{ americanthinker.com } ~ Friday, speaking to Jan Crawford of CBS This Morning in an interview, Attorney General William Barr had some pretty extraordinary things to say... In the interview, Barr indicated that Robert Mueller could have chosen to make a call on whether Trump had engaged in criminal activity regarding obstruction but chose not to do so. This surprised Barr and deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and forced them to make that call. In addition, Barr stated that "he Mueller also said that he could not say that the president clearly did not violate the law, which of course is not the standard we use at the department." This indicates that Mueller and his team inverted the standard of a prosecutor in the United States from innocent until proven guilty to guilty until proven innocent. Barr also stated that "we didn't agree with the legal analysis — a lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department. It was the views of a particular lawyer or lawyers" and that the instances highlighted by Mueller in part two of his report were deficient in proving clear obstruction according to the law. But the most extraordinary part of the interview was when Crawford asked Barr about his March 24 four-page summary. Barr indicated that the only reason he issued a summary instead of the full Mueller report is because "it was going to be a period of weeks before we could get the report out. ... I would have liked to get the report out as quickly as possible ... because I didn't think the body politic would allow us to go on radio silence for four weeks." He continued, "There was all kinds of wild speculation going on ... by former senior intelligence officials ... and talking heads." Why would there be a period of several weeks before the Mueller report could be issued? Barr explained that he had asked Mueller's team prior to March 5 to highlight 6E grand jury material so the attorney general's office could issue the report within a week after conducting the proper redactions as required by law. But Mueller's team failed to do this and this surprised Barr because "we thought it was being done" and forced them to spend weeks identifying and redacting the 6E grand jury material, which constituted "one tenth of one percent of the report." When Crawford asked Barr if, had Mueller properly highlighted the 6E material, his four-page summary would have been unnecessary, Barr replied in the affirmative. Barr stated, "If we could readily identify the 6E material, I thought we could do it in a, you know, less than a week. ... Once I realized it was going to take 3 or 4 weeks, I felt I had to say something in the interim." Crawford also asked Barr about how Mueller's press conference addressed the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted and about how this factored into Mueller finding that Trump had committed a crime. Barr responded to press confusion about the matter, stating that "the confusion arose because what Bob Mueller's position was was that the OLC opinion coupled with other things as a prudential matter made him feel that he shouldn't even get into the analysis of whether something was a crime. ... He didn't get into the analysis at all. Part of the reason for that was his judgment about the OLC opinion coupled with other things he just didn't think it was proper exercise of his authority."... https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/congress_must_subpoena_robert_mueller_for_questioning.html
by sundance
by Raymond IbrahimWe all know that weather is beyond human control, but that hasn’t stopped leftists from insisting we can change this through government mandates that reduce our dependence on carbon-based energy and force us into other lifestyle corrections. Climate change was among several pet issues radical Democrats sought to address when they took over the House in last year’s midterm elections, and the Green New Deal is their most obvious effort. Never mind that not a single Democrat senator had the guts to vote for this colossally asinine legislation when the opportunity arose. But there are still a number of true believers out there in the House, and parts of the legislation could certainly find their way into other bills.
Those who’ve lived it have written at length about the dangers of socialism as an economic system, but what was lost in the initial assessment and commentary on the GND was the environmental track record of nations often considered to be leaders in green.
For example, North Korea has its fans among the Radical Green because its carbon output per capita is barely one-fourth that of its capitalist neighbor to the south. If one doesn’t mind the starvation and repression, North Korea comes across as an environmental paradise — at least until one sees the nighttime satellite images of a light-free nation and the daytime images of extensive deforestation.
And North Korea isn’t an outlier among communist nations. Writing at National Review, Shawn Regan, a research fellow at the nonprofit Property and Environment Research Center, makes the case that socialism, practiced in the style of the Green New Deal, has a “dismal environmental legacy.” As Soviet-era communism began to collapse three decades ago, the West could see firsthand the “massive ‘tragedy of the commons’” in the former Soviet Union and its onetime Eastern European satellite nations. Mass starvation killed millions. And then there was Chernobyl, which is now the subject of an HBO miniseries revealing just how calloused and deceptive Soviet officials were in the lead-up to and cover-up of that disaster.
The Communist Chinese are the world’s worst current offenders. Residents of Beijing must often wear masks to even breathe in the smog-laden city. And yet American leftists are content to take China’s pinky swears about reducing emissions for deals like the Paris Agreement.
Yet our own government doesn’t escape scrutiny. The military, federally owned power plants, and agricultural policies have despoiled their share of our landscape over the decades. Even the EPA dumped millions of gallons of toxic sludge into a Colorado river.
On the other hand, the U.S. has built a sanitary infrastructure to eradicate most water-borne disease and restricted unfettered private property rights in favor of generally (but not always) reasonable environmental regulations. Public outcry eliminated most of the automobile smog from our big-city skies and wanton dumping of industrial wastes into our waterways, and created entrepreneurial opportunities for satisfying both private and public interests. One of the many advantages of our capitalist system is how nimbly it can address such issues as they occur.
As for the Green New Deal, its mandates and red tape would create prosperity for a connected class of bureaucrats and rent-seekers, while the rest of us are met with energy costs that have “necessarily skyrocketed,” to paraphrase a former president. The GND would thus be a GRD (Green Raw Deal) for all but a privileged few.
Environmental, economic, and ultimately societal — the destruction of our nation would be complete if the proponents of the GND ever truly got their way. Socialism’s awful economic legacy is well documented, but its environmental legacy is one the Left would love to keep under wraps. ~The Patriot Post
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