The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
The spooks have come home to roost
by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
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Conservatives, Choose Your Mascots Carefully
By Allyne Caan: Americans often express frustration at the partisan gridlock in Washington: One party opposes the other party's ideas not on merit but on political allegiance. Party trumps principle.
Unfortunately, even conservatives outside of DC are guilty of falling into a similar trap — not just the pitfall of rejecting something because leftists like it, but of embracing something simply because leftists oppose it. Such is the problem represented by the Milo Yiannopoulos's of the world.
Milo, a man who openly embraces gender disorientation pathology, has made his reputation by being offensive. Until recently, he was a senior editor at Breitbart. As trendy-left site Vice notes, "He's built an entire career on claiming to be a 'dangerous faggot,' the supervillain of the internet, a man who says the things that people aren't meant to say." Not surprisingly, this approach has won him more enemies than we can count. Indeed, who can forget the recent violent protests at Berkeley after the college Republicans invited Milo to speak on campus?
Milo himself has claimed, "All I care about is free speech and free expression. I want people to be able to be, do and say anything. These days ... that's a conservative issue." It's true that what he says is often compelling and right. So, as a result, he's become a darling of many in the conservative — and so-called "conservative" — movement. After all, a gay Breitbart journalist who's not afraid to outrage the Left must be on "our" side, right? Not so fast.
As Ben Shapiro notes, Milo has used his free speech to, among other things, "characterize[e] a Jewish BuzzFeed writer as 'a typical example of a sort of thick-as-pig sh-t media Jew'" and to justify "anti-Semitic memes as playful trollery." Milo is sometimes offensive just because.
And yet somehow Yiannopoulos secured an invitation to keynote this week's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), speaking on free speech, among other things. But CPAC uninvited him after a video surfaced appearing to show him defending pedophilia (sexual relations between men and boys) and crediting a Catholic priest for educating him in a specific sex act. Not long after being disinvited, Milo resigned from Breitbart.
Even after the video surfaced, some continued to defend him because, well, he's for free speech and against political correctness. In other words, simply because the Left hates Milo, he must be our friend.
Such a standard is not fighting for conservative principles; it's abdicating them.
As Shapiro writes, "Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. ... That's dangerous. It leads to supporting bad policies and bad men. The enemy of your enemy isn't always your friend. Sometimes he's your enemy. ... It's not good enough to just be opposed by the Left — you must actually oppose the Left. We must ask what someone is fighting against, not merely whom."
If conservatives focus on the "whom" to the exclusion of the "what," we lose our effectiveness, our moral high ground, and all too often, our honor.
Indeed, David French writes, "People have deep and understandable affection for those they believe are effectively fighting for them. ... That's the source of the bond between Milo and his followers. He is 'fearless.' He 'destroys' feminists in the same way that John Oliver 'destroys' Fox News. Fight the enemy, and your fans will forgive a multitude of failures. Yet, these failures weaken the very thing we're fighting for."
"Conservatives need to fight," French continues, "but we must fight with honor to advance honorable goals. Otherwise, the culture war will be fought over ruins, with cultural rubble the victor's only spoils."
Now, in an ironic twist, Robert Tracinski explains, "Note how the people who allowed themselves to be driven by hate achieved the opposite of what they told themselves they wanted. They said they wanted to break the power of the left's hair-trigger accusations of racism and sexism. By embracing this champion, though, they merely added fuel to those accusations."
If conservatives' only hallmark Pork is hatred from liberals, then we can claim no honor and deserve not the freedoms we champion. Being conservative means more than paying homage to someone the Left hates; it means actually standing for the principles — moral, social and economic — that have brought freedom to more people on earth than any other political or ideological system in world history.
Conservatives are the heirs of our nation's Founding Fathers. We're defenders of the flame of Liberty lit by that generation of American Patriots. It behooves us all to remember that. ~The Patriot Post
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Who Is Johnny Chung?
{conservativezone.com} ~ Quick — can you name an Asian fundraiser for the liar-Clinton family who admitted to stupefying corruption on a grand scale yet spectacularly failed to tar or feather either of the liar-Clintons in any serious way... despite tales of their mutual misdeeds being splashed all over the front pages of American newspapers? If you guessed Norman Hsu, you’d only be half correct. The truth of the matter is, there are at least three other people who fit this obscure bill whose tales may be wilder and more colorful than Hsu’s. In case you don’t remember Hsu, he was a Ponzi schemer and criminal who was busted in 2007 after serving as a major campaign bundler for liar-Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. In this case, the name of Johnny Chung could be another correct answer although there are still others to the question involving liar-Clinton corruption... http://www.conservativezone.com/articles/who-is-johnny-chung/
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Valerie Jarrett Living With liar-nObama...
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Hussein liar-nObama must plan to be quite visible in the insurrection he is launching against the duly elected President of the United States... That’s not the kind of thing he’d be able to keep under wraps for long and still be effective, so he probably dismissed that idea long ago. His new home in the Kalorama section of Washington DC, two miles away from where he used to squat as the pretend ‘president,’ will be the insurgency headquarters. Of course no sedition against the United States would be complete without the thoughtful advice of Iranian American Valerie Jarrett, so she’s already moved in. She’s living with the liar-nObamas in the DC headquarters and command center for their subversion against the government of the United States. A source that the Daily Mail described as a close family friend of liar-nObama said that their plan is to force President Trump out of office, either by his resignation or through impeachment...
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President Gave A Great Speech As
Irrelevant Dems Sat On Their Hands
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs has a few thoughts “on President Trump’s first address to Congress, his message of both unity and resolute determination to make America great again.” He notes that “President Trump’s address was widely praised... In fact a CBS news poll, yes, that CBS, shows 76% of Americans who watched the President’s address approved.” Dobbs continues, “By the same margin they declared the speech to be positive. The majority of viewers also describing Mr. Trump’s speech as presidential, unifying and inspiring, and they’re right. He delivered a stemwinder, an outstanding speech; powerful, inspiring and commanding. And I believe that was in part because President Trump talks about all Americans, the American people about whom he cares greatly.” “Unlike his predecessor,” note Dobbs, “President Trump talks about we, the people. The President used the word ‘we’ more than 110 times in last night’s speech. And when you include ‘our’ and ‘us,’ the total rises to more than 220 instances of first person plural mentions. President Trump made only 50 mentions of himself.”... http://rickwells.us/dobbs-president-gave-great-speech-irrelevant-dems-sat-hands/
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liar-nObama EPA WOTUS “Pond Criminal” –
Trump Trashed Rule, Release Imprisoned Vet
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ On Tuesday President Trump killed one of the most abusive tools used by the EPA against the American people, the WOTUS, Waters of the United States rule. It seems only logical that those who are imprisoned for violations, especially when their convictions were obtained through questionable means, would be immediately released from prison... Something simply being fair and logical in no way means it’s going to be reflected in the actions of our judiciary. Justice is often not a consideration for their actions and if it is, it still can, even with good intentions, be slow to materialize. Disabled 78-year-old Navy Veteran and Montana resident Joe Robertson continues to languish in prison for violating the WOTUS, six months into an eighteen month sentence. His crime was the creation of several ponds and in the process dumping the excavated fill back into them as part of their construction. He improved the sites and no permit for that type of landscaping is required. The ponds enhanced wildlife and provided water sources for fire fighting and other uses. Under the liar-nObama EPA, slaves challenge their authority to dictate on their private property pay a hefty price... http://rickwells.us/obama-epa-wotus-pond-criminal-trump-trashed-rule-release-imprisoned-vet/
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Leaked Draft Shows GOP Plan Will Not
Only Replace liar-nObamacare,
But Transform Medicaid
by Avik Roy
{forbes.com} ~ A leaked “discussion draft” of House Republicans’ liar-nObamacare repeal-and-replace bill surfaced on Friday. The draft reveals important details about the plan being designed by House GOP leadership... details that weren’t available in a white paper published last week. The question remains: will the House plan pass muster with Congress’ non-partisan budget scorekeepers? The 106-page discussion draft, dated February 10, was obtained by Paul Demko of Politico. It corresponds reasonably closely to the 19-page outline that House GOP leadership leaked on February 16. Both documents reflect a shift in strategy for House Republicans. After Donald Trump’s November victory, congressional Republicans were planning a “repeal and delay” approach in which they first repealed liar-nObamacare’s funding streams, and then worked with Republicans and Democrats to formulate a replacement...
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The spooks have come home to roost
by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Last week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that members of the intelligence community — part of the deep state, the unseen government within the government that does not change with elections — now have acquired so much data on everyone in America that they can selectively reveal it to reward their friends and harm their foes. Their principal foe today is the president of the United States.
Liberty is rarely lost overnight. The wall of tyranny often begins with benign building blocks of safety — each one lying on top of a predecessor — eventually collectively constituting an impediment to the exercise of free choices by free people, often not even recognized until it is too late.
Here is the back story.
In the pre-Revolutionary era, British courts in London secretly issued general warrants to British government agents in America. The warrants were not based on any probable cause of crime or individual articulable suspicion; they did not name the person or thing to be seized or identify the place to be searched. They authorized agents to search where they wished and seize what they found.
The use of general warrants was so offensive to our Colonial ancestors that it whipped up more serious opposition to British rule and support for the revolutionaries than the "no taxation without representation" argument did. And when it came time for Americans to write the Constitution, they prohibited general warrants in the Fourth Amendment, the whole purpose of which was to guarantee the right to be left alone by forcing the government to focus on bad guys and prohibit it from engaging in fishing expeditions. But the fishing expeditions would come.
In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was intended to rein in the government spying on Americans that had been unleashed by the Nixon administration. FISA established a secret court and permitted it to issue warrants authorizing spying on agents of foreign governments when physically present in the United States.
People born in foreign countries who are here for benevolent or benign or even evil purposes have the same constitutional protections as those of us born here. That's because the critical parts of the Constitution that insulate human freedom from the government's reach protect "persons," not just citizens. But FISA ignored that.
And FISA was easy for the government to justify. It was a pullback from Richard Nixon's lawlessness. It required the feds to seek a warrant from federal judges. The targets were not Americans. Never mind, the argument went, that FISA has no requirement of showing any probable cause of crime or even articulable suspicion on the part of the foreign target; this will keep us safe. Besides, the government insisted, it can't be used against Americans.
That argument was bought by presidents, members of Congress and nearly all federal courts that examined it. We don't know whether the authors of this scheme really wanted federal spies to be able to spy on anyone at will, but that is where we are today. Through secret courts whose judges cannot keep records of their own decisions and secret permissions by select committees of Congress whose members cannot tell their constituents or other members of Congress what they have learned in secret, FISA has morphed so as to authorize spying down a slippery slope of targets, from foreign agents to all foreigners to anyone who communicates with foreigners to anyone capable of communicating with them.
The surveillance state regime today permits America's 60,000 military and civilian domestic spies to access in real time all the landline and mobile telephone calls and all the desktop and mobile device keystrokes and all the digital data created and used by anyone in the United States. The targets today are not just ordinary Americans; they are justices on the Supreme Court, military brass in the Pentagon, agents in the FBI, local police in cities and towns, and the man in the Oval Office.
The British system that arguably impelled our secession in 1776 is now here on steroids.
Enter the outsider as president. Donald Trump has condemned the spying and leaking, as he is a victim of it. While he was president-elect, the spies told him they knew of his alleged misbehaviors — vehemently denied — in a Moscow hotel room. Last week, his White House staff was shaken by what the spies did with what they learned from a former Trump aide.
Trump's former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, himself a former military spy, spoke to the Russian ambassador to the United States in December via telephone in Trump Tower. It was a benign conversation. He knew it was being monitored, as he is a former monitor of such communications. But he mistakenly thought that those who were monitoring him were patriots as he is. They were not.
They violated federal law by revealing in part what Flynn had said, and they did so in a manner to embarrass and infuriate Trump.
Why would they do this? Perhaps because they feared Flynn's being in the White House, since he knows the power and depth of the deep state. Perhaps to send a message to Trump because he once compared American spies to Nazis. Perhaps because they believe that their judgment of the foreign dangers America faces is superior to the president's. Perhaps because they hate and fear the outsider in the White House.
The chickens have come home to roost. In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit — even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself.
This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack liar-nObama — all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties. This is not the government the Framers gave us. But it is one far more dangerous to human freedom than the one from which they seceded in 1776.
Liberty is rarely lost overnight. The wall of tyranny often begins with benign building blocks of safety — each one lying on top of a predecessor — eventually collectively constituting an impediment to the exercise of free choices by free people, often not even recognized until it is too late.
Here is the back story.
In the pre-Revolutionary era, British courts in London secretly issued general warrants to British government agents in America. The warrants were not based on any probable cause of crime or individual articulable suspicion; they did not name the person or thing to be seized or identify the place to be searched. They authorized agents to search where they wished and seize what they found.
The use of general warrants was so offensive to our Colonial ancestors that it whipped up more serious opposition to British rule and support for the revolutionaries than the "no taxation without representation" argument did. And when it came time for Americans to write the Constitution, they prohibited general warrants in the Fourth Amendment, the whole purpose of which was to guarantee the right to be left alone by forcing the government to focus on bad guys and prohibit it from engaging in fishing expeditions. But the fishing expeditions would come.
In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was intended to rein in the government spying on Americans that had been unleashed by the Nixon administration. FISA established a secret court and permitted it to issue warrants authorizing spying on agents of foreign governments when physically present in the United States.
People born in foreign countries who are here for benevolent or benign or even evil purposes have the same constitutional protections as those of us born here. That's because the critical parts of the Constitution that insulate human freedom from the government's reach protect "persons," not just citizens. But FISA ignored that.
And FISA was easy for the government to justify. It was a pullback from Richard Nixon's lawlessness. It required the feds to seek a warrant from federal judges. The targets were not Americans. Never mind, the argument went, that FISA has no requirement of showing any probable cause of crime or even articulable suspicion on the part of the foreign target; this will keep us safe. Besides, the government insisted, it can't be used against Americans.
That argument was bought by presidents, members of Congress and nearly all federal courts that examined it. We don't know whether the authors of this scheme really wanted federal spies to be able to spy on anyone at will, but that is where we are today. Through secret courts whose judges cannot keep records of their own decisions and secret permissions by select committees of Congress whose members cannot tell their constituents or other members of Congress what they have learned in secret, FISA has morphed so as to authorize spying down a slippery slope of targets, from foreign agents to all foreigners to anyone who communicates with foreigners to anyone capable of communicating with them.
The surveillance state regime today permits America's 60,000 military and civilian domestic spies to access in real time all the landline and mobile telephone calls and all the desktop and mobile device keystrokes and all the digital data created and used by anyone in the United States. The targets today are not just ordinary Americans; they are justices on the Supreme Court, military brass in the Pentagon, agents in the FBI, local police in cities and towns, and the man in the Oval Office.
The British system that arguably impelled our secession in 1776 is now here on steroids.
Enter the outsider as president. Donald Trump has condemned the spying and leaking, as he is a victim of it. While he was president-elect, the spies told him they knew of his alleged misbehaviors — vehemently denied — in a Moscow hotel room. Last week, his White House staff was shaken by what the spies did with what they learned from a former Trump aide.
Trump's former national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, himself a former military spy, spoke to the Russian ambassador to the United States in December via telephone in Trump Tower. It was a benign conversation. He knew it was being monitored, as he is a former monitor of such communications. But he mistakenly thought that those who were monitoring him were patriots as he is. They were not.
They violated federal law by revealing in part what Flynn had said, and they did so in a manner to embarrass and infuriate Trump.
Why would they do this? Perhaps because they feared Flynn's being in the White House, since he knows the power and depth of the deep state. Perhaps to send a message to Trump because he once compared American spies to Nazis. Perhaps because they believe that their judgment of the foreign dangers America faces is superior to the president's. Perhaps because they hate and fear the outsider in the White House.
The chickens have come home to roost. In our misguided efforts to keep the country safe, we have neglected to keep it free. We have enabled a deep state to become powerful enough to control a powerful president. We have placed so much data and so much power in the hands of unelected, unaccountable, opaque spies that they can use it as they see fit — even to the point of committing federal felonies. Now some have boasted that they can manipulate and thus control the president of the United States by selectively revealing and concealing what they know about anyone, including the president himself.
This is a perilous state of affairs, brought about by the maniacal passion for surveillance spawned under George W. Bush and perfected under Barack liar-nObama — all with utter indifference to the widespread constitutional violations and permanent destruction of personal liberties. This is not the government the Framers gave us. But it is one far more dangerous to human freedom than the one from which they seceded in 1776.
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