~ Featuring ~
Democrats' Twilight Zone
Cal Thomas.
Californians Fume Over Massive Power
Outages and Sky-High Gas Prices
by Leslie Eastman
{ legalinsurrection.com } ~ This week, I reviewed the climate alarmist protest organized by “Extinction Rebellion,” whose members want us to drastically reduce our use of electricity and other resources... These green justice warriors should head over to California where we are living the dream! In an effort to avoid another devastating spate of autumn wildfires such as last year’s Paradise fire, approximately 800,000 Pacific Gas and Electric customers are preparing for the company to intentionally cut their power. This is likely the largest deliberate power shut-off in state history. A Red Flag Warning is being issued over the next few days with strong winds expected to make the risk of wildfire extremely high. The outages are expected to start as early as Wednesday at midnight and could last until mid-day on Thursday. They may affect millions of people living in 34 counties. While 34 northern and central California counties are included on the list, PG&E said it won’t be every customer within those county lines.The action created a backlash with many Californians, especially in light of the short notice PG&E gave before the shut-off occurred. …Brady Miller, a resident of Red Bluff, about two hours north of Sacramento, said he barely had cell service and no way to charge his phone, lamenting he had only flashlights and canned goods to get through the power outage. “It sucks,” he said. “Twenty-four-hour notice gave panic to our community.” Angie Sheets of El Dorado Hills noticed that generators were flying off the shelves at Costco as she shopped for groceries earlier in the week. Considering the nearly $1,000 worth of food she planned to purchase and the imminent power outage, Sheets said, she called her husband to talk about buying one for their home. “By the time I had done that, the last big generator was gone off the shelves,” she said. Her husband, a law enforcement officer, found a generator at a Costco in Rancho Cordova and paid about $600 for it. On Tuesday night, they filled up their bathtubs with water, unsure whether the toilets would flush without electricity. Sheets went to Safeway to pick up more bottled water and said a line of cars snaked around the gas station parking lot. “In this particular area, they did say we could lose power for up to seven days,” Sheets said. “I think that’s what’s making people on edge, the fear of the unknown and wanting to be safe for your family.”...
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Democrats Drag Rick Perry Into
Impeachment Mess, Issue Subpoena
By ANDREW DESIDERIO, KYLE CHENEY and ANTHONY ADRAGNA
{ politico.com } ~ House Democrats issued a subpoena on Thursday to Energy Secretary Rick Perry as part of their impeachment inquiry... The subpoena demands a series of documents related to Perry's knowledge of President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump pushed his counterpart to investigate former Vice President loose lips liar-Joe Biden. Three House committees investigating the episode note that Perry reportedly encouraged Trump to make the phone call. They also want information about whether Perry sought to press the Ukrainian government to make changes to the advisory board of its state-owned oil and gas company, Naftogaz. In a statement, Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes said: “The Department of Energy is aware of the House Committees’ letter to Secretary Perry and it is currently under review by DOE's Office of General Counsel.” POLITICO previously reported that Perry asked the company to expand its board to include Americans, though he said he offered suggestions only at the request of the Ukrainian government. Zelensky denied Perry asked him to dismiss the head of the state-run gas company in comments to the Kyiv Post on Thursday. POLITICO has reported Perry intends to depart the administration within months, though he denied the report earlier this week. The subpoena demands records and communications related to the May inauguration of Zelensky, for which Perry led the U.S. delegation. It seeks records connected to a host of meetings abroad and at the White House that Perry attended along with senior Ukrainian officials. And it requests all records related to “proposed or actual transactions, investments, or projects relating to liquified natural gas (LNG) in Ukraine.”...
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Andrew McCabe Opens Up About Steele
Dossier, Origins Of Trump-Russia Probe
by CHUCK ROSS
{ dailycaller.com } ~ Andrew McCabe, the embattled former FBI deputy director, said at a recent event that former British spy Christopher Steele disclosed to FBI investigators that his infamous anti-Trump dossier should not be taken as “gospel,”... and that he could not vouch for the accuracy of some of the material in the infamous document. McCabe, who spoke Oct. 3 at an event hosted by journalist Carl Bernstein, was defending the FBI’s handling of the Steele dossier by insisting investigators were aware of the document’s flaws during the Trump probe. The FBI’s handling of the dossier is the subject of a Justice Department inspector general’s investigation that began in March 2018. McCabe, who was fired from the FBI on March 16, 2018, also described in the most detail to date how the FBI decided who to initially investigate as part of Crossfire Hurricane, the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. McCabe said the FBI opened its case in late July 2016 based on information about Trump adviser George Papadopoulos. “We open the case, and then we think, ‘OK, now who are we actually going to investigate?'” McCabe said at the event, which aired Tuesday on C-SPAN. “Who do we know who is associated with the campaign who has known, significant ties to Russian intelligence?” he asked rhetorically. “We quickly come up with four names that will not surprise you.”McCabe, who served as deputy director of the FBI during the investigation, defended the FBI’s decision to open the investigation, which initially focused on Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Carter Page. He also sought to defend Steele and his salacious dossier, which the FBI used to obtain surveillance warrants on Page. “It is raw source reporting,” McCabe said, “and Steele presented it as such.” “We knew that Steele was working a number of different sources, some of which has sub-sources, and sub-sub-sources, and he would represent that in the reporting, as any good source should. It didn’t come with his imprimatur of, ‘this is all gospel.’ It was like, ‘this is what I’m hearing,'” said McCabe, who is under Justice Department investigation...
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Despite Sanctions, Iran Exports Hundreds
of Millions Worth of Polyethylene to China
by Saeed Ghasseminejad
{ fdd.org } ~ Abdolnasser Hemmati, the head of the Central Bank of Iran (CBI), announced last week that from March to September 2019 the CBI managed to provide $19 billion to pay for Iran’s imports... of which $11 billion came from the proceeds of its non-oil exports. According to Iran’s customs organization, Tehran exported $21 billion of non-oil goods in the aforementioned period, 10 percent less than in the same period the previous year. Assuming their accuracy, these figures indicate that Washington’s success in reducing Iran’s oil exports has not extended to other valuable export commodities, including the key petrochemical polyethylene. Petrochemical products are among Iran’s top non-oil exports even though the industry has labored under sectoral sanctions since November 2018. Previous FDD analysis showed that in its first four months under sanctions, Tehran’s average monthly export of petrochemicals dropped by 18 percent in comparison to its level during the seven months before sanctions. According to Iranian customs data, in the last full year of the Persian calendar March 2018 – March 2019, $14.1 billion of Iran’s non-oil exports, or 32 percent of the total, came from the petrochemical sector. Within that sector, $3.4 billion, or 24 percent, came from polyethylene, the most common plastic in the world, whose primary use is in packaging. In the March 2018-March 2019 reporting period, Iran exported $2.7 billion of polyethylene, or 80 percent of the total, to China. Beijing is the largest importer of polyethylene in the world. According to the China Customs Organization, in 2017, China imported $14.2 billion worth of polyethylene. The top seven exporters of polyethylene to China that year were Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, the United States, and Qatar. These seven supplied 80 percent of China’s polyethylene imports, with Iran accounting for 16 percent of the total, or $2.24 billion. The latest Chinese data shows that, in the first seven months of 2019, China imported $1.43 billion of polyethylene from Iran, an amount comparable to its imports during the corresponding period of 2018 and higher than those in the corresponding period of 2017. In terms of weight, China’s imports of polyethylene from Iran have increased significantly, rising from 1.2 million tons in the first seven months of 2018 to 1.4 million tons in the same period of 2019...
https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2019/10/10/despite-sanctions-iran-exports-hundreds-of-millions-worth-of-polyethylene-to-china/ .
Report on Status Iran Nuclear Program
by news.usni.org ~ Iran’s nuclear program began during the 1950s. The United States has expressed concern since the mid-1970s that Tehran might develop nuclear weapons... Iran’s construction of gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facilities is currently the main source of proliferation concern. Gas centrifuges can produce both low-enriched uranium (LEU), which can be used in nuclear power reactors, and weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is one of the two types of fissile material used in nuclear weapons. The United States has assessed that Tehran possesses the technological and industrial capacity to produce nuclear weapons. But Iran has not yet mastered all of the necessary technologies for building such weapons. Whether Iran has a viable design for a nuclear weapon is unclear. A National Intelligence Estimate made public in 2007 assessed that Tehran “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003. The estimate, however, also assessed that Tehran is “keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons” and that any decision to end a nuclear weapons program is “inherently reversible.” U.S. intelligence officials have reaffirmed this judgment on several occasions. Obtaining fissile material is widely regarded as the most difficult task in building nuclear weapons. As of January 2014, Iran had produced an amount of LEU containing up to 5% uranium-235, which, if further enriched, could theoretically have produced enough HEU for as many as eight nuclear weapons. Iran had also produced LEU containing nearly 20% uranium-235; the total amount of this LEU, if it had been in the form of uranium hexafluoride and further enriched, would have been sufficient for a nuclear weapon.. After the Joint Plan of Action, which Tehran concluded with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States collectively known as the “P5+1”, went into effect in January 2014, Iran either converted much of its LEU containing nearly 20% uranium-235 for use as fuel in a research reactor located in Tehran, or prepared it for that purpose. Iran has diluted the rest of that stockpile so that it contained no more than 5% uranium-235. In addition, Tehran has implemented various restrictions on, and provided the IAEA with additional information about, its nuclear program pursuant to the July 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Tehran concluded with the P5+1. Although Iran claims that its nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes, the program has generated considerable concern that Tehran is pursuing a nuclear weapons program. The U.N. Security Council responded to Iran’s refusal to suspend work on its uranium enrichment program by adopting several resolutions that imposed sanctions on Tehran. Despite evidence that sanctions and other forms of pressure have slowed the program, Iran continued to enrich uranium, install additional centrifuges, and conduct research on new types of centrifuges. Tehran has also worked on a heavy-water reactor, which was a proliferation concern because its spent fuel would have contained plutonium—the other type of fissile material used in nuclear weapons. However, plutonium must be separated from spent fuel—a procedure called “reprocessing.” Iran has said that it will not engage in reprocessing...
https://news.usni.org/2019/10/10/report-on-status-iran-nuclear-program?utm_source=USNI+News&utm_campaign=6429856c90-USNI_NEWS_DAILY&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0dd4a1450b-6429856c90-231491269&mc_cid=6429856c90&mc_eid=3999f18767 .
France's Homegrown Terrorism
by Giulio Meotti
{ gatestoneinstitute.org } ~ This time, the terrorist did not use firearms; his victims were not unarmed children, cartoonists or Jews but policemen... The site of the October 3 attack was also striking: "The interior of the Paris police headquarters is supposed to be a stronghold; it is the symbol of public order in France and of the anti-jihadist struggle that has been shaken," the French scholar Gilles Kepel told Le Figaro. "We have entered a... terrorism made in France... with a mixture of Friday preaching by extremist imams, social networks and the instrumentalization of fragile individuals. It is about creating a new panic in society by targeting iconic ... places... The attack is a major turning point in Islamist terrorism." The assailant, Mickaël Harpon, born in the French Caribbean island of Martinique, was shot and killed after stabbing four people to death with a ceramic kitchen knife during the lunchtime assault at the Paris police headquarters. Harpon, a civilian IT specialist in the intelligence division holding high-level security clearance, had worked for the police for 16 years. First he killed three men in the intelligence division, then he stabbed two female police employees in a stairwell one died from her wounds before he finally was shot and killed in the building's courtyard. Harpon was a longtime convert to Islam and a conscientious attendee of his local mosque, where he attended morning and evening prayers. A radical imam who was nearly expelled from France officiated there. According to the Wall Street Journal: "Authorities discovered several USB flash drives at his desk, one containing the personal information of agents and violent Islamist propaganda, authorities said. "A key question is whether Harpon downloaded that data onto the flash drive for his job... or to send it to his extremist contacts that could use it to target the police."...
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14980/france-homegrown-terrorism .
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Democrats' Twilight Zone
Cal Thomas
A 1961 “Twilight Zone” episode starred Peter Falk as a Central American revolutionary whose paranoia eventually leads to his destruction. The dictator he has deposed tells him about a mirror given to him by “an old woman,” a mirror that will show him who’s plotting to assassinate him. The revolutionary soon sees enemies everywhere and begins to unravel, picking off his comrades one by one, believing they are out to get him.
Fantasy, sure. But President Trump and Vice President Pence could use such a mirror to reveal those partisan forces attempting to carry out political assassination on the entire Trump administration.
The latest assault comes from another anonymous “whistleblower,” who told The Washington Post a Treasury Department official appointed by Trump sought to interfere with an audit of the tax returns of the president “or” vice president. Doesn’t that sound vague? On Sunday, the attorney for the first whistleblower told ABC News he is representing a second whistleblower who has “firsthand” knowledge of the president’s call to the president of Ukraine.
The first anonymous whistleblower has tentatively agreed to meet with congressional lawmakers, according to CNN, on the condition that his or her legal counsel is cleared to accompany the whistleblower to the meeting. No word yet on the second whistleblower’s conditions.
This is all political theater and bad theater at that. Democrats are going through the motions of impeachment, hoping to thwart the president’s re-election. They know the Senate is unlikely to convict him should impeachment articles be approved. It’s all about pleasing their base and fundraising, which both sides are doing. This is one of many reasons Congress’ approval ratings remain low.
Ruslan Ryaboshapka, Ukraine’s new general prosecutor, told Reuters that he was not aware of any evidence of wrongdoing by the son of former U.S. Vice President loose lips liar-Joe Biden, but would be reviewing criminal cases opened by his predecessor, including some that could relate to the Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, a natural gas company that paid Hunter Biden.
If John Durham, the Connecticut prosecutor tapped by Attorney General William Barr to look into the origin of the phony Russian collusion probe, comes up with facts that lead to the indictment of anti-Trump Democrats, will that make any difference to those smearing the president? It might in public opinion, which Democrats are trying to shape against the president, but probably not to the real conspirators and colluders, except perhaps some lower-level types. The Establishment always protects its own. Could it be possible that Democrats are rapidly pursuing the impeachment inquiry to soften any blows that might come from Durham’s report?
That the president had to suggest Ukrainian and even Chinese leaders look into Hunter Biden’s possible corrupt activity is its own indictment of the anti-Trump media, scumbag/liar-nObama administration holdovers and career prosecutors.
The conservative organization Judicial Watch has been relentless in its pursuit of collusion by anti-Trump actors. It has released 145 pages of communications between former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and others which it says include a one-line email to special counsel Robert Mueller. It said, “The boss and his staff do not know about our discussions.” The communication included “off the record” emails with major media outlets (collusion?) around the time of Mueller’s appointment and “show that Rosenstein did not dispassionately go along with the fraudulent probe in an attempt to get at the truth, but was an active participant in the deep state coup, secretly plotting with other FBI and DOJ officials against the president of the United States.”
Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said, “the astonishing emails further confirm the dishonest corruption behind Rosenstein’s appointment of Robert Mueller. The emails also show a shockingly cozy relationship between Mr. Rosenstein and anti-Trump media reporters.”
If true, why is that shocking, given the nonstop media assault on Donald Trump even before he took office? Their goal has been to impeach, or damage him sufficiently so a Democrat will win the White House next November. Consider the one-sided “coverage” in major newspapers, the broadcast and at least two cable networks.
More facts will emerge that undermine the Democrats’ narrative, but it won’t matter to anti-Trumpers. They live in the Twilight Zone.
~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/65955?mailing_id=4575&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4575&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body
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