[Townhall] Well, pack some sandbags and brace for impact, folks. Russian collusion hysteria is about to erupt all over again. House Democrats voted to subpoena Special Counsel Robert Mueller for the full report, including all the evidence that’s been collected over the past two years. This investigation began as an FBI probe into possible Russian collusion, a counterintelligence investigation where disgraced ex-FBI Agent Peter Strzok was reportedly one of the key people to sign off on it.
Strzok is known for his extramarital affair with former bureau lawyer Lisa Page. The pair exchanged tens of thousands of texts, many of them anti-Trump. Some of the most infamous texts were the ones where Strzok and Page discussed an "insurance policy" concerning Trump, with the former outright saying that they would stop a Trump presidency, whatever that meant. The two also worried that the FBI was going too hard on Hillary when the bureau was investigating whether the former first lady had mishandled classified information while serving as secretary of state via her unsecured and unauthorized homebrew server; Clinton conducted all official business through this server.
Now, Mueller’s investigators, most of them partisan Democrats, are a bit irritated that Attorney General William Barr’s summary didn’t really touch upon the severity of their findings...allegedly (via NYT):
#2
Everybody has been wondering about the Preistap testimony for some time now...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/04/2019 16:08 Comments ||
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#3
They spent two years trying to dig up enough dirt on Trump to get him out of office. They did not find it, and now they are openly bitter. So what...
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
04/04/2019 17:22 Comments ||
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[American Thinker] A stunning moment took place yesterday on CNN, as that network's "chief international anchor" interviewed former FBI chief James Comey and suggested that federal law enforcement should have "shut down" chants of "lock her up" at Trump rallies. Amanpour, who also is employed by PBS as host of Amanpour & Company (replacing Charlie Rose after his sexual bullying of younger female staffers was exposed), appeared to be completely serious in suggesting that political speech that she disagrees with ought to be forcibly repressed by federal law enforcement.
For all his flaws, James Comey recognized the constitutional stupidity on display by someone who makes her living based on the First Amendment. The exchange is worth watching for the 90 seconds of the video below. A transcript follows, if you are in a hurry, though I urge you to watch and make your own determination on her sincerity.
#2
When younger, I never understood why so many anchors and correspondents were foreigners. Then I realized the people running American news media are anti-American.
BLUF:
[Townhall] I had to do a double-take, it was April 1st, after all. But the headline was a shock, considering the source. "China announces new crackdown on fentanyl in win for US President Trump," the CNN website read. A win for President Trump being touted on the network of Don Lemon and Brian Stelter? Had to be a joke, right? But it wasn’t. And it wasn’t just a win for the president, it’s a win for everyone. Still, it had to kill them to write it.
"The Chinese government will add fentanyl-related substances to their list of controlled drugs from May 1, in a move aimed at curtailing the manufacturing and distribution of one of the world's most powerful opioids," CNN reported.
This is huge news for anyone with a friend or family member suffering with opioid addiction, and there are a lot of them. Opioid-related deaths now annually outpace the number of deaths during the entire Vietnam War ‐ 58,220 to 70,237 in 2017 alone. And a major cause of those deaths is fentanyl, one of the deadliest substances on Earth.
[AFP via France24] Former military chief Benny Gantz has mounted a serious challenge to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of April 9 polls by maintaining a tough-guy aura with only vague policy ideas.
When he declared in December as an electoral rival to Netanyahu, the 59-year-old ex-paratrooper who rose to become a respected military chief of staff had no political experience.
But since then, polls show his Blue and White alliance becoming a threat to four-time premier Netanyahu as he emerges as a security hawk but centrist on social issues such as religion and state.
The alliance is co-led by former finance minister Yair Lapid and includes two other ex-military chiefs.
Gantz has presented himself as someone who can heal divisions in Israeli society he says Netanyahu has exacerbated. He has also pledged to improve public services and show "zero tolerance" for corruption -- a reference to graft allegations facing Netanyahu.
Israel's attorney general has announced that he intends to charge Netanyahu with bribery, fraud and breach of trust pending a hearing. Netanyahu denies all the allegations.
Gantz's campaign is unrolling with military precision with the aim of placing him at the heart of the Israeli consensus, espousing what one opponent called "a supermarket" of policies. The goal, commentators say, is aimed at taking votes from Netanyahu's right-wing coalition without alienating the centre.
- Parents survived Holocaust -
He was born on June 9, 1959, in Kfar Ahim, a southern Israeli village that his immigrant parents, both Holocaust survivors, helped to establish.
"In many ways my life began before I was born. It began at the moment my mother Malka walked out of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp," he said in a February speech at the Munich Security Conference.
"The Jewish people and the Jewish state will never again put their fate in the hands of others. We will protect ourselves by ourselves and guarantee the future of our people."
Gantz joined the army in 1977, completing the tough selection course for the paratroopers. He went on to command Shaldag, an air force special operations unit. In 1994, he returned to the army to command a brigade and then a division in the occupied West Bank.
According to his official army biography, he was Israel's military attache to the United States from 2005 until 2009.
He was military chief of staff from 2011 to 2015, when he retired, and has boasted in video clips of the number of Palestinian militants killed and targets destroyed under his command in the 2014 war with Gaza's Islamist Hamas rulers.
In another video he stresses the need to try to make Arab-Israeli peace.
The Blue and White election manifesto speaks of wanting to separate from the Palestinians, but does not specifically mention a two-state solution. It pledges to keep the strategic Jordan Valley area of the West Bank under Israeli security control and all of the disputed city of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.
Both are unacceptable to the Palestinian leadership.
[Townhall] American college is terrible and, as a society, we should stop doing it ‐ at least how it is being currently done. The greatest benefit of a system where most citizens are pushed to get college educations, whether they truly need and want one or not, would be a society of really smart, informed, and engaged citizens. Do you see that happening?
No, you do not.
Instead, we have a bunch of people who are dragged down by crushing debt after wasting years of their youth chasing a piece of paper that often has no relationship to these graduates’ futures. Compounding the failure is how these grads march off campus infatuated with ridiculous commie notions abhorrent to a free people. The college system is a disaster ‐ an expensive disaster that picks our pockets as well as those of the suckers who matriculate ‐ and we should stop tolerating it. Time for conservatives to reform academia the hard way, and by "reform" I mean, "Destroy it, sow the campuses with salt, and rebuild academia into something that isn’t useless."
About 99% of current college grads will feel that "sow with salt" line zoom over their empty heads. Most of them probably think "Carthage" is a rapper, or maybe a lesser Kardashian.
The college admission scandal, where a herd of rich Democrat donors paid a ton of dough to get their half-wit progeny into Snooty U, was the perfect encapsulation of how big a rip-off college really is. Did you notice how the parents forked over cash to get Junior into school because Junior scored 112 on his SAT and then...Junior stayed in the elite school with no problem? You might think that if these schools were rigorous institutions of higher learning instead of ruling class credential rubber-stump machines, they might flunk out? But no. When the internet famous daughter of that (former) Full House / Hallmark-movie-about-a-widow-finding-love-with-a sexy-carpenter-at-Christmas starlet Lori Loughlin was busted, she was literally sailing around the Bahamas on a yacht owned by a USC trustee.
I guess she needed a break from her work carrying on Dr. Ha
#3
I guess she needed a break from her work carrying on Dr. Hawking’s particle physics research.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/04/2019 9:05 Comments ||
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#4
Worth remembering. Guess what the median grade at Harvard is. Go on, guess. Our most rigorous school, right? It should be really hard, right? Lots of “C” and “B” grades because of said rigor, right?
It’s an “A-.” The median grade at Harvard is an “A-,” which is supposed to be “outstanding.” But a Harvard A- is not “outstanding.” It is the default. Think about it. Half the grades at Harvard are “A-” or above. Would you give our ruling class an “A-”?
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/04/2019 9:15 Comments ||
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#5
What has happened to universities over the years is infuriating. There is far to much government influence in universities from phony admission scams to phony research schemes. Government regulations, political agendas and money taint the universities.
Otherwise, what Raj said about becoming an electrician (except unions often taint this profession too).
First after graduation I worked for Social Security with my Poli Sci degree, lasted 1 year before I left screaming for the wilderness and became a nail banger. 6 years later Jimmuh tanked the economy so I went to Control Data Institute and became a programmer, 30 plus years later I retired to a pretty comfortable life.
Back in the 60's - 70's college wasn't the financial chasm it is today so I don't really resent the cost. I did learn a few good things.
#9
Just think if you'd learned set theory. why RDB's are done the way they are. Formal logic, discrete maths. All the foundations you can work IT art around when architecting.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.