ATF: 423M guns in America, 1.2 per person, 8.1B rounds of ammunition a year

Article by Paul Bedard in "The Washington Examiner":

America’s love affair with guns is only getting stronger.

New federal data shows that there are 422.9 million firearms in circulation, or about 1.2 guns for every person in the country.

What’s more, despite years of criticism of modern “assault-style” rifles such as the AR-15 and AK-47, there are a record 17.7 million in private hands, proving that it is the most popular gun around.

And last year alone, the arms industry produced 8.1 billion rounds of ammunition.

The figures are from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and were crunched by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry trade group.

“These figures show the industry that America has a strong desire to continue to purchase firearms for lawful purposes,” said Joe Bartozzi, president of the NSSF, in a statement releasing the group’s new report.

“The modern sporting rifle continues to be the most popular centerfire rifle sold in America today and is clearly a commonly owned firearm with more than 17 million in legal private ownership today. The continued popularity of handguns demonstrates a strong interest by Americans to protect themselves and their homes and to participate in the recreational shooting sports,” he said.

Gun shops contacted by Secrets said that they are seeing more and more purchases of semiautomatic weapons such as handguns and AR-15s due to the criticism of those guns by 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

“Sales have definitely been brisk, especially of small, concealable handguns. We also saw a spike in sales of tactical rifles like AR-15s and AK-47s, for which I think we can confidently thank Beto O’Rourke,” said Justin Anderson, the marketing director for Hyatt Guns in Charlotte, North Carolina, one of the country’s biggest retailers.

During his short presidential campaign, O'Rourke called for a ban on the rifles.

Other details from the NSSF report, shared with Secrets:

• Of all rifles produced in 2017, 54% were modern sporting rifles.
• In 2017, 7,901,218 total firearms were produced and imported. Of those, 4,411,923 were pistols and revolvers, 2,821,945 were rifles, and 667,350 were shotguns.
• An interim 2018 estimate showed 7,660,772 total firearms were produced and imported. Of those, 4,277,971 were pistols and revolvers, 2,846,757 were rifles, and 535,994 were shotguns.
• Firearms-ammunition manufacturing accounted for nearly 12,000 employees producing more than $4.1 billion in goods shipped in 2017.
• An estimated 8.1 billion rounds, of all calibers and gauges, were produced in 2018 for the U.S. market.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/atf-423-million-guns-in-america-1-2-per-person-8-1-billion-rounds-of-ammo-a-year

 

France braces for major transportation strike amid unpopular pension reform

OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 4:00 PM PT — Wednesday, December 4, 2019

France is bracing for a major strike of transportation workers, which could become the biggest in decades. On Wednesday, authorities said they will deploy thousands of police officers to provide security during the protests, which are slated for Thursday.
Thousands of workers in French airlines, railway companies and bus operations are planning walkouts and demonstrations against a proposed pension reform.
French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to replace the current retirement system with a “universal points-based system.” Unions said the reform could reduce the disposable incomes of French households.
“I’ll strike for three weeks if I have to, and I don’t have cash stashed in the bank – all I have is my salary as a railway worker,” stated CGT Union Rep. Patrick Belhadj. “I’m fighting for my children and grandchildren, because what’s cooking for them is not the recipe for happy days.”
French authorities are expecting hundreds of flights to be delayed or cancelled. The Paris subway, local railways and bus routes could stop indefinitely.

https://www.oann.com/france-braces-for-major-transportation-strike-amid-unpopular-pension-reform/

James Carafano: Trump at NATO summit – There is nothing new about elitists trashing presidents

 Article by James Jay Carafano in "Fox News":

"When today’s meetings are over, I will be heading back to Washington," President Trump tweeted from the London NATO meeting on Wednesday morning. "We won’t be doing a press conference at the close of NATO because we did so many over the past two days. Safe travels to all!"
   

Just hours after that tweet Trump left the UK without participating in the final NATO press conference.

The other “BIG NEWS,” in London on Wednesday, according to numerous breathless accounts, is a video reportedly catching Canadian President Justin Trudeau joking about Trump’s lengthy impromptu press conference on Tuesday.

Quel scandale! And when Trump then decided to skip the final press conference… ooh-la-la!
It’s much ado about nothing, and it’s nothing new at all.

The gossipy accounts from the NATO summit come on the heels of stories noting that Princess Anne’s popularity popped up after she apparently snubbed the U.S. president at a royal reception. And, of course, last week, the Washington Post bravely went after the first lady, taking issue with her fashion choices at the unveiling of the White House Christmas decorations.
 
Such small-ball reporting reflects how desperate some journalists are to find fault with the president. They must be incredibly frustrated that the president they want to hate so much is so maddeningly effective as both president and leader of the free world.

There is nothing new about elitists trashing presidents who don’t act and think like they do

Washington’s “better types” turned up their noses at Andrew Johnson, Truman and Eisenhower as not being sufficiently urbane and presidential. Lincoln was reviled by many.

Gerald Ford was the butt of jokes on “Saturday Night Live” throughout his presidency. Ronald Reagan was considered beyond the pale among the Illuminati in Washington and Europe. No matter, all of these rank outsiders managed the job of president just fine.

Some suggest Trump is particularly ripe for ridicule. Yes, he is unpopular in Europe, but his approval level among Europeans isn’t much different from that of George W. Bush in his day. And while Reagan was cheered for saying “tear down that wall,” he was also the target of anti-nuclear riots across Europe over the deployment of U.S. intermediate-range nuclear missiles—criticism far more intense than anything faced by Trump.

Whether it happens at home or abroad, trashing the U.S. president is par for the course—and completely risk-free. Ours is, after all, a free world. Were this Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China, that kind of criticism would land you in a gulag or reeducation camp. In Putin’s Russia or Xi’s China mocking the great leader won’t earn you much better accommodations.

What’s interesting about this small-ball carping about Trump’s leadership is that it looks like that’s all they have to work with.

It’s hard to go after him for his leadership in NATO after the Secretary General heaped praises on him for pushing alliance members to invest in defense and pay more attention to common concerns about China. And, they can no longer credibly criticize him for Syria, where none of the dire predictions have come to pass.

Most saw Macron’s “brain dead” comment not as a critique of NATO or Trump, but as a reminder that there was no practical alternative to U.S. leadership in the alliance. No one is interested in remaking NATO in the interests of France or the foolish pursuit of European autonomy that would leave Europe more vulnerable than it is now. And virtually no one takes seriously Macron’s jab that the U.S. isn’t the most effective leader in the war against ISIS.

Nor do the sneerers have much to work with elsewhere in the world. They see that Putin has been checked. They see how Beijing struggles to deal with Trump. They see him continue to press for the denuclearization of North Korea. They watch him just hammer Iran.

The Europeans see all this too—and recognize that none of it comes at their expense This is why he’s been able to make them do more in their own defense than they thought they could do. They’ve seen that the U.S. isn’t stepping down from the world stage, that we are not cutting back defense or pulling back. His leadership has led the free world to do more to defend the free world.

Nor does Trump look like a weakened leader in London. Trump clearly believes the impeachment inquiry won’t force him from office or hurt his re-election chances. And it appears that our friends, allies and enemies are thinking that way as well. The world, some of them grudgingly, are seriously thinking about how to deal with four more years of Trump.

Faced with a president that is actually batting above 500 on the world stage, critics are grasping at any straw they can find, whether it’s going after the first lady’s wardrobe or showcasing national leaders mildly dishing and giggling like middle-schoolers in the lunchroom.

Good luck with that. If those are the best criticisms that can be found to indict American global leadership, things are going very well indeed for Uncle Sam.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trump-nato-summit-james-carafano

Impeachment witness jokes about Barron Trump’s name

Article by Aaron Feis in "The New York Post":

An expert witness in Wednesday’s House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing riffed on the name of the president’s teen son, Barron — drawing a swift and forceful rebuke from the Trump campaign.

“Contrary to what President Trump has said, Article 2 [of the Constitution] does not give him the power to do anything he wants,” testified Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School. “The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron.”

The wisecrack drew a strongly-worded clapback from Trump’s 2020 campaign.

“Only in the minds of crazed liberals is it funny to drag a 13-year-old child into the impeachment nonsense,” read a statement from campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany. “Pamela Karlan thought she was being clever and going for laughs, but she instead reinforced for all Americans that Democrats have no boundaries when it comes to their hatred of everything related to President Trump.”

The statement in turn invoked the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly called on to testify in the impeachment hearings.

“Hunter Biden is supposedly off-limits according to liberals, but a 13-year-old boy is fair game,”
McEnany continued. “Disgusting.”

The statement additionally called for Democrats to “immediately repudiate” Karlan, and demand an apology to the First Family.

Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who sits on the committee, also jumped to the Trump family’s defense, scolding Karlan, “When you try to make a little joke out of referencing Barron Trump, that does not lend credibility to your argument.

“It makes you look mean and like you’re attacking someone’s family, the minor child of the President of the United States.”

https://nypost.com/2019/12/04/impeachment-witness-jokes-about-barron-trumps-name/

Adam Schiff Has Crossed a Line: He's Obtained Phone Records of Devin Nunes, Nunes' Aide, Rudy Giuliani and John Solomon

Elizabeth Vaughn reporting for RedState

As promised, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff released the Democrats’ report on the Trump impeachment inquiry on Tuesday. If anyone is so inclined, the report can be viewed .

The report says, “President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign…The inquiry uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election.”

Speaking to reporters after the report’s release, Schiff said, “It is deeply concerning that at a time when the president of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity.”

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said in a statement, the document “reads like the ramblings of a basement blogger straining to prove something when there is evidence of nothing…At the end of a one-sided sham process, Chairman Schiff and the Democrats utterly failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump. This report reflects nothing more than their frustrations.”

The most stunning aspect of the report, to me anyway, was the inclusion of telephone records of House Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, Nunes’ aide David Harvey, President Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and investigative reporter John Solomon. Schiff refused to say how he was able to obtain these records.

The mainstream media is abuzz with stories about Nunes communication with “Rudy Giuliani during key aspects of his Ukraine pressure campaign.” Nunes was in touch with John Solomon around the times he published major articles. And on and on. The telephone records don’t include the actual conversations. They identify who was calling whom and how long they spoke.

Schiff has crossed the line of decency with this move. Once again, he has abused his power. Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton tweeted that obtaining these records is a remarkable abuse of President Trump’s constitutional rights. I would argue that it’s an abuse of the constitutional rights of all of the above. These are KGB tactics.

Well, fair is fair. Republicans should obtain Schiff’s phone records, those of the so-called whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, and the colleague with whom he had a “bro-like” relationship, you know, Sean Misko, the one Schiff hired as an aide the day after the whistleblower’s complaint was submitted.

The repellent Adam Schiff has managed to reach a new level of depravity. The sooner this inquiry ends, the better. Once Schiff passes this to the Senate, it will be the Democrats on trial. This has become demoralizing. Republicans need to take off the gloves and fight back.

On a more positive note, donations to the RNC have been skyrocketing over the last two months, a direct result of the Democrats’ Schiff show.

Schiff Hired Whistleblower Ciaramella’s Former Colleague the Day After the Trump-Ukraine Call

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

How deep and questionable were the contacts between Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and the alleged whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella? 

We got another piece of the puzzle today, with what has to be the “coincidence” of all time. 

Ciaramella, the CIA officer who was on the NSC during the Obama administration and worked on Ukrainian issues with Joe Biden. He was Biden’s guest at a State Department banquet in October 2016. 

Ciaramella continued in that NSC position during the Trump administration. He had a good buddy who he worked with on the NSC, Sean Misko. An official spoke to the Washington Examiner and described the two as “bros” who had similarly antagonistic feelings toward the Trump administration. 

Prior to working with the NSC, Misko “worked in the Obama administration as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff for deputy chief of staff Jake Sullivan, who became Hillary Clinton’s senior foreign policy adviser during her 2016 presidential campaign.” That perhaps explains the antagonistic feeling toward the Trump administration. 

While we knew that Misko subsequently went to work for Schiff, prior records had suggested that he started in August. But according to the Washington Examiner, new records indicate his official date of hire was July 26, the day after the Trump-Zelensky phone call. Gee, one has to wonder about the nature of the timing and how that came about, because that’s blinking red flags all over the place. 

He isn’t the first NSC Obama-holdover who Schiff hired. Abigail Grace worked for the NSC under Trump until 2018. She was hired by Schiff in February. 

Both Misko and Grace are now working on the impeachment proceedings for Schiff. The new report released by Schiff lists Misko as part of the “impeachment inquiry investigative staff” and Grace as part of “oversight staff.” 

The whistleblower filed his complaint on August 12. 

From Washington Examiner: 

Schiff initially denied he knew about the complaint before it was filed in mid-August.

“We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to,” Schiff said on Sept. 17. However, the statement was false, and an aide from his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before the whistleblower complaint was submitted.

The identity of the Schiff aide who spoke to the whistleblower has not been made public, and it has not been confirmed until now that Misko was on Schiff’s staff at the time.

By Oct. 5, it was reported the whistleblower had never indicated to the inspector general he contacted Schiff’s office before filing the complaint against the president.

The whistleblower’s excuses for not talking about the contacts with Schiff’s staff were weak at best, as we previously reported. The form specifically asked for anyone contacted about the complaint and had a section to fill in if you contacted Congress in any capacity. He failed to fill that in. He’s now claiming he didn’t think they discussed anything of “substance” and suggested the wording was unclear. As you can see, it wasn’t. 

Can we say all of this stinks to high heaven? Not to mention, Schiff has continued with the fiction that he doesn’t even know who the whistleblower is, despite personally receiving a letter from the whistleblower and having to ‘protect his identity’ in transcripts and proceedings. Schiff was basically caught in the lie when he stopped Lt. Col. Vindman from saying anything more about who he had talked about the July 25th call with, obviously indicating both he and Schiff knew who the whistleblower was. 

Republicans are aching to put Schiff under cross-examination to question all of this. 

The House Judiciary Committee is expected to proceed with its first hearing on Wednesday, and Georgia Republican Rep. Doug Collins, a senior member of the committee, wants to call Schiff as a witness to testify about what he knows about the whistleblower and the interactions his staff had with the whistleblower prior to filing the complaint.

During an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Collins said, “It’s easy to hide behind a gavel and Intelligence Committee behind closed-door hearings, but it’s going to be another thing to actually get up and have to answer questions about what his staff knew, how he knew, what he knew about the whistleblower report, his interactions he’s had with Ukraine, the other things that he’s had over time in this process.”

A Stunning 180-Degree Turn...

Matt Vespa reporting for Townhall

Democrats Appear to do a Stunning 180-Degree Turn On This Aspect of Their Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Push

As Katie wrote, the Democrats' impeachment report is out. It’s 300 pages long—and it’s a work of pure fiction. It’s partisan trash. We all know it is; Democrats have admitted it. This is about them trying to reverse the results of the 2016 election. It was grounded in Russian collusion nonsense, which turned out to be a pure myth. Now, we have this Trump-Ukraine phone call drama, where Trump reportedly tried to shake down the Ukrainians into investigating corruption allegations into Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma or risk having military aid withheld. We’re onto quid pro quo now.

Oh, and this all came to light thanks to a CIA agent, who is also a registered Democrat and had worked with a 2020 candidate, filed a whistleblower report about this despite not having heard the call. It’s all second-hand information. And this person had contacted Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) staff prior to filing the report. Schiff probably knows this person, he wants Trump out, and as chair of the House Intelligence Committee, he has set this in motion. He’s spearheading the push, already getting things together to weaponize this report in order to execute this impeachment push Democrats have been lusting to do for years. 

Impeachment is not a legal battle. It’s a political maneuver, but you still need facts and evidence. Impeachment based on dislike or political disagreement is not considered something that meets the vague “high crimes and misdemeanors” benchmark, but this is where we are. What happened to that aspect? The Trump-Ukraine whistleblower report was supposed to be the smoking gun. The guns are smoking when it comes to booting Trump, right? Yet, once again, Democrats got a face-full of buckshot. The witnesses Schiff dragged onto the Hill offered nothing earth-shattering. There were no bombshells, which is why Democrats waited so long to bring this effort out of the basement. They know torpedo-sized holes will tear this narrative apart, just like Russian collusion. Why? There is no smoking gun. Hence, why Democrats and Trump haters are saying that they don’t need such evidence to impeach the president. Sounds like mission creep, huh? It sounds like a partisan witch hunt. It sounds like the Democrats perverting American institutions
(via Washington Examiner):

Florida Rep. Val Demings maintained that President Trump should be impeached even if the alleged quid pro quo with Ukraine never took place.

Demings, a Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, was asked during an interview on This Week whether it was relevant to the impeachment proceedings that Trump’s request for an investigation into Joe Biden never came to fruition. Host Martha Raddatz noted that no investigation into the Bidens ever happened and Ukraine received its military aid anyway, but Demings maintained that it was irrelevant.

“You’re going to make me go back to my law enforcement experience. I had an opportunity in 27 years to deal with a lot of people who attempted to rob a bank, attempted to burglarize a house, attempted to carjack an individual,” Demings said. “We didn’t say, ‘Well, since you weren’t successful, we caught you, you weren’t successful so let’s just let you go and forget it.”

Well, talk about a 180-degree turn since September at least with the 2020 candidates. Like with Russian collusion, I think we have a lot to suggest that there is no solid evidence of the so-called quid pro quo. I mean even the witnesses in this circus, like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman who listened in on the call, said that the president could legally withhold aid.

In all, it was a series of career bureaucrats who disagreed with Trump on Ukraine policy. That’s not a crime. This being framed as the crime of the century is absurd. The Democrats needed smoking guns in September. And now, with no evidence, no movement in the polls regarding support for impeachment—the Left decided to forgo evidence in order to get Trump. That’s fine. They only look like bigger clowns and battleground state voters, who already are sour on this whole fiasco, will only be less inclined to vote Democratic in 2020. The Trump agenda has helped these states. They’re the ones who will decide the next election—and they’re all that impressed with the 2020 Democratic field. And just like in 2016, a lot of these folks are former Obama voters. 

Democrats tried to lay down the foundation of this impeachment game in the basement. They released selective transcripts that only favored their narrative and for good reason. When this thing entered the public arena, it ended with an underwhelming thud. There’s been nothing new that would be considered a game-changer, but Democrats need to keep this impeachment theater open—even if it’s solely run on snake oil. No evidence is needed to go after your enemies, huh? And people think Trump is the one who is mentally ill and sick in the head. 

Oh, and this entire impeachment acid trip Democrats are forcing us all to participate in only helps Russia. Russia wanted division in the U.S.. The Democrats are doing a fine job with that because...'orange man, bad.' 

9 of the 10 Richest

https://fee.org/articles/what-9-of-the-10-richest-people-in-the-world-have-in-common/

9 of the 10 Richest People in the World Are Self-Made Entrepreneurs

The world's billionaires are a pretty diverse bunch, but nine out of the top ten are self-made entrepreneurs.

Jon Miltimore - Tuesday, December 3, 2019

Every year Forbes publishes its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. Topping the list in 2019 for the second year in a row was, to no one’s surprise, Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder kept the top spot despite a divorce that sent his net worth tumbling from $160 billion to $114 billion.

Worldwide, Americans represent a sizable portion of the wealthiest people on the planet, accounting for seven in the top ten (see below). Many of the names making the list of the world’s richest people are familiar, as are their respective brands—Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. (Some—such as Amancio Ortega and his fashion empire Zara—are probably less familiar.)

#	Name	Net Worth*	Company	Self-made Entrepreneur?
1	Jeff Bezos	$131 B	Amazon	Yes
2	Bill Gates	$96.5 B	Microsoft	Yes
3	Warren Buffett	$82.5 B	Berkshire Hathaway	Yes
4	Bernard Arnault	$76 B	Louis Vuitton (LVMH)	No
5	Carlos Slim Helu	$64 B	Grupo Carso	Yes
6	Amancio Ortega	$62.7 B	Zara (fashion chain)	Yes
7	Larry Ellison	$62.5 B	Oracle	Yes
8	Mark Zuckerberg	$62.3 B	Facebook	Yes
9	Michael Bloomberg	$55 B	Bloomberg LLP	Yes
10	Larry Page	$50.8 B	Google	Yes

It’s a pretty diverse bunch, but what unites these individuals (aside from their enormous wealth) is that each, with the exception of Bernard Arnault, the chairman of Louis Vuitton who joined his father’s company in 1971, is a self-made entrepreneur. (This is a contrast to earlier times in human history when the wealthiest individuals were conquerors and political rulers.)

Without exception, each man’s story is impressive and compelling.

Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle, was born in 1944 to an unwed Jewish mother in New York City and raised by his adoptive parents (his aunt and uncle) on the South Side of Chicago. At age 22, Ellison dropped out of the University of Chicago after a single semester and moved to California, where he was hired by an electronics company. In 1977, with $1,200 of his own money, he launched a small company with two partners and obtained a contract to build a database management system for the CIA—which they named Oracle. It would become the company’s name in 1982 (Oracle Systems Corporation, later shortened to simply Oracle).

Amancio Ortega

The youngest of four children, Amancio Ortega was born in Busdongo de Arbás, León, Spain. The son of a railway worker, as a teenager Ortega moved with his family to A Coruña, where he took a job with a local shirtmaker and learned how to make clothing by hand. At age 16 he determined that the key to success in the business was not stocking up clothing inventory but giving customers precisely what they wanted when they wanted it. In 1975, Ortega used his small savings to open his first storefront—blocks from the store he had once worked. He named it Zara. More than four decades later, Zara stores around the world still employ the “fast fashion” strategy, refreshing clothing stock twice a week and filling orders in the first 48 hours.

Bill Gates

Who can forget Bill Gates? At age 13, when most kids are playing sports or video games, Gates wrote his first software program. He enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1973 but left after just two years to join his hometown pal Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where they’d commercialize their newly developed programming language: Microsoft Basic.

Carlos Slim

Carlos Slim was born in Mexico City in 1940. The son of Lebanese immigrants, Slim learned finance from his father, who died in 1953 when Slim was just 13. By that time, Slim had already purchased his first government bond and shares in Mexico’s largest bank.

  Bezos had the dual distinction of being high school valedictorian and working the breakfast shift at McDonald's as a short-order line cook.After graduating college in 1961, he became a stockbroker, often working 14-hour days. After four years he had earned enough to start his own brokerage firm—Inversora Bursátil—and begin laying the groundwork for Grupo Carso, the global conglomerate company Slim would form in 1990.

Larry Page

Larry Page was born in Lansing, Michigan. The son of a computer science professor, he decided to write his PhD dissertation on the link structure of the interwebs and the role of authoritative citations. Page would team with fellow Stanford graduate fellow Sergey Brin to use the research to develop Google’s PageRank algorithm, which drives the world’s best search engine.

The list goes on. Warren Buffet made thousands of dollars selling newspapers as a teenager and sold his first business when he was 17. Mark Zuckerberg famously launched Facebook from his college dorm with college pals—whom he’d try to screw over like pretty much everyone else he worked with. Michael Bloomberg was the son of an accountant. After being laid off from his investment bank (without a severance package), he used the equity he had earned to start his own company, which sold business information to clients. Today Bloomberg L.P. is the world leader in business data and insights, employing 20,000 people in 167 offices on two continents.

Jeff Bezos

And then there’s Bezos. The owner of the world’s largest online retail company was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen in Albuquerque to a 17-year-old high school student and a bike shop owner in 1964. After a divorce, his mother would marry a Cuban immigrant four years later, Miguel "Mike" Bezos, who’d relocate his family to Houston and, later, Miami. Before attending Princeton and later launching Amazon from his garage in 1994, Bezos had the dual distinction of being high school valedictorian and working the breakfast shift at McDonald's as a short-order line cook.

The Moral of the Story

There’s a pervasive belief that wealthy people usually inherit their money from a rich uncle or are born with silver spoons in their mouths, but the opposite is actually true.

In their book The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy, authors William D. Danko and Thomas J. Stanley note that fewer than 20 percent of millionaires in the US inherited more than 10 percent of their wealth.

These self-made entrepreneurs became insanely wealthy by taking a risk to act on vision, which resulted in an innovation that improved the world around them.

The same is true of billionaires, only more so. Even Bernard Arnault, the one man on the list who didn’t create his own company, can say the vast majority of his wealth was earned. In 1976, when Arnault convinced his father to liquidate its construction division and shift to real estate, it sold for roughly 40 million francs—about $31 million (USD) in 2018 dollars. That’s less than one-tenth of one percent of his estimated $76 billion wealth today.

This isn’t to say that some of these billionaires didn’t have certain advantages or privileges. Warren Buffett was the son of a congressman. Carlos Slim worked very hard, but his family was not bad off. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and perhaps others attended elite private schools that no doubt were substantially better than your typical public school.

What’s undeniable is that these self-made entrepreneurs became insanely wealthy by taking a risk to act on vision, which resulted in an innovation that improved the world around them. And that’s what entrepreneurship is all about.

Nunes Sues CNN For Defamation Following False Vienna Collusion Story

Sean Davis reporting for The Federalist

Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), sued CNN for defamation yesterday over its report falsely claiming he traveled to Vienna last year to secretly meet with former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin.

“CNN is the mother of fake news,” Nunes’ lawsuit, which asks for more than $435 million in compensatory and punitive damages, declares in the very first sentence of the introduction.

On November 22, CNN published a story from reporter Vicky Ward that claimed Nunes traveled to Vienna, Austria, in December 2018 to meet with Shokin, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general whose firing had been demanded by then-Vice President Joe Biden in early 2016. At the time, Shokin was reportedly investigating Burisma, a shady Ukrainian energy company that paid Biden’s son Hunter millions of dollars to sit on its board despite his lack of expertise in business, Ukraine, and the oil and gas industry.

“A lawyer for an indicted associate of Rudy Giuliani tells CNN that his client is willing to tell Congress about meetings the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee had in Vienna last year with a former Ukrainian prosecutor to discuss digging up dirt on Joe Biden,” CNN claimed in its story on Nunes.

View this document on Scribd

The problem for CNN is that Nunes, according to his lawsuit, has never spoken with or met Shokin and never traveled to Vienna in 2018. At the time of the alleged meeting, Nunes was on official congressional travel in Malta and Libya, where he met with government officials in both countries. His lawsuit included pictures of him with the prime minister of Malta and the head of the Libyan National Army.

“This statement [by CNN] is demonstrably false,” the defamation suit against CNN states. “[Nunes] was not in Vienna in 2018. Between November 30, 2018 and December 3, 2018, when CNN claims [Nunes] was in ‘Vienna,’ [Nunes] was actually in Libya and Malta.”

The lawsuit against CNN also notes that despite public denials from both Nunes and Shokin, the cable news network and its employees doubled down on its false reporting during Chris Cuomo’s television show on the evening of November 22.

“The prosecutor who was the one at the center of all the controversy met with Nunes in Vienna last December,” Cuomo falsely claimed on-air.

“Nunes meets with [Lev] Parnas several times,” Ward falsely claimed, referring to an attorney for Shokin who was indicted by U.S. authorities in October. Nunes states in his lawsuit that he has never met Parnas.

Cuomo falsely claimed again later in the interview that Nunes “went to Vienna” to “meet with Shokin.”

“Devin Nunes was not in Vienna in December 2018,” Nunes’ lawsuit notes. “Devin Nunes has never met Shokin. Devin Nunes never communicated with Parnas in December 2018 at the time of the ‘Vienna trip’ (that also never happened).”

The false claims against Nunes are similar to those levied against Michael Cohen, a former lawyer for President Donald Trump. A foreign researcher hired by Fusion GPS, the left-wing opposition researcher outfit paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on Trump, falsely claimed in 2016 that Cohen had secretly traveled to Prague in August 2016 to collude with Russian intelligence officials. That trip never happened, and the final report of the sprawling multi-year investigation by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller declared earlier this year that Mueller’s investigators found no evidence of treasonous collusion with Russian officials by the Trump campaign.

“CNN misrepresented the extent of its investigation and knowledge, misrepresented that it had verified Parnas’ story, and deliberately minimalized the credibility problems of its source,” Nunes’ lawsuit alleges. “CNN knew its statements were materially false, and possessed information that demonstrated the falsity of its statements.”

“In spite of multiple reports on November 23, 2019, November 24, 2019 and November 25, 2019, confirming that Shokin never met with [Nunes],” the lawsuit continues, “CNN refused to update or correct its story.”

The suit notes that multiple other news outlets who had been pitched the same false story rejected it because there was no evidence to support its claims. You can read the full lawsuit here.

A Word to Democrats About...

Christoper Chantrill for American Thinker

A Word to Democrats About Democratic Principles

Now that you Democrats have got back from Thanksgiving and have finished telling your #MAGA uncle he is a racist-sexist-homophobe, I would like a word before you chaps plunge into full-on impeachment in the House.

The most important political experience in my life was 30 years ago when my Greek friend explained it all to me. The conversation happened about the time that the Greek colonels had decided to return Greece to democracy.

What was needed, my friend said, was for the center-right to win the next election, and for the left to concede the election. Then what was needed was for the left to win the next election, and for the center-right to surrender political power and leave office.

Let us call this sophisticated philosophy “alternation in office.”

I think that alternation in office is the basic principle of peaceful politics. When the other guys win, you and your leaders gracefully concede, say we are all Americans, and energize your followers with “wait until next time.” Otherwise, each side will be arming up to take power by force, or dialing up their LTC interagency pals. And that is not good.

And so, since that time, I voted for Clinton after three GOP terms; for G.W. Bush after two Democratic terms; for Obama after two GOP terms; and for Trump after two Democratic terms. Hey! It means I have voted for a lot of winners! I believe that the one important thing in politics is that the Outs get their turn to be Ins, and don’t start plotting revolution.

Now, Sean Trende, the political analyst, wrote a while back that it is unusual for a party in the U.S. to win more than two presidential elections in a row. Typically, the voters decide after two terms that it is “time for a change.” What a good thing that is! Who knew the voters were so wise?

But obviously our Democratic friends do not understand that. Perhaps it is because they have never read about it in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, etc. Of course, this blindness is understandable in our elected officials. As Joseph Schumpeter wrote, the democratic politician’s expertise is “dealing in votes” and not thinking deep thoughts about separation of powers and alternation in office. Right Nancy?

Thus it was that Hillary Clinton, Democrat, failed to concede the normal change election of 2016. Thus it was that Al Gore, Democrat, failed to concede the normal change election of 2000. Thus it was that nobody had the chops to tell the deep state to knock it off and wait for Nixon to leave office; or wait for the ageing Reagan to leave office without Iran-Contra-ing him.

I do not say these people are evil; I say that they are fools and knaves. But just imagine if there was a political columnist with half a brain at the New York Times, and he wrote an “Alternation in Office” piece every four years saying that, even though Republicans were all far-right racist-sexist-homophobes, still, all evolved educated people -- the kind that read the New York Times -- knew the importance of conceding elections, especially when their party had just finished up two terms in power. Or imagine that political-science professors at the university educated good little girls about alternation in office, so that when they ended up writing conventional wisdom at the NYT they would be writing about alternation in office instead of diversity and safe spaces.

If you want to understand why our Democratic friends could be so wrong, a good place to start is Curtis Yarvin (lately Mencius Moldbug) and his five-part effusion on “The Clear Pill” over at American Mind. He argues that our liberal gentry -- bless its heart -- is just responding to the seductive “anthems” composed by the ruling class “that appeal to the liberal gentry’s natural ambition, honor, and vanity.”

What can compare to the ambition of “fundamentally transforming” America from its shameful past of slavery and oppression? And what honorcan compare to the knightly quest for the Holy Grail that will save the planet from climate change? Or the vanity of driving around in a hybrid Prius?

We need some liberal notable to write that there is nothing more honorable than conceding elections, so that all the Times-reading liberal gentry would start teaching their #MAGA uncles that the culture of alternation in office was what distinguished the gentry from the commoners.

Somewhere, somehow, some liberal Sacrificial Hero might be ready to teach the left about alternation in office. But I think it more likely it will take a string of Republican presidents before a new Clinton will appear as a New Democrat.

Abandon your impeachment folly, Democrats, before it is too late.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Conservative Media isn't stoking the cultural war, it's The Left

by Emily Jashinsky for The Federalist

The progressive left demands cultural changes, putting conservatives on the defense. It's never conservatives throwing the first punch.

A recent Voxsplainer aimed at breaking down the “War Against Thanksgiving” to bespectacled urbanites referred, mostly in passing, to the “culture war-stoking conservative media.” This is adorable, and for two particular reasons.

First, because its matter-of-fact presentation demonstrates how deeply this notion is embedded as conventional wisdom on the center-left. Second, because it’s so obviously stupid.

Of course, it’s allegedly the Fox-guzzling conservative rubes stoking the culture war, those reactionary pitchfork wielders who burn Howard Zinn books and listen to Blake Shelton sing about trucks. Or perhaps it’s the fault of cynical Beltway operators who exploit the anxieties of Flyover simpletons for profit and power.

The “culture-war stoking conservative media” is a liberal trope because it neatly comports to basic elite stereotypes about conservatism as a misguided ideology of blind rage and ignorance. The culture war itself is seen as a lowbrow battleground for reactionaries and the Brooks-Brothers elites who mine their concerns for clicks.

This brings me to the second reason Vox’s descriptor is amusing. The progressive movement is waging this war on culture by its own admission. By the essence of their mission and the definition of their moniker, progressives are on offense. There would be no cultural battles were it not for changes demanded by the left. Those of us so-called “culture war-stoking” conservatives in media are on defense. Almost always.

We focus heavily on culture because it’s what our audience finds useful. It’s what our audience finds useful because they, too, are on defense—and that’s because the left is focused even more heavily on culture. This kind of coverage is entirely a response to the left’s broad and deliberate cultural offensive, which honest progressives should fully own. The left raises proposals (or demands, more often) for cultural change. In response, we stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” (Or we’re supposed to, at least.)

Of course, media conservatives are blamed for stoking the flames of a culture war because center-left elites wouldn’t dare admit their own hands have been dirtied by something so asinine and lowbrow. Yet, curiously, they own all of these politicized initiatives to alter the culture. But you can’t have it both ways.

For instance, are the conservatives who cover transgender bathrooms stoking the culture war by virtue of their coverage, or is it the folks who introduced the idea and are seeking aggressively to normalize it? Again, to an honest progressive, the answer should be easy: the culture is oppressive and they are waging a righteous war against it.

Consider awards season, which regularly produces a stream of contrived liberal broadsides. I love Meryl Streep, but it was her choice to pit popular sports against “the arts,” echoing the snobbishness that drove voters to Donald Trump. She did the stoking, conservative media simply responded. When Sean Spicer was cast on “Dancing with the Stars,” conservative media’s coverage was provoked entirely by the left’s complaints.

As for the “War on Christmas,” an admittedly dramatic designation, it isn’t exactly conservative Christians pushing to secularize the holiday, and the push to secularize the holiday absolutely exists. Is conservative media sometimes guilty of framing cultural conflict in hyperbolic terms? Of course. But, often, what looks like hyperbole to elites—who cheer many sweeping progressive initiatives—sounds pitch perfect to conservative bystanders watching their world get turned upside down. You can go down the line on these issues, from the national anthem to comedy to statues of Thomas Jefferson to Taylor Swift, it’s never conservatives throwing the first punch.

Even the aforementioned Vox article, headlined “Trump’s made-up war on Thanksgiving, explained,” gently undermines its own contention about the culture war. In a subheading titled “It’s not a bad idea to give Thanksgiving a think,” the author suggests using Thanksgiving as a time to “[consider]” the plight of the Native American community, which is perfectly reasonable idea, but certainly calls for change. It’s also perfectly reasonable for conservatives to counter that suggestion by arguing the holiday would be better spent focusing on our “social and domestic ties,” as Sarah Hale proposed so many years ago. Either way, the would-be change agents aren’t coming from the right.

Whatever is happening with Thanksgiving is nothing compared to wars being waged on other cultural fronts. And it’s not a war being “stoked” by conservative media, but by the left. To believe otherwise is to undermine the entire progressive project.