Monthly Archives: September 2019

Deutschland unter alles

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Let’s add one more strand to our understanding of how the world is being shaped at the moment, this one on Merkel’s Germany. Here’s how it starts.

The best profile of Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in the English language is this one.  This is no doubt she was very sympathetic to the Soviets growing up. Her parents moved from West Germany to East Germany in 1954, soon after she was born. She literally got her communism with her mother’s milk. At 1970 at the age of 16 she won the national prize in East Germany for her Russian-speaking ability. At Leipzig University she devoted a year to studying Marxist-Leninist thought. She attended a university in Leningrad for a year in 1977, away from Stasi and available to the KGB without the Stasi being aware. Coincidentally, Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer in Leningrad in 1977.

From there it gets only more incredible but remains plausible to the end, to put it mildly. Only the relatively optimistic tone in the conclusion seems misplaced. I suppose you have to hope.

Why isn’t there more outrage?

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Comments from Trump strikes back, a post at Powerline re Biden and Son. What does get me down is that there is not more disgust in America such that not only will PDT win the election, but the Republicans will also sweep the House and pick up another half dozen in the Senate. If the Dems represent somewhere near the middle of where sentiment now is, the West is truly lost and we will all in good time end up like China.

As for our diseased and addled media, anyone at the ABC, to take just one example, who thinks there is a case for a Democrat candidate to win against PDT is a terrifying example of political idiocy, with zero morality and less judgement. I can see what they do not want; what is invisible is what they would like to replace Donald Trump with, and what policies they would like to see put in place instead. If you are interested in how empty the rhetoric of the left is, read the comments following absolutely any PDT tweet. There is never anything but hate and a near-insanity level of anger. Common sense and policy coherence are inevitably absent. Here, however, are a few comments from our side.

FROM: PRESIDENT DONALD J TRUMP
TO: THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
SUBJECT: IMPEACHMENT

MY FELLOW AMERICANS:

I WANT TO BE IMPEACHED!

For the last several years, our nation has been subjected to an attack on our constitutional order.
Our institutions have been weaponized against the political opposition. This political rot has been facilitated by a complicit news media, our universities, Hollywood, and multinational corporations whose globalist orientations have brought our energy, logging, mining, and manufacturing sectors to their knees.

The previous administration has corrupted our IRS, DOJ, FBI, CIA, and elements of the State Dept.

In the interest of transparency, it is time that these efforts to destroy a constitutionally elected administration, to nullify the votes of 63-million American citizens be confronted in an open forum.

We have the evidence in our possession…documents, emails, texts; names, dates, places. The American people will be shocked to discover that a political coup was conceived in the Obama oval office enlisting members of our national security apparatus, the Hillary Clinton campaign, DNC, and members of our legislative branch.

I am fully prepared to undertake the risks of this impeachment process. I love this country and its people.
It is time for the American people to learn the truth, to render their verdict…and for those responsible for this abomination to face justice.

LET’S ROLL.
MAY GOD BLESS AMERICA.

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DOH! Did You Know There’s a Treaty Between the USA & Ukraine Regarding Cooperation For Prosecuting Crimes?
Posted on September 25, 2019 by DCWhispers
My goodness. It was passed when Joe Biden was a member of the U.S. Senate and then signed by then-President Bill Clinton.

A comprehensive treaty agreement that allows cooperation between both the United States and Ukraine in the investigation and prosecution of crimes.

It appears President Trump was following the law to the letter when it comes to unearthing the long-standing corruption that has swirled in Ukraine and allegedly involves powerful Democrats like Joe Biden and others.

“To the Senate of the United States: With a view to receiving the advice and consent of the Senate to ratification, I transmit herewith the Treaty Between the United States of America and Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters with Annex, signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998. I transmit also, for the information of the Senate, an exchange of notes which was signed on September 30, 1999, which provides for its provisional application, as well as the report of the Department of State with respect to the Treaty. The Treaty is one of a series of modern mutual legal assistance treaties being negotiated by the United States in order to counter criminal activities more effectively. The Treaty should be an effective tool to assist in the prosecution of a wide variety of crimes, including drug trafficking offenses. The Treaty is self-executing. It provides for a broad range of cooperation in criminal matters. Mutual assistance available under the Treaty includes: taking of testimony or statements of persons; providing documents, records, and articles of evidence; serving documents; locating or identifying persons; transferring persons in custody for testimony or other purposes; executing requests for searches and seizures; assisting in proceedings related to restraint, confiscation, forfeiture of assets, restitution, and collection of fines; and any other form of assistance not prohibited by the laws of the requested state. I recommend that the Senate give early and favorable consideration to the Treaty and give its advice and consent to ratification.”

WILLIAM J. CLINTON.

___

Trump hater John Kasich was interviewed on CNN this morning.

When asked if President Trump was guilty of crimes due to the transcript, Kasich said no. When asked if the Muller Report justified impeachment, again Kasich said no. Finally, Kasich added that no one in Ohio is talking about this nonsense, and they could care less what the Democrats are doing.

People who live in the DC bubble and think there is a big there there do not realize just how fed up with the little games lawyers and Deep Staters are playing not only with the Constitution, but with 330 million peoples lives.

I’ve been hoping the House impeaches President Trump for over a year now. The backlash will be so strong from the average American that is prospering for the first time in 30 years that those in the Republican party that back the President will win. That will assure at least 5 more seats in the Senate in 2020, and the House will have a comfortable R margin as well.

I’m sorry to say this – but the average American thinks that Democrats are psychotic, hateful, deranged, anti-American sleazeballs and have proven it constantly over the past 3 years. We are sick of being told what to say, what to think, when to walk, which way to turn, and asking for permission to breathe.

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I am a baseball fan. One truism of replacing a pitcher who maybe isn’t doing great, is that you have to have someone better to put in. I was a Democrat my entire adult life until 9/11. In 2016, I cared about 4 main issues: First Amendment rights; Second Amendment rights; a secure border; and support for Israel. Hillary was 0-4. Trump was 4-4.

Where do YOU stand on those issues? And, what current candidate do you see that supports my four concerns? In answer to YOUR question, there is almost nothing DJT could do to alienate me as long as he stays firm on those four issues. When every single Democrat candidate raised xer hands for FREE health care for illegals, there is no alternative but DJT. Plus, oh yeah, also I love the guy!

And from The Babylon Bee.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Joe Biden has apologized for his recent seemingly racist comment, where he said that poor kids are sometimes as smart as white kids.

“Everyone who knows me knows I’m not a racist,” said Biden. “I even have a black friend, Barry. Smart, articulate guy.”

Aides were then seen signaling him to stop talking, but Biden pushed on.

“Rest assured,” Biden said. “I like all races, even the bad ones.”

Aides threw up their hands in exasperation.

“What? What’d I say?”

Media immediately jumped all over Biden’s comments, responding to his horrifying gaffe by calling on President Trump to resign.

 

The Crowdstrike connection

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From The Other McCain.

A key point in the transcript of the call was that President Trump was urging the Ukrainian president to investigate the role played by the firm Crowdstrike in the 2016 election campaign:

After the Department of Justice released the call transcript between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Wednesday morning, officials also reconfirmed U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into Ukraine’s role and potential interference in the 2016 presidential election.
“A Department of Justice team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. While the Attorney General has yet to contact Ukraine in connection with this investigation, certain Ukrainians who are not members of the government have volunteered information to Mr. Durham, which he is evaluating,” DOJ Spokesperson Kerri Kopek released in a statement.
According to the transcript, President Trump was concerned about Ukraine’s role and asked Zelensky to get to the bottom of what happened.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people…The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation,” Trump said on the call. “I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”

Crowdstrike is the company Democrats brought in to investigate the hacking of their servers, and the company has a Ukrainian connection. John Solomon reported in The Hill four months ago:

In its most detailed account yet, the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington says a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider during the 2016 election solicited dirt on Donald Trump’s campaign chairman and even tried to enlist the country’s president to help.
In written answers to questions, Ambassador Valeriy Chaly’s office says DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa sought information from the Ukrainian government on Paul Manafort’s dealings inside the country in hopes of forcing the issue before Congress.
Chalupa later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign, the ambassador said.
Chaly says that, at the time of the contacts in 2016, the embassy knew Chalupa primarily as a Ukrainian American activist and learned only later of her ties to the DNC. He says the embassy considered her requests an inappropriate solicitation of interference in the U.S. election.

Now, from the Observer in January 2017:

In addition to the Chalupas [Alexandra and her sister Andrea], the co-founder and CTO of Crowdstrike, the cyber security firm that the DNC hired to investigate the alleged hacks, Dmitri Alperovitch, also serves as a senior fellow to the Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, which is an openly anti-Russian organization partly . The Atlantic Council is funded by Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, who also happens to be one of the most prolific donors to the Clinton Foundation. The DNC denied multiple requests from the FBI to access their servers, effectively forcing the FBI to rely on CrowdStrike’s assessment of the hacks.

 

Red Nation Rising@RedNationRising

Twitter is trying to silence it.
Don’t let them. is the Google company the DNC paid to “examine” their servers; after refusing to turn them over to the FBI. The Dems are panicked because Trump asked Ukraine to look into the matter.

MAKE. IT. TREND.
RT

Breitbart News

✔@BreitbartNews

Mystery: Why was Hunter Biden being paid $83,000.00 a month by Ukranian energy company Burisma when he had no background in energy while his father Joe Biden was Vice President and the point man on Ukraine-US policy? https://trib.al/UYOjGr6 

Hunter Biden’s $83K per Month Burisma Salary Raises Questions on Role

Hunter Biden’s $83,000 per month salary from the board of a Ukrainian oil giant is raising questions about if he profited from his father’s connections.

breitbart.com

A soul sickness unto political death

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This absolutely certain event, an event known only because it was bragged about by its central protagonist, is merely incidental to the current Democrat/Media tempest in a teaspoon. But really, no matter how you frame it, this is the most blatant example of political corruption I have ever seen. Whatever the foreign policy interests of the United States were at the time, the only interest shown by its Vice President, Joe Biden, was to ensure that his son made a lot of money in some business venture in The Ukraine. If this has not caused a full-on tornado of disgust in the US, then the Democrats and their media allies are even more soul sick than I could ever have imagined. What puzzles me most of all is that this event and its implications is hardly discussed at all.

The photo is from here.

And now let me add thisAND NOW LET ME ADD THIS:

The economic resistance speaks out

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Peter Costello was Australia’s greatest Treasurer bar none. Today in The Oz there is a front page story that reminds me just how much this is so: RBA cuts won’t help the economy, says Peter Costello, with the subtitle, “Former Treasurer urges Coalition to Resist Infrastructure Splurge”. And it’s not just rate cuts that are useless.

Future Fund chairman Peter ­Costello has brushed off suggestions that further cuts in official interest rates will help the economy, while urging the government to resist calls to ratchet up infrastructure spending, saying it should tackle the “hard” issues of structural reform.

He ran the economy for eleven years, and among the best forecasts I ever made was to say that we will all live through it, see how well a policy of balanced budgets and zero debt actually works, and not learn a thing. Come the GFC, and that fiscal incompetent Kevin Rudd grabbed the stimulus tray with both hands and now, more than a decade later, we cannot get our economy untracked. And it’s not just balancing the budget that matters.

So let me bring you back to the economics of the classics and tell you what needs to be done: (1) leave growth to the private sector and (2) keep interest rates high enough to stop our resources being ploughed into unproductive projects (eg the NBN, desal plants, streetcars down George St, billion dollar train stations at places no one goes to).

The problem remains that Keynesian macro and every introductory text – except mine – pushes stimulus spending and low rates of interest, the perfect recipe for staying in the doldrums for a very long time.

And by structural reform, the proper meaning, which I assume is the same as Peter’s, is to let the economy adjust so that we are producing value-adding goods and services that will actually make a profit in the market. And if we do that, strangely enough, it will also add to the economy’s capacity to provide higher levels of public spending, even though it is a smaller proportion of total output.

Free speech as an economic principle

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This is John Stuart Mill discussing freedom of speech as an economic issue in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), in my view the best single text on economics ever written. Freedom of speech, as he writes in the passage below, is a crucial element in allowing minds to wander where they will and consider all kinds of ideas and alternatives, and then to debate freely each and every one of the various considerations that different individuals might have. Without such freedom of thought, an economy cannot prosper. What is specially interesting are the examples from his time where different ideas have been suppressed. It would almost entirely be the reverse opinions that might be suppressed today.

The notion, for example, that a government should choose opinions for the people, and should not suffer any doctrines in politics, morals, law, or religion, but such as it approves, to be printed or publicly professed, may be said to be altogether abandoned as a general thesis. It is now well understood that a régime of this sort is fatal to all prosperity, even of an economical kind: that the human mind when prevented either by fear of the law or by fear of opinion from exercising its faculties freely on the most important subjects, acquires a general torpidity and imbecility, by which, when they reach a certain point, it is disqualified from making any considerable advances even in the common affairs of life, and which, when greater still, make it gradually lose even its previous attainments….

Yet although these truths are very widely recognized, and freedom both of opinion and of discussion is admitted as an axiom in all free countries, this apparent liberality and tolerance has acquired so little of the authority of a principle, that it is always ready to give way to the dread or horror inspired by some particular sort of opinions. Within the last fifteen or twenty years, several individuals have suffered imprisonment, for the public profession, sometimes in a very temperate manner, of disbelief in religion; and it is probable that both the public and the government, at the first panic which arises on the subject of Chartism or Communism, will fly to similar means for checking the propagation of democratic or anti-property doctrines. In this country, however, the effective restraints on mental freedom proceed much less from the law or the government, than from the intolerant temper of the national mind; arising no longer from even as respectable a source as bigotry or fanaticism, but rather from the general habit, both in opinion and conduct, of making adherence to custom the rule of life, and enforcing it, by social penalties, against all persons who, without a party to back them, assert their individual independence. (Mill ([1871] 1921): 940)

Did you make it this far? Not everyone finds Mill all that easy to read, but once you get the rhythm there is no one like him anywhere.

Trump speech to UN

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It’s 36 minutes long. Here is a report on the speech. Here’s a part of that speech.

“We are here to advance the common good while upholding our shared humanity and values,” the secretary general said. “That vision united the founders of our Organization.” However, Secretary General Guterres’ concept of the UN “vision” today is of a globalist institution, which was not the founders’ original vision at all. The founders’ vision for a new United Nations was much closer to the one that President Trump has articulated. The United Nations was founded to bring sovereign nations together for the purpose of cooperating in the solution of common problems and taking collective action where warranted against aggressors’ threats to international peace and security. The United Nations Charter specifically recognizes the sovereign status of the member states. It stipulates that the United Nations does not have the authority “to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

But if you have time, watch it through. It will also do very well as a re-election speech as well. It was also a warning to anyone thinks they might take the US on. This is a new form of diplomacy/ Puts it straight to the Chinese and invites Britain to leave the EU and join in a trade agreement with the US.

An incredible moral force. An astonishing speech.

And for another perspective on PDT as a diplomat, this is the transcript of his conversation with the President of the Ukraine. Not only no wrong-doing, much right-doing. He makes his enemies look smaller and more repulsive every day.

No shame, no guilt, just straight out corrupt

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Watch Joe Biden Brag About Bribing Ukraine To Fire The Prosecutor Investigating His Son’s Company before he video disappears. Here’s the relevant transcript.

I remember going over and convincing our team, others, to convince that we should be providing for loan guarantees. And I went over, I guess, the 12th, 13th time to Kiev. And I was supposed to announce that there was another billion-dollar loan guarantee. And I had gotten a commitment from Poroshenko and from Yatsenyuk that they would take action against the state prosecutor. And they didn’t.

So they said they had—they were walking out to a press conference. I said, nah, I’m not going to—or, we’re not going to give you the billion dollars. They said, you have no authority. You’re not the president. The president said—I said, call him. (Laughter.) I said, I’m telling you, you’re not getting the billion dollars. I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a b-tch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.

He really is too stupid to be president. Why did they make him Vice President?

Media lies (both a verb and a noun)

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Coup Trump Racism Overton Window

This is the printed title, On Trump, Progressives confused by irony and facts, and this is what the article is about, being the subhead:

The NYT published an article asserting 40 “facts” indicting Trump. In truth, each of those “facts” was false or pure opinion based upon intractable bias.

This one is Number 40. Go to the link to read the first 39. It’s a long article, and you may already know most of it in one way or another, but it’s an important reminder all the same.

“He has called America a ‘hellhole.’”

If you follow all the links to the LA Times to CBS, what you will find is a 2015 article where Trump did indeed refer to the America being created by Obama a “hell hole” and that Trump said he was thinking of running for the Presidency to “make America great again.”  A significant majority of the electoral college firmly agreed over a year later.

I also think Trump was again trolling the Democrats. If you’ve paid any attention to the Democrat presidential candidates this time around, you’ll see that they describe America in dystopian terms as an impoverished, violent, racist . . . hellhole. Trump long ago accepted the Democrats’ characterization of our once great nation and promised to reverse that damage.

I think the only reason he has the strength for it is that he finds it all funny, in a very tragi-comic way. I will also find it funny, but only when his presidency is over in 2025.