The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Finding Relief on the Streets and at the Office
by Peggy Noonan
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MSM Silence on Menendez Is Deafening
by Political Editors: A mistrial has been declared in the corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) due to the jury becoming hopelessly deadlocked. One juror said that the panel was split 10-2 in favor of acquittal. It remains to be seen whether the Justice Department will seek a second trial.
by Political Editors: A mistrial has been declared in the corruption trial of Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) due to the jury becoming hopelessly deadlocked. One juror said that the panel was split 10-2 in favor of acquittal. It remains to be seen whether the Justice Department will seek a second trial. Menendez’s co-defendant, Dr. Salomon Melgen, was convicted earlier this year in Florida of massive Medicare fraud. Fraud in which Menendez was implicated for having pressured Medicare officials to change billing practices after it was determined that Melgen had over-billed by millions of dollars. Menendez was also alleged to have helped Melgen, who is married, secure visas for his foreign mistresses. The government alleged that Menendez had then received luxury vacations and hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Melgen’s business.
Like a scene straight out of the movie “The Untouchables,” Menendez, sounding every bit the part of a mobster, warned, “To those who were digging my political grave so they could jump into my seat: I know who you are, and I won’t forget you.” Yikes!
One of the most troubling aspects of this whole Menendez saga has been the mainstream media’s near silence on the story. The MSM has hardly covered the scandal and the subsequent trial. If Menendez were a Republican, every American would know about him and what he was accused of doing. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/52485
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FINALLY: Jeff Sessions Turns
Focus to liar-Clinton’s Uranium Scandal
by Andrew
{conservativefreepress.com} ~ The Washington Post intercepted a letter this week showing that Attorney General Jeff Sessions may finally be ready to do his damn job... and turn the attention of the Justice Department on the crimes and misdeeds of the liar-Clinton Foundation, including the charity’s suspicious involvement in the sale of a uranium company to Russian government interests. According to the paper, Sessions’ assistant attorney general, Stephen Boyd, responded to an inquiry from House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, saying the AG was considering the possibility of appointing a second special counsel to investigate the worst of the charges against liar-Clinton and her cronies. At the very least, he has directed some of his top federal prosecutors to explore the issues and report back to him. Those prosecutors, wrote Boyd, will “report directly to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”... http://www.conservativefreepress.com/trump-administration/finally-jeff-sessions-turns-focus-clintons-uranium-scandal/.
Lawmakers Advance
Measures to Block Aid to Hamas
by Abha Shankar
{investigativeproject.org} ~ The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislative measures Wednesday targeting the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas... The approved measures include the Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act (H.R. 2712), that will impose sanctions to end support for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad from Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hizballah. "Iran and Hizballah are clearly working to extend their influence over Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip through increased financial and military aid," said U.S. Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif... https://www.investigativeproject.org/6916/lawmakers-advance-measures-to-block-aid-to-hamas
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Klayman and Freedom Watch Sue Sessions, DOJ and
FBI to Force Investigation Into Illegal Leaks
and Conflicts by Mueller!
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Rush Limbaugh Revealed The Secret Of
Who Launched The Attacks On Judge Roy Moore
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VIDEOSISIS Threatens Christmas Attack At The Vatican
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House GOP Celebrates Passing Tax Reform Bill.
Netanyahu: Iran ‘Cares More About Hating Israel Than Helping Earthquake Victims’.
Kurtz: Could loose lips-Biden’s “Hands-On” Style Hurt Him?.
Menendez Juror Shares Reasons For How He Voted.
Peter Schweizer On Possibility Of Investigation Into liar-Hillary.
Judge Napolitano: Will the Justice Department Ever Do its Job?.
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Finding Relief on the Streets and at the Office
by Peggy Noonan
{peggynoonan.com} ~ In 2001 I thought it would be a suitcase bomb, a homemade nuclear device, not airplanes going into buildings. I’d felt something coming, had written of it, but that day, amid all the grief and carnage, I felt a lurking relief. I’d feared worse—tens of thousands gone, parts of the city rendered uninhabitable.
I feel a version of that relief now, after Tuesday’s truck attack downtown, within the shadow of the Freedom Tower. Barely three hours later, on Lexington Avenue from the 90s through the 70s, the streets were crowded with kids and parents out for Halloween. The mood was not a sag-shouldered “This is the new normal,” but a collected sense of “We can handle this.” There was an air of gallant enjoyment. It made the emotionalism of the mayor’s remarks—“We will not be cowed”; “This action was intended to break our spirit”—seem both hyped up and rote, and appropriate to another time.
Yes, ISIS is here; yes, this will happen again, and security is appropriately high for this weekend’s marathon. But it’s obvious, and has been for some time, that we’re in a different moment, a different part of the battle. For months and then years after 9/11, we feared al Qaeda would hit us again, harder. Sixteen years later what we see is a series of single, random-seeming acts by weak, stupid, highly emotional men who read propaganda sites and become excited in the way of the weak, stupid and highly emotional. Their attacks are low-tech, limited.
Graeme Wood had a smart piece for the Atlantic hours after the attack. “The details strongly suggest that the man was a complete idiot,” Mr. Wood wrote of the suspect, Sayfullo Saipov. “I harp on Saipov’s apparent stupidity for one reason: As long as Islamic State’s attackers are idiots like Saipov, our societies can probably handle them. . . . The Idiots’ Crusade is a manageable problem. Much less tolerable would be a campaign of competent terror—the kind of mayhem enabled by training, like the 2015 Bataclan killers in Paris had, or by patient planning, as Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas did.”
Continued vigilance is in order: “As Islamic State loses territory, the greatest danger remains the prospect that some of the battle-hardened fighters will return home, raising the average IQ of attackers, and making possible attacks that would be many times more deadly than this one.”
The bad guys now seem incompetent. But the bad guys will never go away, and it is to the deep and everlasting credit of U.S. law enforcement, especially the New York City Police Department, that they have been so contained. Some day they’ll hit us hard again, so no relaxation of efforts is possible. But right now it feels more like Britain’s long struggle with the Irish Republican Army than an existential threat, and we must be thankful when feelings improve. This was my small epiphany Tuesday night as I moved among people dressed as bumblebees, Pharaohs, Godzilla and an angel with black wings. I liked the gallant enjoyment. I shared it.
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Here we shift to another thing that has changed, this one permanently. Before it goes away as a regular front-page story—and it will, because as Thoreau said, once you’re familiar with a principle you become less interested in hearing of its numerous applications—it must be noted that what has happened the past month regarding sexual harassment in the workplace is epochal, a true watershed and long overdue.
The revelations will have a huge impact, not because men now understand that sexual abuse and bullying are wrong—they always knew, and for many the wrongness would have been part of the enjoyment—but because they now know, really for the first time, that they will pay a terrible price if their misbehavior is revealed. And from here on in, there’s a greater chance it will be revealed, and believed.
The price to be paid was the real lesson of the past few weeks of resignations and firings. Celebrity abusers understand the first paragraph of their obit will now include something like, “. . . but fell from his position of power in the sexual-abuse scandals of the 2010s.”
That there is a price to be paid will have a deterrent effect. Human sin won’t stop; harassment will continue—but something important happened here.
In July 2015 New York magazine put 35 women on the cover who alleged that Bill Cosby had sexually violated them. Until then it had been a cloudy, amorphous story. Suddenly it was no longer he-said/she-said: You saw the faces, read the testimony, and knew what Mr. Cosby really was. A year later Gretchen Carlson, and later others, went up against Fox News’s Roger Ailes ; her lawsuit was settled for $20 million. Then came the revelation of the Bill O’Reilly settlements.
But Black October for sexual harassers began with the New York Times stories by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey on Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuses and payoffs, followed by Ronan Farrow’s lengthy investigation in the New Yorker, and then on to other men in show business and the news media.
Something happened. Media outfits made a commitment—expensive in terms of resources, personnel and legal costs—to get the story. What they found was numbers—the sheer number of abusers and the number of accusers who’d testify. They discovered details that established patterns.
This is all good. And one of the things that fell is the phrase “everybody knew.” That is now a self-indicting phrase.
I close with a point that may grate on those who, like me, are glad at what has happened and wish to see just revelations continue.
The challenge is to pursue justice while keeping a sense of humanity. Human-resources departments terrified of costly lawsuits will impose more and stranger rules that won’t necessarily thwart bad guys but will harass good men. This is the way of things. Two recent anecdotes: At a yearly checkup, a male doctor went through his short list of how to stay healthy in New York. It included: don’t stray onto the curb, stay on the sidewalk, keep back from careening trucks that take a corner too tight and knock people down. I got it, I said—I take the arms of cellphone zombies and guide them a step back to keep them safe. I’d done it recently with a young woman. He got a poignant look. “I can’t do that now,” he said. If he put his hand on a strange woman’s arm, it might be misunderstood.
I was told the other day of a news executive who complimented his co-worker on her boots. He was later taken aside by a colleague: You can’t talk like that now! He hurriedly called the woman and apologized: He meant no offense, didn’t mean to sound leering. She said: Are you kidding? I knew it was a compliment, no offense at all.
That was human. Common sense is better than antihuman edicts.
It’s good the pendulum has swung. You want it to hit the bad guys hard, and leave the good ones untouched.
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