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US House Approves Authority to Sue
Trump Advisers Who Ignore Subpoenas
by ijr.com: The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday voted to give lawmakers clear authority to sue Trump administration figures who defy congressional subpoenas... including former White House Counsel Don McGahn. In an escalation of wide-ranging probes of President Donald Trump and his inner circle, lawmakers voted 229-191 along party lines to approve the measure authorizing House committees to file lawsuits in federal court seeking orders from judges to compel officials to cooperate with congressional inquiries. The measure authorizes the House Judiciary Committee to seek a court order enforcing subpoenas seeking an unredacted version of Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election and underlying evidence from the investigation. Democrats acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the resolution. “This has not been done before. But neither have we ever seen blanket stonewalling by the administration of all information requests by the House,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman scumbag liar-Jerrold Nadler said on the floor of the House. “We must go to court to enforce the subpoenas.” Democrats predicted that scumbag liar-Nadler would move quickly to compel McGahn’s testimony before his panel about the Republican president’s efforts to impede Mueller’s investigation. McGahn, a star witness in the Mueller report, last month defied a subpoena for his testimony and related documents after the White House directed him not to cooperate with the Judiciary panel. “He’s made it clear that he’s very committed to getting Mr. McGahn before the committee as quickly as possible,” Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat on scumbag liar-Nadler’s panel, told reporters on Capitol Hill. The measure also establishes a process for other panels to take similar action. Half a dozen House panels are looking into Trump’s presidency and personal holdings. The House Ways and Means Committee is seeking his tax returns. Other panels are probing his financial records and documents on policies ranging from immigrant family separation to the transfer of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia...
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Freedom’s Eastern Frontier
by Roger Kaplan
{ spectator.org } ~ Energy, intellectual property, guns and jet fighters: when you get right down to it, the elements needed to keep the Iron Curtain from shredding... bringing on another great European war, are quite similar to those that obtained when the line was at the Oder. Now it is several hundred miles to the east. To defend a free Poland, as once the U.S. defended a free Germany, you need a power-house free market-based economy, you need better tech — and the human brains that go with it — and you need the machinery — and the men — of war. Precisely in order not to put them in harm’s way. The best use of armies is when they deter other armies. This, in index card form, are the words that will be exchanged between Presidents Donald Trump and Andrzej Duda today, as the American and Polish heads of state meet for the second time in Washington to discuss basic questions of survival. The survival of Poland, surely. But America needs friends abroad today for the same reasons it needed them after World War II: hungry powers and waves of nihilism in the air challenge the peace and freedom so painfully defended. President Macron of France, in a pretentious D-Day speech he meant it as flattery, said America is at its best when it fights for all. That is not so, and Messrs. Trump and Duda will say no such nonsense. After the annexation of Crimea and swathes of Ukraine by the post-Soviet Russians — and mind, there may well be parts of Crimea and Ukraine that are indeed more Russians than Ukrainian, but that is another issue — the Poles, not unlike the Balts and a few other peoples who used to be captive nations, have every reason to be on their guard. Hence President Duda comes to Washington to assure his American colleague in head-of-statehood that one or even several permanent USA and USAF bases in Poland would be welcome — so welcome that he’ll foot the bill, or rather Polish taxpayers will. Judging from a recent poll — actually, the elections to the European Parliament — many if not an overwhelming majority of Polish taxpayers agree with Mr. Duda. And even those who voted against his party, Law and Justice, in power since 2015 and expected to keep its governing majority after national elections in September, are not necessarily against the “NATO-East” policy he espouses. They may not like L&J’s Eurosceptic positions. They may themselves be skeptical of its unabashed embrace of Christian, specifically Catholic, values. But they do not doubt the message they must send their neighbor to the east is that bears are fine as long as they are not overbearing...
https://spectator.org/freedoms-eastern-frontier/?utm_source=American%20Spectator%20Emails&utm_campaign=32ebbbf632-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_12_10_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-32ebbbf632-104608113 .
Texas Just Keeps Getting Freer: Here Are
5 New Bills Gov. Abbott Signed to Give
Texans More Liberty
by Madison Dibble Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a stack of bills giving the people of Texas more freedom. The Texas state legislature recently wrapped up its 2019 legislative session, leaving Abbott with several bills to sign, as the legislature only convenes every two years. While New York Democrats like Mayor scumbag-Bill de Blasio and Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) work to phase out hot dogs and kill jobs with the Green New Deal, Texas Republicans lifted several regulations from their constituents. Here are a few of the freedom-loving bills Texas just adopted.
Lemonade Liberty Free Speech on Campus No More Red-Light Cameras At-Home Beer and Wine Delivery and Freedom to Work... https://ijr.com/new-bills-greg-abbott-signed-to-give-texans-more-liberty/ .
IDF General: Lebanon to pay heavy price
in next Israel and Hezbollah war
by Anna Ahronheim
{ jpost.com } ~ A few hours before a drone infiltrated Israeli airspace from Lebanon, OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Amir Baram warned of overt action against Hezbollah... if it continues to build up terrorist infrastructure along the border, and that Lebanon risks paying a heavy price for its cooperation with the terrorist group. “We will continue to act to thwart its Hezbollah’s efforts to threaten our security, covertly and overtly as required, and if war is imposed on us, we will exact a heavy price from this organization and those who give it backing, wherever necessary,” he said Tuesday night at a memorial commemorating the 13th anniversary of the Second Lebanon War. “Hezbollah’s loyalty was and remains to the supreme leader in Iran, not to the citizens of Lebanon,” he continued. “As a direct result, the Lebanese state is liable to pay a heavy price for its cooperation with Shi’ite terrorism in the next campaign.” Baram accused Hezbollah of violating United Nations Resolution 1701, which set the terms to end the 34-day war fought between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. “The 13 years that have passed since the Second Lebanon War and the security stability that it brought to the region are the best evidence of the deterrence created by the war,” Baram said. But, he warned, “Hezbollah continues to consolidate power in southern Lebanon, contrary to the UN resolution, and is building infrastructure of terrorism and rockets in the villages right here opposite us, and intends to try to threaten us with offensive forces as well. Hezbollah must understand: We will not allow it to realize its plans and destructive ambitions and those of its patrons in Iran.” On Wednesday afternoon, a small drone infiltrated into northern Israel from Lebanon and flew over the town of Shlomi in the Western Galilee before it crossed back into Lebanon...
https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Lebanon-to-pay-heavy-price-in-next-war-between-Israel-and-Hezbollah-592247 .
Minneapolis’ Sacred Stupidity
by Scott McKay was to present themselves as “technocrats” — capable administrators who would make few political waves but rather focus on non-sexy items like transportation, drainage, garbage pickup, economic development, urban renewal, and public works. Of course, technocracy came and went without very much in the way of actual results in urban management. And today’s generation of Democrat machine politicians in charge of our cities don’t bother trying to sell themselves as capable administrators anymore. How can they, when Los Angeles’ trash piles rival those of Kinshasa, homeless bums micturate on passing taxicabs on New York streets, it’s recommended that one wear galoshes on the streets of San Francisco so as to avoid ruining one’s Ferragamos by stepping in freshly-lain human feculence, and New Orleans is inundated each time there’s a hard rain because the city’s pumps and drainage infrastructure are virtually untouched by improvement despite billions in spending for just that purpose? At some point you can’t sell yourself as a technocrat when the place is demonstrably worse off than when you found it. At that point you need a new hook for the rubes, because even though much of the Democrats’ mismanagement of our cities has run off their middle class residents in their millions it’s possible the remainder might get wise to the grift and throw the bums out. Which cannot happen. In the event a Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, or Portland might turn the Democrats out of power this is a hypothetical, of course; calm down and newly-empowered Republicans would get to examine the books, losing an election would generally be the least of the problems for the operators of those machines. Perhaps then some of these statesmen and Public Servants might do for Leavenworth and Marion and Victorville what they’ve done for Newark and Jackson and Flint. We know what the new hook is. It’s cultural Marxism and in particular Critical Race Theory, the simplest functional definition of which is the nonstop agitation of those under your power along racial lines so as to make them completely dysfunctional in their relations with one another without your expert hand guiding them. Which brings us to Minneapolis, the hometown of the illustrious illegal immigrant and tax-evading congresswoman worthless-Ilhan Omar. And one Jacob Frey, the Democrat mayor of the City of Lakes, who thought it a wonderful idea to commemorate the 400th anniversary of black slaves arriving at the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia by holding something the city’s “Racial Equity Coordinators” call “400 Years of Resistance and Liberation. Remembering, Recovering, Reimagining — Sacred Conversations with City Staff.”...
https://spectator.org/minneapolis-sacred-stupidity/?utm_source=American%20Spectator%20Emails&utm_campaign=32ebbbf632-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_06_12_10_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-32ebbbf632-104608113 .
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Mileage Standards and Biofuels Are Both TerribleLewis Morris: The Trump administration is set to make major changes to the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that govern what automakers produce and undoing yet another scumbag/liar-nObama-era power grab. Barack scumbag/liar-nObama elected to raise fleet CAFE standards to 54 miles per gallon by 2025. It was a mark that the automotive industry fears it could not reach in time and still stay in business.
Thankfully, the Trump administration is about to put a freeze on those requirements, setting the fuel-economy standard at 2020 levels through 2025. The change would also revoke California’s waiver to set its own fuel economy standard under the Clean Air Act. This rule has been in place for decades, but it came to the nation’s attention when California essentially set the fuel-economy standard for the country during the scumbag/liar-nObama years.
A protracted legal battle between California and the Trump administration is assured if a deal cannot be worked out on a common fuel standard that suits both parties. Meanwhile, 17 automakers sent a letter to Trump to create one national fuel standardand not go to war with California. An extended court case would put car companies in regulatory limbo until matters are sorted out.
On a side note, Government Motors (GM) shareholders sent a letter to CEO Mary Barra stating that they want the automaker to hold firm to the California model. Never forget that this is the company bailed out by government largess “repaid” with leftist board of director appointments and transfers of voting stock.
At this point, there doesn’t look to be any forthcoming deal between California and the White House.
Unfortunately, it’s not all good news. Hot on the heels of the Trump administration’s wrong-headed expansion of ethanol usage comes news that further proves why the president is acting on the wrong side of this issue.
The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) first came about in 2005 as an attempted end run around the free market by forcing drivers to buy biofuels that nobody would otherwise touch. Biofuels have been government subsidized and sycophantically supported by the Left ever since. Despite reasoned scientific study that pointed out the weaknesses of biofuels since the beginning, our enlightened government superiors mandated that we use ever more of it in our fuel supply.
The [Government Accountability Office (https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-47) (GAO) released a report last week that didn’t receive as much press as it deserved. The GAO determined that ethanol has basically been a bust. The biofuel has not had any noticeable impact on CO2 levels in the atmosphere, nor has it made gas cheaper at the pump — both ostensible goals of the ethanol mandate. It’s not the GAO’s place to make policy recommendations, but the office’s work speaks for itself.
The GAO got involved in examining biofuels in 2014 when it discovered that refiners’ costs for complying with the Renewable Fuel Standard had increased. Two years later GAO also found that greenhouse gas emissions were not going to meet the target set for 2022.
The GAO’s findings were immediately attacked by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has an obvious interest in seeing ethanol succeed. The USDA challenged GAO’s conclusions about the limited effect the program has had on reducing emissions. While they’re on the subject, they should talk about last year’s EPA reportthat found corn-based ethanol and soybean-based biodiesel were hurting water quality.
The issues of mileage standards and ethanol levels are related because of the top-down, Big Government mandates that dictate what kind of cars we drive and what fuel we put in them. Both should be permanently scrapped so the free market can determine the way forward. ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/63562?mailing_id=4326&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4326&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
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