Thursday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Fickle Flirt
by Tom McLaughlin
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Strzok IGNORED EVIDENCE liar-CLINTON
Bootleg Server Hacked So Comey 
Could Exonerate 
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{ rickwells.us } ~ It makes sense that treasonous FBI agent Peter Strzok would look the other way when presented with evidence that implicates liar-Hillary Clinton... given his efforts to make sure that she was elected and those against President Trump. What is now being learned is that he ignored actual evidence that the bootleg server, on which liar-Clinton stored stolen classified American documents, had been hacked. The national security implications were and remain huge and he chose to ignore the threat and the crime and to forego any possible damage mitigation efforts. Fox News reported, “Sources said that Strzok, who sent anti-Trump text messages that got him removed from the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, was told about the metadata anomaly in 2016, but Strzok did not support a formal damage assessment.” The evidence Strzok was informed of was described as an “irregularity in the metadata,” an indicator that a device has been hacked. His failure to act violates FBI protocols, as well, most directly “Directive 732, damage assessments are done in response to unauthorized disclosure or compromise of classified national intelligence.”...Why isn't anything done on this issue. https://rickwells.us/strzok-ignored-clinton-hacked/ 
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Trump Offers to Revoke Steel 
Tariff in Exchange for NAFTA Deal 
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by Alice Greene 
{ punchingbagpost.com } ~ President Trump on Monday suggested he would withdraw the recently announced tariffs on steel and aluminum if... Mexico and Canada finalize a new NAFTA agreement. The effort to renegotiate NAFTA began last August, with the most contentious issues including access to US procurement deals, a proposal to require more auto manufacturing in the US, dispute resolution mechanisms, seasonal barriers to farming goods, and a clause that would terminate the deal after five years. Trump’s announcement about the steel and aluminum tariffs, which he says are needed to protect America’s national and economic security, came just days before the seventh round of NAFTA talks began in Mexico City. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blasted the tariffs as “unacceptable."...  http://punchingbagpost.com/trump-offers-to-revoke-steel-tariff-in-exchange-for-nafta-deal/?pb_list=pb_list  
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Tariff May Have Just Revealed Trump’s 
Plan for Income Tax… and It’s Massive
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by CILLIAN ZEAL
{ conservativetribune.com } ~ For many conservatives, the president’s decision last week to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent on imported aluminum... was where they decided to get off the Trump train. One of those departures was House Speaker Paul Ryan. “We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” Ryan’s spokeswoman, AshLee Strong, told reporters on Monday. “The new tax reform law has boosted the economy and we certainly don’t want to jeopardize those gains.”  Make no mistake: tariffs on steel and aluminum will likely make certain things more expensive. However, given how much of our revenue stream comes from income taxes, relying more on tariffs could mean that the president could reduce taxes even further without affecting the deficit. For most Americans, this would mean a massive cash infusion into both the economy and their own personal bank accounts. It would be the biggest American paradigm shift in terms of national revenue in over a century.  It would also be an exceptionally daring — and potentially dangerous — experiment for a president to try... https://conservativetribune.com/tariff-revealed-trump-plan/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=CTBreaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=conservative-tribune 
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President Trump, Tell Terror-Supporting 
Qatar It Can Kiss Our US Air Base Goodbye
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by PAMELA GELLER
{ gellerreport.com } ~ “Rather than using the base as an excuse for inaction against Qatar, we should be using it to leverage changes in Qatari behavior... The Trump administration needs to make clear to Qatar that its current conduct is unacceptable and will not be tolerated by the United States.” Bard is right. Trump has already set a different tone to U.S. foreign policy by cutting money to the “Palestinians” in light of their obvious lack of interest in pursuing peace. Now he should do the same thing regarding Qatar: tell them that if they continue to support jihad terror, they will lose the U.S. air base and everything that goes with it. Enough is enough. Nations that support jihad terror are no friends of the United States, whatever short-term benefits they may provide, and they need to be put on notice...   https://gellerreport.com/2018/03/qatar-air-base.html/
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UN Complains About Trump Aid Cuts to
Palestinians, but Ignores the Real Problem 
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by Ryan Jones 
The head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) complained this week that US President Donald Trump's decision... to cut funding had left the organization crippled. While there are numerous refugee situations in the world, UNRWA exists solely to aid the Palestinians and perpetuate their status as "refugees." Trump slashed aid to the group after learning that it routinely finds itself involved in anti-Israeli incitement and Palestinian terrorist activity, and in response to ongoing Palestinian refusal to negotiate with Israel. UNRWA chief Pierre Krähenbühl moaned that the result was that "525,000 students no longer have access to education, three million patients don't have access to healthcare and 1.7 million don't receive emergency assistance."... And what has Palestinians leader done to solve this issue. Giving our aid to terrorists.  http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/33517/Default.aspx 
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Fickle Flirt
by Tom McLaughlin
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Portland Harbor 2017
 
{ tommclaughlin.blogspot.com } ~ Spring has teased for weeks now, but New England knows she’s a flirt and not always a pretty one. Snowbanks melt back along streets in Portland to show us accumulated trash the careless have dropped or thrown from car windows all winter. With it are thawing remains of pigeons and seagulls. Little is picked up because we know more snow will bury it again and soon.
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My granddaughters in Lovell
 
Along country roads the melt exposes empty beer cans but thankfully not many. Other detritus is mostly leaves and branches — the benign debris of Nature. Turkey buzzards back from southern climes appear overhead scouting remains of forest animals too old and weak to have survived winter. During seasonal transitions we look forward and back. New England poet Robert Frost reflected on this in A Patch of Old Snow:

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper
The rain had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten — 
If I ever read it.


Few poets appeal to me but Frost always has, and he knew the tease of March and April. Reading him I see it, smell it, feel it.
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Frost in New Hampshire
 
Warm breezes over Portland Harbor carry a stronger scent of salt water. The sea was whipped up last weekend by a strong storm to our south and helped a full moon, making high tide very high indeed. Wind whipped the white salt spray from tops of waves, but Boston and Cape Cod absorbed most of the fury.
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Next to Portland Harbor a mountain of snow melts slowly. Front-end loaders on city streets filled trucks that dumped load after load beside it as bulldozers pushed snow up ever higher up the side of it. Like the dirty snowbanks that comprise it, no white is visible. It’s a pile of frozen liquid covered with sand that doesn’t melt completely until the end of May sometime.
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My back yard
 
After the flirt of our fickle New England spring comes the snub. By the time you’re reading this another storm will have blanketed everything once again. Then spring will resume her flirting only to spurn us again before April arrives. But our April spring isn’t steadfast either. Frost tells of that in the third stanza of Two Tramps in Mudtime:

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
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It’s not just ominous buzzards. Other, more agreeable birds appear too. Near the sea in South Portland I’ll see cardinals, but rarely do I see them in the mountains near Lovell.
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Out my office window to NH
 
Frost the poet spent decades in New Hampshire, the mountains of which I see out my office window in western Maine. He describes another spring songbird in the fourth stanza:

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn't blue,
But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom.
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March brings New Englanders together in town meetings as sap buckets appear on old maple trees. Mud forms atop frozen ground after the sun is high but freezes again at night — over and over before finally drying firm again. Mud doesn’t impede life in paved-over cities but it brings many things to a halt in the countryside. Roads are posted against heavy trucks. Loggers and builders wait for mud to dry, but most of us savor warm spring breezes. Frost wrote about those in To the Thawing Wind:
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Come with rain, O loud Southwester! 
Bring the singer, bring the nester; 
Give the buried flower a dream; 
Make the settled snow-bank steam; 
Find the brown beneath the white; 
But whate’er you do to-night, 
Bathe my window, make it flow, 
Melt it as the ice will go; 
Melt the glass and leave the sticks 
Like a hermit’s crucifix; 
Burst into my narrow stall; 
Swing the picture on the wall; 
Run the rattling pages o’er; 
Scatter poems on the floor; 
Turn the poet out of door.


When our New England spring finally exposes the brown earth beneath, my wife is turned out with her boots on to scratch it and coax her buried flowers upward.
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