The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
At the Sessions hearing, the business
of government is ... hysteria
by Matt Welch
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Top Headlines
Trump's short list for the Supreme Court. (The Daily Signal)
Congress OKs budget — first step toward liar-nObamaCare repeal. (Fox News)
Dead people get $2.6 billion in food stamps. (Washington Free Beacon)
Lockheed Martin CEO meets Trump, says deal to lower F-35 costs is close. (Reuters)
California's bullet train is hurtling toward a multibillion-dollar overrun, a confidential federal report warns. (Los Angeles Times)
Video: BuzzFeed/CNN DID Push #Fakenews in "Trump Intelligence Memos." (CBS Atlanta)
Trump to meet with Martin Luther King III. (Washington Times)
Rep. Smith re-introduces bill to provide emergency relief to Christian genocide survivors in the Middle East. (CNS News)
liar-Clinton Global Initiative is shutting down after liar-Hillary's loss. (Heat Street)
Policy: National concealed carry reciprocity lies and the lying liars who tell them. (NRA-ILA)
Policy: Black clergy, big government and black responsibility. (Inside Sources) ~The Patriot Post
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Illegal Aliens Demand “Rights”
In Demonstrations Across America
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ The groups themselves, their members and the left-wing propagandist, both in media and government, label them as “immigrant rights groups,” but that’s deliberately misleading... If they were immigrants, they would have nothing to protest and nothing to fear from law enforcement. They would be legally in the United States. But they’re illegal aliens, not immigrants. The dictionary defines an immigrant as a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence. Illegals migrate for as long as they can get away with it. They enter the arrangement knowing that it’s probably temporary, that they’re criminals every day they’re in the parasitic host nation and that they’ll exist on the fringes of society. They might find a way to pull it off permanently, but that should be the rare exception to the rule. In a normal setting, the jig is up as soon as they drive with a broken tail light and get pulled over. They know going into it that it’s a situation where there is little in the way of rights beyond the basics of survival...That's correct, they have no rights. Their here illegal. http://rickwells.us/illegal-aliens-demand-rights-demonstrations-across-america/
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CIA Director Brennan Joins Democrat Effort
To Discredit Trump As Illegitimate
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Departing CIA director John Brennan took aim at Russia and the potential for improved relations between our two nations on Sunday, criticizing Donald Trump’s handling of national security matters... Brennan has long been believed to be a practicing Muslim who converted while working in Saudi Arabia. He also may have overridden the decision of his subordinate as the CIA Station Chief in Jeda, and ordered the visas for the 9/11 hijackers approved. He’s known to have a close relationship with Hussein liar-nObama, and clearly they have a lot in common. Brennan is doing his part in the Democrat campaign to discredit Mr. Trump, posing as the objective intelligence professional when he’s actually a compromised political appointee heading an agency that falls short of expectations. Their endorsement of the claims of the Democrats and liar-Hillary Clinton campaign that the Russians are responsible for passing the truth on to the American people have yet to be substantiated. We’re supposed to just take Brennan at his word, he’s at least as honest as liar-nObama...Come to think about it, liar-nObama is the real Illegitimate. http://rickwells.us/cia-director-brennan-democrat-effort-discredit-trump-illegitimate/
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Political Power Boosts Controversial
Green Energy Financing Scheme
by Lachlan Markay
{freebeacon.com} ~ As an innovative but controversial green energy financing mechanism picks up steam, hacked communications from a former White House official provide previously unreported insight into the confluence of public policy... private investment, and political money that helped fuel its rise. Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is quickly gaining popularity as a means of outfitting commercial and residential properties with solar panels, energy efficiency improvements, and other environmentally conscious modifications. PACE allows homeowners to finance those modifications through loans from private lenders and to pay back those loans through their property tax bills. Local governments that levy those taxes pass on the assessments to the lenders... http://freebeacon.com/issues/political-power-boosts-controversial-green-energy-financing-scheme/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=bce1e5e96e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-bce1e5e96e-45611665
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U.S. Must Investigate and Withdraw
From UN “Education” Agency
by Alex Newman
{thenewamerican.com} ~ The United Nations “education” and “cultural” organization, as well as its controversial Communist Party boss Irina Bokova, are facing growing pressure over corruption, abuse, mismanagement, and other scandals... Several major donor governments including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Israel have recently been up in arms about the outfit, formally known as UNESCO. Meanwhile, insiders at the UN agency tell The New American that an external independent audit is needed to bring everything to light. And in the United States, where federal law already prohibits U.S. tax funding to the scandal-plagued UN “education” body, calls for a complete American withdrawal are growing louder. The scandals plaguing the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) have been bubbling under the surface for years. Indeed, controversy has surrounded the UN bureaucracy almost from the start, as its leaders, often actual communists, pushed global schemes to promote globalism, humanism, totalitarianism, U.S. disarmament, and other controversial ideologies and beliefs...Pull out of the UN period.
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The Phony ‘Public-Health Crisis’
of Gun Violence
by Vik Khanna
{nationalreview.com} ~ Two major medical journals have decided to renew the academic medical establishment’s assault on gun owners. The first shot across the bow appeared in the November 8 Journal of the American Medical Association... where esteemed Stanford University health economist Victor Fuchs published a paper on the problem of life expectancy in the black community. Near the end of his lamentation, Fuchs asserts that increasing life expectancy in the black community “depends more on public health measures such as gun control than on medical care.” The second shot came with the release of the January issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, which has four papers and an editorial devoted to firearms violence, with a heavy emphasis on suicide prevention, which would benefit whites much more than it would the black community... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443876/public-health-crisis-gun-violence-debunked?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Trending%20Email%20Reoccurring-%20Monday%20to%20Thursday%202017-01-16&utm_term=NR5PM%20Actives
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At the Sessions hearing, the business
of government is ... hysteria
by Matt Welch
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Code Pink may get a bad rap, disrupting as it does seemingly every significant event on Capitol Hill. But the most hysterical performances at Tuesday's serially interrupted Senate confirmation hearing for attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions came not from scrappy protesters, but from the august senators within.
"I would like to begin," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said to Sessions, "with the second largest criminal industry in this country, which is now - believe it or not, by revenues produced - human sex trafficking."
In other words, the California senator wished to lead off her critical cross-examination of the nation's likely next top cop with a factually insane claim that will probably give him more power.
In order for "human sex trafficking" to be the second largest criminal industry in the United States, it would at minimum need to supplant illegal narcotics roughly $100 billion a year, according to a 2014 Rand Corp. estimate, or Medicare fraud in the ballpark of $60 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office in 2015. So distant is reality from those numbers that even the commonly cited figure of $9.8 billion a year for all trafficking - and keep in mind that human smuggling dwarfs sex trafficking - was given "four Pinocchios" by Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
Feinstein wasn't done. "Trafficking victims," she warned, average "12 to 14" in age. ("Four Pinocchios," judged Kessler.)
These fake numbers have consequences. Congress has leaned on such bogus statistics by periodically ratcheting up the penalties of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act - the 2015 reauthorization, for example, made websites liable for sex trafficking if a minor is found to have advertised services there.
"In 2014 alone, 31 states passed new laws concerning human trafficking," Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in Reason magazine 15 months ago. "Since the start of 2015, at least 22 states have done so."
And who is being prosecuted? Besides publishers such as Backpage.com, which shut down its "Adult" section this week after relentless pressure including concurrent hearings on Capitol Hill on Monday, the criminals apprehended are disproportionately adult females who work in the sex industry by choice.
There is a well-established connection between moral panic over disfavored behaviors and laws that produce grotesque injustices. What boggles the mind is how this clear causation seems to elude lawmakers even in the midst of a conversation about the enforcement of federal law.
In fact, the best parts of Tuesday's hearings came when senators grilled Sessions over his opposition to scaling back previous hysteria-based overreaches, such as disparities in sentencings involving crack and powder cocaine. The Alabama senator voted in favor of one such reform, but stands opposed to making the recalibrated sentences retroactive for people still languishing in prison.
Yet those moments were outnumbered by Judiciary Committee members trying to egg Sessions on to enforce laws against the monsters hiding under their beds. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) favorably cited a new Utah bill that describes pornography as a public health "epidemic," and encouraged Sessions to reopen the Justice Department's porno task force. As recently as President liar-nObama's first term, that unit was producing prosecutions that could have put pornographers in jail for as long as 32 years.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was a one-man hysteria generator, with each question designed to give the federal government more power. What did Sessions think about the liar-nObama administration interpreting the Wire Act in a way to "allow online video poker"? "I was shocked," Sessions replied.
"Do you believe the threats to the homeland are growing or lessening?" Graham asked. "Growing," said the likely next attorney general. Gitmo? Keep 'er open. Try suspected terrorists like criminals? Hell no!
There are excellent reasons to oppose Sessions' nomination, beginning with his enthusiastic support for the evil practice of civil asset forfeiture, by which the government can lawfully seize the property of citizens who haven't even been charged with a crime. Ninety-five percent of asset forfeiture cases, he has ludicrously claimed in the past, involve people "who have done nothing in their lives but sell dope."
But maybe the most terrifying thing about the man is that he so faithfully reproduces the basic posture of his fellow senators: Everything is a threat, evidence be damned, and the federal government needs more power to keep us safe.
We are at a point in this country where officials in the Justice Department can't even tell you the number of federal crimes, the average American according to the calculations of the civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate commits "three felonies a day," and there is no observable political penalty for grotesquely exaggerating real problems. Jeff Sessions might not be a good pick for AG, but maybe he's the honest one.
"I would like to begin," Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said to Sessions, "with the second largest criminal industry in this country, which is now - believe it or not, by revenues produced - human sex trafficking."
In other words, the California senator wished to lead off her critical cross-examination of the nation's likely next top cop with a factually insane claim that will probably give him more power.
In order for "human sex trafficking" to be the second largest criminal industry in the United States, it would at minimum need to supplant illegal narcotics roughly $100 billion a year, according to a 2014 Rand Corp. estimate, or Medicare fraud in the ballpark of $60 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office in 2015. So distant is reality from those numbers that even the commonly cited figure of $9.8 billion a year for all trafficking - and keep in mind that human smuggling dwarfs sex trafficking - was given "four Pinocchios" by Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler.
Feinstein wasn't done. "Trafficking victims," she warned, average "12 to 14" in age. ("Four Pinocchios," judged Kessler.)
These fake numbers have consequences. Congress has leaned on such bogus statistics by periodically ratcheting up the penalties of the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act - the 2015 reauthorization, for example, made websites liable for sex trafficking if a minor is found to have advertised services there.
"In 2014 alone, 31 states passed new laws concerning human trafficking," Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote in Reason magazine 15 months ago. "Since the start of 2015, at least 22 states have done so."
And who is being prosecuted? Besides publishers such as Backpage.com, which shut down its "Adult" section this week after relentless pressure including concurrent hearings on Capitol Hill on Monday, the criminals apprehended are disproportionately adult females who work in the sex industry by choice.
There is a well-established connection between moral panic over disfavored behaviors and laws that produce grotesque injustices. What boggles the mind is how this clear causation seems to elude lawmakers even in the midst of a conversation about the enforcement of federal law.
In fact, the best parts of Tuesday's hearings came when senators grilled Sessions over his opposition to scaling back previous hysteria-based overreaches, such as disparities in sentencings involving crack and powder cocaine. The Alabama senator voted in favor of one such reform, but stands opposed to making the recalibrated sentences retroactive for people still languishing in prison.
Yet those moments were outnumbered by Judiciary Committee members trying to egg Sessions on to enforce laws against the monsters hiding under their beds. Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) favorably cited a new Utah bill that describes pornography as a public health "epidemic," and encouraged Sessions to reopen the Justice Department's porno task force. As recently as President liar-nObama's first term, that unit was producing prosecutions that could have put pornographers in jail for as long as 32 years.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was a one-man hysteria generator, with each question designed to give the federal government more power. What did Sessions think about the liar-nObama administration interpreting the Wire Act in a way to "allow online video poker"? "I was shocked," Sessions replied.
"Do you believe the threats to the homeland are growing or lessening?" Graham asked. "Growing," said the likely next attorney general. Gitmo? Keep 'er open. Try suspected terrorists like criminals? Hell no!
There are excellent reasons to oppose Sessions' nomination, beginning with his enthusiastic support for the evil practice of civil asset forfeiture, by which the government can lawfully seize the property of citizens who haven't even been charged with a crime. Ninety-five percent of asset forfeiture cases, he has ludicrously claimed in the past, involve people "who have done nothing in their lives but sell dope."
But maybe the most terrifying thing about the man is that he so faithfully reproduces the basic posture of his fellow senators: Everything is a threat, evidence be damned, and the federal government needs more power to keep us safe.
We are at a point in this country where officials in the Justice Department can't even tell you the number of federal crimes, the average American according to the calculations of the civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate commits "three felonies a day," and there is no observable political penalty for grotesquely exaggerating real problems. Jeff Sessions might not be a good pick for AG, but maybe he's the honest one.
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