The Front Page Cover
Featruring:
House Republicans Repeat an liar-nObama Error
by Peggy Noonan
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. Turkey Threatens European Invasion?
It's no secret — at least to those informed by anything other than Leftmedia propaganda — that jihadis infiltrate the ranks of "refugees" in order to carry out terrorist attacks. Even Barack liar-nObama's State Department quietly acknowledged that fact. While American judges bemoan Donald Trump's travel ban because it "targets Muslims," some Muslims certainly don't have any trouble making it all about religion.
As Gary Bauer notes, "A diplomatic spat erupted recently when Turkey wanted to send diplomats to the Netherlands to campaign among the Turkish residents there for an upcoming constitutional referendum in Turkey. Dutch officials refused to allow the visit, which coincided with their own hotly contested election, and the Turkish government erupted in rage."
"Shame on the EU," Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan thundered. "Down with your European principles, values and justice." He wasn't done, claiming, "They started a clash between the cross and the crescent. There is no other explanation."
Worse, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu threatened, "Soon wars of religion ... will start in Europe." This might happen because, he added, "We could open the way for 15,000 refugees ... each month and blow [Europe's] mind."
Now, a brief history lesson. Less than 100 years after Mohammad's death, Muslims were invading Europe — first Spain and then France before Frankish King Charles Martel defeated them at the Battle of Tours in 732. Hundreds of years of subsequent Muslim aggression led to the Crusades. So no, Dutch politicians did not "start a clash between the cross and the crescent." Muslims did that 1,400 years ago and they've never stopped. The battle just looks different now, and the "army" is a horde of "refugees."
Did we mention that Turkey is a member of NATO and ostensibly and ally of Western Europe? ~The Patriot Post
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A Watergate-style Threat to the Democratic Process
by Accuracy In Media
{aim.org} ~ Former NSA/CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery has told Accuracy in Media through his attorney Larry Klayman that it is entirely possible that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) was used as a back channel to collect and pass information... based on electronic surveillance of Trump associates and Donald J. Trump personally—to officials in the liar-nObama administration. Montgomery said the procedure known as shell-game eavesdropping, in which the NSA can deny they are wiretapping, and the GCHQ can also deny that they are wiretapping, could have been used in this case. In other words, the NSA, CIA or FBI would ask the British to conduct the surveillance on behalf of the U.S. government so that U.S. officials could deny their own involvement. Montgomery said that he has provided extensive evidence of illegal wiretapping by U.S. intelligence agencies to the FBI, but that the Bureau has failed to act on the evidence since he provided it almost two years ago. Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News had said, “The NSA has given GCHQ full 24/7 access to its computers, so GCHQ — a foreign intelligence agency that, like the NSA, operates outside our constitutional norms — has the digital versions of all electronic communications made in America in 2016, including Trump’s.”...
Pyongyang Military Exports Directly Threaten Israel...
by Ruthie Blum
{algemeiner.com} ~ North Korean exporting of missile and other military systems to countries and terrorist organizations around the world directly threatens the Jewish state... Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Monday. According to Channel 2, Arab media outlets reported over the weekend that an arms shipment on its way to Hezbollah was attacked by the IDF in Syria late Thursday night/early Friday morning. The shipment, according to these sources, included advanced North Korean missiles. Channel 2 added that the nuclear reactor in Syria, which Israel destroyed in September 2007, was built for President Bashar Assad with the aid of the regime in Pyongyang. As The Algemeiner reported last April, former US Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser John Hannah, a senior counselor at the DC-based policy institute the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, penned a piece in the journal Foreign Affairs in which he said about the 2007 reactor-bombing — code-named “Operation Orchard” — that America “dodged a bullet in Syria…all courtesy of the Israelis.”... https://www.algemeiner.com/2017/03/20/report-pyongyang-military-exports-directly-threaten-israel-latest-arms-convoy-to-hezbollah-struck-by-idf-in-syria-contained-north-korean-missiles/
.Trump Fight Or Surrender Time – Limbaugh Says
Hearings An Impeachment Threat To Back Off
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Have we now, after the nauseating partisan display of Comey being vacillating Comey, a tool of the deep state swamp targeting President Trump, reached the point where the gloves finally are tossed aside?... Will President Trump come out with his guns blazing and go after those who are attacking him. He’s got the tools and the evidence. Put liar-Clinton and liar-nObama before grand juries, and start an investigation into what’s motivating FBI Director James Comey. The collusion is not between Trump and Russia, it’s between the establishment and the shadow government elites. These political operatives, the high profile swamp vermin included, must be gotten rid of. Allowing them to remain in power allows them to continue to abuse it in ways that are detrimental to the President and to this nation. They will never do the right thing or use the power they have been given in the interest of the American people...
.Michael Savage was target of NSA spying
by wnd.com
{wnd.com} ~ Talk-radio host Michael Savage is among the public figures who were under surveillance by the National Security Agency as part of its “Project Dragnet,” according to a database revealed by an agency whistleblower... Jerome Corsi, an investigative reporter for Infowars.com, told Savage on “The Savage Nation” radio show Monday that one of Savage’s email addresses was discovered in the database. Infowars.com said the database has evidence of spying on U.S. citizens from 2004 to 2010, but Corsi told Savage there is no indication the surveillance has stopped. It shows Donald J. Trump and Infowars founder Alex Jones also were under illegal, unauthorized government monitoring during those years... http://www.wnd.com/2017/03/michael-savage-was-target-of-nsa-spying/
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Gowdy Asks Comey To Pledge Investigation
Of NYT, WP Leaks – Nope, But It’s “Serious”
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Congressman Trey Gowdy questioned FBI Director Comey in Monday’s hearings, attempting to elicit a pledge that the leaked information which appeared in the leftist establishment publications, the New York Times and Washington Post, would not go uninvestigated and theoretically unpunished... Comey hid behind his familiar cover of integrity, something that Gowdy later notes in a less overt manner, is easily turned off and on at other times, dependent upon the situation and who benefits. He asks Comey if he’s aware of any carve-outs for media types to be able to disseminate classified information without legal consequences. He says there’s no carve-out that he’s aware of but that to his knowledge nobody has been prosecuted in his lifetime. Gowdy mentions that the Logan act has also never been prosecuted but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of discussion from time to time. Comey testifies that the only way a reporter would know about the existence of intercepted phone calls would be if they were declassified and revealed in an official setting such as a hearing or if they had been given to them by someone who wasn’t supposed to. The leaking of classified information, a felony... http://rickwells.us/gowdy-asks-comey-pledge-investigation-nyt-wp-leaks-nope-serious/
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House Republicans Repeat an liar-nObama Error
by Peggy Noonan
{peggynoonan.com} ~ It is challenging for important Republicans on Capitol Hill now. They are leading their party at a time when it is changing and the country has changed. There are fissures in terms of what they believe and what they want. There is no shared, overarching sense of the meaning and purpose of the Republican Party, no agreed-upon blueprint from which to operate.
Most of them know that something substantial happened in 2016, when half, and then considerably more than half, of the Republican base followed Donald Trump, along with a great many Democrats. But they are still uncertain of the meaning of the event. I suggested to a Capitol Hill figure last week that it was a populist wave and the future of the Republican Party is moderate populism. He answered that in fact the president, in his famous rallies, was often simply road-testing ideas and applause lines, adopting what got cheers and dropping what didn’t. He’d personally seen this. I thought: I’m sure you saw what you saw, but what you are noting is Mr. Trump’s cynicism when what matters is what the crowds agreed with—what they applauded. When he would say, seemingly in passing, that he won’t touch Medicare or Social Security, people are in enough trouble and a deal’s a deal, everyone—Republicans, Democrats—cheered. Because they are in financial trouble. And because they don’t trust Washington to be fair or wise in cutting or rejiggering essential programs.
But the Hill figure did not believe that 2016 marked a change in political direction, and I suppose that’s lucky for him, because if he followed the prompting of a Trumpian base, his donors would not like it.
Surely it is reasonable to conclude a big, burgeoning hunk of voters came forward in 2016 with a new definition of what popular, centrist GOP policies would look like—more economically nationalist and more socially and economically populist.
The GOP’s first big legislative endeavor, the repeal of liar-nObamaCare, has been understood as a classic fight between party leadership and the more conservative and libertarian wings, and there’s truth in that. I wonder if it will not also become a struggle between the leadership and the Trumpian core.
The new bill lacks an air of appropriate crisis, a sense that it is responsive to this moment. I criticize it not from the right but I suppose the left: Eight years ago, I argued liar-nObamaCare would be an unmitigated mess: “The system will be overwhelmed, the government won’t be able to execute, the costs will be huge.” I urged Mr. liar-nObama to focus instead on Medicare; attack waste, fraud and abuse; come up with far-sighted cost saving measures—and, once this was accomplished with bipartisan support, make one little change: open the program to the uninsured under 65. Expensive? Yes. But simpler, cleaner, and better than destroying the health insurance system. The 2008 crash had occurred less than a year before. That was the moment American insecurity began to surge and reasonable pessimism take hold.
Is it so different now?
The two great sociocultural documents of this moment are by the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt and the journalist Christopher Caldwell .
Mr. Eberstadt, in a Commentary piece titled “Our Miserable 21st Century,” writes that the year 2000 marked a grim milestone: “The Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.” He traces the economic factors, including dismal labor-force trends: “The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.” The top is doing fine but not the bottom: “21st-century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealth-holders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers.”
Physical health has deteriorated for a significant swath of white America, “thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse. All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-binging health setbacks. Yes: It can happen here, and it has. Welcome to our new America.”
He quotes a 2016 study reporting that nearly half of all prime-working-age male labor-force dropouts—some seven million men—take pain medication daily. That “adds a poignant and immensely sad detail to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.”
Mr. Caldwell, in First Things, focuses on the narcotics epidemic: “The scale of the present wave of heroin and opioid abuse is unprecedented. Fifty-two thousand Americans died of overdoses in 2015—about four times as many as died from gun homicides and half again as many as died in car accidents.” Salisbury, Mass., population 8,000, lost one resident in the Vietnam War. “It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years.” In four hours last summer 28 people in Huntington, W.Va., population 49,000, overdosed.
The death toll “far eclipses” that of every previous drug crisis. Mr. Trump’s willingness at least to speak of the crisis surely helped him win, Mr. Caldwell observes: “In his inaugural address, President Trump referred to the drug epidemic, among other problems as ‘carnage.’ Those who call the word an irresponsible exaggeration are wrong.”
These two great pieces in great magazines deserve the deep, focused and alarmed attention of policy makers. We are in the midst of the kind of crises that can do nations in. It is pleasant to chirp, as Speaker Paul Ryan does, of “choice” and “competition” and an end to “paternalistic” thinking on health care. Is it responsive to the moment? Or does it sound like old lyrics from an old hymnal?
I close with Tucker Carlson’s Wednesday night Fox News interview with Mr. Ryan. It cut to the political heart of the matter.
Mr. Carlson questioned the new bill’s elimination of a tax on wealthy investors. “Looking at the last election, was the message of that election really, ‘We need to help investors?’ I mean, the Dow is over 20,000. Are they really the group that needs the help?”
Mr. Ryan answered that the tax had been imposed by liar-nObamaCare. “The trillion-dollar tax cut that this bill represents—that is part of the trillion-dollar tax increase that was in liar-nObamaCare to finance liar-nObamaCare.” It deserves repeal: “It’s bad for economic growth.”
Mr. Carlson: “But the overview here is that all the wealth, basically, in the last 10 years, has stuck to the top end. That’s one of the reasons we’ve had all the political turmoil, as you know. And so, kind of a hard sell to say ‘Yeah, we’re gonna repeal liar-nObamaCare, but we’re gonna send more money to the people who’ve already gotten the richest over the last 10 years.’ I mean, that’s what this does, no? I’m not a leftist, it’s just—that’s true.”
“I’m not that concerned about it,” Mr. Ryan replied. Republicans promised to repeal liar-nObamaCare, and they are.
Maybe he should be concerned.
Most of them know that something substantial happened in 2016, when half, and then considerably more than half, of the Republican base followed Donald Trump, along with a great many Democrats. But they are still uncertain of the meaning of the event. I suggested to a Capitol Hill figure last week that it was a populist wave and the future of the Republican Party is moderate populism. He answered that in fact the president, in his famous rallies, was often simply road-testing ideas and applause lines, adopting what got cheers and dropping what didn’t. He’d personally seen this. I thought: I’m sure you saw what you saw, but what you are noting is Mr. Trump’s cynicism when what matters is what the crowds agreed with—what they applauded. When he would say, seemingly in passing, that he won’t touch Medicare or Social Security, people are in enough trouble and a deal’s a deal, everyone—Republicans, Democrats—cheered. Because they are in financial trouble. And because they don’t trust Washington to be fair or wise in cutting or rejiggering essential programs.
But the Hill figure did not believe that 2016 marked a change in political direction, and I suppose that’s lucky for him, because if he followed the prompting of a Trumpian base, his donors would not like it.
Surely it is reasonable to conclude a big, burgeoning hunk of voters came forward in 2016 with a new definition of what popular, centrist GOP policies would look like—more economically nationalist and more socially and economically populist.
The GOP’s first big legislative endeavor, the repeal of liar-nObamaCare, has been understood as a classic fight between party leadership and the more conservative and libertarian wings, and there’s truth in that. I wonder if it will not also become a struggle between the leadership and the Trumpian core.
The new bill lacks an air of appropriate crisis, a sense that it is responsive to this moment. I criticize it not from the right but I suppose the left: Eight years ago, I argued liar-nObamaCare would be an unmitigated mess: “The system will be overwhelmed, the government won’t be able to execute, the costs will be huge.” I urged Mr. liar-nObama to focus instead on Medicare; attack waste, fraud and abuse; come up with far-sighted cost saving measures—and, once this was accomplished with bipartisan support, make one little change: open the program to the uninsured under 65. Expensive? Yes. But simpler, cleaner, and better than destroying the health insurance system. The 2008 crash had occurred less than a year before. That was the moment American insecurity began to surge and reasonable pessimism take hold.
Is it so different now?
The two great sociocultural documents of this moment are by the political economist Nicholas Eberstadt and the journalist Christopher Caldwell .
Mr. Eberstadt, in a Commentary piece titled “Our Miserable 21st Century,” writes that the year 2000 marked a grim milestone: “The Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then—and broke down very badly.” He traces the economic factors, including dismal labor-force trends: “The plain fact is that 21st-century America has witnessed a dreadful collapse of work.” The top is doing fine but not the bottom: “21st-century America has somehow managed to produce markedly more wealth for its wealth-holders even as it provided markedly less work for its workers.”
Physical health has deteriorated for a significant swath of white America, “thanks in large part to drug and alcohol abuse. All this sounds a little too close for comfort to the story of modern Russia, with its devastating vodka- and drug-binging health setbacks. Yes: It can happen here, and it has. Welcome to our new America.”
He quotes a 2016 study reporting that nearly half of all prime-working-age male labor-force dropouts—some seven million men—take pain medication daily. That “adds a poignant and immensely sad detail to this portrait of daily life in 21st-century America: In our mind’s eye we can now picture many millions of un-working men in the prime of life, out of work and not looking for jobs, sitting in front of screens—stoned.”
Mr. Caldwell, in First Things, focuses on the narcotics epidemic: “The scale of the present wave of heroin and opioid abuse is unprecedented. Fifty-two thousand Americans died of overdoses in 2015—about four times as many as died from gun homicides and half again as many as died in car accidents.” Salisbury, Mass., population 8,000, lost one resident in the Vietnam War. “It has lost fifteen to heroin in the last two years.” In four hours last summer 28 people in Huntington, W.Va., population 49,000, overdosed.
The death toll “far eclipses” that of every previous drug crisis. Mr. Trump’s willingness at least to speak of the crisis surely helped him win, Mr. Caldwell observes: “In his inaugural address, President Trump referred to the drug epidemic, among other problems as ‘carnage.’ Those who call the word an irresponsible exaggeration are wrong.”
These two great pieces in great magazines deserve the deep, focused and alarmed attention of policy makers. We are in the midst of the kind of crises that can do nations in. It is pleasant to chirp, as Speaker Paul Ryan does, of “choice” and “competition” and an end to “paternalistic” thinking on health care. Is it responsive to the moment? Or does it sound like old lyrics from an old hymnal?
I close with Tucker Carlson’s Wednesday night Fox News interview with Mr. Ryan. It cut to the political heart of the matter.
Mr. Carlson questioned the new bill’s elimination of a tax on wealthy investors. “Looking at the last election, was the message of that election really, ‘We need to help investors?’ I mean, the Dow is over 20,000. Are they really the group that needs the help?”
Mr. Ryan answered that the tax had been imposed by liar-nObamaCare. “The trillion-dollar tax cut that this bill represents—that is part of the trillion-dollar tax increase that was in liar-nObamaCare to finance liar-nObamaCare.” It deserves repeal: “It’s bad for economic growth.”
Mr. Carlson: “But the overview here is that all the wealth, basically, in the last 10 years, has stuck to the top end. That’s one of the reasons we’ve had all the political turmoil, as you know. And so, kind of a hard sell to say ‘Yeah, we’re gonna repeal liar-nObamaCare, but we’re gonna send more money to the people who’ve already gotten the richest over the last 10 years.’ I mean, that’s what this does, no? I’m not a leftist, it’s just—that’s true.”
“I’m not that concerned about it,” Mr. Ryan replied. Republicans promised to repeal liar-nObamaCare, and they are.
Maybe he should be concerned.
http://www.peggynoonan.com/house-republicans-repeat-an-obama-error/
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