Right-Wing Populism Is the Way Forward

The times are changing and it is past time the Republican Party unapologetically declares itself the party of normal people and governs like it wants their support.

Ely Osbourne for American Greatness

For too long, the Republican Party has squandered its political power. Although no one would know it from watching primetime news, enjoying professional sporting events, or opening social media, America remains a generally “center-right” country. Popular culture spews progressive values and liberal thought. As recently as 2019, however, Gallup found that a combined 72 percent of Americans would classify themselves as “conservative” or “moderate.” Along with that, the middle class continues to shrink as incomes at the top continue to rise.

Pew Research found that the middle class does not make a majority of the American population for the first time in over 50 years. The share of middle-class income has fallen from around 60 percent to nearly 40 percent during the same period. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, manufacturing made up nearly 30 percent of the nominal GDP in the 1950s, but now teeters around 10-15 percent. This is important because it suggests a significant part of the country among the working- and middle-class hold moderate to conservative views with no real representation. 

Both parties have neglected these Americans. Democrats have abandoned their pitch to working people in exchange for an appeal to identity politics and elites in Hollywood, academia, and Silicon Valley. Republicans have wasted decades drafting “free trade” deals and rebuilding countries around the globe while many in middle America lost their jobs and watched their communities crumble. Capitalism is a fantastic thing but why on earth should CEOs make millions of dollars in a single day while U.S. taxpayers subsidize their employees through food stamps and other social safety-net programs?

Moreover, why should a Chinese company, running on child labor, be able to sell goods in America with no tax while the small business down the street pays a third of its revenue in taxes? Why is it deemed righteous to send tens of billions of dollars to other countries but it is “liberal” to invest that same money in American education, health care, or public transit? Why do those at the top profit during a pandemic while those at the bottom have to choose between groceries and rent? These questions are simply not being addressed. 

The Republican Party should address these concerns by recommitting to the values of right-wing populism. It should emphasize being “America First” through policies such as securing the border, limiting annual immigration, keeping resources at home instead of sending them overseas, and promoting American industry. It should acknowledge that industrial jobs provide stability for the economic and social fabric of the country.

Politicians tout their “experience” and “accomplishments” as reasons for reelection. But anyone who has lived in working-class America knows that the leadership of the last 30 years has failed.

The Republican Party should protect the American way of life by creating safe neighborhoods through supporting the military, law enforcement, and the exercise of the Second Amendment while promoting Judeo-Christian values of being pro-life and pro-family. Liberty is crucial for the republic’s survival, but it is just as important for children to grow up in stable homes and be taught the difference between right and wrong. 

Republicans should reject corruption and refuse to be influenced by big tech companies and Wall Street. They must stop trying to satisfy social media giants, multinational companies, and pharmaceutical companies and rather fight to protect the free speech rights of American citizens on their platforms, ensure their constituents continue to have quality jobs in their neighborhoods, and address the over-prescribed drugs that are addicting their constituents.

Common people are the ones who put Republicans in office, not the elite, and their policies should reflect that. “Joe Smith,” who has an opioid-addicted wife and recently lost his job, couldn’t care less that a school was rebuilt in a country around the world that he can’t even pronounce. He does not even have the basic internet capability to watch the Netflix documentary where the American elite are lecturing him on identity politics and his “privilege.” He is just focused on having enough money to feed his little girl and figuring out why the closest rehab facility is an hour away and at full capacity for the next three months. This is an all-too-familiar story for many. 

It is as if the ruling class is completely deaf to the cries of normal people. Politicians tout their “experience” and “accomplishments” as reasons for reelection. But anyone who has lived in working-class America knows that the leadership of the last 30 years has failed.

Republicans want to play by the old rule book that the Democrats have long abandoned. As Republicans worry about “procedure,” Democrats plan to abolish the filibuster, get rid of the Electoral College, and pack the court system while lecturing us about the Constitution as they shove their radical agenda down the throats of everyday Americans. It is no longer acceptable for Republicans to be “Democrat-Lite” and slowly cede ground to the Left. That is why now, more than ever, a new right-wing must rise and keep the liberal mob from running this country into the ground. America is worth defending and it is time for a new generation of patriots to fight the progressive movement that is attempting to take over the country.

President Trump has significantly changed the direction of the Republican Party but he will not always be in office. If the next phase of the party returns to free trade and wasteful regime change wars, the party will die forever—and deserve it. In decades past, before Trump, working people would have blindly thrown their support to Democrats and Republicans would never bother addressing many of these issues. The times are changing and it is past time the Republican Party unapologetically declares itself the party of normal people and governs like it wants their support. 

Who or What Exactly Is Running Against Trump?

The inner-Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.

Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

As we enter the final 90 days of the November presidential campaign, a few truths are crystalizing about the “Biden problem,” or the inability of a 77-year-old Joe Biden to conduct a “normal” campaign.

Biden’s cognitive challenges are increasing geometrically, whether as a result of months of relative inactivity and lack of stimulation or just consistent with the medical trajectory of his affliction. His lot is increasingly similar to historical figures such as 67-year-old President William Henry Harrison, William Gladstone’s last tenure as prime minister, Chancellor Hindenburg, or Franklin Roosevelt in late 1944—age and physical infirmities signaling to the concerned that a subordinate might assume power sooner than later.

In the past, it was to Biden’s advantage to postpone his selection of his female-mandated vice presidential running mate, given the lose-lose choice of either picking a woke young African American female who may polarize swing voters while spending the next three months being vetted in the fashion of California Representative Karen Bass’s Scientology and Fidel Castro issues, or selecting a vetted, but off-putting former National Security Advisor Susan Rice or Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who does not especially like Biden and would be seen as hovering and rummaging about as an impatient president-in-waiting.

Biden, remember, is one of the few primary candidates in history who promised in advance to pick a running mate on the basis of gender and, as events would dictate, and by inference, race as well.

But now there seems an additional urgency to select a running mate, given the Democratic ticket is a construct, with no visible or viable presidential candidate. While traditional polls show a sizable Biden lead, at some point voters will want more than the current contest of Trump alone versus the media, the virus, the lockdown, the economy, and the rioting. But so far, it remains a one-person race, in the fashion of Clint Eastwood’s weird 2012 Republican National Convention appearance speaking to an empty chair.

Perceiving the Inner Biden

So we are witnessing a campaign never before experienced in American history and not entirely attributable to the plague and quarantine. After all, the fellow septuagenarian Trump, with his own array of medical challenges, insists upon frenetic and near-constant public appearances. His opponent is a noncandidate conducting a noncampaign that demands we ask the question, who exactly is drafting the Biden agenda and strategy? Or, rather, who or what is Biden, if not a composite cat’s paw of an anonymous left-wing central committee?

When Biden speaks for more than a few minutes without a script or a minder in his basement, the results are often racist of the sort in the Black Lives Matter era that otherwise would be rightly damned and called out as disqualifying. If his inner racialist persona continues to surface, Biden’s insensitivities threaten to expose a muzzled BLM as a mere transparent effort to grab power rather than to address “systemic racism” of the sort the exempt Biden seems to exude.

Biden needs the minority vote in overwhelming numbers, as he realized in his late comeback in the primaries. But the continuance of his often angry, unapologetic racialist nonsense suggests that his cognitive issues trump his political sense of self-control.

The inner Biden at 77 is turning out to be an unabashed bigot in the age of “cancel culture” and thought crimes that has apparently declared him immune from the opprobrium reserved for any such speech.

For Biden, if any African American doesn’t vote for him, then “you ain’t black”—a charge fired back at black podcaster with near venom. Biden more calmly assures us, in his all-knowing Bideneque wisdom, that Americans can’t tell Asians in general apart—channeling the ancient racist trope that “they all look alike.”

In his scrambled sociology, blacks are unimaginatively monolithic politically, while Latinos are diverse and more flexible. Biden seems to have no notion that “Latino” is a sort of construct to encompass everyone from a Brazilian aristocrat to an immigrant from the state of Oaxaca, and not comparable to the more inclusive and precise term “African American.” Moreover, while the black leadership in Congress may be politically monolithic, there are millions of blacks who oppose abortion, defunding the police, and illegal immigration. The best minds of the conservative intellectual and political movement so often are African Americans.

When asked questions, Biden’s answers so often reveal racist subtexts. A few days ago, CBS reporter Errol Barnett, who is black, asked Biden whether he would take a cognitive assessment exam. Biden fired back to him that such an unfair question would be as if he had asked Barnett whether he was getting tested for cocaine before going live. “That’s like saying,” a perturbed Biden exclaimed to Barnett, “before you got on this program, you’re taking a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not . . . What do you think, huh? Are you a junkie?” Note the tell-tale Biden trademark of racist insinuation delivered with punk-like braggadocio.

Note, too, Biden’s racist assumption that an African American professional journalist might be likely to be defensive about being a cocaine addict. Yet Biden should know—from the drug struggles of Hunter Biden—that cocaine is in fact the favorite drug of the white elite.

Mental Lapses as Force Multipliers

The problem is that in the past, a cognizant Biden was already racially edgy with his various earlier-career riffs about inner-city criminals, blue-collar chest-thumping about busing, and his more recent ideas about donut shops, accomplished black professionals on the verge of returning to slave status (“put y’all back in chains”), his racist descriptions of candidate Obama’s supposedly exceptional personal hygiene and ability to speak well, his corn-pop braggadocio, and on and on.

His mental lapses now serve as force multipliers and accelerants of the old Biden’s foot-in-mouth disease and render him often a caricature of a racist.

Politically, the point is not that he will not win the majority of minority voters, but rather that he won’t win enough of them at a margin necessary that carrying large swing-state cities such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and others, will make up for the likely loss of rural areas and working-class whites, supposedly the “clingers” that “good ’ole Joe from Scranton” was supposed to own.

Even more disturbing, the media simply is unconcerned about Biden’s racial putdowns, stereotyping, and uncomfortableness with the proverbial “other.” And the more the inner-Biden racialist sounds off, the more ridiculous such contextualizing becomes and the less people listen when journalists and activists spout off about a systemically racist America.

Recently, when Biden has attempted to speak without prompts, indeed to clear up “rumors” of his cognitive problems, he simply loses his train of thought and utters a series of unstructured and unsettled thoughts that refute the very premise of his interview. The understandable Democratic strategy is to run out the clock and to choreograph a few post-Labor Day public appearances, to outsource campaigning to his running mate and future cabinet secretaries, and then to hope, in the manner of a 2016 Hillary Clinton, that he has amassed a large enough September lead to outlast a closing October Trump campaign.

There are problems with such a strategy, as we saw in 2016. If Biden late in the campaign stumbles in the debates, there is no post-convention remedy to reassure the public he is compos mentis or otherwise can be replaced by a majority consensus. Then the country would be entering something eerily similar to, but far graver than, the McGovern debacle of desperately looking for a new running mate after it was disclosed that an apparently perfectly cognizant Tom Eagleton—his running-mate for 18 days—had undergone two electric shock treatments in his past as well as undisclosed prior hospitalizations for bipolar disorder.

Biden’s Race Against Time

Right now, the Democrats have a virtual campaign and a virtual candidate and a strategy of running against the Trump news cycle. That may work, but it assumes Americans under quarantine don’t mind that they do not really know who is the Democratic challenger, or that Biden is, in fact, not physically or mentally able to function as either a candidate or president. It also assumes that the Trump-owned news cycle will remain as dismal over the next three months as it has the last five or six weeks, and that the virus will spike in late October again, rather than slowly burn out as it seems to be doing in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.

Add it all up and the question is no longer whether Biden could fulfill the duties of the presidency but whether he can finish a traditional campaign over the next three months—without outsourcing his duties to a committee, or serially saying something blatantly racist, or simply disappearing to the nether world of his basement where saying nothing beats saying anything.

Greece on alert as Turkey sends survey ship to disputed waters

Turkey has sent a ship to conduct a seismic survey in a disputed area of the eastern Mediterranean - a move that has put Greece on alert.
The search for potentially rich oil and gas deposits is to take place south of the Greek island of Kastellorizo.
Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis called a meeting with military chiefs on Monday, after Turkey issued an international maritime alert, known as a Navtex.
The Oruc Reis's mission challenges a Greek-Egyptian gas exploration deal.


There are also tensions around Cyprus over rival exploration rights. The Republic of Cyprus and Greece do not accept any such rights for Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus in the region.
The self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, defended by Turkey, is not internationally recognised. Last year Turkey sent two drilling ships - the Fatih and Yavuz - to waters off Cyprus.
The Oruc Reis is accompanied by two auxiliary vessels. Its voyage had been suspended by Turkey last month, amid international concern.
The Greek foreign ministry said the latest mission was a "new serious escalation" which "exposed" Turkey's "destabilising role".
Greece and Turkey are both Nato members, but have a history of border disputes.
Last Thursday Greece and Egypt signed a deal to create an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in waters that contain oil and gas reserves.
The deal conflicts with a rival EEZ that Turkey and the internationally-recognised government in Libya have sought to establish. Such zones can extend for 200 nautical miles.
The Republic of Cyprus has EEZ accords with Lebanon, Egypt and Israel, similarly linked to the development of offshore energy resources.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53723984

Appeals Court to Either Reassign Flynn Case or Restrict Judge

Petr Svab reporting for Epoch Times

The case of former Trump adviser Michael Flynn may be reassigned to a different judge, or the current judge will be restricted in how he can proceed, several lawyers have predicted based on recent developments in the case.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear the case tomorrow.

Flynn’s lawyers consider the current district judge, Emmet Sullivan, to be biased against Flynn, mainly because Sullivan has refused to accept the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) decision in May to drop the case, which has been stuck in the court process since.

Flynn, a retired three-star Army general, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in 2017, but later moved to withdraw the plea, saying he was misled and pressured into it.

The DOJ moved to dismiss the case after a review highlighted documents indicating that the FBI didn’t have a proper investigative purpose to interview Flynn and may have done so only to elicit false statements from him.

A three-judge panel of the appeals court ordered Sullivan to accept the case dismissal in June, after which he appealed for a rehearing before the full court of 11 judges (en banc).

The court granted the hearing, but on Aug. 5, ordered the parties to “be prepared to address at oral argument the effect, if any” of a law that tells judges to recuse themselves if their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” and also when they become “a party to the proceeding.”

Option 1: Sullivan Goes

“They are going to conclude that by petitioning for rehearing en banc, Judge Sullivan has, practically if not officially, made himself a ‘party’ to the district court proceedings, and as such the very appearance of bias means he cannot continue overseeing the case,” appellate attorney John Reeves, former assistant Missouri attorney general, predicted in an email.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy agreed.

“It is incumbent on him to recuse himself,” he said in an Aug. 8 National Review op-ed. “If he can’t bring himself to do that—a failure that would further demonstrate a lack of judicial detachment—the D.C. Circuit should disqualify him. Either way, the case should be reassigned to a new judge, who should promptly grant the Justice Department’s motion to dismiss.”

The court won’t formally order the new judge to accept the case dismissal, Reeves said, “but will informally ‘remind’ the new judge about the law limiting the courts’ ability to question the prosecution’s motives for seeking dismissal, especially when it is unopposed.”

The new judge should only take a week or two to familiarize himself or herself with the case file.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Flynn will be treated more favorably. Of the 14 D.C. district judges, 10 were appointed by Democratic presidents, an approximate indicator of their leanings.

Option 2: Sullivan Stays

While the court “would be within its rights to reassign the case,” it’s more likely the appeals court will allow Sullivan to stay, but will impose restrictions on him, said Mark Chenoweth, executive director and general counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonprofit that litigates against administrative state overreach.

Flynn originally sought the appeals court’s intervention because Sullivan indicated he would allow third parties to weigh in on the dismissal.

Sullivan then appointed former federal Judge John Gleeson as an amicus curiae (friend of the court), tasking him to develop arguments against the case dismissal. He then ordered a hearing on the matter.

Just days before his appointment, Gleeson had co-authored an op-ed arguing for Sullivan’s launching a “full, adversarial inquiry” into the dismissal and possibly denying it and sentencing Flynn.

The appeals court’s three-judge panel, in a split 2–1 decision, granted Flynn’s mandamus petition.

Because the Constitution leaves charging decisions to the executive, a hearing on dismissal motion is only appropriate in some rare cases, which Flynn’s “is plainly not” and “cannot be used as an occasion to superintend the prosecution’s charging decisions,” stated the opinion, authored by Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee.

In vacating the decision, the appeals court signaled that the majority of the judges weren’t convinced.

It ordered that “the parties should be prepared to address whether there are ‘no other adequate means to attain the relief’ desired.”

“It is possible the en banc court thinks that Judge Sullivan should have been allowed to proceed with a hearing on the motion to dismiss charges, while surely still cutting back on the outsized role amici were slated to play in that district court hearing,” Chenoweth said in an email.

“If so, the court could say that any error in Judge Sullivan’s ultimate ruling on the motion to dismiss charges would be correctable on appeal.”

Seven of the 11 active judges were appointed by Democrat presidents. In addition, one Trump appointee, Judge Gregory Katsas, recused himself from the case.

The process with Flynn, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration and former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, has been marked by dozens of lies, contradictions, and unusual occurrences.

In June, documents were released indicating that in early 2017, both then-President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were personally involved in the case.

The evidence shows that Obama discussed the case with the director of the FBI and a top Justice Department official in January 2017, a day after investigators at the FBI intended to dismiss the case but were held off by higher-ups.

Court Decisions Upholding DACA Set Stage For Pres. Trump To....

Court Decisions Upholding DACA Set Stage For Pres. Trump To Use Executive Orders For Brilliant End Run of Pelosi and Schumer

Shipwreckedcrew reporting for RedState

Barrack Obama signed an Executive Order creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program on June 15, 2012.  He did so after his efforts to get a comprehensive immigration reform bill passed by Congress to address the problem of illegal aliens who had been brought into the United States by their parents when they were children.

It is undisputed that the terms of the Executive Order conflicted with valid United States immigration law passed by Congress and signed by a President.  For one thing, it provided that persons who “qualified” under the terms of the program created by Executive Order could obtain work permits — green cards — when by law they were not eligible.  Other provisions of DACA were also in conflict with existing federal immigration law.

In June 2017 the Trump Administration announced that it was reviewing the DACA program, suggesting that it would be canceled.  But the Administration delayed for six months while the Democrat controlled House and Republican controlled Senate attempted to negotiate a comprehensive immigration reform to address DACA and other issues involving federal immigration law.  Ultimately no agreement could be had, and in March 2018 the Trump Administration began the process to terminate the program.  Three separate lawsuits were filed challenging the Administration’s actions under the Administrative Procedures Act.  All three courts granted preliminary injunctions against the proposed termination finding the Administration had not strictly complied with the APA’s procedural requirements.

So, a federal program that was created by Executive Order, in conflict with established federal immigration law, and which was not itself enacted in conformance with the procedural requirements of the APA, could not be canceled by the next Presidential Administration due to a failure to precisely follow the APA.  A program that had no lawful basis for its legitimacy, would be protected from termination on the basis that such an action was “arbitrary and capricious”.

Turn the page now to the negotiations between the House and Senate over extending benefits to middle and low-income Americans as part of existing COVID-19 relief measures already adopted.  No agreement can be reached because the Democrats, sensing this is a “must-pass” measure, decide to hold passage “hostage” with a wish-list of election-related demands like allowing mail-in voting nationwide, allowing “vote-harvesting” nationwide, and additional money to the Postal Service to meet the demands anticipated by states that want all mail-in balloting.  With the Postal Service currently struggling to meet normal delivery demand, there is great uncertainty about the degree the Postal Service will be able to accommodate tens or hundreds of millions of ballots being mailed out and returned in a relatively short window of time.

Pres. Trump refused to give in to the extortion, and with all talks seeming to have collapsed Friday, he signed four Executive Orders on Saturday to deal with four specific problems.

1. He suspended IRS collection of payroll taxes on workers earning less than $100,000 a year.
2. He suspended the collection of payments on Student Loans.
3. He imposed a federal nationwide moratorium on evictions by landlords.
4. He extended unemployment benefits, including a supplemental amount of $400 per month (down from $600 previously passed by Congress).

The outrage expressed by Democrats today over Pres. Trump’s unilateral action is simply delicious since Trump had warned when the Democrats opposed the termination of DACA that fighting to keep the clearly unconstitutional program in place gave too much power to the Executive Branch.  He proved that point yesterday with his action.

No one among the Democrats in Congress objected to Pres. Obama executing an end-run around GOP Congressional opposition to comprehensive immigration reform by imposing DACA via Executive Order.   That was election-year politics, with Obama creating the program to the delight of Hispanic Americans, only 6 months before his 2012 re-election contest with Mitt Romney.

Now, only 3 months before the 2020 election, Pres. Trump is faced with economic hardship connected to continuing economic issues involving COVID-19, and the Democrats in Congress are happy to block a relief package based on the idea that not getting the relief would hurt Pres. Trump’s re-election chances.

So Trump did what Obama did, only with an added degree of cunning.  Not only did he sign 4 Executive Orders that have little or no political downside, he now has the Democrats in Congress in a position to having to advocate for eliminating relief to the unemployed, students, and workers — and maybe even compelling them to go to court in an effort to block the relief from getting to those who need it.

Are these bold unilateral steps Pres. Trump has taken, possibly infringing on the authority of Congress to pass tax & spending measures?

Maybe.

I think the Democrats should go to court to find out.

Instigators of the Occupy Movement Now Calling for ‘Siege’ of the White House

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

While we are currently dealing with the radical BLM/Antifa chaos being wrought in various cities and towns around the country, prior to them there was an antecedent – Occupy.

Now it’s sort of important to understand that while in each new iteration of “leftist movement” while there are some new folks who come in with whatever the chief “cause” of the moment, there’s still the same general core of leftists that move from one “movement” to the next. So if you check many BLM folks, many of them were also involved in Occupy.

The “cause” of the moment is about getting new adherents, be it “evil billionaires” or “black lives.” But in the end the real underlying cause is always the same: it’s really all about pushing the country further to the radical left.

But the folks who were behind Occupy have something else in the works. Call it “Occupy 2.0” if you will.

You may not recall who was behind Occupy. I recall because I covered it extensively from the beginning when it came off of Anonymous discussion boards and then suddenly appeared in NYC. It was instigated by Adbusters, with initial boots on the ground from folks like Anonymous and various far left organizations. Then as now, the media didn’t write about the real nature of the folks behind it.

Adbusters is now calling for a siege of the White House, starting September 17. “We will lay siege to the White House. And we will sustain it for exactly fifty days,” they say on their website. “Are you ready for the revolution,” it asks.

Now the terminology is likely to get the attention of the Secret Service and other law enforcement who find words like “revolution” and “siege of the White House” more than a little concerning.

They claim they will have “tens of thousands” of folks streaming into Lafayette Square on that date the anniversary of Occupy. “Fifty days — September 17th to November 3rd…we’ll inspire a global movement of systemic change — a Global Spring — a cultural heave towards a new world order.”

The purpose here seems to be to completely paralyze the debate and create a crisis in the run up to the election, likely thinking the D.C. police wouldn’t unseat them. But they misjudge, they will be dealing with the feds, far more than just the D.C. police.

They already seem to have a couple of problems. Like first, just being able to count. September 17 to November 3 isn’t 50 days, it’s 48.

Then they haven’t even settled on a “demand” yet. They’re so incensed, yet they don’t even know what they want?

“What is our one demand? We want to collaborate with you — brainstorm tactics with you — spark a revolution with you. We need your voice of wisdom and expertise to pull off a radically democratic toneshift in our politics. If you would like to either contribute or just shoot the shit, drop us a line at blackspotcollective@adbusters.org,” they ask.

But they haven’t even gotten together with some of who they would need for boots on the ground.

Apparently, Twitter doesn’t have any problem with such an announcement either. They’re too busy busting the president for saying that children rarely get the Wuhan coronavirus.

Americans had a message for these characters. Just like with Occupy, this isn’t going to end well for them. Safe to say, they got badly ratioed for this. 

Indeed. ‘Siege’ starts September 17? Meet our friends from the Secret Service and Homeland Security. Occupation ends by September 18.

Wild bear that sniffed woman's hair is caught and castrated

There is outrage in Mexico after a black bear seen on video approaching a visitor in a nature park and sniffing her hair was caught and castrated.

 

There is outrage in Mexico after a black bear seen on video approaching a visitor in a nature park and sniffing her hair was caught and castrated.

Some people are questioning plans to move the animal to a different state.
But experts say the move is necessary because it had become accustomed to being fed by humans in the ecological park where it lived.
They said the footage showed the consequences of feeding wild animals for the sake of a selfie.

'Friendly bear'

The animal, a juvenile male black bear weighing 96kg (212lb), was caught because it was considered to pose a risk to visitors of Chipinque Ecological Park. Video showed it getting very close to a young woman who was taking a selfie with the bear last month


Officials said there had been other close encounters between humans and the same bear in the park and in residential areas nearby.
Locals dubbed it "the friendly bear" and called it "Chipi" after the park where it lived.
The bear was captured by officials from the federal environmental protection agency (Profepa) while having a snooze in the backyard of a house after its residents alerted the authorities to their unexpected guest.
Veterinarians at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León checked it over and fitted it with a radio collar.
The animal was also castrated, a move which is now being investigated by Profepa.
The agency has released a statement saying that the decision to castrate the bear was taken by the co-ordinator for wildlife at the university after consulting with Profepa's director-general for wildlife control, Martín Vargas Prieto.
According to the statement [in Spanish], Mr Vargas Prieto argued that the bear had to be castrated to avoid him getting into fights with other bears once he is released in the Sierra de Nido mountain range in Chihuahua state.
Both the castration and the planned move to Chihuahua have caused outrage among people in the state of Nuevo León, where the bear was captured.

 But some have commented on social media that whatever led to the decision to castrate and move the bear, the outrage should be directed at those visitors and guides who are reported to have fed the bear with scraps to make him approach humans who wanted to have selfies taken with him.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53721759?at_medium=custom7&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_custom4=27EB8814-DAF7-11EA-86C3-CE163A982C1E&at_campaign=64&at_custom2=twitter&at_custom3=%40BBCWorld

Must be getting close, the conspirators are deploying chaff and countermeasures....

Steven Schrage Appears to Discuss His Role in “Spygate”

We have a saying in the south: ‘hang around a one-legged man long enough and eventually you’re gonna start limping‘.  This interview is an example of how that cuts through the BS, spin and political chaff and countermeasures.  Steven Schrage should be trusted as far as you can spit into a hurricane – which is to say, not at all.

First, in an article to accompany his media effort, Schrage waxes philosophical and woefully about how his years-long good friend and phd supervisor, Stephan Halper, the one-legged character in the metaphor, turned out to be a politically motivated snake and spy.  Oh, but all the years previous this wasn’t noticed?  Not buying it.

Second, Schrage sat and watched Michael Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova get raked over the coals for three+ years only now, right now, to find his conscience bothered by his participation in assisting the lies pushed by his friend against them?  Isn’t that convenient timing?… Yeah, sure. I might have been born at night, but I wasn’t born last night.

Third, Schrage notes he was interviewed by John Durham. Horsepucky. Durham doesn’t interview anyone; someone else does, someone very specific; and the fact that Schrage has no clue who that person is implies an aspect to the side-show he now presents as total nonsense.  In short, this is a distraction story…. Look over there…. shiny things.

I’ve watched and researched these intelligence characters for so long their M.O. screams like visible strings on marionettes. And yes, once you see the strings it’s impossible to return to a time when you did not see them. This interview is a purposeful ruse.

[His article here]

I also do not fault Matt Taibbi or Maria Bartiromo for falling for it.

Devin Nunes was right about Schrage a YEAR AGO:

[…] What you have there is, you have an American citizen, somebody who’s long been involved in politics, and the guy’s name is Steven Schrage. Now, knows that the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the FBI, we want to talk to anyone and everyone who was dealing with Carter Page and other Trump associates, especially in early 2016.

Schrage is the one who invited Carter Page to this event. Schrage is the one who organized this event. So — but instead of coming forward, a guy who’s been involved in politics for this long doesn’t come forward? I want to know, did he know about the Steele dossier at that time? When did he find out about the Steele dossier? Did he have control of the Steele dossier at any time? Did he give it to anyone?

Those are the types of things that Steven Schrage needs to come clean on, because, you know, look, maybe he was just a guy working for minimum wage sweeping the floors around Cambridge. I highly doubt it.

And the fact that he hasn’t come forward in two-and-a-half years is highly suspect. Now, when you look at the other Brits that were involved there, Maria, if you — this also ties in with General Flynn, because these Brits were the ones who went public and said — specifically, Christopher Andrew said that General Flynn had a Russian girlfriend.  (more)

Nice try…

Lindsey Graham’s Decepticon Games....

Senator Lindsay Graham Releases FBI Talking Points for SSCI Briefing February 14, 2018 – Graham Positioned to Defend SSCI

Today Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsay Graham released a set of talking points [full pdf below] from the FBI during a briefing on February 14, 2018 to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The unknown FBI briefer is informing the SSCI about the reliability of Chris Steele’s primary sub-source, and whether he agrees with the Dossier content & conclusions:

At first blush the impression from the release; and indeed the expressed position as outlined by Graham in the release; is that some unknown entity from the FBI was misleading the SSCI in February of 2018 about Christopher Steele and the perspective of his primary sub-source. However, there’s a deeper story.

Within the release it must be noted the date of the briefing material is February 14, 2018. The unknown FBI briefer is saying, in essence, the primary sub-source doesn’t dispute the Dossier material. Obviously this position is demonstrably false given how the PSS said the Dossier was full of “rumor”, “gossip”, “innuendo” and “bar talk”.

The FBI briefer is misleading the Senate and so today we see the angry position expressed by Graham as he reveals this misleading briefing. However, five days prior to this briefing, on February 9, 2018, the text messages between SSCI Vice-Chairman Mark Warner and Chris Steele’s lawyer, Adam Waldman, were released. This frames the accurate context to consider the position of the SSCI and FBI briefer on Feb 14, 2018.

Yes, the FBI briefer was misleading the SSCI… However, the SSCI wanted to be mislead. This is how plausible deniability is built into the process. The SSCI was conducting an investigation of Trump-Russia; if we are honest the SSCI was participating in a process to weaponize the committee to advance a narrative against the interests of the Trump administration; therefore the SSCI and FBI briefer were aligned in common interest.

Lindsay Graham’s outrage over the misleading briefing is nothing more than an attempt to retroactively cover for the SSCI as they continued their role in the plot to remove President Trump throughout 2018 and 2019.  Graham is taking the purposefully built plausible deniability, assembled in 2018, and using it as a distraction today in 2020.

Graham knows the FBI lied, this is not a revelation. The FBI supported the DOJ letter July 12, 2018, that mislead the FISA Court five months after this misleading SSCI briefing. The current level of Graham outrage is ridiculous when considering he could have asked these same questions in April when the DOJ-NSD letter was released.

Who was the FBI official who reviewed the July 12th letter and supported its conclusions? The most likely answer is the same FBI official who did the SSCI briefing on Feb 14th. This is not rocket science dot-connecting.

The FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) conducted the interviews with Steele’s primary sub-source in Jan, March and May 2017. Yet I’ll bet you a donut it was not the FBI-WFO who was briefing congress…. there’s another layer of plausible deniability. This is how the system is set-up. Today, Lindsay Graham is playing an outrage game. Where was this outrage in April?

Here’s the full briefing material [Original pdf Here]

View this document on Scribd

.

This is all connected back to FBI SSA Brian Dugan’s work.  The briefing was a way for the SSCI to establish plausible deniability five days after Vice-Chairman Mark Warner’s covert text messages were made public.

This is why the focus on the story behind SSCI Security Director James Wolfe is critical.  All of these granular machinations are connected to the objective to remove President Donald Trump.  The SSCI was supporting and coordinating with the special counsel.

It is all one team effort.

Let’s look at how the IG report frames the primary sub-source, and specifically notice the FBI contact and questioning took place in January 2017 (we now know that date to be January 12, 2017):

Those interviews with Steele’s primary sub-source took place in January, March and May of 2017; and clearly the sub-source debunked the content of the dossier itself.

Those interviews were a year before the Feb 14, 2018, FBI briefing outlined by Graham today.

Those interviews were also 18-months, 16-months and 14-months ahead of the July 2018 DOJ letter to the FISC.   The DOJ-NSD says the sub-source was “truthful and cooperative” but the DOJ doesn’t tell the court the content of the truthfulness and cooperation.  Why?

Keep in mind this activity to support the Dossier and by extension the FISA application to the SSCI and FISC was written by AAG John Demers in July 2018 and briefed to congress in February 2018.  Jeff Sessions was Attorney General (firewalled), Rod Rosenstein was Deputy AG (providing no special counsel oversight); Christopher Wray was FBI Director, David Bowditch is Deputy, and Dana Boente is FBI chief-legal-counsel.

Why would the FBI mislead the senate intelligence committee?  

Why would the DOJ-NSD not be forthcoming with the FISA court about the primary sub-source?

This level of disingenuous withholding of information speaks to an institutional motive.

In February and July 2018 the DOJ clearly knew the dossier was full of fabrications, yet they withheld that information from the SSCI and FISC and even went to far as to say the predicate was still valid.  Why?

It doesn’t take a deep-weeds-walker to identify the DOJ motive.

In Feb-July 2018 Robert Mueller’s investigation was at its apex.

This SSCI briefing and FISC letter, justifying the application and claiming the current information would still be a valid predicate therein, speaks to the 2018 DOJ needing to retain the validity of the FISA warrant.

My research shows it was the full control by the special counsel at play.  They needed to protect evidence the Mueller team had already extracted from their fraudulent FISA authority.  That’s the motive.

In February of July 2018 if the FBI, DOJ-NSD or special counsel had admitted the FISA application and all renewals were fatally flawed Robert Mueller would have needed to withdraw any evidence gathered as a result of its exploitation.

The FBI and DOJ in 2018 was protecting Mueller’s poisoned fruit.

If the DOJ had been honest with the court, there’s a strong possibility some, perhaps much, of Mueller evidence gathering would have been invalidated… and cases were pending.  The solution: mislead the court and claim the predication was still valid.

This is not simply a hunch, because that motive also speaks to why the FISC would order the current DOJ to release the July 12, 2018, letter.

Remember, in December 2019 the FISC received the IG Horowitz report; and they immediately noted the disparity between what IG Horowitz outlined about the FBI investigating Steele’s sub-source, as contrast against what the DOJ told them in July 2018.

Both the February FBI briefing and the July DOJ letter are transparent misrepresentation when compared to the information in the Horowitz report.  Hence, the FISA court ordered  the DOJ to release the July letter so that everyone, including congressional oversight and the public can see the misrepresentation.  Unfortunately the “congressional oversight” aspect was/is aligned with the scheme.

The FISA court was misled; the SSCI was willfully mislead; now everyone can see it.

The content of that FBI briefing and DOJ-NSD letter, and the subsequent disparity, points to an institutional cover-up; and as a consequence the FISC also ordered the DOJ to begin an immediate sequestration effort to find all the evidence from the fraudulent FISA application.  The proverbial fruit from the poisonous tree…. And yes, that is ongoing.

Lindsay Graham is still playing cover-up to protect the Senate.  Nothing more.

Graham could have demanded these same answers in April of this year.  He didn’t.

Senator Graham Defends The Senate Role in Trying to Remove President Trump

Senator Lindsay Graham appears on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo to profess his public outrage about the senate being lied to by the FBI in 2018. {Go Deep}

In essence what Graham is doing is establishing the defense of the Senate for their role in attempting to remove President Donald Trump. ie. Selective Outrage.

The simple way to identify Graham’s motive is this way:…  The SSCI was aware of this briefing in 2018 right?  So why didn’t any SSCI member step forth after the Horowitz report in 2019 and say they were mislead?… or at any time after the truth of the primary sub-source was evident?   It does not take the public release of briefing material, two years later, to initiate senate outrage if senate outrage was genuine.

Graham wasn’t outraged when the senate knew about it, he becomes outraged when the public knows about it.  See how the application of common sense works?

Methinks Graham doth protest too much.

The more he spoke of his honor, 

the faster we counted the spoons.