Category Archives: Politics – international

Sanctimony at its highest level

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I have been watching the opening of the Kavanaugh hearings. It is a bizarre exercise in which every bit of what the Democrats are doing is a fishing exercise to hope that something might yet come up that might, if the right slant is put on the issue, be made to discredit the nominee. There are millions of pages of text that the Dems are hoping to comb through to find something, just anything at all will do. And now, even as I watch, there are protestors getting up, screaming and then being led out. As Drudge has it:

CHAOS AT KAVANAUGH

Kavanaugh has given 370 decisions in his time and countless speeches. They are available already and have no doubt been gone through with a fine tooth comb but with nothing that has come up so far. But there is always some freak chance something might come up. That is what all of the histrionics are about.

For a bit of balance, you might turn to this as a reminder not just that there does remain sanity, but also how much remains at stake: President Trump Evansville Indiana Rally Drew Largest Crowd Ever to Ford Center….

THE MORNING AFTER: Didn’t make it through the night so missed this endorsement by Senator Ted Cruz. The first point is obvious. Cruz lays out why Brett Kavanaugh ought to be elevated to the Supreme Court. There are five million documents they already have. But he goes into the detail about what Kavanaugh’s role as “staff secretary” for President George HW Bush. These are papers he sorted through and passed along, but did not write. All that is made clear below.

THE MORNING AFTER: Didn’t make it through the night so missed this endorsement by Senator Ted Cruz. The first point is obvious. Cruz lays out why Judge Kavanaugh ought to be elevated to the Supreme Court. There are five million documents they already have. But he goes into the detail about what Kavanaugh’s role as “staff secretary” for President George HW Bush. These are papers he sorted through and passed along, but did not write. There is nothing relevant to the Senate hearing in any way. These papers provide absolutely no insight into anything that the Judge believes about anything. All that is made clear below.

The second issue is that Cruz who had been on the other end of Donald Trump’s ferocious rhetoric during the nominating process is in every way supportive to the fullest extent of now President Donald Trump. The contrast with the recently departed Senator McCain is clear.

Geoff Sessions and the Deep State

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Paul Mirengoff, a deep state #NeverTrumper, discusses the American Attorney General in a post with a quite revealing title: In Praise of Geoff Sessions. Here are the two sides from the comments to the post, with my own view expressed by the first.

I think Trump was expecting Sessions to clear out the swamp at the DOJ. Instead he seem unwilling to do and is letting leftist/D-oriented careerist carry on. I think Trump is surprised that Sessions, an early supporter of his, has turned out to be so timid/meek in dealing with he swamp. I think those of us who are not lawyers are also less willing to give those who are the benefit of the doubt when they are in positions of public trust. Since Sessions won’t deal with the swamp in any meaningful way, Trump should fire his ass and all the top officials in the DOJ and any swamp-inclined US Attorneys. Of course, the GOP senator types (mostly more lawyers) are hinting at temper tantrums if he does so. F*ck them too. Trump only has two (maybe 6 years) left to get things done. He needs to get moving. If this means he loses more votes. So be it, Let the GOPe self-identify and deal with the electoral fallout. The US is running out of time.

This is the benefit of the doubt perspective:

I’m in the camp that thinks Sessions is doing the President’s most important work: draining the swamp.

The media gets so excited when Trump tweets something that appears to indicate displeasure with the Attorney General.

But I think there are basically two kinds of Trump-haters that matter here.

The first is the rank-and-file believer who maintains a position of influence in the democratic party or the so-called mainstream media. These persons are thoroughly convinced that Trump is just dumb. These people have bought in, completely, to the idea that Trump doesn’t even factor into his own success. They have embraced the totally irrational narrative that the bigotry of tens of millions of hateful morons elevated this incompetent boob to the single most powerful post on the planet.

The second type of Trump-hater runs the first like assets in a foreign theater. These are people who fear the President. Not because he is seen as an idiot undeserving of the awesome powers of the presidency, but because they recognize that he doesn’t have anything invested in the status quo which keeps them in business. They know that his promises to drain the swamp are manifestly different than those made by Nancy Pelosi, circa 2005, because Pelosi’s rhetoric merely disguised her own role in leveraging accumulated institutional power against the interests of the People, at the expense of the People.

The “establishment” ruling class has no effective means of controlling Trump because he played no part in the willful sacrifice of American citizens’ interests for his own gain over the course of the last 40 -50 years, which means he has no compelling reason to keep their secrets or allow them to continue their exploitation of We The People.

Donald Trump represents a very real threat to their methodically conceived permanent power structures.

The first type of Trump-hater is too blinded by their conviction that Trump is stupid to realize what kind of danger he poses to the second group’s near-hegemonic grip on power.

So, it is literally inconceivable to these witless ideological foot-soldiers that Trump could be trying to accomplish something specific through his tweets that seemingly put him in conflict with his Attorney General. To them, it makes sense that Trump is just lashing out at this honorable man for being an honorable man — which to them means staying on the sidelines and refusing to protect the President.

However, that second type of Trump-hater are certainly well aware that Sessions is actively building cases against their top tier operatives — and they are using the media’s naive perception of and intense focus on Trump’s tweets to buy time by feeding into the false notion that these tweets are a sign of desperation. Meanwhile, Sessions is quietly securing testimony and evidence of widespread corruption throughout the federal government.

I think Sessions will end up being a hero in all this. I think the star witnesses will be Bill Priestap, Lisa Page, Sally Yates, Bruce Ohr, and Lanny Davis.

I also think Rosenstein, Stzrok, McCabe, and Simpson will be paraded around in very public perp-walks.

Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe Sessions really is so afraid and/or incompetent that he’s just sitting around waiting to see how this all shakes out, hoping to remain unsullied by Mueller’s illegal probe…

What i see, however, leaves me reasonably sure that Sessions and Trump are working closely together. The Twitter rantings targeting the AG look suspiciously like theater to me. Bait for CNN and WaPo to sink their teeth into and keep them preoccupied while the real strategy plays out beyond the medias myopic obsession with their hallucinations of “collusion.”

The first breed of Trump-hater is being played by both sides. The second is in full blown panic, losing sleep over what Sessions knows and when he’s coming for them…

Personally no one on the DS side seems to be losing sleep to me, and this is all ridiculously distracting. And it is this of itself that could turn the House and even the Senate in November. I trust the President’s judgement on what he can and cannot do, but if he had a free hand, there is little doubt that Sessions would be out the door within minutes.

Getting the unbalanced just right

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On the one hand:

Longtime Trump Org CFO granted immunity...
'Narrow in scope'...
Manhattan D.A. Eyes Criminal Charges...
'We don't know quarter of what's in pocket of Mueller'...
RUDY TAKES SHOT AT PRESIDENT FOR 'FLIPPING' COMMENTS...
LEAK: Aides expect to go rogue on pardon...
DRAMA: George Conway tweets again...
Mueller Muzzles Manafort...
BUCHANAN: We are headed for hellish year...
DAN RATHER: STAY TUNED...
Kavanaugh argued the president can be impeached for lies, cover-ups and refusing to testify...
Dems' midterm strategy: Stop talking about Trump... 

But then on the other:

STOCKS RECORD HIGH...

Trumped up charges

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Before I add my own comment, you are advised (urged) to look at this post at Reddit: Connecting some dots. You are guaranteed not to read it in the papers.

Now to Manafort and Cohen, which is, in essence: “Look Michael, see what we did to Paul. Well we can do the same to you.” And they can. And they will, if he does not cooperate 100%. So what is the issue? This is how Manafort fits in:

The trial of Manafort, who chaired Donald Trump’s campaign in mid-2016 when Trump was selected as the Republican presidential nominee, never dealt with possible collusion between the campaign team and Russia or efforts to obstruct justice that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating.

But they got their man. So how does Cohen fit in: Cohen testifies Trump told him to commit crime by paying off women. This, by the way, is not illegal:

U.S. President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen testified on Tuesday that Trump had directed him to commit a crime by arranging payments ahead of the 2016 presidential election to silence two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

This is what’s illegal:

“Today he (Cohen) stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election,” Davis said in a statement.

And only if that was the reason is it even technically illegal, and only because the payment was not declared as an election expense. If he merely wished to avoid having to deal with his wife over the question of adultery, say, then it is not illegal for him to have paid these women to keep things to themselves.

We are dealing with some of the sleaziest people you will ever see and I don’t in this case mean Stormy Daniels. Meanwhile it is very likely that Cohen will say whatever he is told to say:

Cohen, 51, made the statements as he pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges in federal court in Manhattan, including tax evasion, bank fraud and campaign finance violations.

If they can get him out, they will get him out. All of it right before your righteous eyes.

MEANWHILE: Unless you have been paying close attention, you won’t even know who this is: JUDGE GIVES NO JAIL TIME TO IMRAN AWAN, ATTORNEY CLAIMS HE WAS BUILDING ‘WOMEN’S SHELTER’. The major points in the story:

  • Former IT aide Imran Awan received no jail time Tuesday after a federal judge said he had “suffered enough.”
  • His lawyer said his “destitute” client was building a charity hospital, but reports show that the land was also used for a real estate development and was allegedly stolen from farmers.
  • Former Democratic chiefs of staff wrote letters of support for Imran, despite IT-violation findings by the House inspector general and Capitol Police.

Here is an anodyne version of why he was up on charges:

Imran and his family were banned from the House computer network in February 2017 after the House’s top law enforcement officer wrote that Imran is “an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems,” and that a server containing evidence had gone “missing.” The inspector general said server logs showed “unauthorized access” and procurement records were falsified.

The best bit in the story is that Imran actually thanked the prosecutors! He also no doubt has more material than Julian Assange that if he leaked it out could put half the Democrat caucus away for a very long time.

And I like this from some comment somewhere:

Mueller’s novel and idiotic theory is that Trump’s blackmail payoff was an illegal campaign contribution to himself.

I wonder if that really is the scope of it.

A positive story about both coal AND Donald Trump

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The world may really be about to change. From Donald Trump saves coal from renewables surge from The Weekly Standard and published in The Australian.

No country has a greater abundance of hydrocarbon energy than the US. The corollary is that no country was as big a loser from participating in the Paris Agreement and its intention to progressively decarbonise the world’s hydrocarbon superpower. On July 10, the Energy Information Administration forecast that next year the US would produce 12 million barrels of oil a day and overtake Saudi Arabia to be the world’s No 1 producer. When it comes to the politics of energy, the interests of the US and European green ideology are irreconcilable.

Trump understands this. “Our country is blessed with extraordinary energy abundance, which we didn’t know of even five years ago and certainly 10 years ago,” the President said last year. Those remarks were not only a paean to America’s energy resources, they were a full-dress rejection of the policies of his predecessor and of the Democrats’ goal of Europeanising US energy policy.

“We have nearly 100 years’ worth of natural gas and more than 250 years’ worth of clean, beautiful coal,” he said. “We are a top producer of petroleum and the No 1 producer of natural gas. We have so much more than we ever thought possible. We are really in the driving seat. And you know what? We don’t want to let other countries take away our sovereignty and tell us what to do and how to do it. That’s not going to happen. With these incredible resources, my administration will seek not only American energy independence that we’ve been looking for so long, but American energy dominance.

“And we’re going to be an exporter — exporter. We will be dominant. We will export American energy all over the world … These energy exports will create countless jobs for our people, and provide true energy security to our friends, partners and allies all across the globe.”

For the first time since 1992, when George HW Bush went to the Rio Earth Summit, a US president was outlining a global energy strategy diametrically opposed to the tenets underlying the UN climate process. Trump was establishing a rival pole based on energy realism and energy abundance.

On just this alone, PDT can lift the American economy into a prolonged period of rising growth and higher incomes. It’s amazing that no one else has the strength and courage to do the same anywhere else.

“No borders, no wall, no USA at all”

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That’s Antifa, the American left in all its insanity, just today. Is that really what they want, because whether or not that is what they really want, that is what they are heading towards? This, however, seems more to the point, which when all is said and done amounts to pretty much the same thing:

How do these people get half the votes?

The Obama legacy disposal team

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And at the link.

On Inauguration Day, 2017, President Donald Trump’s first act in office was to mobilize the military’s “Legacy Disposal Team” to undo the damage caused by Barack Obama. In this video, you’ll see and hear the run-up to the team’s action as stockpiles of Obama’s broken promises, failed policies, and unconstitutional executive orders are collected in isolated areas…followed by the explosive beginnings of what will surely be a very long process.

But there are still places he can show his face and feel he’s among friends: ‘Obama! Obama!’: Barack Obama is back on Martha’s Vineyard. Everywhere else he is Mister Zero.

And then there’s this: Barack Obama Gets Another Peace Prize: Here Are 5 Reasons He Doesn’t Deserve It. This is Number 5:

5. Praising South Africa’s Newest Dictator

While the media slobbered all over him…again…there were a few remarks he presented at a recent speech in South Africa—that the media naturally ignored—that revealed the true nature of Barack Obama:

In a highly controversial speech in South Africa, a nation on the brink of catastrophe amid racist land grabs and brutal massacres that experts have linked to the ruling regime, former U.S. President Barack Obama showered praises on President Cyril Ramaphosa (shown here with Obama) and other highly controversial figures. The adulation poured out on Ramaphosa went far beyond normal diplomatic courtesy. In fact, Obama claimed the radical left-wing strongman, who is right now leading the charge to steal land from minority farmers without compensation, was “inspiring new hope in this great country.” In reality, critics say he is driving it over the edge of a cliff.

Perhaps even more alarming, Obama appeared to praise Ramaphosa’s dangerous efforts to supposedly reduce inequality in South Africa — efforts that mimic the disastrous land-expropriation schemes pursued in neighboring Zimbabwe by genocidal Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe that practically destroyed the nation. Touting the Marxist Goal 10 in the United Nations Agenda 2030 scheme, which calls for national and international wealth redistribution, Obama told the crowd in Johannesburg that “we’re going to have to figure out how do we close this widening chasm of wealth and opportunity both within countries and between them.”

Irony and self-reflection are obviously not characteristics of the left. On the other hand, there is this: Saturday Was Obama’s Birthday. Here’s The *Best* Card He Got.

Jesse Kelly®

✔@JesseKellyDC

Happy birthday @BarackObama. Thank you for all you did.

Like millions of Americans, you probably did not know that Saturday was Obama’s birthday. With the economy booming, and unemployment numbers at historic lows, people were either relaxing on the weekend, or shopping…with the extra money in their paychecks, thanks to the Trump tax cuts.

Although Obama’s fans sent him birthday greetings, this one has got to be the best 🙂

And then there’s this: Top Ten Reasons to Be Nostalgic for Obama. Here Number 10.

10. Debt

Ahh, remember when massive, unsustainable debt was cool because Obama did it? When he took office in 2009 his answer to the recession was to spend, spend, spend… and spend he did. For the next three years America had deficits over $1 trillion with very little to show for it. The recession officially ended in June 2009, but the actual recovery was the slowest since the Great Depression. Wages remained low and flat. Who wouldn’t miss that?

Now go read the other nine.