Conservative Commentary on the News, Politics and Current Events of the Day
"Wait until Scranton hears about this.
One of Joe Biden’s ways of contrasting himself with President Trump has been to declare the election a battle of Park Avenue values vs. Scranton, Pa., values.
Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China. The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with drama and intrigue.
The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski, who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.
He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago. That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy.”
No what the denials only an intellectual moron, or most of the MSM, would believe that something is crooked and has been crooked in Biden's world. Moreover, it has been crooked since the days of his VP duty in the Obama administration.
Which begs the question, did Obama know anything about this or worse did he get enriched by it. Or better yet, knowing that Trump was threatening to expose this type of corruption did Obama call the Code Red and order an investigation/ spying in order to remove Trump from the equation.
No matter what happens on election day, the rest of the story will unfold. At this point Biden's excuses or rather lack of excuses in a lame attempt to dismiss the allegations are wearing thin.
Here it is. Hardly "African American". Someone worked real hard to hide this. I worked harder.
"Despite the best-friend bond Joe Biden touts with former former President Obama, tensions have lingered between the two statesmen over their vastly different governing styles, according to a Politico report.
To start, a number of anonymously sourced quotes from Obama leaked out throughout the 2020 Biden campaign where the former president allegedly expressed doubts about his former running mates’ fitness for office.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f--k things up,” one Democrat who spoke to the former president recalled him saying.
When lamenting his own diminishing relationship with the current Democratic electorate, particularly in Iowa, Obama reportedly told one 2020 candidate: “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.”
Some Biden aides pointed out that, when Obama’s endorsement of Biden in 2020 finally did arrive, it didn’t have nearly the energy of his endorsement of Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office,” Obama said of Clinton in 2016 in an endorsement video. “I believe Joe has all of the qualities we need in a president right now … and I know he will surround himself with good people,” Obama said in Biden’s endorsement video.
And while some senior Democrats credited Biden’s ties to Obama for his strong relationship with Black voters, Biden has emphasized that he earned their votes all on his own. He told aides after his South Carolina primary win Obama hadn’t “lifted a finger” to help him."
Obama picked Biden to get the white vote in 2008, nothing more. But it soon became clear that Biden was a fuck up who told so many falsehoods over the years, basically rending him incapable of truly running for President on his own.
"Put simply, Kamala Harris is constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States because she is not a natural born citizen, as required by Article II (and, by reference, the 12th Amendment) of the U.S. Constitution.
While born in the United States — Oakland, California — at the time of her birth, Kamala Harris’ father was a citizen of Jamaica and her mother was a citizen of India. This makes Kamala Harris a native-born American — thus eligible to serve as a U.S. senator — but she is not a natural born citizen, the higher standard set for those occupying the office of president.
What follows is a historically detailed and constitutionally precise analysis of why the Framers of the U.S. Constitution raised the required citizenship bar for those elected president of the United States. I know it’s a bit lengthy, but stay with me. Preventing constitutionally unqualified candidates from usurping power is of critical concern to every American and every man and woman whose life and liberty could be taken by the person with his — or her — finger on the button.
The Constitution does not define natural born citizenship, neither have Supreme Court and Congress. The term "natural born citizen" comes from the English concept of "natural born subject," which came from Calvin's Case, a 1608 decision.
Natural born subjects were those who owed allegiance to the king at birth under the "law of nature." The court concluded that under natural law, certain people owed duties to the king, and were entitled to his protection, even in the absence of a law passed by Parliament."
The short is that this is a disputed opinion, and even though it appeared Trump gave credence to it (he didn't, just another media troll), Harris has enough baggage to get toasted as it is.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson used the closing segment of Monday night’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to blast the New York Times for an upcoming article allegedly set to reveal his home address.
“Last week, The New York Times began working on a story about where my family and I live,” Carlson said. “As a matter of journalism, there is no conceivable justification for a story like that. The paper is not alleging we’ve done anything wrong and we haven’t. We pay our taxes. We like our neighbors. We’ve never had a dispute with anyone.”
Carlson speculated that the intent behind an article of that nature could only be “to hurt us, to injure my wife and kids so that I will shut up and stop disagreeing with them.”
“They believe in force,” he said. “We’ve learned that.”
"The Harvard graduate who went viral for saying she'd 'stab' anyone who told her 'all lives matter' in a satirical TikTok video has revealed she’s been fired from her consulting job at Deloitte, but says she’ll continue to advocate for the Black Lives Matter movement.
Claira Janover, who graduated in May with a degree in government and psychology, tearfully revealed on TikTok that she lost her job at Deloitte, a renown UK-based accounting firm.
'Standing up for Black Lives Matter put me in a place online to be seen by millions of people,' she said wiping away tears in a new video shared Wednesday afternoon.
'The job that I’d worked really hard to get and meant a lot to me has called me and fired me because of everything,' she added.
According to her LinkedIn account she was an 'incoming government and public business service analyst'"
Well not anymore!
Over and over again we see people can get into real trouble posting on TikTok, unfiltered feeling and outright lunacy without gaining unwanted attention.
"Janover, who has 113,000 followers on TikTok, can be heard saying in the clip: 'The next person who has the sheer nerve, the sheer entitled caucasity to say 'all lives matter', imma stab you.
'Imma stab you and while you're struggling and bleeding out, imma show you my paper cut and say "my cut matters too."'
Havard grad huh? They taught you how to verse your english language?
Indeed!
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| Bubba Wallace |
Whatever Jussie.....
All he left out was the MAGA hats and the chlorine.
President Trump late Tuesday congratulated incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith for handily defeating an insurgent challenge by Democrat Mike Espy in Mississippi's contentious special election runoff to become the first woman ever elected to Congress from the state.
Hyde-Smith, 59, is an ardent supporter of Trump who was appointed earlier this year by Mississippi's governor to fill retiring Sen. Thad Cochran's seat. She will finish out the remaining two years of Cochran's term in the deep-red state that went for Trump by nearly 20 percentage points in the 2016 presidential election.
"Congratulations to Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith on your big WIN in the great state of Mississippi. We are all very proud of you!” Trump tweeted.
With 95 percent of precincts reporting, Hyde-Smith had 446,927 votes to Espy's 374,880 -- a commanding margin of 54.4 percent to 45.6 percent, according to state election officials. The race marks the final midterm contest of 2018.
“I want everybody to know, no matter who you voted for today, I’m gonna always represent every Mississippian,” Hyde-Smith said at her victory party late Monday night. "Being on that MAGA-wagon, the Make American Great Again bus, we have bonded, we have persevered, we have gotten through things, we were successful today."
Hyde-Smith's win gives Republicans more leeway to ensure the confirmation of Trump's federal judicial and Cabinet nominees that require Senate approval and strengthens the party's chances of holding the majority in 2020.
"She has my prayers as she goes to Washington to unite a very divided Mississippi," Espy said in his concession speech.
Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said on Sunday that he does not believe Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on President Donald Trump will show any criminality.
Dershowitz told George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week,” that he does think Mueller’s impending report about Trump and Russia will be politically “devastating.” However, he guessed that there will not be anything in the report that will lead to charges against the president.
“I think the report is going to be devastating to the president and we know the president’s team is already working on a response,” Dershowitz explained. “The critical questions are largely political — when I say devastating, I mean it’s going to paint a picture that’s going to be politically very devastating.”
“I still don’t think it’s going to make a criminal case because collusion is not criminal,” he asserted, adding that conspiracy is “too much of a stretch.”
Donald Trump insists the GOP’s midterm election shellacking had nothing to do with him. Things will be different, he says, when his name is actually on the ballot in 2020.
While it’s true that most presidents who see their party suffer major losses in their first midterm election get reelected anyway, Trump isn’t most presidents — and there are lots of blaring-red warning lights in this month’s election results for his bid for a second term.
Unlike most of his predecessors, he’s been persistently unpopular, with approval ratings mired in the 40-percent range — so far, he’s the only president in the modern era whose job approval ratings have never been over 50 percent, according to Gallup.
Some of Democrats’ biggest gains came in the states that powered Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while a president’s base has stayed home in previous midterm elections, leading to losses, the record turnout in this year’s races suggests 2018 was more like a 2016 re-run than Trump voters standing on the sidelines.
Thus far, even Trump loyalists in the party haven’t seen the president expand his electoral base beyond core Republicans.
Perhaps it depends, especially when it comes to the juggernaut that has become modern day technology companies. Glenn Reynolds writes.
I’ve just finished reading Columbia Law professor Tim Wu’s new book on antitrust, "The Curse of Bigness," and my biggest takeaway is that President Donald Trump has an opportunity to follow in former President Teddy Roosevelt’s footsteps.
Roosevelt built a strong reputation by going after the trusts, huge combinations that placed control of entire industries in the hands of one or a few men. He broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the Google of its day. He shut down J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Co., which would have monopolized rail transportation in much of the United States. And he pursued numerous other cases (45 in all) that broke up monopolies and returned competition to markets.
Roosevelt operated against a Gilded Age background in which a few companies had, by means both fair and foul, eliminated virtually all competition. This was bad for consumers, as it drove prices up. It was also, surprisingly, bad for shareholders: Wu notes that Standard Oil’s value actually increased post-breakup, as it went from inefficient monopoly to a collection of competitive companies. Most of all, it was bad for American society.
Climate change is a danger to us all and President Trump must be stopped — that’s the chorus we always hear when new climate reports are released and destructive fires ravage California. But is it true?
On Oct. 31, six days before the midterm elections, the journal Nature published an article suggesting that the world’s oceans were absorbing much more heat from climate change than previously calculated. The research, by scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and New Jersey’s Princeton University, was obligingly picked up by the national media with alarming headlines such as:
Study: Oceans warming faster than anticipated giving humanity even less time to stave off worst impacts of climate change — San Diego Union-Tribune
Oceans warming faster than anticipated, giving even less time to stave off worst impacts of climate change, study finds — Los Angeles Times
Startling new research finds a large buildup of heat in the oceans, suggesting a faster rate of global warming — The Washington Post
Oceans Warming Much Faster Than Thought, Study Finds – The New York Times
Politicians and their campaigns quickly followed suit. California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, running for re-election against a fellow Democrat, tweeted this on Oct. 31: “New science shows the oceans are warming more than we thought. We may have to cut emissions 25% faster to avoid a disastrous 2°C of global warming. It’s time to stop pretending climate change isn’t a real threat—our future depends on it.”
As with many scientific studies in the climate science realm, this one had been weaponized in the service of politics. But the study was deeply flawed. On Election Day, after five days of extensive and frequently breathless media treatment of the ocean warming study, British mathematician Nicholas Lewis posted some doubts on Dr. Judith Curry’s blog:
I was asked for my thoughts on the Resplandy paper as soon as it obtained media coverage. Most commentators appear to have been content to rely on what was said in the press release. However, being a scientist, I thought it appropriate to read the paper itself, and if possible look at its data, before forming a view.
… A quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results. Just a few hours of analysis and calculations, based only on published information, was sufficient to uncover apparently serious (but surely inadvertent) errors in the underlying calculations.
Soon, the authors of the study admitted to fundamental errors in math that unraveled their frightening conclusions. Many of the stories in the mass media were corrected and, in some cases, editors felt the need to change their headlines. The New York Times now heads their shortened story from Oct. 31 with the pedestrian, “Scientists Find a New Way to Take the Oceans’ Temperature.”
President Trump’s critics are belittling him for not buying the lefty narrative that global warming is to blame for the California wildfires. Instead, Trump points to decades of mistakes by government agencies that caused the woodlands to become overly dense and blanketed with highly flammable dead wood and underbrush.
Turns out he’s exactly right.
Just ask California officials. Two months ago, the state legislature enacted a measure that would expedite the removal of dead trees and use “prescribed burns” to thin forests. In other words: the very same reforms that Trump is now being mocked for proposing. The September law followed a Gov. Jerry Brown executive order earlier this year that also called for “controlled fires” to improve forest health.
This scientific approach isn’t easily conveyed in Trump’s preferred mode of communication, the 280-character tweet. But University of California forest expert Yana Valachovic conceded in a Washington Post interview that Trump’s “general sentiment is correct — that we need to manage fuels.” That is, to get rid of dangerous buildups of dead and dying trees.
Meadows - chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations, told The Hill that it's time to "circle back" to former Utah Attorney General John Huber's probe with the Justice Department into whether the Clinton Foundation engaged in improper activities, reports The Hill.
"Mr. [John] Huber with the Department of Justice and the FBI has been having an investigation – at least part of his task was to look at the Clinton Foundation and what may or may not have happened as it relates to improper activity with that charitable foundation, so we’ve set a hearing date for December the 5th.," Meadows told Hill.TV on Wednesday.
According to a report by the Dallas Observer last November, the Clinton Foundation has been under investigation by the IRS since July, 2016.
Meadows says that it's time for Huber to update Congress concerning his findings, and "expects him to be one of the witnesses at the hearing," per The Hill. Additionally Meadows said that his committee is trying to secure testimonies from whistleblowers who can provide more information about potential wrongdoing surrounding the Clinton Foundation.
"We’re just now starting to work with a couple of whistleblowers that would indicate that there is a great probability, of significant improper activity that’s happening in and around the Clinton Foundation," he added.
The Clinton Foundation - also under FBI investigation out of the Arkansas field office, has denied any wrongdoing.
White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.
The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s practices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign. Trump attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her “Crooked Hillary” for using a personal email account as secretary of state.
Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.
In a statement, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Lowell, acknowledged that the president’s daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her messages contained classified information.
“While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” he said in a statement.
...
Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose record requests sparked the White House discovery, said it strained credulity that Trump’s daughter did not know that government officials should not use private emails for official business.
“There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” Evers said. “There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal email use.”
Ivanka Trump and her husband set up personal emails with the domain “ijkfamily.com” through a Microsoft system in December 2016, as they were preparing to move to Washington so Kushner could join the White House, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
The couple’s emails are prescreened by the Trump Organization for security problems such as viruses but are stored by Microsoft, the people said.
The transcript of the Nov. 16 court session in which Kelly delivered his oral ruling was released in a group of court papers on Monday. Kelly declared that the White House could not eject Acosta without first providing him due process — specifically, notice of the revocation of his press pass, a chance for Acosta to respond, and a written decision.
In short, the judge said to the White House: You can't throw out a reporter without going through a process. But if you go through a process — which you, the White House, can design — then you can throw the reporter out. In the end, it could be that Kelly's ruling will make it easier for the White House to oust reporters in the future — and to make the decision stick.
Throughout the court session, Kelly referred to the only real precedent in the Acosta matter, a 1977 case from the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals called Sherrill v. Knight. In that case, the court ruled that the White House — specifically the Secret Service — could not deny a press pass to a "bona fide journalist" without due process. The court defined due process as "procedures whereby an applicant is given notice of the evidence upon which the Secret Service proposes to base its denial, [and] the journalist is afforded an opportunity to rebut or explain this evidence, and the Secret Service issues a final written decision specifying the reasons for its refusal to grant a press pass."
In court, Kelly told lawyers for CNN and the government that he would use Sherrill as a guide in the Acosta matter. In his view, the due process arrangement outlined in Sherrill should apply to the Trump White House's treatment of Acosta or any other White House reporter. "The court in Sherrill held that this process must include notice, an opportunity to rebut the government's reasons, and a written decision," Kelly said.
The judge's clear implication was that if the White House takes those actions if it jumps through those hoops in the future, it can expel a reporter without raising due process concerns.
The White House has halted efforts to bar CNN journalist Jim Acosta but has introduced a wave of new rules for reporters attending news conferences.
According to a letter sent to Mr Acosta, reporters will now only be allowed one question each if called on at future news conferences and are only allowed to ask follow-up questions at the discretion of the US leader.
Guidelines state journalists are compelled to physically surrender microphones if Mr Trump has not granted a follow-up question.
Failure to abide by the new guidelines could result in reporters losing their passes.
It comes after the White House previously accused Mr Acosta of manhandling an intern who tried to take his microphone away as he questioned Donald Trump during a heated news conference. He was subsequently banned from the White House.
Mr Trump's administration warned his credentials could be pulled again if he failed to adhere to the new guidelines for journalists.
A group of Senate Democrats is suing to block Matt Whitaker from serving as acting attorney general on grounds that his placement in the post was unconstitutional.
The suit, which is being filed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, is the latest and most aggressive salvo against the Whitaker appointment. Last week, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel defended Whitaker’s promotion in a memo that drew immediate criticism for its expansive understanding of the president’s power. That view is in hot dispute, including from the state of Maryland, which petitioned a federal judge to stop him from serving on constitutional grounds.
The latest suit, which was brought by the groups Protect Democracy and the Constitutional Accountability Center for the Senators, argues that Whitaker’s appointment violates the Constitution’s Appointments Clause because the U.S. Senate did not confirm him to his prior post. Whitaker was chief of staff to now-former Attorney General Jeff Sessions before President Trump elevated him to his current gig. Trump did so through the Vacancies Reform Act, which allows the staffing of vacant positions for up to 210 days. But many constitutional scholars have argued that the Vacancies Reform Act doesn’t let the president appoint people to cabinet-level positions who haven’t been senate confirmed. The Senate confirmed Whitaker in 2004 as a U.S. Attorney in Iowa, but his opponents—most prominently George Conway, the husband of White House senior staffer Kellyanne Conway, and former Solicitor General Neal Katyal—say that confirmation has effectively lapsed.
The Justice Department told President Donald Trump that Matthew Whitaker could hold the post of acting attorney general, before Trump appointed him to that post.
News of that preapproval comes as critics have said Trump violated the Constitution by installing the 49-year-old Whitaker on a temporary basis as the nation's top law enforcement official without first getting Senate approval.
That argument was based on the fact that Whitaker had not held a Senate-approved position before he was appointed acting AG. The state of Maryland cited that claim when it filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging Whitaker's appointment, calling him an "unqualified" partisan.
But NBC News reported Wednesday that the department told Trump, before he tapped Whitaker for the job, that he could appoint Whitaker as acting head of Justice.
Whitaker was named to the post a week ago, after Trump forced out Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
His temporary appointment immediately sparked concerns that he will squelch the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller's office into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and possible coordinating with the Trump campaign in that effort.
Whitaker before joining the Justice Department had been a critic of Mueller's probe. He now has oversight of Mueller's office, due to his appointment as acting attorney general.
Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, had been Sessions' chief of staff. He will be allowed to serve as acting attorney general for at up to at least 210 days.
Steven Engel, assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, said in a written opinion cited by NBC News that his office told the White House — before Whitaker was appointed — that the president "could designate a senior Department of Justice official, such as Whitaker, as acting attorney general."
According to Engel's opinion, the Justice Department has identified more than 160 occasions in which a president appointed government officials who not been confirmed by the Senate to serve in high-level positions, NBC News reported.
"For 15 years, Snipes has served as Broward County’s elections chief, with mixed results. Long lines and vote counts that continued long after polls closed marred elections in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2012, 2016 and, of course, this year.
Among other issues:
-- A court ruled she had broken election law when she destroyed ballots from the 2016 election 12 months after it, instead of the 22 months required by federal law.
Broward elections supervisor illegally destroyed ballots in Wasserman Schultz race, judge rules
-- A medical marijuana amendment was left off some ballots in 2016.
-- Election results in the 2016 primary were posted on the elections office’s website before polls closed, another violation of election law.
-- In 2012, almost 1,000 uncounted ballots were discovered a week after the election
-- In 2004, some 58,000 mail-in ballots were not delivered to voters, leaving election officials to scramble to send new ones."
Now after numerous starts and stops and a failure to properly submit results, and two law-suits who ruled against her, one, for violating Florida law, she is again at the end of a complete screw up the recount of Florida.
"Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said Tuesday.
ABC, in a stunning move, has decided to cancel its Roseanne revival following star Roseanne Barr's racist tweet Tuesday.
"Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said Tuesday.
Early Tuesday, star, head writer and executive producer Barr attacked Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, in a since-deleted tweet in which she said "Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj." Barr subsequently apologized: "I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste."
Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger also weighed in on the decision to cancel Roseanne: "There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing," he tweeted."
