out, not when he’s angling for a bonus or promotion, but at the end, when he gets a new job and gives his two weeks’ notice, or when he starts training his successor as he reaches retirement.

How hard does he work those final weeks? Does he still put the company first, or does he just phone it in? Or does he stuff his briefcase with office supplies, raid the petty cash drawer, and pilfer the prototype cabinet every evening before he goes home?

If he really gives it all he’s got, right up to the last day, then there’s a role model to remember with love.

The same goes for political leadership when it has had its walking papers served on Election Day, or even when that eventuality becomes evident, months in advance.

The polls now are in agreement: barring some earth-shaking shock this autumn, the Democrat party will be out of leadership in the United States House of Representatives and in some state legislatures as well, following the November elections.

Despite what I just quoted, my advice to Republicans is not to count their chickens just yet. There are three plus months for Democrats to pull every dirty trick they can to make sure they hang on to power. Expect anything.

However, the article makes some very good points about the actions of the past Democrat political leadership versus some recent Republican leadership:

As author Barbara Olson revealed in her shocking book, “The Final Days,” much of the Clinton team was so certain they would be carried forward in a Gore administration, many engaged in petty (and some not so petty) acts of sabotage across the executive branch, especially at the White House, between Election Day 2000 and Inauguration Day 2001. That crew spent their final months doing damage.

By contrast, think back on the end of Donald Trump’s first term, as the clock ticked off the final months in 2020-2021.

President Trump’s medical response team had been working on fast-tracking the development and approval of vaccines and treatment arrays for Covid-19 throughout 2020; they didn’t let up, they accelerated their work, right up to the final day, turning over a complete, impressive vaccine and treatment program to the incoming Biden regime.

The article concludes with the actions of the current Congressional leadership:

The Pelosi/Schumer team sees the end of their own gravy train approaching, and they’re gathering every last handful of perks, doling out every last favor to their friends, distributing the largesse that you and I fund to the non-profits and NGOs from whom they will likely seek lucrative jobs the very morning after the voters toss them out on their ungrateful ears in November.

And worst of all, even though this future is all but written in stone, we have to watch it unfold, predictably but unalterably, for another six long, painful months.

There are good reasons why, in the private sector, once you realize you have employees like this in your organization, you have them pack up their desks, and you direct Security to march them out immediately, without postponing the inevitable another day.

Hang on to your hats–unfortunately it’s not over yet.

Something Rarely Mentioned In The Abortion Debate

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On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial about an aspect of abortion in America that is rarely mentioned.

The editorial notes:

Scholarly studies show that black women are far likelier to terminate their pregnancies than whites.

…Bill Clinton’s famous formulation in 1992 was that abortion ought to be “safe, legal and rare.” His goal was to coalesce liberal and moderate Democrats on the issue, but the wording also suggested that even among supporters of Roe v. Wade, abortion was properly viewed as undesirable: the fewer, the better.

In the three decades since, the U.S. abortion rate has in fact declined—in recent years it’s fallen to about half of what it was in the early 1980s—yet significant racial disparities persist. In other contexts, group differences in outcome set off alarms on the political left. The racial gap in test scores has brought calls to eliminate the SAT and other admissions tests. The racial gap in arrest and incarceration rates has brought calls to legalize drugs and reduce resources for law enforcement. Racial differences in wealth and income fuel progressive demands for slavery reparations and a larger welfare state. And so on.

When it comes to abortion, however, left-wing concern seems to stop at making the procedure safe and legal, even while black-white disparities have not only persisted but widened. A 2020 paper by public-health scholar James Studnicki and two co-authors cites data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to note that the black abortion rate is nearly four times higher than the white rate: “Between 2007-2016, the Black rate declined 29% and the White rate declined 33%—meaning that the racial disparity actually increased rather than decreased.” Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in a 2019 abortion case observed that “there are areas of New York City in which black children are more likely to be aborted than they are to be born alive—and are up to eight times more likely to be aborted than white children in the same area.”

The editorial concludes:

You’d think that the activists and media elites who are otherwise obsessed with equity—and who have spent the better part of a decade lecturing the country about the value of black lives—might take more interest in the Roe decision’s contribution to racial inequality. The black poverty rate has been roughly a third higher than the white rate for close to 30 years. Among married blacks, however, poverty has been in the single digits over the same period. In some years, the poverty rate for black married couples has been below the rate of not only blacks as a whole but also whites as a whole. If activists believe that higher black incomes will result in fewer black abortions, why not focus on how to increase black marriage rates?

One problem is that such a conversation requires frank talk about counterproductive attitudes toward marriage and solo parenting in low-income black communities. It requires discussing antisocial behavior and personal responsibility. The Democratic left has fashioned a politics around avoiding those subjects and accusing anyone who broaches them of racism. No issue has a bigger impact on America’s black population than legal abortion, but we’re not supposed to talk about that.

There is a reason Planned Parenthood puts their abortion clinics in poor minority neighborhoods. At some point Americans need to realize that you are not really helping people by making it easy to kill their children.

Why Does The Establishment (Republicans and Democrats) Hate Donald Trump?

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Yesterday Victor Davis Hanson posted an article at American Greatness titled, “Why Do They Hate Him So?” The article analyzes the reasons that President Trump is opposed by both the political left and the establishment right.

The article states:

Again, why the unadulterated hatred? For the small number of NeverTrumpers, of course, Trump’s crudity in speech and crassness in manner nullify his accomplishments: the unattractive messenger has fouled an otherwise tolerable message.

While they recognize in the abstract that the randy JFK, the repugnant LBJ, and the horny Bill Clinton during their White House tenures were far grosser in conduct than has been Donald Trump, they either assume presidential ethics should have evolved or they were not always around to know of past bad behavior first hand, or believe Trump’s crude language is worse than prior presidents’ crude behavior in office.

The article continues:

Had Donald Trump in his first month as president declared that he was a centrist Republican —as many suspicious Never Trumpers predicted that he would, true to past form—and promoted cap-and-trade and solar and wind federal subsidies, tabled pipeline construction and abated federal leasing for gas and oil production, stayed in the Iran nuclear deal and Paris Climate Accord, appointed judges in the tradition of John Paul Stevens and David Souter, praised the “responsible” Palestinian leaders, pursued “comprehensive immigration reform” as a euphemism for blanket amnesties, then Trump would be treated largely as a George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush: hated, of course, but not obsessively so.

More importantly, had Trump just collapsed or stagnated the economy, as predicted by the likes of Paul Krugman and Larry Summers, he would now be roundly denounced, but again not so vilified, given his political utility for the Left in 2020 as a perceived Herbert Hoover-esque scapegoat.

Had Trump kept within the media and cultural sidelines by giving interviews to “60 Minutes,” speaking at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, bringing in a few old Republican hands to run the staff or handle media relations like a David Gergen or Andrew Card, Trump would have been written off as a nice enough dunce.

But Trump did none of that. So, the hatred of the media, the Left, the swamp, and the celebrity industry is predicated more on the successful Trump agenda. He is systematically undoing what Barack Obama wrought, in the manner Obama sought to undo with his eight years the prior eight years of George W. Bush.

But whereas the Obama economy stagnated and his foreign policy was seen by adversaries and rivals as a rare occasion to recalibrate the world order at American’s expense, Trump mostly did not fail—at least not yet. We are currently in an economic boom while most of the world economy abroad is inert. Had the economy just crashed as predicted, the Trump agenda would have been discredited and he would be written off a pitiful fool rather than an existential monster.

Again, hatred arises at what Trump did even more than what he says or how he says it.

The obvious conclusion:

The bipartisan Washington establishment? If an outsider Manhattan wheeler-dealer without military or political experience can at last call an appeased China to account, can avoid a Libyan fiasco, can acknowledge that America is tired of a 18-year slog in Afghanistan when others would not, or believes ISIS thrived as a result of prior arcane restrictive U.S. rules of engagement—and he is proven largely right—then what does that say about the credentialed experts who dreamed up the bipartisan conventional wisdom that with a few more concessions China would eventually become Palo Alto or that Libya would bloom at the heart of the Arab Spring?

The Left detests Trump for a lot of reasons besides winning the 2016 election and aborting the progressive project. But mostly they hate his guts because he is trying and often succeeding to restore a conservative America at a time when his opponents thought that the mere idea was not just impossible but unhinged.

And that is absolutely unforgivable.

Be prepared for a very nasty year before the election in 2020. There are a lot of very unhinged people in politics and in the media.

Going Back To The Origins Of The Problem

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I’ve done a couple of articles recently on the charges against Brett Kavanaugh (here and here), but there is one fact that is continuously overlooked by people reporting the story. On September 4th, Townhall posted an article with the following headline, “Christine Blasey Ford’s Lawyer: Okay Fine, Protecting Abortion Was Part of Why She Accused Kavanaugh.” What? So it’s okay to attempt to ruin a man’s marriage, career, and life in order to protect abortion?! That’s sick.

Then we have another article from Townhall about The New York Times again bringing up those charges in a new attempt to smear Justice Kavanaugh. But there is a problem. The supposed victim has no memory of the incident described by Max Stier who coincidentally represented Bill Clinton when Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.

This is disgusting, and it needs to end. It is time for Justice Kavanaugh to sue the people making the allegations and demand to see the proof of those allegations. The allegations are at least thirty-five years old, and there seems to be no evidence of a pattern. I suspect that certain Democrat operatives would pay serious money for any woman willing to come forward and charge Justice Kavanaugh with improper conduct some time in the past ten years. However, at this point no one who is paying attention would believe the charges. The Democrat slander campaign has backfired.

A Few Notes On A Previous Post

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Yesterday I posted an article about the latest attack on Justice Kavanaugh published in The New York Times. As more information comes out, it becomes even more obvious that this is a political hit job. Below are a few sources and quotes.

From The Daily Caller today:

The Washington Post passed on a thinly sourced, unproven allegation about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before the New York Times published it in a misleading article in Sunday’s paper that has since been corrected.

From The Federalist today:

The New York Times has finally admitted that the premise of its much-hyped story about an alleged incident with United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was false, as the alleged victim says she has no recollection of the incident in question.

The admission undermines what was an already weak story of dubious credibility.

From PJ Media yesterday:

On Saturday, The New York Times ran a story repeating allegations that Brett Kavanaugh was drunk at a party in college and had his genitals thrust into a woman’s face. The allegation has not been confirmed, and friends of the alleged victim say she has no recollection of the events. The man telling the story, Max Stier, represented Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.

The mainstream media used to do investigative reporting. The fact that they no longer investigate allegations against conservatives or Republicans is one of the reasons the alternative media is flourishing. The New York Times story is a prime example of a political hit job disguised as a news article.

As I have previously stated, there should be a penalty for making unsubstantiated allegations against any public figure.

Bringing Justice In The Midst Of A Tangled Web

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On Wednesday, Forbes posted an article about financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Epstein was charged with sex crimes in Florida and avoided trial with a plea deal that seemed very lenient for the charges involved. He was arrested Saturday in New York City and charged with sex trafficking minors. He is expected to appear in court in New York on Monday.

The article reports:

A federal appeals court Wednesday ordered that 167 documents in a lawsuit that alleges famously well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein participated in a sex-trafficking ring should be unsealed—and that many of his powerful friends could be named.

  • In its 27-page decision, the court cited the public’s right to access the case information outweighed the privacy of certain individuals, “including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well‐known Prime Minister, and other world leaders.” 
  • Virginia Guiffre (now Roberts) filed the lawsuit against Ghislane Maxwell, alleging that she had used her as part of a sex trafficking network of underage girls to Epstein and a number of his famous friends, including his lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. Both men denied the accusations.
  • Dershowitz has supported unsealing the documents, according to the Daily Beast.
  • The documents will not be immediately available, as anonymous individuals involved in the case have two weeks to file appeals.
  • The court advised the documents be read carefully. “We therefore urge the media to exercise restraint in covering potentially defamatory allegations, and we caution the public to read such accounts with discernment,” wrote the court in its decision.

In January 2015, The U.K. Daily Mail posted some of the flight logs from the “Lolita Express’ (the nickname of Epstein’s airplane that he used to transport people and underage girls to his private island. Please follow the link to the article to read the names. Because of those names, I would be very surprised if the court documents are actually unsealed. Mr. Epstein had connections in high places, which allowed him to avoid the punishment in Florida that an ordinary person would have received. It will be interesting to see if he has those same connections in New York City.

 

There Is A Difference Between Affectionate and Being Creepy

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The media has written a lot about Joe Biden’s style in the past few days. Today the Associated Press posted an article stating that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has stated that Joe Biden needs to understand that people have personal space that needs to be respected. Yesterday The American Thinker posted an article noting that even after the dawn of the #MeToo movement, Democrats do not seem overly concerned about Joe Biden’s behavior. Remember, this is the party of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton,  etc. Joe Biden’s behavior seems tame. There are numerous pictures showing questionable behavior by Joe Biden, but he gets a pass. There was no actual evidence against Clarence Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh, but they were viciously attacked. The Lt. Governor of Virginia is still in office despite reports of sexual assault that were reported at the time of the incident. There seems to be a bit of a double standard here.

The American Thinker concludes:

My guess — and it is a pure guess, as I have no connections with the Dems’ inner circles — is that Joe Biden is going to see the wisdom of withdrawing from the race, especially since his son Hunter’s connections in Ukraine are at risk.  He’s old and has been making scads of money giving lectures.  He has a choice: retire and reap gratitude, honors, and many more lucrative speaking gigs, or else press forward with his candidacy and become an icon of perversion, with his son facing Trump treatment by the media, an old white male whose apologies for his privilege only further enrage the aggrieved.

I think Joe Biden is probably a very nice man, but I don’t want a man who has no respect for personal space as President. I realize that the media will pretty much leave him alone because he is a Democrat, but there would always be a controversy about his behavior swirling around him.

 

This Could Take Some Very Interesting Turns

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This article is based on two articles posted yesterday–one in The New York Post and one at Fox News.

The New York Post reports:

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into its own possible misconduct in the wrist-slap prosecution of multimillionaire serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

The investigation is being conducted by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, according to MSNBC.

“OPR has now opened an investigation into allegations that Department attorneys may have committed professional misconduct in the manner in which the Epstein criminal matter was resolved,” Assistant Attorney General Stephen E. Boyd said in a Feb. 6 letter to Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.).

“OPR will thoroughly investigate the allegations of misconduct that have been raised and, consistent with its practice, will share its results with you at the conclusion of its investigation as appropriate,” he wrote.

Sasse, a member of the Judiciary Committee, had asked last month for an investigation into Justice’s treatment of Epstein, citing a Miami Herald series on the pervy hedge fund manager’s crimes and the sweetheart deal that let him off the hook.

Senator Sasse has a reputation as someone who opposes President Trump.

Fox News reports:

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has opened an investigation into a generous plea bargain awarded in 2007 by a top Florida prosecutor — who now serves as President Trump’s secretary of labor — to a wealthy, Clinton-connected financier and sex offender accused of abusing underage sex slaves.

…Alexander Acosta negotiated what critics are calling a sweetheart, potentially corrupt plea deal with Jeffrey Epstein when he was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida. The arrangement required Epstein to pay restitution to dozens of victims, but offered a variety of unusual concessions as part of a non-prosecution agreement.

So let’s back up and look at this for a minute. Jeffrey Epstein was (and is) very well connected politically. Bill Clinton is directly involved in this scandal–there are records of him flying to Epstein’s island on Epstein’s plane. However, the Clintons have lost a lot of their political sway in the past two years. It is quite possible that this investigation will snare Bill Clinton, but it will also make President Trump look bad because he appointed Alexander Acosta as Secretary of Labor. For a never-Trumper like Senator Sasse, it’s a win-win situation–the Republicans get Bill Clinton and he gets President Trump.

The matter did come up during Alexander Acosta’s confirmation hearing.

Fox News reports:

In 2017, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine asked Acosta about the plea deal during his confirmation hearings.

“Why cut a non-prosecution deal despite your staff saying you shouldn’t?” Kaine asked.

“That is not accurate,” Acosta, who at the time was dean of Florida International University’s law school, responded. ““It was a broadly-held decision. … The grand jury recommended a single count of solicitation not involving minors. That would have resulted in zero jail time, zero registration as a sexual offender and zero restitution for the victims in this case.”

Instead, Acosta said, he pushed to escalate Epstein’s case to the federal level, even as he recognized that proving all of the allegations against him would be difficult.

“It was highly unusual where a U.S. attorney becomes involved in a matter that has already gone to the grand jury at the state level,” Acosta told senators. “We decided that Mr. Epstein should plead guilty to two years, register as a sexual offender, and concede liability so the victims should get restitution in this matter.”

Asked about keeping the deal confidential, Acosta suggested that he was following common practice.

Jeffrey Epstein’s sentence was a joke. The Department of Justice should investigate it. However, considering some of the bias shown in the recent actions of the Department of Justice, I have no idea what to expect.

When Facts Get In The Way Of A Good Narrative

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Yesterday Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial about the situation on our southern border. I guess you might even call the editorial a fact-check on some of the things we have been told recently by the mainstream media.

The editorial reports:

NPR’s “fact check” — like countless others — dismissed Trump’s claim as false because “illegal border crossings in the most recent fiscal year (ending in September 2018) were actually lower than in either 2016 or 2014.”

What they aren’t telling you is border patrol agents apprehended more than 100,000 people trying to enter the country illegally in just October and November of last year. Or that that number is way up from the same two months the year before.

Nor do they mention that last year, the border patrol apprehended more than half a million people trying to get into the country illegally. And that number, too, is up from the year before.

NPR may call that a fact-check, but it seems to me that it is more like political spin.

The editorial continues:

Trump’s critics certainly don’t bother to mention that those figures only count illegals the border patrol caught. It does not count the ones who eluded border patrol agents and got into the country.

The Department of Homeland Security claims that about 20% of illegal border crossers make it into the country. Other studies, however, say border agents fail to apprehend as much as 50% of illegal crossers.

Even at the lower percentage, that means that 104,000 illegals made it into the country in 2018 alone.

Is that not a crisis at the border?

I strongly suggest that you follow the above link to read the entire editorial. It contains a lot of important information that is not necessarily being reported.

The editorial notes that previous Presidents noted the crisis and promised to fix it:

Here’s another problem with claims that we don’t have a crisis at the border.

Past presidents all treated it like one.

In 1982, for example, President Ronald Reagan said that “The ongoing migration of persons to the United States in violation of our laws is a serious national problem detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

President Bill Clinton said in his 1995 State of the Union address that “All Americans … are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.” That’s why, he said, “our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders.”

President George Bush, in a prime-time Oval Office speech in 2006, declared that securing the U.S. border is a basic responsibility of a sovereign nation. It is also an urgent requirement of our national security.”

Bush also promised to end the practice of catch-and-release “once and for all.” He said that “people will know that they’ll be caught and sent home if they enter our country illegally.” 

President Barack Obama in 2005 declared that “we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked.” And in 2014 even he admitted there was a crisis on the border — one that he did virtually nothing to fix. (Apprehensions at the border last year were almost the same as in 2014.)

The editorial concludes:

Yet despite repeated promises by presidents and Congress for the past three decades, the border remains nearly as porous as ever. And catch-and-release is still alive and well. Is it any wonder so many try to cross the border illegally every month.

Isn’t the failure of leaders to do what they all say is necessary to protect national security interests the very definition of a crisis at the border?

Democrats, it seems, want to label everything a crisis. We have a health care crisis. A clean water crisis. A “food desert” crisis. An infrastructure crisis. A homelessness crisis.

Democrats label just about everything a crisis. Why? Because they want to whip up public support for bigger, more expensive, more intrusive government programs.

Everything, that is, except for the very real, long-standing crisis posed by a porous border that each year lets in tens of thousands of illegals.

The current government shutdown is about border security. Any other discussion is irrelevant spin. The Democrats simply do not want President Trump to have a border wall, and the Republicans do not want to see an end to cheap labor. That is the impasse.

The Economy Under President Trump

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I am not an economist, but I have learned over the years to listen to the people with the best track records on analysis. One of those people is Stephen Moore, who posted an article at The Wall Street Journal yesterday.

The article reports:

Liberals are tripping over themselves to explain why the economy has performed so much better under Donald Trump than it did under Barack Obama. The economy has grown by nearly 4% over the past six months, and the final number for 2018 is expected to come in at between 3% and 3.5%. The U.S. growth rate has doubled since Mr. Obama’s last year in office.

When Mr. Trump was elected, many Democratic pundits predicted an economic and stock-market meltdown. Then the economy started surging and they abruptly changed their tune, arguing that Mr. Trump was simply riding a global growth wave. That narrative was shattered when U.S. growth kept steaming ahead even as global growth—especially in China and Germany—stalled.

The people who predicted an economic crash if President Trump was elected are now saying that the tax cuts have given us a ‘sugar high’, and the market will crash when the sugar wears off. That makes about as much sense as President Obama taking credit for the move toward American energy independence.

The article continues:

The real contradiction in the “sugar high” argument is that it ignores the slow growth of the Obama years, which featured an avalanche of debt spending. Deficits as a share of GDP were 9.8% in 2009, 8.6% in 2010, 8.3% in 2011 and 6.7% in 2012. Where was the sugar high then? Instead of the expected burst in output coming out of the 2008-09 recession, borrowing more than $1 trillion a year for four years yielded the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Even excluding 2009, Mr. Obama’s deficits averaged more than 5% of GDP throughout the rest of his presidency but produced less growth than Mr. Trump has with lower deficits.

This wasn’t what Keynesians expected. Mr. Obama’s economic team predicted 4% growth every year coming out of the recession. Instead the “sugar high” from record peacetime deficits produced measly 2% growth. By 2016 GDP was running about $2 trillion below the trend line of a normal recovery.

The fastest growth rate over the past three decades was recorded in Bill Clinton’s second term, when federal government spending fell from 21.5% to 18% of GDP and deficits disappeared into surpluses. So much for the idea that deficit spending is a stimulant.

Mr. Trump’s fiscal policies have produced more growth than Mr. Obama’s because they were designed to incentivize businesses to invest, hire and produce more here at home. The Obama “stimulus,” by contrast, went for food stamps, unemployment benefits, ObamaCare subsidies, “cash for clunkers” and failed green energy handouts.

The article concludes:

Those pushing the “sugar high” fallacy also don’t realize that the Trump tax cuts aren’t going away soon. The 2017 business tax cuts can’t cause a recession in 2019 or 2020 because they don’t expire until 2025. They aren’t sugar pills.

The biggest threats to the economic boom and financial markets today are a deflationary Federal Reserve and the specter of a global trade war. Solve those problems and the American economy can keep flying high on its own power. And Mr. Trump’s critics will be proved wrong again.

When you decrease taxes and regulations on businesses, we all gain. That combination, if allowed to continue, will bring us continued economic growth.

I’m Grateful We Didn’t Know About This When It Happened

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On Tuesday The Daily Telegraph posted a story about some events in the White House during the Clinton presidency.

The article reports:

For several months during Bill Clinton’s administration, a former top military officer says the White House lost the card with a set of numbers for opening the briefcase containing the codes for a nuclear attack.

Gen Hugh Shelton, who was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, said in his new memoir, “Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior” that “the codes were actually missing for months. That’s a big deal – a gargantuan deal.”

…A similar claim was made by Lt Col Robert Patterson, a former aide, in a book published seven years ago. He was one of the men who carried the briefcase, known as the “football”, and he said that the morning after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke that he made a routine request of the president to present the card so that he could provide an updated version.

“He thought he just placed them upstairs,” Lt Col Patterson recalled.

“We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.”

The article also notes:

Former president Jimmy Carter was rumoured to have once left the “biscuit” in a suit that was sent to the dry cleaners.

Please follow the link above to the article–there are some very interesting quotes at the end. Meanwhile, it seems as if the people concerned about Donald Trump having the nuclear codes might want to check the skeletons in their own closets.

Underneath The Borking

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What is being done to Judge Kavanaugh is a borking. It’s an eleventh-hour attempt to make sure he never sits on the Supreme Court. It is based on a thirty-some-year-old charge that cannot be substantiated or disproved. On an interesting side note, a classmate at one point posted on Facebook that the incident happened and was the talk of the school for days. Unfortunately, the incident evidently happened in the summer when school was not in session. One thing everyone needs to consider is whether or not they want to live in a country where when you are up for a promotion a person can come out of the woodwork and deny you that promotion based on an unsubstantiated claim that you did something inappropriate in high school. The other thing to consider is patterns. Is there a pattern of abuse in Judge Kavanaugh’s life? Is the pattern there that was there with Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and some other public figures? If there is a pattern, this charge needs to be examined more closely. If not, it is time to move on and understand that the charge can be neither proven or disproven and therefore must be dismissed.

Yesterday The New York Post posted an editorial about the circus this nomination process has become.

The editorial states:

It didn’t have to be this way.

Feinstein didn’t have to leak the anonymous accusation to the press, contrary to Ford’s wishes. Or she could have urged Ford to go public early, giving both parties enough time to be heard.

Even now, Feinstein and her colleagues could back a committee hearing, without which Kavan­augh has no realistic opportunity for mounting a defense. Kavan­augh is a judge and a political operator. But he ‘s also a father and husband.

But no. Senate Dems have settled on the ugliest means available, even by the standards of the body that added the verb “Borking” to our political vocabulary. The question is: Why have Republican high-court nominations brought out the worst from the left, going back to the Ronald Reagan era?

The short answer is that liberals fear their major cultural victories of the past half-century are democratically illegitimate. Not a single one was won at the ballot box, going back to the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold decision, which recognized a constitutional right to contraceptives. From abortion to gay marriage, plus a host of less titillating issues, modern liberalism has lived by the Court. And liberals fear their cause will die by the Court.

Unless, that is, they block conservative encroachments into the judiciary by all means necessary. Hence, Borking and Clarence Thomas-ing. And hence, too, the naked slandering of Mitt Romney in the course of the 2012 presidential campaign, to forestall his shifting the Court to the right.

I wish I could say that the way out of this impasse is for the right to double down on the gentle conservatism represented by Romney, the Bush dynasty, and the late John McCain. Perhaps that is the right course in the long term. But for now, it is imperative for the health of American democracy to resist the liberal ruthlessness that is on display in the halls of the Senate.

The verb “to Kavanaugh” must not be permitted to enter our lexicon, lest the step to unfreedom become irrevocable.

This is where we are. The only way out is to confirm Judge Kavanaugh so that this does not happen again. The last-minute sex accusation did not work on Clarence Thomas and it should not work on Brett Kavanaugh. Maybe after two strike outs, the Democrats will stop using this technique.

Questionable At Best

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The October Surprise is a political tactic that has been used in the past to convince the public that a candidate is unfit for office. It is done close enough to the election so that there is not adequate time to research the the accusation before the election. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. Somehow the accusation and the accusers disappear after the election. Rarely does the accused get a chance to redeem his reputation. In the past the tactic has been used in presidential campaigns and Congressional campaigns. A form of it has also been used to attempt to block Supreme Court nominees. It worked on Robert Bork; it failed on Clarence Thomas. I have no idea what is going to happen with Judge Kavanaugh.

There are a few things to consider in the attack on Judge Kavanaugh. Paul Mirengoff at Power Line posted an article today that revealed the following:

It looks like Brett Kavanaugh’s mother, Judge Martha Kavanaugh, ruled against the parents of Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accuses Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Court documents show the losing party in a foreclosure case Martha Kavanaugh heard to be Ralph and Paula Blasey of Potomac, Maryland. They appear to be Christine Blasey Ford’s parents.

The fact that Kavanaugh’s mother ruled against Ford’s parents doesn’t prove Ford is lying about the conduct of the son. Her allegation, coming so many years after the fact and without a description of when or where the event supposedly occurred, is probably not susceptible to being ruled out conclusively. But there now seems to be a motive, beyond partisan politics, for Ford to make up or significantly embellish her story so long after the “fact.”

In any event, the fact that Ford’s story, having been presented so late and with little detail as to time and place, is probably not susceptible to being ruled out means that, if not “ruled in” conclusively, the story should not preclude Kavanaugh’s confirmation. We have statutes of limitations for a reason.

Finally, unless we accept the view that Kavanaugh truly attempted to rape this girl, I don’t believe his conduct provides a basis for rejecting his nomination. Kavanaugh was still a teenager. More than five dozen women who knew him at the time vouch for his behavior. His female law clerks consider him a gentleman and a mentor.

The American Thinker posted an article today detailing some of Ms. Ford’s student reviews. It is very obvious that Ms. Ford easily fits into the category of a radical liberal. The question is whether or not she has any foundational principles that would prevent her from making false accusations.

The article at The American Thinker concludes:

So has Kavanaugh gotten on Ford’s bad side by expressing conservative ideas?  Probably.  And even if her allegations are true, I very much doubt she’d have come forward had Kavanaugh stayed on her good side by being a leftist reprobate in the mold of Slick Willie or Chappaquiddick Ted Kennedy.  For a good example of such situational sexual mores, note that liberal reporter Nina Burleigh actually said in 1998 about B. Clinton, “I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”

As for Kavanaugh, unless it’s shown that he’s like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy and has exhibited a pattern of sexual wrongdoing, there’s nothing to see here.  Ford claims that the 36-year-old alleged incident of sexual misconduct took place in a room with only her and the two boys present.  So while 65 women who knew Kavanaugh in high school have come forward to vouch for his character as a gentleman, Ford’s lone word is the only claim against him.  Heck, there are more testimonials as to Ford’s alleged insanity than there are regarding Kavanaugh’s alleged impropriety.

This is foul play on the part of the anti-Trump crowd. The fact that Jeff Flake is using these accusations as an excuse not to vote Judge Kavanaugh out of committee and let the Senate vote is an indication of where things are. The fact that the Democrats are using this tactic to attempt to stall the nomination also illustrates their pettiness in trying to prevent the President from exercising his Constitutional right to select judges. The actions of Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats involved in this smear campaign are a disgrace to their party and to their country. These are the people who supported Bill Clinton as President when there was current evidence against him. Now they have discovered morality and can’t support a man with a questionable accusation from thirty years ago. That really does not pass the smell test.

The Double Standard Is Alive And Well In The Media

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Newsbusters posted an article yesterday that illustrates that media bias is not anything new.

The article reports:

It’s always big news when a former associate of a President goes on trial, right? Well actually no.

When Bill Clinton’s Whitewater business partners Jim and Susan McDougal and the former Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker were tried (and convicted) for conspiracy and fraud charges the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) evening news programs devoted (on average) just 36 seconds per night (March 3, 1996 – May 29, 1996) to the trial. This despite the fact that the then-sitting President offered video testimony during the court proceedings.   

In contrast, the trial of Donald Trump’s one-time campaign manager Paul Manafort – for charges in a tax fraud case that had nothing to do with President Trump or alleged Russian collusion –  averaged 2 minutes and 18 seconds per night (July 31 – August 21) on those same evening programs. This was at a rate almost 4x higher than network coverage of the 1996 trial. 

…In total ABC, CBS and NBC spent 51 minutes and 28 seconds in 87 days on the trial of Clinton’s business partners.

In contrast, ABC, CBS and NBC almost reached that total (50 minutes, 30 seconds) in just 22 days of coverage of the Manafort trial.

Let’s not forget the lack of reporting on President Obama’s close association with Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, and Bernadette Dorn.

The thing to remember in dealing with the 24/7 coverage of anything detrimental to President Trump is that the heyday of the power of the American press was Watergate–when they drove President Nixon from office. The would love to repeat that performance. For whatever reason, the mainstream press is unaware that attempting to drive a duly-elected President from power does not help the republic.

First They Came For…

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As we approach the mid-term election, there are a number of things to consider. One of the things to look at is the Right-Direction or Wrong Track poll done by Rasmussen. Right now 43 percent of Americans think we are headed in the right direction; 52 percent think we are headed in the wrong direction. In contrast, on October 30, 2016, 30 percent of Americans thought we were headed in the right direction, and 63 percent thought we were headed in the wrong direction. In early January 2016, 28 percent of Americans thought we were headed in the right direction, and 67 percent thought we were headed in the wrong direction. So where am I going with this? As Bill Clinton said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Hopefully most Americans understand that if the Democrats are able to take control of Congress this year, the economic progress made by the Trump administration will end. Impeachment proceedings against President Trump will begin (it won’t matter whether or not there are any valid charges, the trial will begin). Any investigations into Uranium One, spying on political opponents, or politicizing the justice system will also end. That will mean the institution of a two-tiered justice system in America. If you are connected to the right people, you can pretty much get away with anything. That is what a Democrat victory in the mid-terms will bring us. The Democrats fear that the public will begin to realize this and will attempt to shut down conservative news.

I say all that to predict the actions of the political left in the coming two months. The American Thinker posted an article today spotlighting a situation that should concern all of us. It is about the censorship of Alex Jones. I need to say up front that I am not a huge fan of Alex Jones, but whether you like him or not is not the point. The fact that he can be banned from certain areas of the Internet because of his views should give us all pause. As we approach the mid-term elections, I expect to see more of this. A lot of it is already happening. Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It reminds us of some of the abuses by the media that we have seen in recent years. The Internet has ended the liberal monopoly of the media– it was wounded with the advent of popular talk shows, but the Internet allows everyone to do their own research. Expect to have to look a little harder for your favorite conservative news source in the next few months. I believe PragerU is back on Facebook, but I am not sure for how long. That is only the tip of the iceberg.

Irony At Its Best

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There have been a lot of accusations against President Trump for his attitudes about women. There have been charges of sexism, mysogyny, etc. Some of those things may or may not be true, but there are certain facts that indicate President Trump has been more fair to women than his accusers. In 1980 Donald Trump hired Barbara Res as the construction executive on Trump Tower. She was the first woman assigned to oversee a major New York City construction site. Currently there are many women in high-level positions in the Trump administration. He may or may not be a cad, but he is someone who believes in equal opportunities for women.

On Saturday, Townhall posted an article about a recent Inspector General’s Report on gender equality in various federal agencies. The article deals with the report on the Department of Justice. The report covers the period during fiscal years 2011 through 2016. The government’s fiscal year ends on September 30, so the report generally focuses on the Obama administration.

The article lists a number of findings from the review:

• A significant amount of women, especially criminal investigators, had experienced gender discrimination. 33 percent of female ATF agents, 41 percent of female DEA agents, 43 percent of female FBI agents and 51 percent of female U.S. Marshals said they experienced gender discrimination in the last five years.

• All staff perceive that personnel decisions are based more on personal relationships than on merit. Criminal investigators especially felt this to be true.

• One-quarter of female Criminal Investigator survey respondents believed that men were favored for career enhancing opportunities, such as detail assignments, special assignments, and training opportunities.

• Female focus group participants and interviewees, especially those at headquarters and the Washington, D.C. sites said that they believed they had to work harder than men to be recognized by supervisors in their performance evaluation or to receive a performance bonus.

• Both men and women said female Criminal Investigators often delayed having children or did not have children at all because having children could have affected both their promotion potential and the type of unit to which they would be assigned.

• Across the board, all employees didn’t trust the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) process. Many who felt they were discriminated against would not report it out of fear of it negatively impacting their career.

In 2014 McClatchy posted the following:

President Barack Obama calls it “wrong” and an “embarrassment” that women make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes, saying women deserve equal pay for equal work.

“At a time when women make up about half of the workforce, but still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns – we’ve got to finish the job and give women the tools they need to fight for equal pay,” Obama said Wednesday in Maryland…

…But a McClatchy review of White House salaries shows that when the same calculations that produced the 77 cents is applied to the White House, the average female pay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is less than the average male pay. When counted the same way that produced the 77-cent figure, the analysis found, women overall at the White House make 91 cents for every dollar men make. That’s an average salary of $84,082 for men and $76,516 for women.

After all these words, my point is simple–the American public has been sold a bunch of garbage about President Obama and President Trump. President Obama has been praised as a supporter of women while paying them less than men, and President Trump as been accused of not treating women well while allowing them equal job opportunities. Actually the only thing this is actually related to is the stand on abortion taken by each man. In the liberal world, a man who supports unlimited abortion is given pretty much free rein (Bill Clinton should have been the poster child for the ‘me too’ movement, but he wasn’t because he supported abortion). President Trump has shown that he values the lives of the unborn and therefore must be demonized by the media. Once you understand that reasoning, you can understand why the media ignores so much of the hypocrisy of the political left.

This Isn’t Really A Surprise

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The only surprise in what I am about to share is that it took so long to find out the truth.  As people begin to read through the Inspector General’s Report recently released, it is becoming more obvious that there were a lot of things going on behind the scenes that were simply wrong. BizPac Review posted an article today about one revelation in the Inspector General’s report.

The article reports:

Stunning revelations from the IG report of DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz (an Obama appointee) suggests that the 2016 tarmac meeting between then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton was coordinated — contradicting their claims that the meeting was accidental and coincidental.

In 2016, Lynch — the U.S. attorney general under Barack Obama — secretly met for 30 minutes with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in Arizona. At the time, then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was being investigated by the FBI over her 30,000 deleted emails and her destroyed government-issued phones, which she and her team smashed with hammers.

…Page 203 of the IG report suggests that Bill Clinton’s Secret Service detail had contacted Lynch’s FBI detail to set up the meeting when their planes were on the tarmac:

“The OPA (Office of Public Affairs) Supervisor said that he later learned that former President Clinton’s Secret Service detail had contacted Lynch’s FBI security detail to let them know that the former President wanted to meet with Lynch. Although Lynch’s staff was supposed to receive notice of such 204 requests, witnesses told us that they were not informed of the request from former President Clinton.”

The meeting was planned, and an effort was made to limit the number of people who were aware of or present at the meeting.

The article concludes:

Less than a week after the Lynch-Clinton tarmac meeting, then-FBI Director James Comey (whose boss was Loretta Lynch) announced that the FBI would not recommend an indictment against Hillary. Coincidence?

It Is Going To Be An Interesting Summer

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Last Friday, the following was filed in District Of Columbia District Court:

Before you get too excited about this, Judge Paul L. Friedman was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

The Daily Caller posted an article about the lawsuit today.

The article reports:

Among the many charges that appear in the at times almost incoherent filing is the charge that a criminal syndicate involving the Clintons, David Brock, Donna Brazile, and George Soros murdered Seth Rich.

Byrne is reportedly seeking damages of $1 billion, and refused to provide an address because he feared assassination.

Byrne threatened to file suit against several of the defendants in 2016 following the release of his tell-all book, “Crisis of Character.”

Media Matters and David Brock had referred to Byrne at the time as a “smear merchant,” and he responded during an interview with Breitbart’s Alex Marlow, “Everything in the book is true. I want to set the record straight. And since I can’t get on mainstream media to set the record straight, I’m going to have to do it in court.”

As much as I would love to see this lawsuit be decided in an unbiased manner, I am not optimistic. This is, essentially, a lawsuit against the ‘deep state.’ RICO charges are appropriate, but I can’t imagine the judge being unbiased (because he is a Clinton-appointee). At any rate, it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Sometimes The Double Standard Is Very Puzzling

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The New York Post posted an article today about Bill Clinton. Although he is doing a lot of speaking at various political and charitable events, he is keeping a rather low profile. No so with his wife. According to Hot Air, Hillary Clinton recently tweeted:

If I were a Democrat, that would strike fear into my heart. According to an April 19th article at BizPacReview, Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating is at 27 percent. The article reports that this is a new low for Clinton who dropped in popularity from 30 percent in August 2017. Just as a point of reference, President Trump’s rating was at 35 percent. I suspect it may have gone up in the past month.

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton seems to be relatively popular with the American people despite his past actions.

The New York Post reports:

As recently as 2016, the very liberal Joy Behar was dismissing the women who slept with Clinton as “tramps” on “The View.” Not that much has changed since the period in the ’90s when Maureen Dowd dismissed Lewsinky as being “nutty and slutty” and “a ditsy, predatory White House intern who might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon.”

A Rasmussen Reports poll taken in November 2017, a month after the #MeToo movement began, found that 59 percent of people believe the accusations against Bill Clinton. But you wouldn’t know it from the way he’s being treated.

Somehow Bill Clinton has escaped the wrath of the #metoo movement despite the believable accusations against him.

The article at The New York Post concludes:

It’s not hard to find worse men than Bill Clinton of course (Harvey Weinstein). It’s not even hard to find worse men named Bill (here’s looking at you, Cosby). But there’s a big difference between “not being the worst man in the world” and “being a guest of honor in an age where women are speaking out against assaulters like you.”

If Democrats want to hold Donald Trump accountable for his alleged misconduct, and we should, then we have to hold Democrats accountable, as well. Sexual harassment isn’t an important issue because it serves as leverage against another party. It’s important because it destroys women’s lives and careers. At least in Lewsinky’s case, we know the fallout from the affair rendered her suicidal. But Clinton seemed to go blithely on, largely beloved in spite of the way he abused his power.

Maybe this is the year we say enough. After 20 years, it’s time for Bill to go and take a long walk in the Chappaqua woods.

We should be so lucky.

Changing The Welfare Paradigm

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On Tuesday The New York Post posted an article about President Trump’s Executive Order on welfare reform. The article notes that America currently has a very low unemployment rate and a very high number of people on welfare. That really does not seem to compute.

Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial today on the subject.

The editorial reminds us of some of the history of welfare reform:

Although it was President Clinton who signed that sweeping welfare reform bill into law, plenty of Democrats were furious. Marion Wright Edelman, then head of the Children’s Defense Fund, called it a “moment of shame.” Illinois Sen. Paul Simon declared that “this isn’t welfare reform, it’s welfare denial.” Even now, many Democrats want to get rid of it.

And that’s despite its proven track record of success.

“In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 45%. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts.”

That was how Bill Clinton himself described the reform’s success a decade after he signed it into law.

The reforms that President Clinton put into effect were greatly loosened under President Obama, and welfare rolls soared. Part of that was due to the sluggish economy under President Obama, and part of that was due to the changes in the reforms.

The editorial concludes:

In Trump’s executive order, he makes the compelling case for expanding work requirements:

“Many of the programs designed to help families have instead delayed economic independence, perpetuated poverty, and weakened family bonds.

“While bipartisan welfare reform enacted in 1996 was a step toward eliminating the economic stagnation and social harm that can result from long-term government dependence, the welfare system still traps many recipients, especially children, in poverty and is in need of further reform and modernization in order to increase self-sufficiency, well-being, and economic mobility.”

Well said. But to make that happen, Republicans need to keep hammering away at this theme until it sinks into the public consciousness. And they need to turn around the metric used to define success to one that counts declining enrollment as a victory.

That’s the only way we will ever be able to turn the tide on what seems like a relentless and unstoppable expansion of the welfare state.

Senator Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan wrote a report in 1965 predicting that the War on Poverty would destroy the African-American family. He was right. The welfare programs under the War on Poverty have also destroyed the white family. It is time that generational welfare becomes a bad memory of the past–not a present problem. Hopefully, President Trump has just taken the first step in that direction.,

The Names That Keep Reappearing

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Yesterday Front Page Magazine posted a story related to the Fox News “Scandalous” television series. I guess I really wasn’t paying a lot of attention during the Clinton years–I didn’t realize that in some cases, the same names keep appearing in matters related to the Clintons.

The article includes a number of names we have heard lately:

Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal has recently emerged in the DNC dossier affair. Republican James Rogan, a hawk for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, has given way to Democrat Adam Schiff, whose evidence of Russian collusion has an existential problem. Other links emerged in the 140 pardons Bill Clinton issued on his last day in office.

President Clinton pardoned his brother Roger, busted for distributing cocaine, and Whitewater crony Susan McDougal. He pardoned former HUD boss Henry Cisneros and Patty Hearst who became a partisan of the murderous Symbionese Liberation Army. Clinton also pardoned fugitive financier Mark Rich, but this was not the president’s most controversial last-day reprieve.

John Deutch had been CIA director in 1995 and 1996 and the White House said he was pardoned “for those offenses described in the information dated January 19, 2001.” The precise nature of the DOJ charges remained unclear but, as it emerged, the man in charge of the nation’s secrets had mishandled classified information.

According to ABC News, Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder was unaware of the pending presidential pardon when “Attorney General Janet Reno gave the approval for investigators to make a deal with Deutch.” The former CIA boss had been “under investigation for sloppy handling of secret files.”

…As Hans A. von Spakovsky recalled in National Review, the IG did not let Deutch pick and choose what information he was going to hand over. Instead they sent in a team to grab everything and found that Deutch “continuously processed” classified data “for unclassified use.” This took place on computers that were “vulnerable to attacks by unauthorized persons,” and the information included “Top Secret communications intelligence,” and information on the “National Reconnaissance Program.”

That was a violation of 18 U.S.C. §793, which makes it a criminal offense “through gross negligence” to allow classified information “to be removed from its proper place of custody.”

As von Spakovsky notes, “no intentional misconduct is required; just gross negligence,” and offenders can be fined or imprisoned for violations.

The article continues:

Deutch duly returned to his teaching post at MIT and more than two years later was stripped of his security clearances. What classified information might have been stolen by hostile actors remained uncertain, but with the pardon from Clinton the grossly negligent Deutch would not be taking a fall. This all proved instructive to former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

She kept government information, including classified materials, on a private, unsecured server in her home, and POTUS 44 emailed her through that unsecured network. Hillary Clinton said it was all about Chelsea’s wedding, yoga classes, and no classified material was involved. When government investigators wanted to have a look, Clinton promptly destroyed more than 30,000 emails, bleached the server clean, and smashed up electronic devices.

Trump-hating James Strzok of the FBI changed “gross negligence” to “extremely careless” and FBI boss James Comey said no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges. In similar style, as a deputy attorney general, Comey cut a sweetheart deal with former Clinton national security advisor Sandy Berger, who stole and destroyed classified documents.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch told Comey to call whole thing a “matter” and Hillary Clinton paid no penalty. After she lost the 2016 race, her FBI-DOJ team set about framing the winner, Donald Trump, on the charge that he colluded with Russia to steal the election.

I had forgotten that James Comey had made the deal with Sandy Berger after Berger was caught with classified documents in his socks. This was attributed to sloppiness on Berger’s part!

An article at the Conservative Base posted on November 16, 2016, states the following:

Several law-enforcement officers believe the documents stolen told the true story about the LAX plot, but the Clintons sent their henchman Sandy Berger to get rid of the evidence.

“The Clintons have a history of playing by their own rules which means committing acts that would get anyone else — including Berger — convicted of malfeasance,” said former police detective sergeant Walter Fendner. “Berger fell on his sword for the Clintons and he was rewarded with probation and a slap on the wrist,” Fendner added.

As luck would have it, before the FBI or Justice Department prosecutors could talk to him, Sandy Berger died on Dec. 1, 2015. The cause of death was listed as cancer. He was 70-years-old, said a statement by his consulting firm, the Albright Stonebridge Group. 

The article at the Conservative Base includes evidence that Sandy Berger had been acting as an advisor to Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State.

The article at The Conservative Base reports:

His (Sandy Berger) email correspondence with Clinton was stored on her private server and it’s yet to be reported whether or not he — a convicted thief of classified documents — had access to emails containing classified intelligence.

The release of the Clinton/Berger email was part of a batch of email messages released by the State Department.

Again, James Comey was the person who made the deal with Sandy Berger–Berger was sentenced to community service and probation and fined $50,000 for illegally removing highly classified documents from the National Archives and intentionally destroying some of them.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t even charged for mishandling classified information. I guess she learned from the mistakes of those who came before her.