Saturday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

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TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Democrats Revive FDR's Court-Packing Agenda
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Arnold Ahlert  
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U.S., Taliban Agree to Landmark Ceasefire
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By Adam Kredo
{ freebeacon.com } ~ The United States and the Taliban have reached a landmark agreement that will significantly reduce violence in Afghanistan and pave the way for the two sides to negotiate a peace deal... that could bring the 18-year war in the country to a final end, the State Department announced on Friday. "The United States and the Taliban have been engaged in extensive talks to facilitate a political settlement to end the war in Afghanistan, reduce United States and Allied Forces presence, and ensure that no terrorist group ever uses Afghan soil to threaten the United States or our allies," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said early Friday in a statement. The agreement, being referred to officially as a "reduction in violence" accord, will pave the way for the Trump administration and the Taliban to engage in peace talks that could see most American forces finally exit the country. The first prong of this agreement will go into effect later tonight, U.S. officials said. "In recent weeks, in consultation with the Government of National Unity, U.S. negotiators in Doha have come to an understanding with the Taliban on a significant and nationwide reduction in violence across Afghanistan," Pompeo said. "Upon a successful implementation of this understanding, signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement is expected to move forward. We are preparing for the signing to take place on February 29," according to the secretary of state. "Intra-Afghan negotiations will start soon thereafter, and will build on this fundamental step to deliver a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire and the future political roadmap for Afghanistan. The only way to achieve a sustainable peace in Afghanistan is for Afghans to come together and agree on the way forward." "Challenges remain, but the progress made in Doha provides hope and represents a real opportunity," Pompeo said. "The United States calls on all Afghans to seize this moment." While peace talks planned with the Taliban broke down last year, the Trump administration has been working behind the scenes for months to hash out the reduction in violence agreement.  Rumors that this pact was close to a lock first began to circulate last week. If it sticks, it could enable Trump to make good on his promise to end the war in Afghanistan and bring American troops home.
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NEC Director Larry Kudlow Discusses, 
Coronavirus, China and U.S. Economy
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by sundance
{ theconservativetreehouse.com } ~ National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow appears on CNBC for an extensive interview on upstream economic issues. With China’s economy at a standstill; and with the troubles of the coronavirus spreading outward... what does that mean for us? There’s some good questions in this interview. Domestically, as we noted yesterday, the U.S. economy is strong and growing. However, the Wall Street multinationals are very exposed to the China issues. On the bright side the overall China issues are helping to push more corporate decisions toward domestic investment and away from Beijing. Given these lessons being learned, I sure wish we didn’t have China involved in making our medicines and medical products. The administration needs to look at this more. Director Kudlow also appeared on Fox Business with Lou Dobbs.  https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/21/nec-director-larry-kudlow-discusses-coronavirus-china-and-u-s-economy/  
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Anti-Jewish Hatred Is Alive and Well
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by Guy Millière
{ gatestoneinstitute.org } ~ The ceremony held in Jerusalem on January 23 for the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp created the opportunity to remind the world about the Holocaust... The commemoration of the only attempt totally to exterminate an entire people by industrial means, which was among the worst crimes in history, offered the international leaders who attended the opportunity to reaffirm the need to fight anti-Jewish hatred at a time when, throughout the world, it is rapidly gaining ground. "The industrial mass murder of six million Jews, the worst crime in the history of humanity, was committed by my countrymen", German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier humbly said. One nevertheless feels the need to ask whether those international leaders who attended are actually ready to align their actions with their words. Almost all the speeches there defined anti-Semitism in a vague way, and when the words became more specific, they pointed only at National Socialism Nazism and the "far right". People nostalgic for Nationalist Socialism still exist, as well as far-right political movements, of course; so the world, it seems, does need to remain vigilant. Today, however, in the West, political parties that openly supporting National Socialism, or right-wing movements that promote antisemitic ideas, do not, bluntly, exist. Since the end of World War II, there have been no anti-Semitic murders committed in Europe by people from the "right." In the US, those who perpetrated the antisemitic attacks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on October 27, 2017 and April 30, 2019 in Poway, California, could be defined as "white supremacists", but they did not belong to right-wing political movements. Both men acted alone and appear to have mixed anti-Semitic ideas with weird assertions...  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15601/anti-jewish-hatred 
CIA, DOJ Refuse To Acknowledge Whether 
Eric Ciaramella Records Exist
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By Tristan Justice
{ thefederalist.com } ~ The Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) each refused to either confirm or deny the existence of records related to scumbag/liar-nObama White House Ukrainian intelligence holdover Eric Ciaramella... who is also charged with being the whistleblower at the heart of the Democrats’ recent impeachment proceedings kicked off last fall. Judicial Watch received two letters from the top government agencies that were sent in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits filed in December. Judicial Watch reports that both the CIA and DOJ failed to provide communications between Ciaramella and former deep-state FBI operatives Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, or former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. The group also requested communications records between Ciaramella and the Special Counsel’s Office. “The CIA can neither confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to the requests,” the CIA wrote in a letter to Judicial Watch. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is itself exempt from FOIA under exemption (b )(3) and Section 6 of the CIA Act of I 949, 50 U.S.C. § 3507, and, to the extent your request could relate to CIA intelligence sources and methods information, the fact of the existence or nonexistence of such records is exempt from FOIA under exemption (b)( I) and exemption (b)(3) in conjunction with Section 102A(i)(l) of the National Security Act of 1947, 50 U.S.C § 3024(i)( I). The Justice Department also stonewalled the requests.“I have decided to refuse to confirm or deny the existence of responsive records,” wrote DOJ attorney Timothy Ziese to the watchdog group. In October, Real Clear Investigations identified Ciaramella as the whistleblower whose anonymous complaint charging Trump of tying foreign aid to politically motivated investigations sparked the Democratic impeachment inquiry launched in the House. The Federalist has not independently verified Real Clear Investigations’ reporting. Since the outlet’s report, Democrats and media elites have worked to conceal the whistleblower’s identity while denying Ciaramella as the culprit. In the final days of the Senate impeachment trial, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul twice attempted to ask a question to the House impeachment managers that would have offered insight into the alleged whistleblower that was suppressed each time by Chief Justice John Roberts presiding over the proceedings. On the day before the final acquittal vote, Paul read the question out loud on the Senate floor anyway mentioning Ciaramella’s name.   https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/21/cia-doj-refuse-to-acknowledge-whether-eric-ciaramella-records-exist/?utm_source=The+Federalist+List&utm_campaign=9e2837530c-RSS_The_Federalist_Daily_Updates_w_Transom&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_cfcb868ceb-9e2837530c-83771801 
Iran, Hezbollah stir chaos in Syria's southwest
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By JONATHAN SPYER
{ jpost.com } ~ The global spotlight has currently returned to Syria because of the Assad regime’s current bloody offensive in Idlib, Aleppo and Latakia provinces... The regime is trying to reduce the last enclave held by the Sunni Arab rebels in the country’s northwest. The assault has precipitated one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the bloody, nine-year war. Eight hundred thousand people have left their homes to flee the advance of regime forces and the relentless, indiscriminate bombing of Assad’s Russian allies.  Far to the south of Idlib, however, and largely ignored by the global media, events are under way that may offer a clue to the future direction of Syria. These events are of direct interest to Israel. The regime is currently seeking to consolidate its presence in Deraa and Quneitra provinces in Syria’s southwest. Assad’s army completed its “conquest” of these areas in the summer of 2018. Observation of the current situation on the ground in these areas suggests, however, that the situation remains far from a return to the repressive and stifling order of the pre-revolt days. Rather, the situation is characterized on the one hand by extensive Iranian and Hezbollah activity within the empty shell of the government’s structures, and on the other hand by an ongoing, armed resistance to that government. The precise organization, origins and nature of this resistance remain somewhat mysterious. But the tempo of attacks on regime positions and facilities is relentless, and increasing. Deraa is where the Syrian rebellion broke out, in distant early 2011. Nine years on, it is not yet silenced. Rather, the area and its environs increasingly constitute Syria’s wild southwest. REGARDING IRANIAN and  Hezbollah activity, the extensive human infrastructure maintained by Iran and its proxy in southwest Syria has been well documented...
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Life Under ISIS
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By Marek Jan Chodakiewicz
{ americanthinker.com } ~ James Verini’s They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate has gifted us with gruelingly realistic war vignettes of the Islamic State from Iraq’s second most populous city... Mosul is also one of the oldest human settlements: the Western Fortress of the Akkadians of 4,300 years ago. On a short assignment from National Geographic, Verini, an American, remained behind in the city for a year after it was overrun. His journalism is omnivorous, and superbly faithful to real-time developments, though written within a peculiar framework dictated by his liberal ideology.  At his best, Verini is superbly authentic. One can smell death in his dispatches: "On the sidewalk and pavement were bits of the suicide-driver’s skin and organs and bones, charred and coated in oil. A good fifty feet from explosion lay part of his spinal column." He walks us through the realm of fear and boredom that is the battlefield, both in regular and irregular warfare. Never, one should add, has there been a population, armed and unarmed, more confused than in Iraq. Or more paranoid. By Verini’s telling, they all love America and want to emigrate to the United States, and they all hate America and blame the US for the war. All this they justify and explicate in a dizzying kaleidoscope of conspiracy theories featuring the ubiquitous “Jews” and the omnipotent “Americans.” The author embedded himself with the native forces, usually Iraqi crack anti-terrorist units of the CTS, but also with the Kurdish militia, the Peshmerga. With a keen observer’s eye, he recounts for us the military’s friendly banter, including, for example, casually amiable exchanges about sleeping with each other’s sisters. All the Iraqis were somewhat casual about their battle dress but “they paid as much attention to their hair as any Prussian cavalry officer. They may not have had training on their weapons, they may have been committing human rights abuses, but their heads were marvels of trimming and mousse.” Yet, as much as he enjoys his military pals, both intimate and remote, including General David Petreaus, Verini prefers to focus on the civilian bystanders, the true victims of the conflict. Or at least he believes them, initially at least, to be so. Most Mosulis he befriends and revisits periodically, in their urban domiciles, on the road, and in refugee camps, tend to be Sunni.  Most of them are also former, passive or active, Islamic Sate supporters. Of course some of them lie, disambiguate, deceive, and other otherwise practice their taqiyya on the gullible, bleeding-heart liberal journalist who, nonetheless, over time develops enough critical sense to be able to spot various shades of guilt by association. He is also capable of discerning complex reasons behind the ambiguous attitude toward ISIS among the caliphate’s subjects. They verge from political and religious choices, including primarily the Shia-led government’s persecution of the Sunni who formerly backed Saadam Hussain, to personal reasons...  https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/02/life_under_isis_.html 
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Democrats Revive FDR's Court-Packing Agenda
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Arnold Ahlert:  On February 5, 1937, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced his intention to add six additional justices to a Supreme Court that had thwarted many of his New Deal initiatives. In reasoning that should resonate with millions of Americans, SCOTUS believed those initiatives delegated an unconstitutional amount of authority to the executive branch and the federal government. Nonetheless, for today’s equally rapacious Democrats and their media allies, everything old is new again: Several Democrat presidential candidates have announced their intention to pack the Court, despite the reality that, as The Washington Post put it, the idea “fell into lengthy disrepute after 1937.”

Sen. Elizabeth dinky/liar-Warren’s reason for doing so was unintentionally hilarious. “It’s not just about expansion, it’s about depoliticizing the Supreme Court,” she stated.

Others were less amusing. “It’s no more a departure from norms than what the Republicans did to get the judiciary to the place it is today,” asserted socialist-Pete Buttigieg. “Bold, ambitious ideas need a hearing right now.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar was more pragmatic, saying, “You always want to look at all ideas, but I think right now the most reasonable thing is to win the elections and to try to stop the bad judges.”

As the Democrats’ orchestrated debacle at the Brett Kavanaugh hearings indicated quite clearly, “bad judges” are seemingly those appointed to the Court by President Donald Trump. Thus, the evisceration of a decent man’s reputation, courtesy of rank political maneuvering and an unprecedented level of media smearing, was perfectly acceptable.

By contrast, Sen. commie-Bernie Sanders would attempt to achieve the same result by a different means. “I do not believe in packing the court,” he said. “We’ve got a terrible 5-4 majority conservative Court right now. But I do believe constitutionally we have the power to rotate judges to other courts and that brings in new blood into the Supreme Court and a majority I hope that will understand that a woman has a right to control her own body and that corporations cannot run the United States of America.”

A “terrible 5-4 majority” is in the eye of the beholder. As George Washington University associate professor Brandon L. Bartels inconveniently pointed out in 2018, swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement gave Trump and a GOP Senate “the chance to cement a reliable conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the first time since the New Deal began.”

The New Deal was initiated in 1933. Thus, what Democrats really want is what they had for more than three-quarters of a century, as in a Court willing to implement agendas rejected by state legislatures and/or voters themselves. Toward that end they have no problem whatsoever when a majority of justices “discover” previously undiscovered constitutional rights that align with leftist ideology.

In short, no one is more pleased with a “politicized” Supreme Court than the same Democrats who would pack it when that agenda may no longer be realized.

Moreover, their appetite for judicial supremacy is hardly satiated by SCOTUS. In a speech at the American Law Institute on May 21, 2019, Attorney General William Barr noted as much. “Since President Trump took office, federal district courts have issued 37 nationwide injunctions against the executive branch,” he stated. “That’s more than one a month. By comparison, during President [Barack] scumbag/liar-nObama’s first two years, district courts issued two nationwide injunctions against the executive branch, both of which were vacated by the Ninth Circuit. And according to the [Justice] Department’s best estimates, courts issued only 27 nationwide injunctions­ in all of the 20th century.”

There’s a method to the madness of judicial activism favored by the American Left. As columnist David Horowitz has pointed out, SCOTUS only heard 60 cases in 2018. “Meanwhile,” he notes, “the lower courts heard tens of thousands of cases, and their dockets are full of every political issue under the sun.”

Why is that important? Because the sheer volume of cases advantages the activism.

Despite that advantage, it’s still not enough for a party seeking unassailable power. “More and more Democrats are becoming convinced that we cannot resign ourselves to the third branch of government being captive to partisan Republican forces for the next 30 years,” stated  Brian Fallon, a former scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton advisor who now heads the group Demand Justice.

On the other hand, being captive to partisan Democrat forces is fine, even if it requires stacking the court. “To many leftists and left-liberals, such drastic action is needed if any progressive legislation in the future is to survive,” Vox columnist Dylan Matthews wrote in 2018. “The concerns in question have less to do with hot-button social issues like abortion and LGBT rights and more to do with the constitutionality of economic regulation and redistributive programs.”

Aaron Belkin, San Francisco State University associate professor and executive director of Pack the Courts,  echoes that sentiment. “The strategy is to make the 2020 [Democrat] candidates understand that if they don’t come up with an agenda to deal with the courts, everything they are talking about is going to be dead on arrival,” he insists.

Again, note that if “progressive legislation” aligned itself with a majority of Congress or voters themselves, SCOTUS rulings would be irrelevant. That it not only isn’t but also requires court packing to pass a legislative agenda that would otherwise “be dead on arrival” speaks volumes.

Fortunately, Democrats would have to gain complete control of Congress and the presidency to make it happen. The Constitution grants Congress the power to determine the number of justices, and it passed the Judiciary Act of 1869, setting the number at nine.

Democrats assert that packing is justified due to Republicans refusing to hold a vote on Judge Merrick Garland in 2016. Republicans countered that it was not proper to hold a vote during an election year, a position supported by loose lips liar-Joe Biden in 1992, when he insisted a “lame duck” president should not be in a position to nominate a justice. (It should be noted that Garland would have changed the ideological composition of the Court, and Republicans wanted voters to weigh in.) Democrats’ fury intensified when Donald Trump beat “sure thing” scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton and put Neil Gorsuch on the Court.

Democrats have convenient memories. Prior to 2013, nominees for federal courts and SCOTUS effectively needed 60 votes, meaning a filibuster could thwart a nomination indefinitely. Former Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry dinky-Reid was incensed by such GOP-led filibusters holding up his judicial picks, so he invoked what is known as the nuclear option, lowering the threshold to a 51-vote majority for all judges except those appointed to SCOTUS. Following Trump’s victory, Republican and current Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell extended the nuclear option to SCOTUS justices, paving the way for the appointment of Gorsuch by a 54-45 margin.

Tit for tat? Absolutely. But Democrats have no one to blame but themselves, mostly for assuming Republicans would never behave like … Democrats.

Hence, court packing becomes the next “logical” step in a dangerous game of one-upmanship. Leftists’ real agenda? Like their desire to eliminate the Electoral College, abolish or reconfigure the Senate, and give voting rights to felons, 16-year-olds, and illegal aliens, court packing is about what it has been since FDR first attempted it: the acquisition and maintenance of power, by any means necessary.

Americans should remember that agenda next November.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68706?mailing_id=4876&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4876&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

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  • CIARAMELLA IS THE SO CALLED WHISTLEBLOWER.  SO FAR FROM LINDSEY GRAHAM ALL I HEAR IS TALK I WANT LESS TALK AND MORE SUBPOENAS.  CIARAMELLA HAS TO BE ONE OF THEM THEN BRENNAN, CLAPPER, LYNCH, OBAMA AND THE REST.  

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