Corruption in Portlandia: Anarchy Breaks Out in Portland, With the Mayor’s Blessing
Posted: August 4, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice | Tags: Anarchy, Antifa, Democrats, Far Left, Ice, Immigration, Portland Police, Radical Left, Ted Wheeler 2 Comments
A vicious mob targeted the ICE office and even a food cart. The police followed orders to do nothing.
Andy Ngo reports: Along the trolley tracks behind the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office, a biohazard cleanup crew works under police protection. It finds used needles and buckets of human waste simmering in nearly 100-degree heat. The smell of urine and feces fills the block. For more than five weeks, as many as 200 people had occupied the site to demand ICE’s immediate abolition. They’re gone now, but a community is left reeling. Thirty-eight days of government-sanctioned anarchy will do that.
A mob surrounded ICE’s office in Southwest Portland June 19. They barricaded the exits and blocked the driveway. They sent “guards” to patrol the doors, trapping workers inside. At night they laid on the street, stopping traffic at a critical junction near a hospital. Police stayed away. “At this time I am denying your request for additional resources,” the Portland Police Bureau’s deputy chief, Robert Day, wrote to federal officers pleading for help. Hours later, the remaining ICE workers were finally evacuated by a small federal police team. The facility shut down for more than a week.
Signs called ICE employees “Nazis” and “white supremacists.” Others accused them of running a “concentration camp,” and demanded open borders and prosecution of ICE agents. Along a wall, vandals wrote the names of ICE staff, encouraging others to publish their private information online.
Federal workers were defenseless. An ICE officer, who asked that his name not be published, told me one of his colleagues was trailed in a car and confronted when he went to pick up his daughter from summer camp. Later people showed up at his house. Another had his name and photo plastered on flyers outside his home accusing him of being part of the “Gestapo.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Remember When Obama Did This In Response To Russian Meddling?
Posted: July 19, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Mediasphere, Russia | Tags: Cyber Attack, Cyberwarfare, Democrats, Dmitry Medvedev, media, Obama, Rush Limbaugh Leave a comment
Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh was on a tear on Wednesday over the media’s response to President Trump’s widely criticized summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Limbaugh dedicated one segment of the three-hour show to providing some uncomfortable flashblacks for Trump’s Democratic critics.
Limbaugh led into the discussion by quoting a June 2018 story by Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff titled, “Obama cyber chief confirms ‘stand down’ order against Russian cyberattacks in summer 2016“:
The Obama White House’s chief cyber official testified Wednesday that proposals he was developing to counter Russia’s attack on the U.S. presidential election were put on a ‘back burner’ after he was ordered to ‘stand down’ his efforts in the summer of 2016.
Here’s the video of Obama’s chief cyber official Michael Daniel revealing the “stand down” order in a Senate Intelligence Committee:
“This is the Obama administration,” said Limbaugh. “They knew the Russians were hacking. They knew Russians were engaging in cyber warfare, and the Obama White House chief cyber official testified that he was told to stand down. Read the rest of this entry »
The Left Loses Its Cool
Posted: June 26, 2018 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Health and Social Issues, Politics, Terrorism | Tags: Activism, Bigotry, Democrats, Donald Trump, Global Panic, Marxism, Radical Left, Saul Alinsky, Violence 1 Comment
“When you’re violent and cursing and screaming and blocking me from walking into a movie, there’s something wrong,” said one top GOP official.
In the Donald Trump era, the left is as aggressively confrontational as anyone can remember.
Passers-by gather to take photos in front of the Red Hen Restaurant on June 23, in Lexington, Virginia. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Saturday that she was booted from the Virginia establishment because she works for President Donald Trump. | Daniel LIn/AP Photo
What it means for 2018 — whether it portends a blue wave of populist revolt for Democrats or a red wall of silent majority resistance from Republicans — largely depends on one’s political persuasion. But there’s a bipartisan sense that this election season marks another inflection point in the collapse of civil political discourse.
Few disagree that Democrats are marching, protesting and confronting Republican officials with more intensity during the midterm elections than at any time in decades. The progressive fervor recalls conservative opposition to the previous president in his first midterm, when Democratic members of Congress were left running from disruptive town halls and ended up being crushed at the polls in November.
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet — in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station — you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” implored California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters at a Saturday rally, prompting an immediate conservative backlash on social media.
The intense, in-your-face approach toward public officials is only expected to intensify, fueled by social media and what appears to be an increasingly polarized and angry electorate. Read the rest of this entry »
What’s ‘Genius’ for Obama is Scandal When it Comes to Trump
Posted: March 21, 2018 Filed under: Censorship, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Cambridge Analytica, Democrats, Donald Trump, Facebook, Facebook’s algorithm, journalism, Mark Zuckerberg, media 1 Comment
The scandal involving Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of Facebook data underscores the point.
Ben Shapiro writes:
… In 2012, The Guardian reported that President Obama’s reelection team was “building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”
… Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”
Not so with Trump. As soon as Facebook realized that Cambridge Analytica had pursued a similar strategy, they suspended the firm.
This whole hullaballoo about Facebook isn’t complicated.
1. Trump wins.
2. Democrats/Left declare social media in “crisis,” threaten legislation.
3. Social media heads punish conservatives.— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) March 20, 2018
Again, this isn’t surprising. Since Trump’s election, Democrats — in search of a rationale for their favored candidate’s defeat — have blamed a bevy of social media outlets. Senate Democrats trotted out pathetic Russian-created memes on Facebook, viewed by a handful of human beings, as an excuse for Hillary’s loss; Democrats claimed — without evidence — that “fake news” had swamped Facebook and thus led to Trump’s victory. Democrats have also insisted that Facebook be regulated. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) raged, “You’ve created these platforms, and now they’re being misused, and you have to be the ones to do something about it. Or we will.” Facebook’s former privacy manager called for the government to step into an oversight role regarding Facebook.
[Read the full story here, at TheHill]
In February, Wired magazine ran a cover story specifically dealing with Facebook’s role in the election of 2016, and their subsequent attempts to “fix” the problem. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg even met with Barack Obama, apparently in an attempt to convince Obama that he was serious about stopping the “misuse” of the platform. And in February, Zuckerberg said he wanted to re-jigger the algorithms on his platform to benefit content that Facebook deems “trustworthy, informative, and local.” Wired celebrated: “You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart.” Read the rest of this entry »
Please Don‘t Shut Down The Government, Democrats, Because That Would Be Awful (Not)
Posted: January 21, 2018 Filed under: Humor, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Amnesty, comedy, DACA, Democrats, Fredocons, Shutdown Leave a comment
What a tragedy it would be if Democrats made good on their threat and decided DACA was so important that they must shut down the federal government over it.
Kurt Schlichter writes: What a tragedy it would be if Democrats made good on their threat and decided DACA was so important that they must shut down the federal government over it. Please don’t! Why, I’d be heartbroken if the government did less and a bunch of foreigners didn’t get rewarded for ignoring our laws. I think this is just the right hill for the Democrats to choose to fight to the death on, and I encourage them to do so. Throw us right in that briar patch, because you are smart and savvy and there’s no way a big dummy like Trump could beat you and make you look like fools.
Again.
You remember DACA? It’s an acronym that stands for “That Thing Democrats Want To Use To Fill The Voter Rolls With Foreigners And GOP Donors Want To Use To Get More Serfs To Work For Peanuts While Actual Americans Get Shafted And Called ‘Racist’ If They Dare Complain.” The Democrats desperately want DACA because you Normal people have let them down and voted for your own interests rather than in the way Nancy Pelosi instructed you. Bad, bad electorate! You definitely need to be replaced.
[Read the full story here, at TownHall]
The GOP wants it because its big money donors want it because you actual Americans demand to be treated with respect by your employers and, well, paying Americans what they’re worth is bad for business. And the Senate GOP Sissy Caucus of sanctimonious twits wants it because it gives them a chance to pose and preen and pretend to have the moral high ground over those wicked evil bad bad bad Republicans who want to do what actual Republican voters want done instead of being guided by the eccentric moral compass that Jeff Flake keeps inside himself right next to his head.
The “Schumerhole” controversy arose because Donald Trump indicated that giving Big Amnesty everything it wanted, and in return allowing him to totally alienate his base, was a bad deal. Read the rest of this entry »
How Democracies Panic
Posted: January 21, 2018 Filed under: History, Mediasphere, Think Tank | Tags: Autocracy, Barack Obama, Democracy, Democrats, Global Panic, GOP, Harry Ried, Newt Gingrich, Progressive 1 Comment
We are living in an era of political panic.
Yuval Levin writes: Some of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters in 2016 were motivated to overlook his shortcomings by desperate fear that our system of government was near death and only the most extreme measures could save it. A poll conducted by PRRI and the Atlantic immediately after the election found that more than 60 percent of Trump’s voters believed the 2016 election was “the last chance to stop America’s decline.” As one pro-Trump essayist famously put it, things had gotten so bad that it was time either to “charge the cockpit or you die.”
” … Levitsky and Ziblatt essentially ignore core conservative complaints about the ways in which the left has undermined our constitutional norms and institutions. The progressive celebration of executive unilateralism, of the administrative state, and of a politicized judicial branch are left unmentioned. But even though they do not amount to autocracy, of course, these long-term trends are surely threats to American democracy and of at least the magnitude of President Trump’s tweets.
And yet to say so, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest, would itself amount to an attack on our institutions. Without a hint of irony, they note that one of the ways the Tea Party movement undermined political norms was that it lodged the accusation “that President Obama posed a threat to our democracy.” Later they say, regarding Republican critiques of Obama, that “such extremism encourages politicians to abandon forbearance. If Barack Obama is ‘a threat to the rule of law,’ as Senator Ted Cruz claimed, then it made sense to block his judicial appointments by any means necessary.” Presumably this means that if you write an entire book arguing that Donald Trump threatens to bring the death of democracy, you are similarly justifying resistance to his administration by any means necessary.
Bill Clinton Lost President’s Nuclear Codes, and Nobody Found Out
Posted: January 8, 2018 Filed under: Guns and Gadgets, Mediasphere, War Room, White House | Tags: Bill Clinton, Democrats, Gen. Hugh Shelton, nuclear, Nuclear Codes, Nuclear Football Leave a comment
A military aide carries the “football,” a leather briefcase holding classified nuclear war plans, onto Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base, April 7, 2010. Cliff Owen/AP
The codes needed to launch a nuclear strike are never far from the president’s side — at least they’re not supposed to be.
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The codes needed to launch a US nuclear strike are supposed to be kept close to the president at all times.
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A department within the Defense Department is tasked with overseeing all aspects of the nuclear-launch process, including the codes.
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During Bill Clinton’s presidency, officials from that department discovered the codes had gone missing.
Christopher Woody reports: The process the president has to go through to launch the US’s nuclear weapons isn’t as simple as pressing a button, but the key component of that process — the codes needed to authorize the launch — are never far from the president.
At least they’re never supposed to be.
According to Gen. Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from October 1997 to September 2001, the number of redundancies in the nuclear-launch process “is staggering.” All of steps are “dependent on one vital element without which there can be no launch,” he wrote in his 2010 autobiography, “Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior.”
That element, the president’s authorization codes, is supposed to remain in close proximity to the president at all times, carried by one of five military aides, representing each branch of the military. The codes are on a card called the “biscuit” carried within the “football,” a briefcase that is officially known as the “president’s emergency satchel.”
President Bill Clinton, with Defense Secretary William Cohen, left, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry “Hugh” Shelton, in Washington, DC, September 15, 1998. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
However, around 2000, according to Shelton, a member of the department within the Pentagon that is responsible for all pieces of the nuclear process was dispatched to the White House to physically look at the codes and ensure they were correct — a procedure required to happen every 30 days. (The set of codes was to be replaced entirely every four months.)
That official was told by a presidential aide that President Bill Clinton did have the codes, but was in an important meeting and could not be disturbed.
The aide assured the official that Clinton took the codes seriously and had them close by. The official was dismayed, but he accepted the excuse and left. Read the rest of this entry »
Josh Meyer Gets an Echo Chamber Beat-Down
Posted: December 28, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Foreign Policy, Mediasphere, Terrorism, White House | Tags: Barack Obama, Cassandra, Democrats, DOJ, Drug Trafficking, Echo Chamber, Iran, Iran Deal, Josh Meyer, Politico, propaganda, The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook, Twitter Leave a comment
Politico reporter is punished for raising the curtain on Obama’s Hezbollah policy.
Lee Smith reports: A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose, “The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
Asher helped establish and oversee the project, codenamed Cassandra, that looked into Hezbollah’s wide-range of illicit activities across the globe, including weapons procurement, drug trafficking, and money laundering. Senior Obama officials, according to Asher, ignored the legal and financial instruments that he and others had provided to target a terrorist organization with American blood on its hands and was still plotting against the United States.
In response, a Twitter mob of mid-level bureaucrats and former intelligence officersorchestrated in the usual fashion attacked Asher in tandem with the media echo chamber used to sell the Iran Deal, with former political operatives from the Obama White House supplying the usual talking points to their hatchet-men. Meyer’s “on the record sources have undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” tweeted former Obama speechwriter Tommy Vietor, who has remade himself as a podcast host. Meyer’s “entire piece,” tweeted Obama lieutenant and former CIA officer Ned Price, “is based on pure speculation by these ‘1 or 2 sources’ w undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias.”
The catchphrase, “undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” is an extended replay version of the catchy slogans Team Obama used to market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Opponents and critics of the nuclear deal were “warmongers” beholden to “donors” with “agendas” whose concerns were shaped by their loyalties not to America but rather to the Jewish state. Now, the echo chamber insisted, Meyer’s sources aren’t to be trusted because they were against the Iran deal, or have associated with think tanks that opposed the Iran Deal—which means that they are secret neocon slaves of Israel, of course. Read the rest of this entry »
NYT Only Finds the FBI Texts Newsworthy in that Republicans are ‘Seizing’ On Them
Posted: December 15, 2017 Filed under: Censorship, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: 2016 Presidential Campaign, Bias, Democrats, Department of Justice, DOJ, FBI, GOP Pounce Story, Hillary Clinton, media, New York Times, Peter Strzok Leave a comment
The New York Times has already moved on to the ‘Republicans pounce’ portion of the news cycle.
Becket Adams writes: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation is facing a brewing scandal involving hyper-partisan texts written by his former team members, and the New York Times has already moved on to the “Republicans pounce” portion of the news cycle.
Because that’s often the modus operandi for these sorts of things.
Peter Strzok, who specializes in Russian counterintelligence, was removed from Mueller’s team this July. The decision to take Strzok off the Russia investigation came after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered he had sent and received dozens of anti-Trump texts between August 2015 and 2016 from Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer with whom Strzok was having an affair. Page was also on Mueller’s team, but only briefly. She returned to the FBI before the special counsel was made aware of the texts.
There’s really no getting around it: The texts are extremely partisan.
“I can not believe Donald Trump is likely to be an actual, serious candidate for president,” Page wrote in one note.
Strzok wrote in another note, “God Hillary should win. 100,000,000-0.”
“And maybe you’re meant to stay where you are because you’re meant to protect the country from that menace,” Page wrote in another text. “I can protect our country at many levels, not sure if that helps.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] #NetNeutrality Sign Falls Down and Knocks Democratic Congressman Off Stage
Posted: December 15, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: #NetNeutrality, Congress, Democratic Congressman, Democrats, FCC, Global Panic, Net neutrality, propaganda, South Bronx, video 1 Comment
Bret Stephens: A Century of Progressive Excuses for Communism
Posted: October 28, 2017 Filed under: Education, History, Politics, Russia, Terrorism | Tags: Authoritarianism, Communism, Cuba, Democrats, Dictatorship, DNC, Fascism, Fascist, Genocide, Great Leap Forward, Havana, Joseph Stalin, Killing Fields, Mao, Marxism, Progressive, Progressivism, Red Famine, Stalin, Stalinism, Stalinist, Totalitarianism, Ukraine Leave a comment
People gathered to honor Stalin’s victims at a ceremony in Kiev, Ukraine, last year. Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters
Communism Through Rose-Colored Glasses.
Bret Stephens writes: “In the spring of 1932 desperate officials, anxious for their jobs and even their lives, aware that a new famine might be on its way, began to collect grain wherever and however they could. Mass confiscations occurred all across the U.S.S.R. In Ukraine they took on an almost fanatical intensity.”
I am quoting a few lines from “Red Famine,” Anne Applebaum’s brilliant new history of the deliberate policy of mass starvation inflicted on Ukraine by Joseph Stalin in the early 1930s. An estimated five million or more people perished in just a few years. Walter Duranty, The Times’s correspondent in the Soviet Union, insisted the stories of famine were false. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for reportage the paper later called “completely misleading.”
How many readers, I wonder, are familiar with this history of atrocity and denial, except in a vague way? How many know the name of Lazar Kaganovich, one of Stalin’s principal henchmen in the famine? What about other chapters large and small in the history of Communist horror, from the deportation of the Crimean Tatars to the depredations of Peru’s Shining Path to the Brezhnev-era psychiatric wards that were used to torture and imprison political dissidents?
Archive/Getty Images
Why is it that people who know all about the infamous prison on Robben Island in South Africa have never heard of the prison on Cuba’s Isle of Pines? Why is Marxism still taken seriously on college campuses and in the progressive press? Do the same people who
rightly demand the removal of Confederate statues ever feel even a shiver of inner revulsion at hipsters in Lenin or Mao T-shirts?
These aren’t original questions. But they’re worth asking because so many of today’s progressives remain in a permanent and dangerous state of semi-denial about the legacy of Communism a century after its birth in Russia.
No, they are not true-believing Communists. No, they are not unaware of the toll of the Great Leap Forward or the Killing Fields. No, they are not plotting to undermine democracy. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] White House Policy Advisor Stephen Miller Treats CNN’s Jim Acosta to a Humiliating Defeat
Posted: August 2, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: American Civil Liberties Union, American Immigration Lawyers Association, Democrats, Emma Lazarus, Grover Cleveland, Immigration, Jim Acosta, Left Wing, media, Media bias, New York City, news, Open Borders, Rich Lowry, Statue of Liberty, Stephen Miller, Tom Cotton, United States, White House press corps 1 CommentStephen Miller TKOs Jim Acosta
Rich Lowry writes: When Donald Trump’s policy adviser Stephen Miller stepped to the podium of the White House briefing room on Wednesday to defend a plan for reducing levels of legal immigration, Jim Acosta of CNN was aghast and let everyone know it.
Put aside that Acosta believed it was his role as a reporter to argue one side of a hot-button political issue (this is how journalism works in 2017). The exchange illustrated how advocates of high levels of immigration are often the ones who—despite their self-image as the rational bulwark against runaway populism—rely on an ignorant emotionalism to make their case.
At issue is the bill sponsored by Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia to cut legal immigration by half. The legislation would scale back so-called chain migration—immigrants bringing relatives, who bring more relatives in turn—and institute a merit-based system for green cards based on the ability to speak English, educational attainment and job skills.
Offended by the idea of putting a priority on higher-skilled immigrants, Acosta wanted to know how such a policy would be consistent with the Statue of Liberty. When Miller pointed out that Lady Liberty was conceived as a symbol of … liberty and the famous Emma Lazarus poem added later, Acosta accused him of “national park revisionism”—even though Miller was correct.
Stephen Miller is living rent free in Acosta’s head. pic.twitter.com/WR2AMEmDGW
— Nick Short 🇺🇸 (@PoliticalShort) August 3, 2017
At the dedication of the statue in 1886, President Grover Cleveland declared that the statue’s “stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression until Liberty enlightens the world.” His soaring oration did not include the admonition that so-called comprehensive immigration reform would henceforth be considered the only acceptable immigration policy for the United States.
[Read the full story here, at POLITICO]
Lazarus’ poem was added in a plaque in 1903. The words are not, as Acosta and so many others believe, emblazoned on the statue itself—the plaque is now displayed in an exhibition within the pedestal.
All of this might seem pedantic, but the underlying debate is over the legitimacy of reducing levels of immigration and whether it is appropriate to craft a policy mindful, above anything else, of the national interest. Miller clearly has the best of this argument.
One, making 21st policy in accord with late-19th century poetry makes no sense. We don’t ask, say, whether the naval appropriations bill is in keeping with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship” (“Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great!”)
Two, the cap on refugees in the Cotton-Perdue bill of 50,000 a year is in the ballpark of recent annual refugee numbers. We actually admitted fewer than this in the late-1970s and early-2000s, and the Statue of Liberty still stood … (more)
Source: POLITICO Magazine
During the briefing, Acosta insinuated that the White House wants to allow only immigrants from Great Britain and Australia into the U.S. because they can speak English.
CNN’s Jim Acosta claims victory in briefing beef with Stephen Miller: ‘He couldn’t take that kind of heat’
“I think what you saw unfold in the briefing room is that he [Miller] really just couldn’t take that kind of heat and exploded before our eyes,” Acosta said in an appearance on CNN Wednesday night, hours after the face-off.
Miller spoke to members of the White House press corps about a revised bill from Sens. David Perdue of Georgia and Tom Cotton of Arkansas that would implement a merit-based point system for immigrants applying for legal permanent status. President Trump endorsed the immigration plan during a ceremony at the White House earlier Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »
Debbie Wasserman Schultz Fires IT Staffer AFTER His Arrest
Posted: July 27, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Awan, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrats, Police Chief Matthew Verderosa Leave a comment
Wasserman Schultz kept paying tech expert suspected of stealing House computers.
Alex Daugherty and Amy Sherman report: When a computer expert who worked for congressional Democrats was accused of stealing computers and data systems in February, members of Congress cut him loose within days, leaving Imran Awan with no supporters five months later.
Except for Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The Weston Democrat has not explained in detail why she continued to employ Awan until Tuesday when she fired him — after he was arrested on bank-fraud charges at Dulles International Airport in Virginia attempting to board a flight to Pakistan.
“After details of the investigation were reviewed with us, my office was provided no evidence to indicate that laws had been broken, which over time, raised troubling concerns about due process, fair treatment and potential ethnic and religious profiling. Upon learning of his arrest, he was terminated.”
— Wasserman Schultz, in a statement
And she has not elaborated on what work Awan did for her after he lost access to the House computer network.
[ALSO SEE – ROGER SIMON: Imran Awan Case Needs Special Counsel 100X More than Russiagate]
She declined to answer questions about Awan in Washington on Wednesday, and her spokesman, David Damron, accompanied her to the House floor while instructing a reporter that Wasserman Schultz would not take questions about her former employee.
Wednesday evening, Wasserman Schultz released a statement:
“After details of the investigation were reviewed with us, my office was provided no evidence to indicate that laws had been broken, which over time, raised troubling concerns about due process, fair treatment and potential ethnic and religious profiling,” she said. “Upon learning of his arrest, he was terminated.”
Damron told the Miami Herald that Awan was still working for Wasserman Schultz in an advisory role until Monday, and was fired Tuesday. Wasserman Schultz was one of more than two dozen Democrats in Congress who employed Awan, 37, and four other information-technology staffers accused in February of stealing computer systems.
But months after Awan was fired by everyone else, Wasserman Schultz grilled Capitol Police Chief Matthew Verderosa in May over why computer equipment was confiscated from her office as part of the investigation into Awan even though she was not under investigation. Read the rest of this entry »
The Resistance That Cried Wolf
Posted: July 17, 2017 Filed under: Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, Russia, War Room | Tags: Democratic Party, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Left Wing Activists, Progressives, Radical Left, Ted Kennedy, The Resistance, W. James Antle III, whataboutism Leave a comment
W. James Antle III writes: It’s impossible in some quarters to discuss Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a shady Russian lawyer without being quizzed about similar bad things politicians from the opposing party have done.
What about Ted Kennedy’s secret messages to the Soviets while Ronald Reagan was running for re-election? What about the Ukrainian government trying to help Hillary Clinton? And on and on it goes.
This bit of rhetorical judo has become so common in our politics that it even has a name: “whataboutism.” Naturally, its origins have been traced back to the Russians, if not even further back. The Economist‘s Edward Luce described it as an attempt to “match every Soviet crime with a real or imagined Western one.”
More recently, the tactic has been deployed by diehard supporters of President Trump, as well as by his more removed “anti-anti-Trumpist” backers.
And you know what? Trump’s supporters are not wrong to urge us all to truly examine historical precedents. Because all too often, Trump’s fiercest critics declare his every utterance and action unprecedented without bothering to thoughtfully consider the precedents.
Now, when “whataboutism” is used to defend the indefensible, it is obviously wrong. But not every historical comparison can be dismissed as simple “whataboutism.” And there are good reasons why “What about … ” questions have so frequently been raised under this president. The case against Trump is not simply that he does things that are wrong or bad, but that he is bad in ways that are unprecedented and represent a sharp break from important political norms.
If we are going to chastise Trump for norm violations, shouldn’t we first establish how normal or abnormal his actions in a given area really are? If we are going to say he is guilty of doing the unprecedented, shouldn’t we look to see if there are in fact any precedents? Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Larry Sabato on Implications of Ossoff Defeat: ‘It’s Pretty Depressing’ for Democrats (CNN Staff Very Depressed)
Posted: June 21, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: CNN, Democrats, Georgia, Larry Sabato, media, Ossoff, video Leave a comment
[VIDEO] The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party
Posted: May 22, 2017 Filed under: Education, History, Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank, U.S. News | Tags: Democrat, Democratic Party, Democrats, Prager U, video Leave a comment
Did you know that the Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, and fought against every major civil rights act in U.S. history? Watch as Carol Swain, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, shares the inconvenient history of the Democratic Party.
[VIDEO] The Democratic Agenda: Impeach Donald Trump!
Posted: May 17, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, White House | Tags: Democrats, Donald Trump, Free Beacon, Impeach, Impeachment, media, video Leave a comment
[VIDEO] Freaky Friday Politics: Republicans And Democrats Keep Switching Positions
Posted: May 16, 2017 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Democrats, media, news, Reason (magazine), Reason.tv, Republicans, video 1 Comment
Democrats and Republicans are pivoting on issues faster than a bipolar swing dancer on a merry-go-round. Republicans are now big government protectionists. Democrats support free trade and states’ rights. It’s like the two parties switched bodies! It’s almost as if… they were FREAKY-FRIDAYED!
An Important Announcement From The Former President of the United States
Posted: May 9, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, History, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, White House | Tags: Democrats, FBI, James Comey, journalism, media, Nixonian, Richard Nixon Leave a comment
The Clinton Factor: New York Times Study Suggests That It Was Not Voter Turnout That Determined Election
Posted: May 4, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Democratic Party, Democrats, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, New York Times, Presidential Election 2016, Voter turnout 1 Comment
Hillary Clinton has been speaking publicly about her electoral defeat and offering a long list of reasons for the loss except one: Hillary Clinton herself. A new study by the New York Times however concludes that there was not a failure of Democratic turnout, as often suggested by Clinton supporters spinning the election. Rather, voters simply rejected Clinton herself. While Clinton has offered the perfunctory statement that she takes responsibility for the loss, she has been blaming everyone else except herself from the Russians to the FBI Director to self-hating women. Yesterday, she sat through an interview with Christaine Amanpour at the Women for Women event in New York and proclaimed that, if it weren’t for FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress, and “[i]f the election had been on October 27, I would be your president.” Update: President Donald Trump has fired back at Clinton saying that he…
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[VIDEO] Nancy Pelosi Politicizing Faith at Rally in California
Posted: April 10, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Religion, U.S. News | Tags: California, Democrats, DNC, Free Beacon, Nancy Pelosi, news, Protest, video 1 Comment
[VIDEO] Chuck Schumer Flip-Flopping Compilation
Posted: April 7, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Chuck Schumer, Daily Caller, Democratic Party, Democrats, media, news, video Leave a comment[VIDEO] Krauthammer: On Possible Unmasking, Democrats ‘Are Pretending It Is Not an Issue’
Posted: April 3, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Crime & Corruption, Mediasphere, Politics, Russia | Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Rhodes, Charles Krauthammer, Democrats, Spying, Surveillance, Susan Rice, Unmasking, video 1 CommentCharles Krauthammer argued that the Russian investigation now involves multiple issues, and that it is a partisan maneuver to say that one or another is the only one that matters.
Stephen Miller writes:
…As the facts about who surveilled whom during the transition get sorted out, it is useful to remember why Trump’s team and his supporters have reason to be suspicious, thanks to a long documented history of Obama using shady surveillance tactics on both political opponents and international allies. Rhodes himself knows this history but that doesn’t seem to matter as he once again attempts to make people believe he fell out of the sky and onto Twitter on January 21st, 2017.
To help jog Rhodes’ memory, below are all the documented instances of the Obama administration using and in some cases abusing surveillance.
1. Fox News reporter James Rosen
In 2013 the news broke that Eric Holder’s Justice Department had spied on James Rosen. Obama’s DOJ collected Rosen’s telephone records as well as tracked his movements to and from the State Department from where he reported. Rosen was named as a possible co-conspirator in a Justice Department affidavit. Rosen claims that his parents phone line was also swept up in the collection of his records and DOJ records seem to confirm that. Despite the targeting of Rosen, there were no brave calls to boycott the White House Correspondents Dinner.
2. Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA
CIA officers penetrated a network used to share information by Senate Intel committee members, including Sen. Diane Feinstein, the committee’s Democrat chair. The bombshell New York Times report went on to disclose:
The C.I.A. officials penetrated the computer network when they came to suspect that the committee’s staff had gained unauthorized access to an internal C.I.A. review of the detention program that the spy agency never intended to give to Congress. A C.I.A. lawyer then referred the agency’s suspicions to the Justice Department to determine whether the committee staff broke the law when it obtained that document. The inspector general report said that there was no “factual basis” for this referral, which the Justice Department has declined to investigate, because the lawyer had been provided inaccurate information. The report said that the three information technology officers “demonstrated a lack of candor about their activities” during interviews with the inspector general.
The Obama White House defended CIA director John Brennan’s actions and response. Imagine that.
3. Prism
In 2013, it was revealed how the Obama administration and NSA were facilitating a secret government mass surveillance program called Prism, because the name Orwell would have been too obvious, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »
Analysis: Filibuster Over Gorsuch is Bad for Democrats
Posted: April 3, 2017 Filed under: Law & Justice, Think Tank | Tags: Cloture, Democrats, Neil Gorsuch, Nuclear option, SCOTUS, Supreme Court 1 Comment
WASHINGTON — Debra J. Saunders writes: A favorite truism in Washington these days is: “Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.” It tells the cautionary tale of how Republicans who wanted to run Washington got what they wanted and now must govern.
Here’s another quote for the swamp to consider: “Be careful what you scorn, you may someday become it.”
It has been a favorite pastime of elected Democrats to poke fun at the House Freedom Caucus because the rump is ideologically extreme and frequently self-destructive. Senate Democrats now seem poised to overtake the Freedom Caucus in the race away from moderation and the ability to shoot one’s party in the foot. To wit, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is primed to block the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation of Judge Neil Gorsuch.
I have told you people this a hundred times; underestimate Mitch McConnell at your own peril.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 3, 2017
Gorsuch is the one decision President Donald Trump made and executed flawlessly. In September 2016, Trump released a list of 21 judges from which he pledged to pick a Supreme Court nominee. Gorsuch, 49, was on the list.
Gorsuch has such solid credentials that the American Bar Association unanimously rated him “well qualified” to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court — its highest rating. In other words, Trump did not pick a flame thrower.
George Washington University law school professor Jonathan Turley, who is no Trump fan, argues that Gorsuch is a smart choice because of the Coloradan’s intellect. In USA Today, Turley wrote that he does not expect Gorsuch to change his “deep and well-established jurisprudential views,” which are conservative. “However, I expect he will go wherever his conscience takes him regardless of whether it proves a track to the left or the right.”
As Gorsuch told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings, “It is the role of judges to apply, not alter, the work of the people’s representatives. A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge.”
Confirmed previously
In 2006 the Senate confirmed Gorsuch’s appointment to the Denver-based 10th Circuit Court of Appeals by unanimous consent. Schumer was in the Senate at the time. So how could Schumer tell the Washington Post on Thursday that it is “virtually impossible” to expect him and a majority of the Senate’s 47 other Democrats not to filibuster Gorsuch and deny him a simple up-or-down vote? Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Media, Democrats Praise Gorsuch Confirmation Performance
Posted: March 24, 2017 Filed under: Humor, Law & Justice, Mediasphere | Tags: Democrats, Free Beacon, media, Neil Gorsuch, SCOTUS, Supreme Court Leave a comment
Nope.
Posted: February 19, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Chuck Schumer, Democrats, Time Magazine Leave a comment
[VIDEO] Gutfeld: The Right is Having Fun Again
Posted: February 19, 2017 Filed under: Humor, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Air Supply, Democrats, Fox News, GOP, Greg Gutfeld, media, news, Right Wing, The Greg Gutfeld Show, The Ramones, video Leave a comment
[VIDEO] ‘I Hurt People for a Reason’: Milo Yiannopoulos Spars with Bill Maher
Posted: February 17, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Amy Schumer, Bill Maher, breitbart, Democratic Party (United States), Democrats, Donald Trump, Free speech, Girls (TV series), Halle Berry, Harvard University, Harvey Weinstein, HBO, Jeremy Scahill, Lena Dunham, Liberal, Milo Yiannopoulos, Real Time with Bill Maher, Triggered Leave a commentThe liberal talk show host and conservative Breitbart editor tried to find common ground during an 11-minute discussion, which made national headlines earlier this week after previously scheduled Real Time guest The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill dropped out of the show to protest Yiannopoulos’ booking.
“The Democrats are the party of Lena Dunham. These people are mental, hideous people, and the more that America sees of Lena Dunham, the fewer votes that the Democratic Party is going to get.”
James Hibberd reports: Bill Maher and Milo Yiannopoulos had their controversial showdown on HBO’s Real Time on Friday night, though there were fewer sparks than some had perhaps expected.
“I wrote a bad review of the movie. I said she look like a dude, she does. I said she’s barely literate, she is.”
The liberal talk show host and conservative Breitbart editor tried to find common ground during an 11-minute discussion, which made national headlines earlier this week after previously scheduled Real Time guest The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill dropped out of the show to protest Yiannopoulos’ booking.
“And I simply don’t accept that the star of a Hollywood blockbuster is sitting in a Hollywood mansion crying over mean words on the internet; get over it. Mean words on the internet don’t hurt anyone,”
“The reason [liberals] want to police humor is they can’t control it — because the one thing all authoritarians hate is the sound of laughter,” Yiannopoulos said.
“Nothing annoys people like the truth. Policing humor for racism and sexism is utterly wrongheaded. Not because normally it’s not there, but because that’s how we build bridges and not how we break them.”
“And also because when people laugh they know it’s true,” Maher agreed. “… You are so helped by the fact that liberals always take the bait.”
“I hurt people for a reason. I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll.”
“Nothing annoys people like the truth,” Yiannopoulos concurred. “Policing humor for racism and sexism is utterly wrongheaded. Not because normally it’s not there, but because that’s how we build bridges and not how we break them.”
[Read the full story here, at ew.com]
Yet Yiannopoulos made blatant sexist comments during the interview, criticizing Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman as people who “used to be funny before they contracted feminism.” Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] ‘The Greg Gutfeld Show’ Introduces a New ‘Sponsor’: Victima
Posted: February 12, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Humor, Mediasphere | Tags: Activism, Advertising, Democratic Party (United States), Democrats, drugs, Fox News Channel, Greivance, Identity Politics, Left Wing, Parody, satire, Special Snowflake, The Greg Gutfeld Show, TV Commercial, Twitter, Victim Culture, Victima Leave a comment
‘The Greg Gutfeld Show‘ introduces a new ‘sponsor‘
to learn more about Victima: https://t.co/maZUvxlQLc
and return to @GregGutfeldShow at 5pm!— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) February 12, 2017
Source: The Greg Gutfeld Show [WATCH the video here]
[VIDEO] Two Minutes Show How Much Democrats Love Jeff Sessions
Posted: February 10, 2017 Filed under: Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: Chris Coons, Congress, Democrats, Free Beacon, Jeff Sessions, media, news, Senate, Supercuts, United States Senate, video Leave a comment
TOP FIVE Infuriatingly Ignorant Socialist Quotes From Elizabeth Warren
Posted: February 9, 2017 Filed under: Education, History, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Anti-German sentiment, Communism, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Employment, F.A. Hayek, Federal government of the United States, Free market, Law, Marxism, Milton Friedman, Socialism, Student Loans, Thomas Sowell, United States Leave a comment
Intellectuals and socialism have a long, sordid history
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is a smart cookie, no doubt about it. In fact, she used to vote Republican, so it appears at once she might have had a tiny soft spot for the free market… not that Republicans really believe in a free market either but… forget them, this is about Warren.
Intellectuals and socialism have a long, sordid history. Academics are generally thought to be highly intelligent, so since so many university professors tend to lean left, wouldn’t that mean that socialism is good because smart people back it?
Not so fast.
In “The Intellectuals and Socialism” by F.A. Hayek, the Austrian economist argued that we may be suffering from what’s known as “sample selection bias,” meaning that there are lots of intelligent people who don’t favor socialism, but these people are more likely to find a productive job in the marketplace, rather than join the academy and teach. In other words… in the famous words of polemicist H.L. Mencken: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” And don’t forget that “intellect is not wisdom,” from Thomas Sowell.
Let’s see if Liz Warren has any wisdom to offer in accordance with her intellect.
1. “No one in this country should work full time and still live in poverty.”
Poverty is about more than just how many hours you work. It’s about the decisions you make with the money you earn. Poverty isn’t always a choice, but it isn’t always mandatory either. The US federal government uses poverty thresholds to determine which and how many households have pre-tax income which they claim is insufficient to meet minimal food and basic needs. Really it’s about determining who should receive government assistance, but if you only look at these dollar amounts in American figures, you’re not getting a very good picture of what true poverty is on a global scale. You don’t want to be poor in Europe, trust us.
[Read the full story here, at thelibertarianrepublic.com]
And it’s a complete fallacy that the poor are getting poorer in America. The bottom fifth of U.S. households in 1975 earned $28,000 more in 1991. Not only that, but the poor’s purchasing power has increased. Here in the good old US of A, even poor people have microwaves, smart phones, and a vehicle or two parked in the old dirt road. Some people are poor and happy. Some people aren’t, but here in America, at least poor can be a choice rather than a mandate.
2. “The federal government will make $ 51 billion in profits off student loans. That’s more than wrong. It’s obscene.”
There’s that old bugaboo word there “profit” again. As if making a profit was a bad thing. Libertarians don’t think the government should be in the student loan business at all. Read the rest of this entry »
[VIDEO] Krauthammer: Good for GOP if Warren Leads Democratic Party
Posted: February 8, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, Think Tank | Tags: Charles Krauthammer, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, GOP, media, news, Senator Warren, video 1 Comment
[VIDEO] Dems Once Couldn’t Stop Bashing the Tea Party: Here’s What They’re Saying Today
Posted: February 8, 2017 Filed under: Mediasphere, Politics, U.S. News | Tags: Democrats, Fox News, Free Beacon, news, Supercuts, Tea Party, video Leave a comment
[VIDEO] Ted Cruz vs Bernie Sanders Debate the Future of Obamacare
Posted: February 7, 2017 Filed under: Breaking News, Education, Health and Social Issues, Law & Justice, Mediasphere, Politics | Tags: ACA, Affordable Care Act, Bernie Sanders, Capitalism, CNN, Communism, Debate, Democrats, Free market, GOP, Health Care, Liberty, Marxism, media, Obamacare, Progressivism, Republicans, Rule of Law, Socialism, Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz vs Bernie Sanders Debate, video 1 Comment
[BOOKS] On Howard Stern, Actress Lena Dunham Credits President Trump for Her Weight Loss Success, Debuts New Diet Book
Posted: February 7, 2017 Filed under: Entertainment, Food & Drink, Humor, Mediasphere, Politics, Reading Room, White House | Tags: Activism, Americans, Barstool Sports, Books, Democrats, Donald Trump, Executive order, Girls, Howard Stern, Lena Dunham, Obesity, President of the United States, satire, Television, Weight Loss 1 Comment
Rachel DeSantis reports: Most people turn to diets and exercise to lose extra pounds, but Girls star Lena Dunham is sharing a new weight-loss trick you may not want to try at home.
“Donald Trump became president and I stopped being able to eat food.”
— Actress and diet book author Lena Dunham
Dunham stopped by Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show Monday morning and revealed that she has none other than Donald Trump to thank for her slim figure.
“Everyone’s been asking like, ‘What have you been doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight.’”
“Donald Trump became president and I stopped being able to eat food,” she told Stern after he complimented her look. “Everyone’s been asking like, ‘What have you been doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Try soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness and you, too, will lose weight.’”
The actress, who was on hand to promote the upcoming sixth and final season of Girls, has not been shy about her dislike for the President, and apparently, the feeling is mutual. Read the rest of this entry »
![[VIDEO] TV Asahi’s ‘Life of Paradise’ Features Tono’s Legendary Agriturismo Omori House](https://mottomedia.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/img_8977-2.jpg)
