It's nearly too crazy to be true. They framed a General to get Trump, and the General was so fearful of the prosecution that he pleaded guilty - out of his sense of honor? I don't know why, but he did.

From Rush:

Folks, I am of the opinion that it looks to me like everybody in that town was colluding with the Russians except for Trump. For crying out loud — and do you know we wouldn’t know what we learned yesterday, last night and today if it weren’t for Judge Emmet Sullivan?

If Emmet Sullivan hadn’t insisted on this stuff with Lt. General Flynn, then we would not have seen the documents that the FBI tried to hide. They were released some time ago’ now they were demanded to be produced. If it weren’t for the fact that Judge Sullivan can’t wait to put Flynn behind bars (which isn’t gonna happen), we wouldn’t have learned what we now know — and this has been known by so many people for so long.

Do you know that the people in this investigation actually went out and got liability insurance for themselves because they knew how rotten what they were doing is? They knew that the Mueller team was all about getting Trump? There are two investigators on this team telling each other, “This is not looking good, Jack.” “I know, Fred.” There’s a distinct get Trump attitude with these people.

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2020/09/25/everybody-in-washington-was-colluding-with-russia-except-trump/

Faux Drama

This is faux drama. If you dislike working for religious based organizations and dislike their health care policy, get another job - I can't believe this would impact more than about 12 women. If I'm wrong, I'd sure like to better understand where the impact would fall.

"Even with Ginsburg alive to dissent, the court majority – bolstered by Trump’s first two appointees – ruled last summer that practically all nongovernmental workplaces could flout ACA contraceptive mandates based on religious or moral objections, in line with Trump administration policy."

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/sep/26/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-donald-trump-womens-rights

The Enormity ...

These people ...

Just when you think you have grasped the enormity of the U.S. news media’s Steele dossier scandal, it gets worse. Much worse.

The “primary subsource” for the so-called dossier was suspected once of being a Russian operative and a “threat to national security,” according to newly declassified FBI records.

To put things more clearly: The document the FBI used to secure authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on one-time Trump campaign aide Carter Page is based largely on the say-so of an individual the FBI itself once suspected of being a national security risk.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/the-news-medias-steele-dossier-scandal-is-even-worse-than-you-thought

BLM - how many have they killed?

How many black people died in these BLM riots?

"Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer’s riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.

"ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project’s spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd’s death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him."

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/16/study-up-to-95-percent-of-2020-u-s-riots-are-linked-to-black-lives-matter/

"The cause of violence is not the police. It is not poverty. It is not one’s race. To say so is in fact a smear against poor people and people of the racial group identified. The cause of violence is the people who have chosen to be violent.

"Rather than assigning responsibility for violence to those who engage in it, the report constantly pushes the criminal victimization narrative that the rioters are not to blame for their rioting. This is abuser psychology 101: The abuser is never responsible for his or her abuse. The people who might object to it are. This is also false and manipulative."

Sturgis Was Another Victim of the Fake News

"Not so fast. Let's take a look at what they actually tracked and what's mere speculation.

"According to South Dakota health officials, 124 new cases in the state—including one fatal case—were directly linked to the rally. Overall, COVID-19 cases linked to the Sturgis rally were reported in 11 states as of September 2, to a tune of at least 260 new cases, according to The Washington Post.

"There very well may be more cases that have been linked to the early August event, but so far, that's only 260 confirmed cases—about 0.1 percent of the number the IZA paper offers."

https://reason.com/2020/09/09/no-the-sturgis-motorcycle-rally-didnt-spawn-250000-coronavirus-cases/?itm_source=parsely-api

Next verse, same as the first: "follow the money"

 That's about the size of it.

"All while Kaepernick and Nike cash in and financial donations pour down on Democratic voter drives. Everybody is using George Floyd’s death to make it rain. His memory is used to hype NFL and NBA games, power ad campaigns for podcasts and YouTube shows, leverage media members for promotions and, most importantly, fuel left-wing political funding. 

"Justice is not being sought. Cash and power are.

"The Criminal$ Justice Movement is the Wu-Tang video for the rap song C.R.E.A.M.

Cash Rules Everything Around the Movement. Dolla, dolla bills, y’all."
https://www.outkick.com/blm-101-history-lesson-the-2020-criminal-justice-movement/

All of the above is true, as is this:

"My cousin, Anton, was a paroled felon when sheriffs, in our view, needlessly tasered him to death. I loved my cousin. He had a huge heart. He loved his mother and his brother. He had the potential to be a doctor, lawyer, scientist or whatever he wanted to be. He was let down by his negligent father and a difficult zip code. Dealt a bad hand, he played it poorly and found himself in a dangerous situation he could not control.

"Everyone has a story. And I get why the people close to Blake, Floyd, Garner, Taylor, etc., are devastated. But the outsiders preening outrage and sadness and kneeling for cameras are using the tragedies to advance careers and personal finance."

Too Obvious?

A great read but boils down to conventional wisdom. Better to be bigger, stronger, faster, meaner, tougher, and more shrewd than one's opponent. In my view, liberty makes that all possible and China does not stand a chance if the US sustains economic liberty. 

The Great Nightfall, however, is fundamentally a book about how the United States can establish conventional and strategic deterrence in the modern world. “This book is not a call for war,” writes the author. “The best way to prepare for war is to be prepared to win it. We need to stop underfunding the military, especially in areas of research, non-conventional war, space, cyberwar, and artificial intelligence. War is changing, and we need to change with it. We cannot expect success fighting tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s weapons.”

Middendorf’s blueprint for protecting America in the twenty-first century stands out in two ways. First, he provides a detailed assessment of how to protect the U.S. capacity to build and sustain a modern military. Here, he addresses issues from research and development, to establishing secure, “clean” supply chains, to ship-building. Second, he delivers a comprehensive overview of future U.S. naval needs.

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/avoiding-armageddon-checkmating-china-169198

Suing CNN

It's been a while, had forgotten this incident. Will be interesting to follow. 

I was asked to present the Constitutional argument against President Trump's impeachment and removal to the United States Senate this past January. For an hour and seven minutes, I argued that if a president does anything illegal, unlawful, or criminal-like -- if he commits treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors -- he satisfies the criteria for impeachment under the Constitution. But if a president engages in entirely lawful conduct motivated in part by the desire to be reelected, which he believes is in the public interest, that would not constitute grounds for impeachment. Everybody seemed to understand the distinction I was drawing. Some agreed, others disagreed. But the distinction was clear between illegal conduct on the one hand, and lawful conduct on the other hand.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16520/cnn-lawsuit-dershowitz

"But think of child labor laws ..."e

This is one of my favorite insights about such things as child labor laws - they take effect at the point that they are almost not needed. 

"Actually, it wasn’t child labor laws that let them escape from child labor: it was economic growth. As people grew wealthier, parents no longer needed their children to be productive. Instead, they could support the family without their children’s income and so instead could send their kids to school. And incidentally, as E.G. West showed in Education and the State, the state in Britain was not a major funder of education and yet schooling was widespread.

"It is true that child labor laws reduced child labor around the edges. But they’re an instance of what is almost a general law in economic policy. I’m using “general law” in the sense of regularity. The laws that pick up enough support are usually ones that require people to do what the majority are doing already. I believe for example, although I can’t find the source immediately, that the legislated 40-hour work week came about only after it had become standard practice."

https://www.econlib.org/orourke-on-the-millennials-and-socialism/

Limbaugh: Trump Did What He Said He Would Do

He has produced: on the economy, rebuilding the military, defending life and religious liberty, his stellar judicial appointments, his restoration of America's energy independence (which Biden wants to reverse through his quixotically reckless promise to eliminate fossil fuels) and his decisive rejection of the Democrats' nationally suicidal Green New Deal agenda.

Indeed, Trump has vigorously resisted enormous pressure from radical environmentalists to surrender our sovereignty to international bodies guided by pseudo-science and a Marxist worldview, hellbent on returning us to the horse and buggy.

He has also kept his promise to secure more favorable trade deals for the United States, and even Joe Biden recently admitted that the USMCA is better than NAFTA.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-win-november-david-limbaugh

"You Know Me, You Know My Heart" - Ha!

"The documentary's six chapters each dissect a different deal the Bidens made with the Chinese government — including one in which China planned to invest more than $1 billion in Bohai Harvest RST (BHR), an investment fund partly owned and directed by Hunter Biden."

https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/riding-dragon-documentary-exposes-massive-biden-self-enrichment

So Wrong For So Long

There are not very many "journalists", those who claim the title are new entertainers who hustle for ratings like other entertainers.

"In researching my latest book, I determined that this is happening in 2020 because, above all, too many of us utterly failed to examine and correct what arguably was the biggest case of journalistic malpractice in recent times: the widespread misreporting on the failed Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Everyone from The New York Times to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, to former CIA Director John Brennan to former special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately acknowledged that many investigators and media took the wrong fork in the road. Yet we spent almost no time or energy examining how we could have been so blind, so wrong. We didn’t bother to dig into who was behind the bad information, illegal leaks, slander and libel, intelligence abuses, and destruction of evidence — the sorts of pursuits that used to make journalists want to get up in the morning and work late into the night."

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/516036-journalism-or-partisanship-the-medias-mistakes-of-2016-continue-in-2020

Come On In "Girl With A Gun"

Welcome to self responsibility and self defense.

"A veteran GOP political strategist told me he likens the current state of America to pressure building inside a volcano and predicts, “It will blow its top immediately after the election.”

"Living in Florida, perhaps I watch too much of The Weather Channel, but my own election natural disaster analogy resembles the tracking of a monster hurricane as it moves closer to the U.S. mainland. Based on present conditions, we know at least a Category 3 will strike late on Nov. 3 and gather strength on Nov. 4 or 5. Virtually everyone is aware of the potential for devastation, and millions are taking pro-active precautions — buying guns and ammunition."

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/03/the_guns_of_november__144125.html

Do You "Believe" in Corona Virus Religion?

 In many ways this article only points out what we know - humans respond with too much focus on a novel threat and tend to ignore the everyday threats. 

The other gift from the writer is the clarity that human choice is invaluable to fight off the virus. 

"For one, economic growth has long been the biggest enemy of virus and disease precisely because economic growth produces the surplus resources that can be mobilized in pursuit of cures for what ails us. If something threatens us with sickness or even death, no reasonable person would respond with forced economic contraction.

"Second, the greater the presumed lethality of any virus, the more that any laws or rules meant to limit its spread are superfluous. Really, what about the high possibility of sickness or even death requires a law? People don’t need to be told to not hurt or kill themselves. No reasonable person would seek to expand government power over human action during the spread of a virus precisely because wise people would govern themselves.


"To which some who absolutely revel in being told what to do will respond that not everyone is rational when it comes to protecting themselves. So true.

"All of which speaks to the third reason any kind of governmental response to a virus is impractical. It is because accepted wisdom rarely ages well. Think back to AIDS in the 1980s, and the popular view that it could be spread by people merely existing in the same room."

China Virus Isn't Scary for the Young

CDC confirms — again: Youth aren’t at COVID risk

The latest data on COVID-19 cases and fatalities from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm that young people face a negligible risk of dying from the disease, while people 65 and older face a much higher risk. That latter group accounts for about 16 percent of confirmed cases but four-fifths of deaths. The fatality rates are even lower among minors: 0.04 percent for children 4 or younger and 0.02 percent for 5-to-17-year-olds.

The crude case fatality rate indicated by the CDC’s numbers — deaths divided by confirmed cases — is about 0.25 percent for patients younger than 50 and nearly 16 percent — 63 times higher — for patients older than 64. While the overall crude CFR is 3 percent, the rates among adults range from 0.07 percent for patients in their late teens and 20s to 29 percent for patients 85 or older — more than 400 times higher.

https://nypost.com/2020/09/01/the-numbers-are-clear-covid-is-no-real-threat-to-kids/

Insight On Peace

Remembering my dear friend Al's joke: A man finds a lantern the beach and a genie comes out and offers to make real any wish the man has. The man asks for a bridge from California to Hawaii, because he hates flying and hates boating but wanted to go to Hawaii. The genie asks him to consider all the troubles of humanity and consider that the bridge would be incredibly wasteful and was an incredibly self centered request. Of all of the good he could do with one wish, surely there must be a better choice.
The man agreed and immediately asked the genie for peace in the Middle East.
The genie frowned and said "do you want that bridge with two lanes or four?"

"Anyone — you or I, for example — could play the role of impartial arbiter. What the U.S. can do that no other entity in the world can do is to underwrite the security risks of a peace deal for Israel. Israel will make far greater concessions for peace with the U.S. standing strongly behind it than without. That’s what makes the U.S. a valuable mediator to both the Israelis and the Arabs."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/israel-united-arab-emirates-accord-milestone-middle-east-peace/

The American Way

Could this happen in another country?

"With his studio humming, Perry is taking a page from Disney and Universal for lot development, with plans to build restaurants, shops and an entertainment complex with a theater and a theme park–like experience. Think Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, but with the feel of a down-home Southern kitchen. Perry admits that such a venture will take him outside of his comfort zone in terms of scope, control—and debt, since his business has always been, extraordinarily, a self-financed, all-cash operation. His plans also include housing for trafficked women and LGBTQ youth, and an academy to teach kids who grew up like he did the things he never learned—financial literacy, for one."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2020/09/01/from-poor-as-hell-to-billionaire-how-tyler-perry-changed-show-business-forever/?fbclid=IwAR16yeD0WsKNb9lcI-8sSjoFBkLWHyFnBhcAw172ZbzjGOx3Sd_GKVjZtiU#43e2626a34b5

"An African American man with the middle name Hussein, he began by embracing his unique heritage, punctuating the opening with a line offering the kind of praise for this country we rarely hear from the left side of the political spectrum these days: “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on earth, is my story even possible.”

"But this was not a speech about identity politics. It was, instead, his version of “the shining city on the hill.” America’s original source of greatness, Obama pointed out -- as had Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and, yes, Ronald Reagan before him -- was the Declaration of Independence.

"“Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation, not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy,” he said. “Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over 200 years ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”"

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/16/could_barack_obama_be_nominated_today_143976.html

First Impressions

Without fail, the first narrative is not correct. 

"We are now in an era where initial visceral narratives shape our lasting attitudes. Images of men being lethally shot in the back or dying with a knee on their neck create strong impressions that are not easily changed by subsequently released information. These dynamics were previewed by Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Despite no corroborating evidence, despite her remembrance based on memory-retrieval therapy almost thirty years after the alleged event, her emotional testimony was riveting. It was compelling for many older women as they relived dynamics they had experienced in their youth. No amount of subsequent information that brought into question Blasey-Ford’s veracity made any difference to her supporters."

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2020/09/02/first_impressions_are_trumping_complete_facts_on_police_violence_576028.html

FBI Agent Pleads Guilty?

"“Gosh almighty.” Those words from former Vice President Joe Biden sum up plenty about the announced criminal plea by former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith. Of course, Biden was not referring to the implications of the FBI lawyer who lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court for the efforts to continue the surveillance of an adviser to the campaign of Donald Trump. Nor was he referring to growing evidence that the Russia investigation was launched based on false and flawed evidence.

"Biden was referring to the federal investigation by United States Attorney John Durham that led to the criminal plea by Clinesmith. Like most other Democrats, Biden previously denounced the investigation and the effort to look into criminality. Now that criminality has been found, Democrats and commentators still insist there are no reasons to continue it."

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/512152-democrats-continue-to-denounce-investigation-of-the-investigators

Super Computer Number Crunching = Progress Against the Virus