The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
A Parting Shot at Personal Freedom
by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
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The Opportunity of Trump's Inauguration
Today marks the end of an error. As we go to press, Donald Trump is taking the oath of office to serve as the 45th president of the United States, and Barack liar-nObama will retire to a palatial home in DC from which he still plans to cause trouble. But at least he'll have no power, and change can really take hold.
We've certainly expressed our differences with Trump over the last 18 months, and we stand ready to continue our undaunted advocacy for the Constitution and Rule of Law. But we're encouraged by Trump's cabinet picks and many of his early plans. As any American Patriot should do, we hope he'll succeed in undoing liar-nObama's disastrous legacy on his way to Making America Great Again.
Unfortunately, Trump enters office with record low approval (i.e., virtually no political capital) and a hateful and vigorous opposition, entrenched and ready for battle. Yes, the Democrat base is made up of tender "snowflakes" who can do little except protest or play with Legos, but Democrats in Congress will give Trump no quarter. And as The Wall Street Journal put it, "No President since Nixon will face a more hostile resistance in the press and permanent bureaucracy." Indeed, Democrats and their Leftmedia accomplices have spent the last two months doing everything possible to delegitimize Trump — to undermine him before he's even inaugurated.
The benefit of this starting point is that every small success will improve Trump's standing with the American people. As he moves to lower taxes and reduce regulation, Americans will begin to feel it — more jobs and more income. As one West Virginia resident put it, "If Trump can do half of what he says he's going to do and wants to do, the country will be better off." Emerging from liar-nObama's eight years of economic malaise should be more than enough to earn Trump some political capital. So as the Trump Era dawns, we see it as morning in America.
~The Patriot Post
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The Left's Sick Assassination Day Dream
If CNN desires to re-establish any semblance of credibility as a news organization after last week's fiasco on that fictitious dossier on Donald Trump, its recent report on the question of presidential succession doesn't help. CNN ran a story where it introduced the question, "What if an incoming president and his immediate successors were wiped out on day one?" CNN went way beyond the role of high school civics teacher with this despicable clap trap.
Even during its report, CNN seemingly recognized the poor taste of the question, and attempted to justify the inquiry into the presidential succession process by stating that the government's plan is so unclear that it could lead to uncertainty and create "the potential for chaos." But if that's so, then CNN contradicted its own justification for airing the piece as it proceeded to delineate the exact plan the government has established should this worst-case scenario occur.
First, in the history of the nation, there is no historical precedent for even raising this question beyond academic concerns or Hollywood movies. It's simply not a relevant question. Second, imagine if a major news media organization had raised this same question in 2009 upon the inauguration of Barack liar-nObama. The narrative would have been that those racist conservatives were calling for the assassination of the newly elected president because he was black.
So what's CNN's angle here? It may be best to classify this story as CNN voicing its own leftist daydream of "how many Republicans would need to be knocked off before a Democrat would end up as president?" But those are some seriously sour grapes from the Leftmedia.
~The Patriot Post
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liar-nObama Shows His True Colors
as He Leaves Office
by Charles Krsuthammer
{nationalreview.com} ~ With no reason to suppress his more radical instincts any longer, the president embraced them on his way out the door. Barack liar-nObama did not go out quietly... His unquiet final acts were overshadowed, in part by a successor who refused to come in quietly, and in part by liar-nObama’s own endless, sentimental farewell tour. But there was nothing nostalgic or sentimental about liar-nObama’s last acts. Two of them were simply shocking. Perhaps we should have known. At the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he joked about whether he had a bucket list: “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.”... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444044/barack-obama-exit-reveals-true-colors?utm_source=sailthru&utm_campaign=colors&utm_medium=email&utm_content=krauthammer&utm_term=VDHM
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Border Enforcement Returns To America...
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ General John Kelly has a massive task in front of him now that he has been confirmed as the new Homeland Security Secretary... He’s taking over a department that in some areas has been, to varying degrees, virtually shut down for the last two or three years. That is particularly true in areas dealing with some of the most critical aspects of security, such as border enforcement. In other areas political activism has superseded the rule of law and the laws themselves under his predecessor, Jihadi Jeh Johnson. His task, along with that of Senator Jeff Sessions to rehabilitate the Department of Justice after eight years of politicization, have to be the greatest organizational challenges facing any cabinet members. General Kelly was confirmed by an 88-11 vote, with Senator Jeff Sessions abstaining due to his having been nominated for the Attorney General position. One of those voting against General Kelly was California Democrat Kamala Harris, an illegal alien advocate. She said, “I can’t look these kids in the face and offer them any guarantee that this guy won’t deport them, and without that guarantee I can’t support him.”... http://rickwells.us/border-enforcement-returns-america-gen-kelly-confirmed-dhs-secretary/
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Krauthammer Still Doesn’t Get Trump –
Fears Foreign Govts Quaking In Their Boots
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Charles Krauthammer notes, “There are two audiences, obviously for inaugural addresses, the domestic and the foreign... And I guarantee you that they are quaking in their boots in foreign capitals, particularly of our allies and trading partners.” “The way that Trump spoke about the outside world,” says Krauthammer, “was the most aggressive, the most sort of hyper-nationalist and in some ways most hostile of any inaugural address, I think, since the second World War.” Krauthammer says, “I mean, what Trump pointed out, what he drew was a picture of a zero-sum world, where what we have done for the world they have been stealing from us. He says for decades we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry, subsidized other armies at the expense of the weakening of our army. We made other countries rich while we have become poor.”... http://rickwells.us/krauthammer-still-doesnt-get-trump-fears-foreign-govts-quaking-boots/
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Denmark clamps down on Refugee Child Marriages
by David Frankenhuis
{gatestone.eu} ~ Denmark’s parliament yesterday passed a draft forbidding people to marry a person under the age of consent. In addition to this, Copenhagen decided it will no longer accept marriages that have previously been registered abroad... if one of the persons involved in such a union is under the age of 18 years old. Denmark initiated a similar law in February 2016, but unfortunately for the child brides, the Danish Immigration Service (DIS) decided to reunify them with their ‘husbands’ in September 2016, after the government had made a sudden U-turn on the issue. Copenhagen ‘justified‘ the reversal of its position by stating that preventing this type of child abuse might amount to an infringement of the fundamental refugees’ rights. But the Danish legal crusade against child marriage has been renewed, and is still based on reports from 2016 showing Danish asylum centres accommodate some 27 ‘married’ juveniles, writes The Danish Local. Previous accounts made mention of 14-year-old girls who entered Denmark as refugees and then became the brides of men that were more than ten years their senior... https://gatestone.eu/denmark-marriage/
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Terror tied Linda Sarsour organizes
#WomensMarch against Trump
by Chuck Ross
{themuslimissue.wordpress.com} ~ Linda Sarsour, one of the organizers behind Saturday’s Women’s March, being held in Washington, D.C., was recently spotted at a large Muslim convention in Chicago... posing for pictures with an accused financier for Hamas, the terrorist group. Sarsour, the head of the Arab American Association of New York and an liar-nObama White House “Champion of Change,” was speaking at last month’s 15th annual convention of the Muslim American Society and Islamic Circle of North America. While there, she posed for a picture with Salah Sarsour, a member of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and former Hamas operative who was jailed in Israel in the 1990s because of his alleged work for the terrorist group... https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2017/01/21/terror-tied-linda-sarsour-organizes-womensmarch-against-trump/
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A Parting Shot at Personal Freedom
by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ On Jan. 3, outgoing Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly signed an order directing the National Security Agency — America's 60,000-person-strong domestic spying apparatus — to make available raw spying data to all other federal intelligence agencies, which then can pass it on to their counterparts in foreign countries and in the 50 states upon request. She did so, she claimed, for administrative convenience. Yet in doing this, she violated basic constitutional principles that were erected centuries ago to prevent just what she did.
Here is the back story.
In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon's abusive utilization of the FBI and CIA to spy on his domestic political opponents in the 1960s and '70s — and after Nixon had resigned from office in the wake of all that — Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a secret court that was charged with being the sole authority in America that can authorize domestic spying for non-law enforcement purposes.
The standard for a FISA court authorization was that the subject of the spying needed to be a foreign person in the United States who was an agent of a foreign power. It could be a foreign janitor in a foreign embassy, a foreign spy masquerading as a diplomat, even a foreign journalist working for a media outlet owned by a foreign government.
The American spies needed a search warrant from the FISA court. Contrary to the Constitution, the search warrant was given based not on probable cause of crime but rather on probable cause of the status of the person as an agent of a foreign power. This slight change from "probable cause of crime" to "probable cause of foreign agency" began the slippery slope that brought us to Lynch's terrible order of Jan. 3.
After the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, numerous other statutes were enacted that made spying easier and that continued to erode the right to be left alone guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. The Patriot Act permitted FBI agents to write their own search warrants for business records including medical, legal, postal and banking records, and amendments to FISA itself changed the wording from probable cause "of foreign agency" to probable cause of being "a foreign person" to all Americans who may "communicate with a foreign person."
As if Americans were children, Congress made those sleight-of-hand changes with no hoopla and little serious debate. Our very elected representatives — who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution — instead perverted it.
It gets worse.
The recent USA Freedom Act permits the NSA to ask the FISA court for a search warrant for any person — named or unnamed — based on the standard of "governmental need." One FISA court-issued warrant I saw authorized the surveillance of all 115 million domestic customers of Verizon. The governmental need standard is no standard at all, as the government will always claim that what it wants, it needs.
All these statutes and unauthorized spying practices have brought us to where we were on Jan. 2 — namely, with the NSA having a standard operating procedure of capturing every keystroke on every computer and mobile device, every telephone conversation on every landline and cellphone, and all domestic electronic traffic — including medical, legal and banking records — of every person in America 24/7, without knowing of or showing any wrongdoing on the part of those spied upon.
The NSA can use data from your cellphone to learn where you are, and it can utilize your cellphone as a listening device to hear your in-person conversations, even if you have turned it off — that is, if you still have one of the older phones that can be turned off.
Notwithstanding all of the above gross violations of personal liberty and constitutional norms, the NSA traditionally kept its data — if printed, enough to fill the Library of Congress every year — to itself. So if an agency such as the FBI or the DEA or the New Jersey State Police, for example, wanted any of the data acquired by the NSA for law enforcement purposes, it needed to get a search warrant from a federal judge based on the constitutional standard of "probable cause of crime."
Until now.
Now, because of the Lynch secret order, revealed by The New York Times late last week, the NSA may share any of its data with any other intelligence agency or law enforcement agency that has an intelligence arm based on — you guessed it — the non-standard of governmental need.
So President Barack liar-nObama, in the death throes of his time in the White House, has delivered perhaps his harshest blow to constitutional freedom by permitting his attorney general to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, thereby enabling people in law enforcement to get whatever they want about whomever they wish without a showing of probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires. That amendment expressly forbids the use of general warrants — search where you wish and seize what you find — and they had never been a lawful tool of law enforcement until Lynch's order.
Down the slope we have come, with the destruction of liberty in the name of safety by elected and appointed government officials. At a time when the constitutionally recognized right to privacy was in its infancy, Justice Louis Brandeis warned all who love freedom about its slow demise. He wrote: "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Someday we will learn why liar-nObama did this. I hope that when we do, it is at a time when we still have personal liberty in a free society.
Here is the back story.
In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon's abusive utilization of the FBI and CIA to spy on his domestic political opponents in the 1960s and '70s — and after Nixon had resigned from office in the wake of all that — Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a secret court that was charged with being the sole authority in America that can authorize domestic spying for non-law enforcement purposes.
The standard for a FISA court authorization was that the subject of the spying needed to be a foreign person in the United States who was an agent of a foreign power. It could be a foreign janitor in a foreign embassy, a foreign spy masquerading as a diplomat, even a foreign journalist working for a media outlet owned by a foreign government.
The American spies needed a search warrant from the FISA court. Contrary to the Constitution, the search warrant was given based not on probable cause of crime but rather on probable cause of the status of the person as an agent of a foreign power. This slight change from "probable cause of crime" to "probable cause of foreign agency" began the slippery slope that brought us to Lynch's terrible order of Jan. 3.
After the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, numerous other statutes were enacted that made spying easier and that continued to erode the right to be left alone guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. The Patriot Act permitted FBI agents to write their own search warrants for business records including medical, legal, postal and banking records, and amendments to FISA itself changed the wording from probable cause "of foreign agency" to probable cause of being "a foreign person" to all Americans who may "communicate with a foreign person."
As if Americans were children, Congress made those sleight-of-hand changes with no hoopla and little serious debate. Our very elected representatives — who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution — instead perverted it.
It gets worse.
The recent USA Freedom Act permits the NSA to ask the FISA court for a search warrant for any person — named or unnamed — based on the standard of "governmental need." One FISA court-issued warrant I saw authorized the surveillance of all 115 million domestic customers of Verizon. The governmental need standard is no standard at all, as the government will always claim that what it wants, it needs.
All these statutes and unauthorized spying practices have brought us to where we were on Jan. 2 — namely, with the NSA having a standard operating procedure of capturing every keystroke on every computer and mobile device, every telephone conversation on every landline and cellphone, and all domestic electronic traffic — including medical, legal and banking records — of every person in America 24/7, without knowing of or showing any wrongdoing on the part of those spied upon.
The NSA can use data from your cellphone to learn where you are, and it can utilize your cellphone as a listening device to hear your in-person conversations, even if you have turned it off — that is, if you still have one of the older phones that can be turned off.
Notwithstanding all of the above gross violations of personal liberty and constitutional norms, the NSA traditionally kept its data — if printed, enough to fill the Library of Congress every year — to itself. So if an agency such as the FBI or the DEA or the New Jersey State Police, for example, wanted any of the data acquired by the NSA for law enforcement purposes, it needed to get a search warrant from a federal judge based on the constitutional standard of "probable cause of crime."
Until now.
Now, because of the Lynch secret order, revealed by The New York Times late last week, the NSA may share any of its data with any other intelligence agency or law enforcement agency that has an intelligence arm based on — you guessed it — the non-standard of governmental need.
So President Barack liar-nObama, in the death throes of his time in the White House, has delivered perhaps his harshest blow to constitutional freedom by permitting his attorney general to circumvent the Fourth Amendment, thereby enabling people in law enforcement to get whatever they want about whomever they wish without a showing of probable cause of crime as the Fourth Amendment requires. That amendment expressly forbids the use of general warrants — search where you wish and seize what you find — and they had never been a lawful tool of law enforcement until Lynch's order.
Down the slope we have come, with the destruction of liberty in the name of safety by elected and appointed government officials. At a time when the constitutionally recognized right to privacy was in its infancy, Justice Louis Brandeis warned all who love freedom about its slow demise. He wrote: "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Someday we will learn why liar-nObama did this. I hope that when we do, it is at a time when we still have personal liberty in a free society.
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