Good morning! Here is your news briefing for Tuesday January 14, 2020.
THE DAILY SIGNAL
| Jan 14, 2020 |
| Good morning from Washington, where we hear much noise about the new push to ratify that old chestnut, the Equal Rights Amendment. Jarrett Stepman has four good reasons that’s not a great idea. Should a voter ID measure, passed with the support of over 2 million citizens, be cast aside by a judge? North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest thinks not. Plus: two meaty cases on the Supreme Court’s docket, and, on the podcast, what’s wrong on the streets of San Francisco. On this date in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaims that aliens from enemy nations Italy, Germany, and Japan must register with the Justice Department. |
| COMMENTARY4 Potential Consequences of Passing the Equal Rights AmendmentBy Jarrett Stepman A radical feminist constitutional amendment that could dramatically change the country may be on the verge of passing.MoreCOMMENTARYNorth Carolina Voter ID Ruling Puts Security of Democracy at StakeBy Dan Forest In a 60-page ruling, Obama appointee Loretta Biggs struck down our voter ID law, calling it “discriminatory” and comparing it to the dark American legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.MoreNEWSHomeland Security Officials Tout 100 Miles of New Border WallBy Jason Hopkins Illegal crossings have plummeted across the southern border in recent months.MoreANALYSISPodcast: What It’s Like on the Streets of San FranciscoBy Daniel Davis San Francisco has been called the Paris of the West, but lately, it’s become a nightmare. Rows of tents now line the sidewalks, and the air smells foul.MoreCOMMENTARYSupreme Court to Hear ‘Bridgegate’ and School Choice CasesBy Elizabeth Slattery During the court’s January sitting, the justices will hear arguments in eight cases, including ones dealing with school choice and the “Bridgegate” scandal.More | ||
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THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON
THE DISPATCH
The Morning Dispatch: A Sudden Warren/Sanders SplitPlus, Iran cracks down on domestic protesters yet again.The Dispatch StaffJan 14Happy Tuesday! Unless, of course, you are Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Cameron Diaz, Eminem, Octavia Spencer, or Shaquille O’Neal. A new study from Dartmouth economist David Blanchflower found that happiness follows a U-shaped curve over one’s lifetime, with human misery peaking at age 47. Hang in there, Shaq, it’s all uphill from here!Quick Hits: What You Need to KnowRussian military hackers have been attempting to hack into the computer networks at Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company where Hunter Biden served as a board member. The New York Times cites security experts who believe the Russians may have been looking for information on the Bidens. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker ended his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination after languishing in the polls for months, telling supporters that “we may have challenges right now in our nation, but together, we will rise.”Attorney General William Barr said on Monday that the Pensacola naval base shooting last month that killed three and injured eight was “an act of terrorism.”House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he is introducing a resolution in support of Iranian protesters. “The world is watching, and the people of Iran need to know that they are not alone in this pivotal moment.”Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has declined to testify before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs today about recent developments in Iran.Lev Parnas, one of the Rudy Giuliani associates charged with illegally funneling campaign cash and falsifying records last year, has turned over thousands of pages of documents to House impeachment investigators.The Academy released a list of this year’s Oscar nominees. The Joker received 11 nominations, followed closely by Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, 1917, and The Irishman with 10.Major League Baseball doled out its long-awaited punishments relating to the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal, suspending the team’s manager and general manager for a year, confiscating four top draft picks, and fining the team $5 million. Astros owner Jim Crane immediately fired manager A.J. Hinch and GM Jeff Luhnow for their involvement in the saga.The LSU Tigers defeated the Clemson Tigers 42-25 in the college football national championship game, with star quarterback Joe Burrow throwing for 463 yards and five touchdowns, rushing for one more.The Progressive Cold War Turns HotThe last Democratic debate before the Iowa caucuses is tonight. Six candidates will be on the stage: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer. And while most of the debates have been relatively staid affairs, there has been real sniping in the last 72 hours between the two candidates vying for the progressive mantle: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. The feud broke out into the open when Politico reported on talking points being distributed within volunteer ranks of the Sanders’ campaign. One such script started much like any junior high mean-girl conversation, “I like Elizabeth Warren. In fact, she’s my second choice. But here’s my concern about her.”The script goes on to say that “people who support her are highly educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what.” Warren, currently in fourth place in Iowa, seized on the opportunity for some much needed media attention. On the record, she simply said that she was “disappointed to hear that Bernie is sending his volunteers out to trash me.” But on Monday, an anonymously sourced piece appeared in CNN with echoes of Hillary’s complaints from 2016. Warren and Sanders met privately in December 2018 to discuss their potential presidential bids. According to the story, Warren made her best case for taking on Donald Trump’s economy and “Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.” The Sanders campaign pushed back hard against the “ludicrous” story. “It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucuses and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened. What I did say that night was that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist, and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could.” Warren responded by saying “Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.” It’s got all the makings of a colossal showdown at tonight’s debate, which will be moderated by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, the Washington Post’s Abby Phillips, and Brianne Pfannenstiel from the Des Moines Register. And while viewership has been steadily declining since 18 million people tuned in last June, this rumble in the progressive jungle might just be enough to pique voters’ curiosity again. Regardless, we’ll be tuning in just before 9 p.m. ET to see that opening handshake between Warren and Sanders in all its awkward glory.Another Crackdown in Iran Iranians have taken to the streets in mass outrage over the regime’s blunderous strike on a passenger plane that resulted in the deaths of all 176 passengers, which Tehran spent days lying about before finally admitting fault late last week. It’s been two short months since the last round of protests were brutally suppressed by regime security forces who reportedly killed demonstrators by the hundreds.Those protests, as we wrote at the time, were sparked when the cash-strapped regime slashed its domestic fuel subsidies, causing gasoline prices to spike 50 percent overnight, and spread to more than 20 cities before they were beaten back. What both rounds of protests have in common, however, is a common anxiety: a growing sense among at least some Iranians that the regime is unconcerned with protecting and preserving their lives.“The regime tried to make a show of a strong response without provoking a strong U.S. reaction—it kind of threaded the needle there. And that led to problems when it shot down this plane, the Ukrainian plane, because it showed that while the regime was very careful not to kill Americans, it wasn’t so careful about killing Iranians,” says James Phillips, a Heritage Foundation expert on Middle East affairs. “More broadly, I think that many Iranians are protesting because they feel the regime puts a much higher priority on exporting the revolution… the regime focuses on protecting and advancing the narrow ideological interests of the revolution rather than Iran’s national interests.” The horrible mistake of downing a passenger plane set the stage for renewed protest in several other ways as well. That Iran’s military would panic and accidentally kill a bunch of Iranians supplied the anger. But it also was a strong reminder that the regime’s actual military prowess does not live up to its near-constant military braggadocio. Barriers to government protest fall when that government suddenly shows its weakness in unmistakable ways.Several other remarkable happenings set apart this latest round of protests, too. The New York Times reported that a number of prominent state television and radio hosts quit their jobs Monday, publicly apologizing to the Iranian people for lying on behalf of the government. “It was very hard for me to believe the murdering of my countrymen,” popular TV host Gelare Jabbari wrote on Instagram. “Forgive me for believing it too late. I apologize for lying to you on TV for 13 years.”This isn’t to say, of course, that the Iranian regime is teetering. As far as protesters are concerned, Tehran remains as powerful and terrifying as ever. There’s been no indication that their grasp has weakened on the security forces tasked with violently stamping out citizen disquiet. If this wasn’t clear from November’s suppression effort, local reports this week of riot police firing live rounds and tear gas to disperse demonstrators should remove all doubt. The likeliest short-term outcome of these protests, unfortunately, is the same as with the previous round: shock and awe until anti-regime elements are beaten back underground.But the protests do show a long-term hope for the Iranian people in one crucial way. Whereas anti-regime demonstrations used to be largely contained to Iran’s relatively well-to-do citizens in a few cities, Phillips said, protests over the last few years have been much more all-encompassing—spreading across Iran to areas that had been bastions of support for the regime, “areas that up until then had been considered recruiting grounds for the revolutionary guards.”Absent external intervention, the regime isn’t likely to lose its power until it loses its true-believer police. But if anti-regime fervor continues to spread, the long-term prospects of maintaining and restocking those forces looks dim.Worth Your TimeOne of your Morning Dispatchers is working hard to kick his sugary beverage habit, and has found solace in the flavorful bubbles of Spindrift (this is not an ad, The Dispatch does not run ads!). Founder Bill Creelman joined NPR’s “How I Built This” podcast to detail the seltzer company’s history, reveal where the name comes from, and explain the process behind keeping everything fresh.For the Washington Post, Abigail Jones details the human toll schizophrenia takes on families—and the mental health status quo’s inability to help. “‘It’s an emotional roller coaster all the time,’ she says. ‘You look at your children, and you never dream this is going to be their fate.’ She shakes her head. ‘Never.’”When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced last week that they would forgo the royal lifestyle to become financially independent, many couldn’t wrap their heads around why. Ellie Hall over at Buzzfeed might have found one reason: an analysis of U.K. news outlets and tabloids shows a long history of Meghan being held to a much harsher standard than her sister-in-law, Kate Middleton.Presented Without Commentandi zeisler@andizeislerAbsolutely outstanding correction from the @nytimes January 13th 2020682 Retweets4,309 LikesSomething FunIf you’ve seen 1917, Sam Mendes’ World War I drama, you know just how stunning the film’s cinematography was. But even if you haven’t, check out this split-screen clip depicting all that goes into the finished project you see on the big screen.Adam 🪐@Adamonfilmthis is just incredible #1917Movie January 10th 202020,266 Retweets59,081 LikesToeing the Company LineHeading into tonight’s Democratic debate, Sarah Isgur looks at whether the debates have mattered—in polling, in fundraising, or anywhere else.Jonah has a new episode of The Remnant out, where he and Jake Tapper discuss the 1990s and other topics, Gen X-style.Let Us KnowYesterday we asked you to send in some of your favorite game show bloopers, and you did not disappoint! Some of our favorites are below. (We’ll warn you that a few are also slightly NSFW—don’t blame us, blame your fellow readers!)JeopardyFamily FeudGolden Balls (we didn’t know this show existed, but lots of game theory!)Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons,) and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).Photograph of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren from the July debate in Detroit by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.You’re on the free list for The Morning Dispatch. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber.Subscribe© 2020 Steve Hayes Unsubscribe PO Box 720263, San Francisco, CA 94172 |
THE SUNBURN
| Breaking overnight — “Joe Burrow, LSU cap magical season, beat Clemson 42-25 for title” via Ralph Russo of the Associated Press — Burrow threw five touchdown passes, ran for another score and finished off one of the most accomplished seasons in college football history by leading the top-ranked Tigers to a 42-25 victory against No. 3 Clemson on Monday night in the playoff final. The senior quarterback from The Plains, Ohio, led the Tigers (15-0) to their first national title since 2007 and fourth overall, breaking a few more records along the way in what was already an historic season. His five TD passes and 463 yards passing are the most for a BCS or College Football Playoff title game as were his six total touchdowns. … The final score was lopsided, but it was far from easy for LSU and Burrow. Clemson pushed LSU into the deepest hole it had to climb out of this season in the first half. Two weeks after Lawrence ran for a career-best 107 yards against Ohio State, he opened the scoring with a 1-yard jaunt around right end in the first quarter.Final AP Top 25 poll: LSU, Clemson, Ohio State, Georgia, Oregon … #6 Florida … #8 Alabama … #11 Wisconsin … #14 Auburn … #24 UCF … Also receiving votes: Florida Atlantic (basically #26).—The most entertaining back-and-forth last night was not Tigers vs. Tigers, it was U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz vs. state Rep. Chris Latvala on Twitter. Check out the thread here.—From my wife, Michelle: “To some people, it’s just a box of cookies. To this mom, it’s confidence for my very shy girl. It’s pushing herself outside of her comfort zone to reach her goals. It’s money management. It’s goal setting. It’s work ethic. The Girl Scout cookie program teaches my daughter and all of the girls in my Troop so much. It also allows me to teach them. This year my girls have built a roller coaster, built race cars, explored space, learned how to care for animals and themselves, done service projects for Hurricane victims and animal shelters and learned a lot about being leaders and kind to others. They’ve been horseback riding and are going camping. So that box of delicious Thin Mints is worth so much more than just a box of cookies. If you wanna support my cookie boss, let me know.”I’ll be personally delivering cookies in Tallahassee on the 28th for those of you order this week. Click here to order. Thank you in advance.—The seventh and final Democratic debate before the Iowa caucuses happens tonight at Drake University in Des Moines. Stuff’s getting real.Six candidates in the Dems’ drawn-out game of Political Survivor take the stage. They are (in order of their respective chances to win the nomination, according to FiveThirtyEight.com): Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg play Political Survivor.Amy Klobuchar and Tom Steyer also are on the stage for this debate, with FiveThirtyEight giving them a 1-in-80 chance of winning. That’s another way of saying we probably need to pay extra attention to those two because there’s no sense holding back now.So, what should we look for this time around?Here are five things to watch Tuesday night:The situation with Iran: Democrats have generally been critical of President Donald Trump’s order to deep-six Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. It’s not that they harbor sympathy for a man described frequently as a monster, but the President didn’t consult Congress before arguably committing an act of war.Candidates on the debate stage will no doubt be quizzed on how they would have handled this situation. And Sanders will almost certainly remind everyone that he voted against the Iraq War that removed Saddam Hussein and destabilized that region of the Middle East, while Biden voted in favor.The impeachment trial: We can pretty well guess how this one is going to go — a show of hands, please, for those in favor of removing Trump from office. Six hands go up. Actually, Klobuchar might be more reserved since she has to be a juror in a Senate trial.Sanders, well, he’s on the record many times saying Trump is (paraphrasing here) pond scum.Health care: We’ve heard it, and heard it, and heard it, and we’ll hear it again. Medicare-for-all vs. something less grandiose. This could be a breakout moment for Klobuchar, since she has consistently challenged all the “free stuff” others propose as unrealistic.Iowa is filled with practical people. If she connects with her ‘let’s go for something better, which we can actually get passed’ approach, she could score big points.Climate change: Another issue that is in the Dems’ wheelhouse. They are winning the argument with the public that climate change is real, but Trump appears oblivious and continues to roll back environmental protections put in place under Barack Obama.We can probably sum up the Democratic response to this issue in two words: Trump Bad!!Flyover states: Iowa is in the middle of what Midwestern folks call “the flyover states,” and Trump in 2016 tapped into their anger. It tipped the election as a New York billionaire painted Democrats as elitist and out of touch.Are Dems making the same mistake again? Someone among the surviving candidates needs to make the point that he or she is aware that a whole lot of people don’t live on either coast. They work in farms, factories, and small towns — places the Democratic Party used to all but own.They need to prove they get the message from 2016.A lot of people believe they haven’t yet done that.___Speaking of Democratic politics, here are a couple of first-in-Sunburn items:“LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus President Stephen Gaskill endorses Pete Buttigieg for President” via Ryan Nicol of Florida Politics — “He’s young, thoughtful and progressive,” Gaskill said in a talk with Florida Politics about his decision to endorse Buttigieg. “I think he’s got plans and policies that will help heal the divide of our country and move us forward.” Gaskill said he’s endorsing Buttigieg in his personal capacity and that the LGBTQ+ Democratic Caucus isn’t yet taking a position on the race. But Gaskill argued that seeing an openly gay man compete for a major party’s presidential nomination is a big moment. “He’s a symbol of how far we have come and a reminder of how far we still have to go.”“Poll from GOP group shows Carlos Giménez coasting to win in CD 26 Republican primary” via Ryan Nicol of Florida Politics — Florida Politics has obtained polling data which shows Giménez would be the runaway favorite in a Republican primary for Florida’s 26th Congressional District. The survey, taken in October and commissioned by a national Republican organization, is surfacing one day before Giménez is expected to formally enter the race for a chance to take on Democratic U.S. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. Giménez would join a Republican field that includes restaurateur Irina Vilariño and Omar Blanco, the former head of Miami-Dade Firefighters Local 1403. A whopping 51% of those surveyed said they would back Giménez, with just 6% choosing Blanco and only 2% selecting Vilariño. Another 39% of voters were undecided. |
| Today’s Sunrise On the eve of Session, The Capitol complex was teeming with teachers asking lawmakers to do a better job funding education. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran issued some vague threats about it being an “illegal teacher strike” that could lead to firings; Senate Democrats say that’s ridiculous. They’re also offering an alternative to the Gov. Ron DeSantis’ $900 million teacher pay package.Also, on today’s Sunrise:— The Sierra Club of Florida delivers a report card to DeSantis, giving him a “D” on environmental issues during his first year in office.— A Senate committee approves Alyssa’s Law, requiring panic alarms in public schools.— Backers of the only recreational marijuana amendment that had a chance of making the ballot in 2020 said they’re not going to make the deadline. So, they’re holding off until 2022— Correspondent Noah Pransky talks about a different kind of political poll.— And two Florida Man stories: One faces jail time for spitting; the other for pooping.To listen, click on the image below: |
| Days until Florida TaxWatch State of the TaxPayer Dinner in Tallahassee — 1; Sundance Film Festival begins — 9; “Star Trek: Picard” premiers — 9; Annual Red Dog Blue Dog Celebrity Bartender Benefit — 12; New Brexit deadline — 17; Super Bowl LIV in Miami — 19; Great American Realtors Day — 20; Iowa Caucuses — 20; Eighth Democratic presidential debate in Manchester — 25; Capitol Press Corps press skits — 28; New Hampshire Primaries — 28; Pitchers and catchers begin reporting for MLB Spring Training — 28; Ninth Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas — 36; Roger Stone’s sentencing — 37; Nevada caucuses — 39; “Better Call Saul” Season 5 premiers — 40; 10th Democratic presidential debate in Charleston — 42; South Carolina Primaries — 46; Super Tuesday — 49; Last day of 2020 Session (maybe) — 59; Florida’s presidential primary — 63; “No Time to Die” premiers — 87; Florida Chamber Summit on Prosperity and Economic Opportunity — 126; “Top Gun: Maverick” premiers — 164; Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee begins — 181; Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet” premiers — 185; 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo start — 192; Florida primaries for 2020 state legislative/congressional races — 217; Republican National Convention begins in Charlotte — 223; First Vice Presidential debate at the University of Utah — 267; First Presidential Debate scheduled at the University of Michigan — 275; Second presidential debate at Belmont — 282; 2020 General Election — 294. |
| Top story “Educators throng Florida Capitol to fight for more money” via Bobby Caina Calvan and Brendan Farrington of The Associated Press — Thousands of school workers from around the state thronged Florida’s Capitol to press DeSantis and the Legislature to more than double the nearly $1 billion the Governor is proposing for teacher raises and bonuses. Demonstrators streamed into The Capitol’s main thoroughfare, some hoisting signs beseeching Florida lawmakers to “Fund our Future.” Rally organizers said as many as 10,000 demonstrators would descend on the Capitol on the eve of the official start of the 2020 legislative session. The state’s largest school union said the governor’s proposal merely gives the illusion that he is addressing problems that have long plagued public schools, such as understaffing, crumbling facilities, and low morale. The union said as many as 2,400 teaching jobs remain unfilled.—”Here’s what teachers had to say at the ‘Take on Tallahassee’ march” via CD Davidson-Hiers of the Tallahassee DemocratTweet, tweet: |
| State of the state Gov. DeSantis announced his invitation list to the annual state of the state address:— Chris Atamanchuk is the owner of SandBar Tiki and Grille, a restaurant in Englewood, which was negatively impacted by red tide in 2018.— Lindsay Beam is a teacher at Blountstown Middle School, where she teaches both 6th and 8th grade. Beam is a recipient of the Dr. Brian Dassler Award, established in honor of the late educator and awarded to those who are passionate about teaching.— Talethia Edwards is a mother of seven children, four of whom use the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and three use the Family Empowerment Scholarship. Talethia is a community organizer who helps improve equity and equal access for the disadvantaged in southside Tallahassee.— Byron Hughes is a firefighter with the Mexico Beach Fire Department. Hughes and his wife, Cori, a detective with the Panama City Police Department, were married two weeks after Hurricane Michael, standing on top of a mountain of rubble Michael left in its wake.— Judge Barbara Lagoa is a Cuban American from Hialeah and was appointed by DeSantis to the Florida Supreme Court shortly after he took office last year. Before her appointment, Lagoa served on the 3rd District Court of Appeals, of which she was appointed to by Gov. Jeb Bush in 2006.— Judge Robert Luck was born and raised in Miami-Dade County and was appointed by DeSantis to the Florida Supreme Court shortly after Lagoa. Before his appointment, Luck served on the 3rd District Court of Appeal, of which he was appointed to by Gov. Rick Scott in 2017.— Melissa Pappas is a teacher at Brookshire Elementary School, where she works with autistic students in grades K-5. She is a recipient of the Mary J. Brogan Award, which recognizes extraordinary educators who instill passion, joy and love of learning in their students.— Geoff and Robbie Respstorff are both professional bankers, receiving the statewide recognition of “Bankers of the Year” from the Florida Bankers Association in 2010. In their spare time, they hunt pythons in the Everglades, catching their first snake on Valentine’s Day in 2016.— Brittney Wilson and her husband Jeremy moved to Jacksonville after Jeremy retired from the U.S. Navy. They home-school their three sons, two of whom have special needs and receive Gardiner Scholarships, which provide eligible students a scholarship that can be used to purchase approved services or products to design a customized education program for the student.— Morris Young is the Sheriff of Gadsden County, Florida and has been a member of the Gadsden County Sheriff’s Office for 12 years. Before that, he spent 11 years with the Quincy Police Department, where he was Officer of the Year in 1995.Assignment editors — A group of progressive lawmakers and advocates will provide a ‘people’s response’ following DeSantis’ State of the State Address to open the 2020 Session. The group will also unveil the ‘Sunrise Agenda,’ a group of progressive proposals, approximately 12:15 p.m. (or right after the State of the State Address), 4th-floor Rotunda. |
| Dateline: Tally “VISIT FLORIDA faces another crossroads in 2020” via A.G. Gancarski of Florida Politics — Among the many battles facing the Florida Legislature in this year’s Session: tourism incentives. As has been the case for the last few years, skepticism about the future of VISIT FLORIDA reigns. However, VISIT FLORIDA head Dana Young, who has just passed her anniversary in the role, notes that she is making her own case. “I’ve been meeting with members of the House and Senate … including members of House leadership … since summer,” Young said, “providing them with facts.” … “The facts,” Young added, “are on our side.” While candidate DeSantis may have been more movable on economic incentive programs, as Governor, he’s as consistent an advocate for them as his predecessor.Dana Young faces another uphill battle to save VISIT FLORIDA in 2020.As Session begins, here’s Florida Politics must-read profile on the next House Speaker — “Chris Sprowls combines community ideals, fiscal pragmatism” via Andrew Meacham for Florida Politics — Sprowls grandest vision, the one that got him nominated in the first place, has no legalistic language or dollar figures attached. It’s a vision of people in a community living and working with each other face to face. “The ties that bind us in our communities are things like going to church on Sunday and spending time together and worshipping,” Sprowls said. “And being in a bowling league together. And going to your Rotary Club, your Kiwanis Club, your Red Hat Society, or your Junior League. Or your T-ball on a Saturday morning, and you realize how much you like these people and you enjoy hanging out with them, and you also realize, ‘I have no idea what their political beliefs are.’”“In final Session, Holly Raschein hopes ‘controversial issues’ don’t distract from environmental efforts” via Ryan Nicol of Florida Politics — The Representative from House District 120 also knows the Legislature has several polarizing bills to attend to this Session, including an effort to require parental consent before a minor undergoing an abortion. She says she hopes lawmakers will still find time to focus on other areas. “Those more controversial issues will kind of take away from the other things like, for example, what I’m working on with the environmental budget,” Raschein said. “But those are just a part of life, I guess, and part of the process. And I hope that the tenor of the debate will be respectful, and we won’t be stuck on the floor for hours on end and that people will respect our time there.”During her final Session, Holly Raschein hopes lawmakers will stay focused.“Randy Fine seeks Indian River Lagoon protection, safer crosswalks” via Scott Powers of Florida Politics — Rep. Fine is determined to get major projects going to address the chronically ill Indian River Lagoon running along much of Florida’s East Coast. And he can do anything, If he has his way in 2020, carrot and stick bills to help the Indian River Lagoon and a new approach to midblock pedestrian crosswalks will be his top successes in the 2020 Legislative Session. “It’s water and public safety,” Fine said. The carrot, HB 153, would provide state incentives for local communities to improve existing sewage systems. The stick, HB 1091 and Sen. Joe Gruters‘ companion SB 1450, would raise all fines for sewage overflow discharges by 50%.“Online sales tax, education and an improved legal climate make Florida Chamber’s 2020 agenda” via Drew Wilson of Florida Politics — The pro-business group says lawmakers need to pass bills to lower the costs of living and doing business for the state to meet its predictions of 200,000 new jobs, keeping the odds of recession low. “If Florida were a stock, it would be considered a strong buy. While Florida’s economic outlook for 2020 is positive, it’s not without risks, which is why passing the Florida Chamber’s Jobs Agenda is so important,” said Mark Wilson, president and CEO of the Florida Chamber of Commerce. To accomplish a lower cost of living, the Chamber recommends legislation to improve Florida’s legal climate.“Could the Florida Competitive Workforce Act finally see the light of committee hearings?” via Jacob Ogles of Florida Politics — It wasn’t all that long ago that support for LGBTQ citizens in Florida remained a radioactive issue for Republicans. Indeed, the Florida Competitive Workforce Act remains a popular bill to sponsor but a difficult one to agenda. Rep. Raschein recalls in 2013 becoming the first Republican lawmaker in Florida to sign on as a co-sponsor. Today, lawmakers are more likely to have neighbors, co-workers and state House colleagues who openly identify as gay or lesbian. Along the way, the legislation has picked up other Republican co-sponsors. This year’s version of the bill (HB 161) had 42 sponsors, including nine members of the GOP, as of the eve before Session. |
| Legislation “Over NRA’s objections, Senate committee passes bill closing ‘gun show loophole’” via Lawrence Mower of the Tampa Bay Times — The bill passed over the strong objections of the National Rifle Association’s top lobbyist, who called it “nothing less than gun control on steroids.” “This committee bill is our best effort to try to improve public safety on the margins here,” said committee chairman Sen. Tom Lee. “It is not a perfect system.” Senate Bill 7028 would not require background checks for all person-to-person sales, which make up an estimated 20% of all gun sales. Instead, when selling a gun to another individual, the seller would be required to check the person’s ID to make sure they’re legally allowed to own the weapon and fill out a form recording the transaction.Marion Hammer is objecting to the Senate closing a ‘gun show loophole.’“Senate panel advances annual cost of living increase for state workers” via Renzo Downey of Florida Politics — The Senate Governmental Oversight and Accountability Committee unanimously passed the bill (SB 1114) requiring the Legislature to consider an annual cost of living allowance for workers. And with an amendment by the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Bill Montford, it would expand that consideration to state university employees. The Tallahassee Democrat’s district is home to most of the state’s employees. He has pushed for the measure and served on the Senate Appropriations Committee since he joined the Senate in 2010. His bill would require the Legislature’s Office of Economic and Demographic Research to calculate the cost of living increases over the previous fiscal year. Those state budget experts then send the figure to the Governor, the Senate President and the House Speaker.“Recreational cannabis bill envisions medical storefront sales” via Janelle Irwin Taylor of Florida Politics — Sen. Jeff Brandes‘ bill (SB 1860) would allow adults, regardless of medical status, to possess up to 2.5 ounces of cannabis flower or marijuana products with up to 2 grams of THC. “For me, this is a liberty issue. We should give adult Floridians the freedom to make their own choices when it comes to cannabis,” Brandes said. “It’s not a matter of if, but when, Floridians will have access to adult-use marijuana. This bill allows the Legislature to lead on an issue a supermajority of Floridians support.” Current licensed, vertically integrated medical marijuana stores would sell the product.Senate bill would send Florida Forever cash to Hurricane zones — A proposal filed by the Senate Committee on Environmental Preservation would direct $10 million a year from the Florida Forever program to purchase conservation lands in areas that have been hit by hurricanes, Bruce Ritchie of POLITICO Florida reports. The bill, would also direct money from the land conservation fund to highway wildlife crossings. Committee members voted unanimously to introduce the bill.Water bottling permits would be $1M under Rob Bradley bill — Legislation filed by Senate Budget Chief Bradley would set a $1 million price tag for companies seeking permits to bottle Florida spring water, reports Bruce Ritchie of POLITICO Florida. SB 1798 would direct the permit fee to water conservation and quality programs or land acquisition. Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, director of advocacy for Our Santa Fe River, said Bradley’s bill could actually push agencies to issue more permits for water bottlers. “It makes me a little nervous when we start having bills that are directly associated with allowing permits for water bottling,” she said.”Lawmakers debate if college athletes can be paid” via Bobby Calvan of the Associated Press — “Three House committees encompassing about half the chamber’s 120 members — in the education, commerce and judiciary committees — convened collectively on Monday to begin considering the issue, which has gotten bipartisan support and Gov. DeSantis’ endorsement. Florida has more than 11,000 student athletes, many who play sports that might not get the same limelight as football and basketball but nevertheless achieve acclaim in their own sport. “The most frequently heard argument against this bill is that we cannot turn college sports into professional sports,” said state Rep. Chip LaMarca, who is sponsoring one of the bills seeking to give college athletes financial benefits.“A resolution condemning philosophies of intolerance clears Senate panel” via Sarah Mueller of Florida Politics — A resolution condemning hateful ideologies easily passed the Senate Infrastructure and Security Committee Monday, but it received mixed support from some members of the public. The resolution is co-sponsored by Thonotosassa Republican Sen. Lee and Miami Democratic Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez. Lee chairs the committee and presented the bill. Still, David Caulkett, vice president of Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, said they oppose the resolution. “The resolution is racist, divisive, has no societal benefit, is a golden opportunity for liberals to smear those who advocate for immigration enforcement,” he said. Resolutions carry no weight of law and don’t require any action from the Governor.“Shevrin Jones, Amy Mercado join push to reduce solitary confinement of pregnant prisoners” via Ryan Nicol of Florida Politics — The measure (HB 1259) is being called the “Tammy Jackson Act.” The bill is named after a prisoner who gave birth last year after being placed in an isolated jail cell in Broward County. Jackson said she complained of contractions overnight. Seven hours later, she delivered the child without being taken to the hospital. “Women within correctional facilities are already serving their sentences, and they should have every right to proper medical attention, especially during the sacred act of giving birth,” Jones said in a statement on the bill. State Sen. Jason Pizzo has filed similar legislation (SB 852) in the Senate. |
| Today in the Capitol Assignment editors — President Galvano will host a recognition ceremony to unveil new art outside of the public entrance to the Senate Gallery. The artwork, completed by artist Barry Miller of Rose Boulevard Design in Tallahassee, replaces the “Five Flags Mural,” which was removed and preserved as part of the 2016 Senate Chamber Renovation, 8:30 a.m., 5th Floor Public Entrance to the Senate Gallery.The House Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittee meets, 1:30 p.m., Morris Hall, House Office Building.The House PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee meets, 1:30 p.m., Reed Hall, House Office Building.The House Transportation & Tourism Subcommittee meets, 1:30 p.m., Room 404, House Office Building.The Senate Agriculture Committee will consider several bills, including one to ban declawing cats, 2:30 p.m., Room 301, Senate Office Building.The Senate Commerce and Tourism Committee meets to consider a bill to eliminate a tax on airplane fuel, 2:30 p.m., Room 110, Senate Office Building.The Senate Criminal Justice Committee meets, 2:30 p.m., Room 37, Senate Office Building.The Senate Health Policy Committee meets to consider a bill allowing pharmacies to dispense drugs from automated kiosks, 2:30 p.m., Room 412, Knott Building. |
| Gov. Club buffett Italian minestrone soup; mixed garden salad with dressings; tomato and buffalo mozzarella salad; pasta salad; deli board with tomato, lettuce, cheeses & breads; Ronnie’s fried chicken; grilled teres major of beef with hunter’s sauce; walnut breadcrumb crusted cod with lemon dill cream; buttermilk mashed potatoes; green beans amandine; medley of vegetables; and bread pudding with bourbon sauce for dessert. |
| Statewide Breaking overnight — “University of Florida also a target in foreign research scandal” via Justine Griffin of the Tampa Bay Times — Four faculty members from the University of Florida have left the school amid a widening investigation into foreign exploitation of American-funded medical research. Three of the researchers resigned and one was terminated after the university received a letter from the National Institutes of Health regarding questionable foreign meddling in grant research and funding. The terminated employee worked part-time for the university’s College of Medicine. Two were from the College of Engineering and one was from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Two of the researchers were tied directly to the inquiry by the federal agency, which gives out $30 billion a year to American scientists and universities for biomedical research.”DeSantis announces lower costs, refunds for Florida prepaid college savings” via Emily Mahoney and Megan Reeves of the Tampa Bay Times — DeSantis announced $500 million in cash refunds to those who have used the state-backed Florida Prepaid program to send their kids to college. The price reduction will affect 224,000 accounts dating back to 2008, and about 108,000 of those will now be paid-in-full, DeSantis said. The average payout will be $4,700. Families still paying into the program will see decreases in their monthly payments, the governor’s office said. At the same time, prices for new Florida Prepaid plans will drop to the lowest level in five years, starting at $44 a month for a one-year plan.Ron DeSantis is giving a break to families who pay into the Florida Prepaid College Tuition program.“If 86.9% graduated, does that mean Florida’s dropout rate is 13.1%?” via Jeffrey Solochek of the Tampa Bay Times — As the Florida Department of Education announced, 86.9% of the 212,240 teens who entered a public high school in fall 2015 graduated by spring 2019. What happened to the rest of the group? It would be easy to assume that the other 27,731 students dropped out. But the state lists the official 2019 dropout rate as 3.4% or 7,257 students. What’s up with that? Well, the federal formula that Florida now uses calculates graduation rate as the percentage of students who graduate within four years of their first enrollment in ninth grade.“Will Spanish, Creole-speaking students be able to take tests in their native languages?” via Sommer Brugal of TCPalm — More than 130 languages are spoken by English-language-learners in schools across the Treasure Coast, but a proposed state law — to allow native-language versions of readiness assessments — would address only two. The bill — filed by state Sen. Annette Taddeo — would enable native Spanish and Haitian-Creole speakers to take state-mandated tests such as the voluntary prekindergarten assessment, the kindergarten readiness test, and high school equivalency examinations in those languages. Responsibility to provide the native-language tests would fall on the state Department of Education because the bill focuses on state-mandated tests, spokeswoman Cheryl Etters said.“Disney Aspire keeps growing to add more schools for employees’ free education” via Gabrielle Russon of the Orlando Sentinel — Disney has added Purdue University Global and Southern New Hampshire University to its list of schools where the company’s hourly employees can get their education paid. The schools are now part of the 13 institutions where employees can attend with Walt Disney Co. paying 100% of the tuition as well as fees and book expenses upfront in an initiative called Disney Aspire. Purdue University Global is the Big Ten school’s online program created for working adults. Southern New Hampshire University, a private school, also offers many online classes. Disney is investing $150 million over five years in the program and would pay for employees’ education after the company saved significantly from the GOP tax cuts in 2018. |
| Mother Nature Sounds like the Sierra Club needs to change it’s grading formula — DeSantis earns ‘D’ from Sierra Club — The Governor has made environmental spending a priority through his first year in office. Still, one environmental group says he could be doing a lot more. As reported byRitchie of POLITICO Florida, the Sierra Club says DeSantis’ efforts thus far have netted him a “D” on their grading scale. The below-average grade stems from what the group sees as lackluster efforts on renewable energy, springs protection, growth management, preemption and tree protection. Still, the Sierra Club says he’s doing a better job than former Gov. Scott.The Sierra Club Florida is giving Ron DeSantis a ‘D’ for his first-year performance. But compared to Rick Scott, that’s a huge improvement.“Insurance analysts to downgrade 4 or more property insurers this week” via Renzo Downey of Florida Politics — That’s according to Joseph Petrelli, president of Demotech Inc., which reviews and rates 46 insurers that write approximately 66% of Florida’s homeowners’ insurance premium. “This week, we will begin to issue statements on many of the 46 Florida-focused carriers,” according to a news release. “To avoid downgrades, some carriers may abandon the necessary refinements to their business models and sell their entities or be acquired. Others will be downgraded.” Claims from Hurricanes Michael and Irma have drained some state insurers’ cash pools, forcing them to take on debt. The highest Financial Stability Ratings (FSR) scores are A” for or A’ for unsurpassed. Exceptional ratings earn an A while Substantial S ratings follow ahead of Moderate M.Happening today — The state Public Service Commission will hold a regular meeting, an internal affairs meeting, and discuss a solar-energy proposal by Florida Power & Light, regular meeting at 1 p.m., followed by internal affairs meeting and hearing, Betty Easley Conference Center, 4075 Esplanade Way, Tallahassee. |
| Peachy “How Chuck Schumer might get the last laugh on impeachment trial” via Burgess Everett and Marianne Levine of POLITICO — While Senate Majority Leader McConnell has locked up enough Republican votes to ignore demands for a bipartisan framework for Trump’s impeachment trial, his Democratic counterpart is readying a counteroffensive. Schumer will force a series of votes designed to squeeze vulnerable Republicans and harm them on the campaign trail if they side with Trump. Democrats argue the half-dozen at-risk GOP senators will need some daylight between them and Trump to get reelected. And if they vote against Schumer’s motions to hear new evidence and witness testimony, they’ll be seen as Trump sycophants — undermining their bids and boosting Schumer’s odds of becoming majority leader.Chuck Schumer could have the last laugh on the Senate impeachment trial. |
| D.C. matters “Homestead may be reopening to house minors, feds say. If so, who will land the contract?” via Monique Madan of the Miami Herald — “There have been several ongoing conversations” between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Refugee Resettlement about its reopening, one federal source told the Miami Herald. “Again, it’s an emergency influx center, so it’s expected. Once the number of kids hits the threshold, they put the shelter to go active within the next 30 days.” If the center does reopen, it’s still unclear what company would operate it since Caliburn International’s contract ended on Nov. 30. Caliburn managed the facility for unaccompanied migrant children ages 13 to 17 since 2018. If the facility does reopen, a new contract would have to be solicited.“Q&A with Francis Rooney: retirement, polarized Congress, term limits” via Ledyard King of the Naples Daily News — The one-time ambassador to the Vatican has veered from some Trump policies: he believes human-caused climate change is happening; voted against the president’s emergency declarations as a way to fund his wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, and believes a two-state solution is vital to Middle East peace. Did you know what kind of backlash you’d be facing back home by publicly saying Trump’s conduct troubled you and were undecided on impeachment? “Of course, I did. I knew it would be highly controversial and certainly subject to criticism by a lot of the more hard-core Republican Trump supporters, but that doesn’t really bother me. I thought it needed to be said by somebody that we need to get the facts.”Francis Rooney gives his exit interview. |
| 2020 “Cory Booker drops out of presidential race” via Nolan McCaskill of POLITICO — By most accounts, Booker was a great messenger with a unique resume: a skilled orator who once saved a woman from a burning house, an All-American athlete who played football at Stanford, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, a graduate of Yale Law who rose from city council to become one of just three African Americans in the Senate. But in the era of Trump — and heightened anxiety among Democratic voters — love wasn’t enough. “Cory is not gonna change who he is to win an election,” said South Carolina State Rep. John King, who had endorsed Booker. “He believes in love, but it’s a reality that Trump has corrupted the political arena and the minds of many Americans.”Cory Booker just couldn’t gain the traction needed to stay in the game.“New Iowa poll shows tight race, with Joe Biden jumping ahead” via Giovanni Russonello of The New York Times — Biden has regained some of his strength in Iowa, but his three closest rivals for the Democratic nomination remain clustered at his heels, according to a Monmouth University poll released on Monday. The poll, published three weeks before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest, found the former vice president with support from 24% of likely Democratic caucusgoers, a bump of five percentage points since Monmouth’s most recent Iowa poll, in November. Biden’s three closest competitors are clumped together in a statistical tie, with U.S. Sen.Sanders earning 18% support, former South Bend Mayor Buttigieg at 17%, and U.S. Sen. Warren earning 15%. The poll had a five-point margin of error.“Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren in private 2018 meeting that a woman can’t win, sources say” via MJ Lee of CNN — The stakes were high when Sanders and Warrenmet at Warren’s apartment in Washington, D.C., one evening in December 2018. The longtime friends knew that they could soon be running against each other for president. The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to take on Trump best, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters. Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.“Mike Bloomberg wants to be President, but he also has a fallback plan: defeat Donald Trump and remake the Democratic Party” via Michael Scherer of The Washington Post — Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination, but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat Trump, with a new structure — data, field organizing, advertising and policy — that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party’s voters reject the former New York Mayor this spring. While most presidential efforts start early and poor, the Bloomberg project exists in an inverted dimension, a fact that has caught the attention of Trump, who spent years tracking Bloomberg’s political career closely in New York. The President has been closely monitoring Bloomberg’s campaign, impressed by his extraordinary spending and fearful of his potential rise.Mike Bloomberg wants to be President, but he also has a Plan B.“With its 228 delegates and Super Tuesday slot, Texas looms in the presidential primary” via Abby Livingston of The Texas Tribune — Texas’ large number of delegates could prove decisive, especially if the presidential campaign becomes a protracted race into the spring. And waiting until those first four states are done voting could be too late: Early voting in Texas begins Feb. 18 — only a week after the New Hampshire primary and before primary election day in Nevada and South Carolina. “Given the number of delegates that come out of Texas, you ignore it at your peril,” said Jesse Ferguson, a former Hillary Clinton presidential campaign staffer. |
| The trail “You won’t get to vote on recreational marijuana this year” via Marcia Heroux Pounds of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel — Florida voters won’t decide this year whether to make recreational marijuana legal. A group pushing a constitutional amendment said it would drop its bid to get on this year’s ballot and instead focus on 2022. A separate petition failed to gather the 766,200 signatures required to get to on the 2020 ballot. Recreational marijuana, or adult-use, is legal in Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Michigan, Vermont, Maine, California, Alaska and most recently, Illinois, which began sales on Jan. 1. Legalization could be on the ballots of Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Dakota and South Dakota later this year.Huh? — “Andrew Gillum has spent $450K in committee cash on legal fees since November” via Drew Wilson of Florida Politics — Gillum’s political committee spent $450,000 on lawyers in 60 days — the same amount the former Democratic gubernatorial nominee promised to raise to engage voters of color. The spending was revealed in recent campaign finance reports for Forward Florida, a political committee chaired by Gillum that supported his run for Governor and has continued funding the former Tallahassee Mayor’s post-campaign initiatives. The PAC’s December report showed a $172,000 payment to law firm Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler as well as a $39,244 payment to Perkins Coie last month. Those expenditures were classified as payments for “legal services.” The payment to Stearns Weaver Miller Weissler follows a $190,865 retainer paid to the firm in November. Likewise, Perkins Coie received $45,059 from the fund in the same month.Andrew Gillum’s legal bills keep mounting up.“Florida GOP raises $5.24M in fourth quarter of 2019; Democrats raise $1.5M” via Drew Wilson of Florida Politics — The Republican Party of Florida raised more than triple what the Florida Democratic Party managed during the last three months of 2019. New finance reports show the state GOP collected $5.24 million during the reporting period, with six-figure donations heading in from Heritage Insurance Holdings, the Florida Medical Association, Dosal Tobacco and the GEO Group, among many others. About $1.76 million flowed out of the account during the reporting period, leaving RPOF with $20.56 million at the ready heading into an election year. The Florida Democratic Party raised $1.56 million over the same stretch and finished the year with about $15.3 million on hand.“Short-circuited utility measure tab: $5.75 million” via the News Service of Florida — Backers of overhauling the state’s electric utility industry had raised — and spent — about $5.75 million before the Florida Supreme Court blocked their proposed constitutional amendment last week. The political committee Citizens for Energy Choices, which hoped to put the amendment on the November ballot, raised $226,000 last month, bringing its overall total to $5,758,180 as of Dec. 31. It also had spent $5,749,247, the report filed at the state Division of Elections shows. Almost all the money came from a nonprofit organization known as the Coalition for Energy Choice, Inc.“GOP Senate campaign fund adds $6.5 million in Q4” via Drew Wilson of Florida Politics — The Florida Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee raised nearly $6.5 million during the fourth quarter of 2019, new finance reports show. FRSCC is a Party-affiliated committee charged with supporting Republican campaigns for state Senate. Senate President-designate Wilton Simpson chairs the fund. The new reports show the committee reeled in $6.48 million between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31. The top donor of the quarter was Duke Energy, which cut three checks totaling $300,000 during the reporting period. Spending totaled $837,000 and included payments for events and lodging as well as several payments to Gainesville-based Data Targeting Inc. for direct mail campaigns and polling. At the end of the quarter, FRSCC had about $8.1 million in the bank.Hugh Culverhouse jumps on Vern Buchanan’s wagon — Margaret Good’s most prominent supporter jumped ship. Culverhouse will back Buchanan’s reelection. “I certainly don’t have to agree with all he or his party does, but this is just a two-person race,” Culverhouse said. “I pick him.” That’s a shocker considering Culverhouse served as Good’s most prominent benefactor during star-making runs for state House in 2018 — and because as recently as September, he openly pined for someone to primary Vern’s son James Buchanan for a statehouse seat. But he now fears the Sarasota Democrat’s ambition led her to reach too high too fast. He’d rather Good run for her state House seat again, and maybe go for state Senate afterward.“Shevrin Jones’ Senate bid closes out 2019 strong, adding $54K in December” via Ryan Nicol of Florida Politics — He’s now added more than $320,000 through his campaign and his political committee, Florida Strong Finish. That blows away the rest of the field. Miami Gardens City Councilman Erhabor Ighodaro, who sits in second in overall contributions among the SD 35 field, has raised just under $60,000 in total. Jones will head into 2020 with about $120,000 available in cash on hand. He’s barred from seeking reelection to his House District 101 seat due to term limits. That’s led Jones to compete for the SD 35 seat, along with five other candidates. State Sen. Oscar Braynon II currently holds that seat but is also term-limited following 2020.“Andrew Learned ends 2019 with strong fundraising report” via Janelle Irwin Taylor of Florida Politics — Democratic House District 59 candidate Learned had his second-most productive month of fundraising since he started in August, raising more than $14,000. Learned raised more than $20,000 in August. Learned’s December earnings far outpaced any of his opponents in the race. His Democratic challenger in the primary, Mark Stephan Oliver, raised just $170. Two Republicans are seeking their party’s nomination for the seat. Michael Owen raised $4,800 in December, while Danny Kushmer raised $5,455.“Jackie Toledo ends 2019 with more than $200K banked for reelection” via Janelle Irwin Taylor of Florida Politics — The Tampa Republican raised $13,500 in December, bringing her total raised so far to more than $210,000. Of her total December haul, Toledo took in $8,000 from maximum contributions. That includes $1,000 checks from pharmaceutical company AbbVie Inc., America’s Export Corporation, Vandergrift-Williams Farms, Mag Mutual Florida PAC, Mid Gulf Holdings and development group 2101 Platt LLC and its manager, developer Christopher Chapman, among others. Toledo’s contributions averaged $690 each. Not a single contribution was less than $250.Happening tonight: |
| Local “Feds to investigate JEA privatization” via Christopher Hong and Nate Monroe of the Florida Times-Union — Federal officials will take the lead on an investigation into the controversial effort to privatize JEA, continuing a probe State Attorney Melissa Nelson’s office began last year, a development that significantly escalates a broadening public scandal in Jacksonville city government. Nelson, in a written statement, said she had determined the “appropriate venue to continue this investigation is the federal justice system.” “Last year, the State Attorney’s Office initiated an investigation into issues related to the privatization of JEA. As with all investigations conducted by this office, we have taken this issue very seriously,” Nelson said. “We have referred our investigation to our federal partners, who will take the lead moving forward and have the full support of this office.”Ya think? — “Melissa Dykes won’t seek permanent JEA CEO post” via David Bauerlein of the Florida Times-Union — JEA interim CEO Dykes says the city-owned utility needs a “fresh start.” The board selected her to be interim CEO last month after ousting Aaron Zahn. “This was a difficult decision for me, but a necessary step toward ensuring a fresh start for all stakeholders and what is best for JEA,” Dykes said in a statement. “I remain committed to promoting a culture of employee safety, delivering operational excellence, and rebuilding trust while ensuring a smooth transition. This way, there will be no question that all decisions going forward will be with JEA and the community in mind, instead of through the lens of someone applying for a permanent position.”Melissa Dykes gives a hard pass on the permanent JEA CEO gig.“Kanye West reportedly wants to host a gospel concert in Miami around Super Bowl 54” via C. Isaiah Smalls II of the Miami Herald — Add a West concert to the growing list of Super Bowl activities. The “Jesus Walks” artist has spoken to Super Bowl Host Committee Chair Rodney Barreto about holding “a gospel concert in connection to the big game.” In a text message to the Herald, Barreto said the two had a preliminary conversation but have not yet reached an agreement. Assuming West doesn’t have anything special planned (which is never a safe bet), the “gospel concert” would most likely refer to the Sunday Services that he’s held across the country. The performances, which feature gospel remixes of secular tunes as well as original songs, started as invite-only concerts in January 2019. They’ve since expanded into the public sphere, with shows at Coachella and Howard University.“New terms begin for Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer and commissioners Tony Ortiz, Patty Sheehan and Bakari Burns” via Ryan Gillespie of the Orlando Sentinel — Burns received a loud ovation from supporters who attended the swearing-in at the Dr. Phillips Center, including members of the activist group Organize Florida, the labor union UNITE HERE! and friends and colleagues from Jones High School, Florida A&M University, and Mt. Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church. In his speech, Burns, the CEO of the Healthcare Center for the Homeless, challenged residents to become involved with local government, businesses to invest in their workforce, and the City Council to prioritize investments in affordable housing. Dyer, Orlando’s longest-serving mayor, reiterated his support for Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings’ transportation sales-tax initiative, which Dyer believes would improve the quality of life for city residents.“Orthopedic surgeon files whistleblower lawsuit against Orlando Health, Physician Associates” via Naseem S. Miller of the Orlando Sentinel — An orthopedic surgeon has filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Orlando Health and three of its subsidiaries, alleging that his superiors violated federal laws by requiring him to perform surgeries and make referrals within the Orlando Health network only and then fired him when he refused to comply. Dr. Ayman Daouk is suing Orlando Health, Physician Associates, Orlando Health Physician Group and Orlando Health Imaging Centers, alleging that he was fired by Orlando Health and Physician Associates “because he performed surgeries at a non-Orlando Health facility and referred patients for imaging at a non-Orlando Health facility.”“South Florida sees swell of new residents moving from high-tax states” via Marsha Meroux Pounds of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel — Newly released IRS data for 2018 shows Florida — which has no personal income tax — had a 3% increase over 2017 in the migration of net personal income — the dollars coming into the county versus what’s going out. South Florida saw a more than 60% increase in net personal income over 2017, and Palm Beach County alone saw a 20% increase, according to the IRS, which tracks changes in personal income through address changes on annual tax returns. Americans are taking a closer look at how much they’re paying in taxes, and moving to a lower-tax state like Florida can make a big difference come Tax Day. |
| More local “150 show up for Howey-in-the-Hills meeting spurred by Councilman who made $1M demand” via Martin Comas of the Orlando Sentinel — About 150 Howey-in-the-Hills residents turned out for a meeting in neighboring Tavares, most spurred by a council member’s demand of $1 million to settle his claims that the small Lake County community has caused him economic and emotional harm and violated his civil rights. “I honestly don’t know what his endgame is here,” said Dan Powers, who is part of a recall effort against Town Council member Mat McGill. “Is it just a quick shakedown? Or is it to bankrupt the town so we must change the charter to be favorable to high-profit housing development to get out of debt.”Howey-in-the-Hills Town Council member Mat McGill is threatening to sue the town out of existence. Image via Orlando Sentinel.“City of Pembroke Pines defrauded in $700,000 security scheme: AG” via NBC Miami — Ololade Shokunbi and Oluwatoyin Laditan, the owners of Bayus Security Protection, were arrested in Miami-Dade on an organized scheme to defraud charges, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced in a news release. Olalekan Shokunbi, the company’s operation manager, remains at-large, the release said. According to Moody, the three fraudulently billed the city more than $700,000 for services never provided between October 2012 and June 2017. Their company, now defunct, had a contract to provide security services at several city-owned properties.“Tampa International Airport expanding dine-at-the-airside program” via Richard Danielson of the Tampa Bay Times — Tampa International Airport said it’s expanding its TPA All Access program that allows nonflying visitors to go through security to eat at the restaurants, shop or visit spas at the airside Jan again for other. Starting Saturday, the program will go from Saturdays only to seven days a week. Since its launch last May, more than 1,700 people have taken advantage of the program, which entails signing up at least 24 hours in advance to get a pass. “This airport belongs to the Tampa Bay community, and our All Access program is one way of making sure as many people as possible can experience all it has to offer,” airport chief executive officer Joe Lopano said in an announcement of the expansion. |
| Opinions “Rick Scott: They fought for freedom — how my father and the WW2 generation continue to inspire me” via Fox News — Orba Scott Jr. adopted me when I was a toddler. My dad’s story is the story of many in his generation. He grew up during the Depression with almost nothing by moving in with family and friends. He joined the Army as a teenager. After the war, he struggled for work. But despite the hardship (or maybe because of it), my dad’s life, and my parents’ life, is the story of America. They believed that with the grace of God, and a good education and hard work, their children could be anything — could do anything. But I often wonder if he recognized how important he, and those like him, were to the fabric of American society.“’Year of the teacher’ in Florida kicks off with threats to fire them” via the Orlando Sentinel editorial board — The pay is rotten, the paperwork is mountainous, the testing is debilitating and, if you try to petition lawmakers about those working conditions, the state threatens your job. That’s essentially what happened when hundreds of Polk County teachers notified administrators they would be taking a personal day so they could attend a “Take On Tallahassee” rally organized by the Florida Education Association. “A concerted failure to report for duty constitutes an illegal strike under Florida law,” Matthew Mears wrote. “ … we have the highest obligation to ensure that Polk County educators are advised of the risks associated with participating in a coordinated effort to not report for duty.” See how it works in Florida?“Joshua Simmons: The death of local governments” via Florida Politics — I must implore all Floridians and all local elected officials to be vigilant and pay attention to this Session. Bills have already been filed, committee appointments have been made, and one thing is clear — local governments’ authority will continue to be under attack. Local governments were given the authority to work in the best interest of their constituents and municipalities. After all, local elected officials are closest to the people and are very much in tune with the people who voted them into office. Residents and local elected officials must stand together and work to protect their homes. This is not a partisan battle, preemptions, especially punitive preemption, sees no color and all local governments are affected.“Floridians can prepare their homes for the next hurricane season, and the state can help” via Randy Fine for the Orlando Sentinel — As we’ve seen too often in recent years, hurricanes can threaten our state at a moment’s notice — and destroy the homes and disrupt the lives of our families. Today, more Floridians are making the safe and smart decision to invest in the hardening of their homes using proven resources like the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program to get access to safe, affordable financing to better protect their property and their family. In Florida, PACE offers access to affordable, fixed-cost financing for property owners to make hurricane protection upgrades to their homes, such as impact doors and windows, reinforced roof tie-downs and backup generator power that make a big difference come hurricane season. |
| Movements The Southern Group predicts 2020 Session — In a new video, venerable lobbying shop The Southern Group outlines its expectations for Florida’s 2020 Legislative Session. Titled “Looking Ahead,” the 45-second clip features partner James McFaddin talking about “paradigm shifts” in hospital funding; partner Chris Dudley discussing holding Session during a presidential year and consultant Erin Rock offers her excitement over where Florida will move in the technology sector. The group also expects several battles on the horizon, as well as some “good policy” getting through.To watch the video, click on the image below: |
| Aloe “NASA welcomes 11 new astronauts, first since Artemis missions announced” via Richard Tribou of the Orlando Sentinel — NASA now has 48 active astronauts as 11 candidates chosen in 2017 graduated from basic training, the first since NASA announced its Artemis program to return to the moon. The 11 NASA astronauts received a silver pin in a ceremony at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Those silver pins will be replaced with gold pins if and when they make their first spaceflight. “These individuals represent the best of America, and what an incredible time for them to join our astronaut corps,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine at the ceremony. Two new Canadian Space Agency astronauts who trained alongside the NASA astronauts attended the ceremony as well.NASA introduces its graduating class of 11 astronauts ahead of the next planned mission to the moon. Image via NASA.“‘Joker’ leads Oscar noms; ‘1917,’ ‘Irishman’ close behind” via Jake Coyle of The Associated Press — Female filmmakers were shut out, “Parasite” made history and “Joker” edged out “The Irishman,” “1917” and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” in Oscar nominations. Todd Phillips’ R-rated superhero smash “Joker” topped all films with 11 nominations to the 92nd Academy Awards, while Martin Scorsese’s elegiac crime epic “The Irishman,” Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s Los Angeles fairy tale “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” and Sam Mendes’ continuous World War I tale “1917” all trailed close behind with 10 nods apiece. Those four were among the nine films nominated for best picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.“Gas prices dropping in Florida as Middle East tensions decline” via Florida Daily — With tensions in the Middle East declining, gas prices are starting to slip in the Sunshine State. AAA released a report on Monday showing the average gallon of gas in Florida cost $2.49 on Sunday, down from $2.53 at the start of last week. That’s below the national average, which stood at $2.58 a gallon on Sunday. “Rising crude prices dragged gas prices higher in recent weeks. However, oil prices quickly sank as tensions between the US and Iran began to ease. Last week, the price for a barrel of WTI crude dropped nearly $5, going from $64/b on Monday to $59/b on Friday,” AAA noted. |
| Happy birthday Belated wishes to Rep. Charlie Stone and Toni Smith Large of Uhlfelder & Associates. Celebrating today are Speaker-designate Chris Sprowls, our dear friend, Erin Ballas of Public Affairs Consultants, Mr. Gwen Graham, Steve Hurm, and the recently engaged Claire VanSusteren. |
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AXIOS
Axios AMSubscribe
By Mike Allen
Happy Tuesday! People to watch: Matt Mowers, former New Hampshire GOP executive director and Trump administration State Department official, is challenging freshman Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), John DiStaso reports for WMUR.
1 big thing: Trump’s big wall win
President Trump has successfully built an immigration wall that has proven impenetrable for tens of thousands of migrants — it’s just not the physical one he and others obsess about, Axios’ Stef Kight reports.
- The number of attempted border crossings is falling, and denial rates are climbing. The very nations most migrants flee are now the nations where asylum seekers are being sent.
- What to watch: Federal courts could still send Trump’s wall of policies and programs tumbling, which some experts and officials fear could lead to another surge at the border in 2020.
Over the past few months, the Trump administration has begun implementing its asylum agreements with Central American nations, which could help keep asylum seekers out of the U.S.
- They’re sending Hondurans to Guatemala — the origin nation for the highest number of migrants who reached the U.S. border last year.
- Officials could begin kicking Mexican, Central American and South American asylum seekers to Honduras or El Salvador as well.
- More than 50,000 Central American asylum seekers have already been forced to wait out their legal cases in Mexico under the Migrant Protection Protocols— “Remain in Mexico.” The program is expected to expand.
Between the lines: Even the thousands who wait out their time in Mexico for a chance at asylum face steep odds of gaining legal passage into the U.S.
- So far, just 117 people covered by MPP since January of last year have been granted asylum by an immigration judge, according to data collected by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
- More than 15,000 have been given orders of removal.
The bottom line: The number of people crossing the border fell for the seventh straight month in December.
⚡ What’s next: Trump continues his slow campaign for a physical wall.
- The WashPost reports that he’s “preparing to divert an additional $7.2 billion in [2020] Pentagon funding for border wall construction this year, five times what Congress authorized.”
2. 2020 rules of the road for Misinformation Age
Just three weeks ahead of the Iowa caucuses, social media platforms have finalized their rules governing political speech — and fired a starting pistol for political strategists to find ways to exploit them, Axios’ Sara Fischer writes.
- Facebook announced it won’t back down from its controversial policy of not fact-checking politicians’ statements. Twitter, YouTube and other platforms have also adjusted their political-speech rules.
- Why it matters: “One opportunity that has arisen from all these changes is how people are trying to get around them,” says Keegan Goudiss, director of digital advertising for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, and now a partner at the progressive digital firm Revolution Messaging.
Axios spoke with a half dozen campaign strategists, both Republicans and Democrats, plus social intelligence experts, about what these rules will mean:
- Paid lies will still flourish: Facebook is one of the strongest tools for campaigns to gather data about voters. Because Facebook said definitively last week that it will not fact-check political speech, nor will it limit micro-targeting political ads, campaigns will leverage both freedoms to make sure the most provocative ads reach the right people.
- Free lies will still flourish: Twitter has banned political ads, but few political ad dollars were spent on Twitter to begin with. Twitter continues to be a powerful platform for driving political conversation, and the platform has lenient policies about politicians’ free speech.
- Ads will be gamed: Google policies prohibit campaigns from micro-targeting users using its ad technology. But the platform can’t stop ad buyers from micro-targeting Google’s inventory through other third-party ad exchanges.
- Sign up for Sara Fischer’s weekly newsletter, Axios Media Trends, out later today.
3. Pelosi’s new card
Protester Laura Albinson of Pasadena, Md., greets House members as they leave the Capitol on Friday. (Think she wanted the Senate side.) Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Speaker Pelosi suddenly has a new lever as she pushes Senate Republicans to include witnesses and documents in President Trump’s impeachment trial — a “trove” of text messages turned over by Lev Parnas, the indicted former Rudy Giuliani associate, Axios’ Alayna Treene and Margaret Talev report.
- Why it matters: A public release of some or all of the materials could give Democrats new ammunition to argue that the White House must turn over more information and allow new testimony from witnesses.
Parnas’ lawyer, Joseph A. Bondy, said in a series of tweets over the weekend and yesterday that he turned over to the House Intelligence Committee the contents of Parnas’ iPhone 11, detailing interactions “with a number of individuals relevant to the impeachment inquiry.”
- Bondy said he has also shared dozens of text messages, photos and materials from a Samsung phone and thousands of documents.
- He is also expected to provide investigators with materials from two other devices, an iPad and another iPhone, “as soon as possible,” per Bondy.
In a phone interview with Axios last night, Bondy said he anticipates that when the articles are turned over to the Senate, “there will be a public record that is transmitted with that, including information from witnesses.”
- “I have reason to believe that at least some of what Mr. Parnas transmitted to [the intelligence committee] will likely make the public record.”
- Asked if the contents of the documents Parnas provided to the committee hurt the president, Bondy replied: “They aren’t helpful.”
- He added that Parnas is eager to testify before Congress, and hopes the document dump will help in getting his client an audience with lawmakers.
What’s next: Pelosi is meeting with her caucus later this morning, and will discuss the next steps on impeachment.
- Shortly after, likely this afternoon or Wednesday, the House is expected to vote on delivering the articles to the Senate and naming House managers.
4. Pic du jour
Photo: Randolf Evan Photography via Reuters
Social media loved this photo of a couple continuing their wedding in the Philippines as the Taal volcano sent out a column of ash in the background.
- The volcano began spewing smoke an hour or two before the wedding, and ash began to fall on the party toward the end of the ceremony, per Reuters.
5. Warren says Sanders dissed women
Screenshot via CNN
Tonight’s Iowa debate (9 p.m. ET on CNN) is the last debate before the Feb. 3 caucuses, so it’s being called the most important night of the 2020 primary season so far.
What to watch: Elizabeth Warren said yesterday that Bernie Sanders told her during a private meeting in Dec. 2018 that he didn’t think a woman could win.
- Sanders denies it.
- But she said in a statement that during a two-hour meeting to discuss 2020, “Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.”
6. Apple signals fight over shooter’s iPhones
Photo: Apple
In a situation that resembles the aftermath of the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, the Justice Department wants access to encrypted iPhones tied to a shooting at the Pensacola Naval Air Station that’s being called terrorism, Axios’ Ina Fried writes.
- Apple is strongly hinting it will challenge Attorney General Bill Barr’s request for data from two iPhones that belonged to the gunman, including one that he fired a bullet into after being confronted by law enforcement. (AP)
Why it matters: Whether law enforcement has the right to access encrypted data on smartphones remains unsettled and is one of the most hotly debated issues in tech, with no clear middle ground.
- Apple said in a statement: “[T]here is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys. Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. … We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users’ data.”
7. Iran announces arrests as anger swells
In Tehran, protesters hold flowers as tear gas fired by police rises at a demonstration on Saturday. Photo: AP
Iran’s judiciary said today that an unspecified number of people had been arrested for the shootdown of a Ukrainian passenger plane, AP reports.
- Why it matters: The announcement came amid an upswell of anger and protests by Iranians over the downing of the jetliner and attempts by senior officials to cover it up.
8. Queen bows to Megxit
Axios Visuals, AP
“The Queen issued an unprecedented personal statement … giving her reluctant support to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to step back from royal duties,” The Times of London reports.
- Her statement “used the word ‘family’ eight times and the Queen appeared to be going out of her way to offer reassurance to the couple.”
9. 1 ⚾ thing
Houston Astros owner Jim Crane announcing firings yesterday. Photo: Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via AP
“The Red Sox may soon face significant pressure to fire manager Alex Cora after Major League Baseball issued a detailed report … that named him the ringleader of a cheating scandal,” the Boston Globe’s Peter Abraham writes.
- “The Houston Astros fired general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch shortly after they were suspended for a year by commissioner Rob Manfred for failing to stop a sign-stealing scheme Cora developed as Houston’s bench coach in 2017.”
10. 1 🏈 thing
Photo: David J. Phillip/AP
“Cigar clippings were scattered on the locker-room floor, a haze of smoke flooded the air and LSU quarterback Joe Burrow emerged with a stogie between his fingers and a smirk across his face,” The Advocate of New Orleans reports.
- In case you didn’t make it to 12:14 a.m. ET: LSU won its fourth national championship, ending Clemson’s 29-game winning streak with a 42-25 victory in the college football championship, at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans.
📬 Thanks for starting debate day with us. Please tell a friend about AM/PM.
THE HILL
| © Getty Images Welcome to The Hill’s Morning Report. Happy Tuesday! Our newsletter gets you up to speed on the most important developments in politics and policy, plus trends to watch. Alexis Simendinger and Al Weaver are the daily co-creators, so find us @asimendinger and @alweaver22 on Twitter and recommend the Morning Report to your friends. CLICK HERE to subscribe! The Senate is readying for the impeachment trial of President Trump to officially get underway next week as Republicans and Democrats continue to jostle over whether witnesses will be called and wait for Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to officially transmit the articles to the upper chamber. Pelosi is scheduled to meet with the Democratic caucus later this morning to determine next steps, which are expected to include sending the articles across the Capitol by the end of the week and naming impeachment managers. As Scott Wong writes, the final actions by Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) could include the decision to publish dozens of documents, recordings, photos and text messages from Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, that may be relevant to the impeachment trial. Publishing the documents and related information could play into the decision for Senate Republicans to call witnesses or not in the coming weeks. After the articles are sent to the Senate, the trial is expected to start soon. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a top adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), told reporters Monday that opening arguments of the trial are expected to start on Tuesday, Jan. 21. One thing Senate Republicans have not released yet is the resolution laying out the rules for the impending trial. According to The Hill’s Jordain Carney, GOP aides expect the resolution to be released after Pelosi sends the articles to the Senate. Negotiations over the language in the resolution are ongoing. The Hill: Republicans brush off Trump’s call for impeachment dismissal. CBS News: White House expects GOP defections on calling witnesses in Senate impeachment trial. The Associated Press: Lawyer: Giuliani associate’s documents turned over to House. As for the president, while he’s been vocal and maintained that he did nothing wrong, he continues to send mixed signals to the Senate GOP about what he wants from the upcoming trial. Trump’s tweets from over the weekend, saying that he wants an “outright dismissal” of the articles by the Senate, puts him in conflict with the strategy McConnell has advocated for weeks. Senate Republicans say they are sticking with their goal of a quick trial, with most of the conference ready to eschew calling witnesses, although some have indicated that they want to hear from former national security adviser John Bolton at some point. While the vast majority of Senate Republicans would prefer not to hear from Bolton, most Americans say they’re all ears. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday, 66 percent of respondents want Bolton to serve as a witness in the Senate trial, including 39 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents and 91 percent of Democrats (Axios). It remains unclear whether additional witnesses will ultimately be called as Senate Democrats search for four Republican colleagues to agree with them. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) continued to argue Monday that McConnell and the GOP will be engaging in a cover-up if witnesses are not called. “If seeking the truth is political, if doing our constitutional duty is political in the minds of our Republican colleagues, then the Republican Party is in trouble,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “History is not kind to political parties that fight to hide the truth. History is not kind to parties that participate in cover-ups.” Meanwhile, McConnell kept up his criticisms of Pelosi for her “one-woman blockade” of the Senate trial. “In terms of influencing Senate procedure, this strange gambit has achieved absolutely nothing,” McConnell said on the floor, adding that he is “glad the speaker finally realized she never had any leverage in the first place … and is giving in to bipartisan pressure to move forward.” The Hill: How impeachment differs from court trials. The Associated Press: McConnell is Trump’s man, assigned to shape his Senate trial. The Hill: Poll: 51 percent of Americans support House vote to impeach Trump. © Getty Images LEADING THE DAYCAMPAIGNS & POLITICS: Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) announced Monday that he is ending his Democratic primary bid after struggling for months to gain traction, headlined by his exclusion from the December debate, as the field winnows further less than three weeks out from the Iowa caucuses. “It was a difficult decision to make, but I got in this race to win, and I’ve always said I wouldn’t continue if there was no longer a path to victory,” Booker said in an email to supporters. “Our campaign has reached the point where we need more money to scale up and continue building a campaign that can win — money we don’t have, and money that is harder to raise because I won’t be on the next debate stage and because the urgent business of impeachment will rightly be keeping me in Washington.” Booker’s announcement brings the primary field to 12 candidates and further deprives the field of diversity that was an exemplar of the initial wide-ranging field last summer (The Hill). Over the last month and a half alone, Booker, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro all have ended their campaigns. The only two non-white candidates remaining are Andrew Yang and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who has been unable to garner the support levels that Booker attracted after his late entrance in the race. The New Jersey Democrat’s announcement came to the displeasure of some in the party and a day before the top six candidates in the field will take part in the seventh primary debate in Des Moines. “The final stages of the Republican primary were more diverse than that of the Democratic primary,” tweeted Bakari Sellers, a former South Carolina state lawmaker who served as a top surrogate for Harris’s campaign. Another question related to Booker’s exit is who will be the beneficiary polling wise. According to a new national Morning Consult poll, 24 percent of Booker supporters say Biden is their second choice, followed by Sanders at 19 percent and Warren at 17 percent. Niall Stanage: What the leading 2020 candidates need to do in tonight’s Democratic debate. The Associated Press: Booker ends presidential bid after polling, money struggles. The New York Times: Booker’s exit from 2020 race ends a once-promising political chapter. © Getty Images > Debate night: Most of the 2020 Democratic field will come together in Des Moines tonight for the latest party debate as the field nears the first votes of the year in the Hawkeye State. All eyes will be on the four top-tier candidates in the field as the race remains fluid ahead of the Iowa caucuses. In recent days, various polls have shown Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or former Vice President Joe Biden topping the field in the state, with Sanders keeping up his attacks against others as he makes his closing case to voters in the state (The Hill). Most notably, Sanders has found himself in a war of words with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over the past couple of days, headlined by the Massachusetts Democrat’s charge that Sanders told her during a December 2018 meeting that a woman could not win a general election race against Trump. After CNN reported the remarks earlier Monday, Warren followed suit and released a statement confirming Sanders’s sentiments. The Vermont Independent denied making any such remarks. “I thought a woman could win; he disagreed. I have no interest in discussing this private meeting any further because Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences on punditry,” Warren said (The Hill). As Jonathan Easley and Amie Parnes report, the back-and-forth between the two left-wing heavyweights has made progressives uneasy and has heightened concerns that a centrist candidate such as Biden or former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg could take home the party’s nomination. “Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you both are progressive champions and our movement needs to see you working together to defeat your corporate Democratic opponents – not attack each other,” the progressive group Democracy for America said in a statement. “Progressives will win in 2020, but only if we don’t let the corporate wing or Trump divide us.” The Washington Post: Sanders-Warren feud takes a turn onto the dangerous turf of gender. The New York Times: Russians hacked Ukrainian gas company at center of impeachment. The Hill: Biden leads in Iowa according to Monmouth poll. The New York Times: Democratic super PAC books first TV ads in $150 million anti-Trump push. IN FOCUS/SHARP TAKESADMINISTRATION, WAR POWERS & IRAN: As many as 10 Republican senators are considering bucking Trump on a measure that would limit his authority to take military action against Iran, according to the bipartisan co-sponsors of the resolution. The move in the Senate, which follows a House vote on war powers last week, is an overlay during what McConnell promises will be Trump’s Senate acquittal on two House charges of abuse of power. The majority leader says he opposes the pending war powers resolution backed by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) as well as Republican co-sponsors Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.). McConnell believes the effort sends the wrong message to U.S. allies following the Trump-ordered killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani (The Associated Press). Lee said last week after an Iran briefing by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top Trump advisers that the presentation was “probably the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue,” during his nine years in the Senate. © Getty Images The president chafes at the second-guessing, defending his decision to order a drone strike to kill Soleimani and nine others as justified because of the Quds Force leader’s “horrible past.” Trump said it did not matter to him if Soleimani posed an imminent or longer-term threat to U.S. national interests at the time he was killed at the Baghdad airport (The Hill). It’s an argument that gives lawmakers significant pause because of international law, the fact that Soleimani was a senior member of the Iranian government and concerns that U.S. missile strikes against government officials abroad incite retaliation against Americans. “The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was `imminent’ or not, & was my team in agreement,” Trump tweeted. “The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!” The Washington Post: “Four embassies”: The anatomy of Trump’s unfounded claim about Iran. Asked again on Monday as he left the White House about intelligence information he discussed with advisers, including Pompeo and others, Trump said Soleimani should have been killed by the United States “20 years ago.” He suggested any misgivings in Congress about his decision are tantamount to an embrace of a terrorist. “We killed Soleimani, the No. 1 terrorist in the world by every account. Bad person, killed a lot of Americans, killed a lot of people. We killed him,” he said. The bipartisan support for a Senate resolution to restrict Trump’s authority to attack Iran militarily counters the president’s political argument that it is Democrats who are his critics, especially during a push to remove him from office. Trump again asserted without examples or evidence that Democrats have defended Soleimani, which he said is “a disgrace to our country. They can’t do that. And let me tell you, it’s not working politically very well for them.” Pelosi, Kaine and other leading Democrats say their condemnation of Iran’s former military mastermind was emphatic and well known for years. During a Fox News interview on Monday, Pompeo did not repeat Trump’s evolving description of an Iranian plot to attack four U.S. embassies. “We can dance around the maypole on the word `imminent,’” the secretary said. “We know that he was traveling in the region both to Beirut and then to Damascus and on to Baghdad with the intense, intent purpose of delivering a strike, a blow against Americans in the region. We weren’t about to take that risk.” The Associated Press: Pompeo, Attorney General William Barr cite deterrence as long-running motive behind Soleimani’s killing. The New Yorker: Barr as “Trump’s sword and shield.” The Associated Press: Iran today said it arrested unnamed suspects after an “extensive investigation” into the shootdown of a passenger jet over Tehran, which killed 176 people. Iran initially said the tragedy was the result of the Boeing plane’s mechanics, then conceded its own missile strike was at fault and was a “mistake.” That concession sparked days of anti-government denunciations and street protests in Iran. Reuters: Britain, France and Germany will trigger a dispute resolution mechanism in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the most definitive response the Europeans have taken as Tehran withdrew from nuclear commitments after the U.S. pulled out of the agreement in 2018. OPINIONIt’s time for the Democratic candidates to talk more about national security, by Brad Bannon, opinion contributor, The Hill. https://bit.ly/2Nn3nk8 The political earthquake propelling Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, by Grady Means, opinion contributor, The Hill. https://bit.ly/2FJNxfa WHERE AND WHEN📺 Hill.TV’s “Rising” program features Paul Steinhauser, a New Hampshire-based political reporter with Fox News Politics, to preview tonight’s debates; W. James Antle III, editor-in-chief of The American Conservative, to discuss the situation in Iran; and J.D. Scholten, a Democratic congressional candidate in Iowa, to talk about tonight’s debate and the Iowa caucuses just around the corner. Coverage starts at 9 a.m. ET at http://thehill.com/hilltv or on YouTube at 10 a.m. at Rising on YouTube. The House meets at 10 a.m. and is expected to debate and vote on a resolution appointing and authorizing managers for the Senate impeachment trial of the president. The Senate convenes at 10 a.m. and will resume debating the nomination of Peter Gaynor to be administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The president headlines a reelection rally in Milwaukee at 7 p.m. Vice President Pence will swear in Gen. John Raymond, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as the first chief of space operations, U.S. Space Force (USSF) at 11:45 a.m. Pompeo is in the San Francisco Bay area through Wednesday to meet with representatives from U.S. tech companies as well as counterparts from Japan and Korea. Economic indicator: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the U.S. consumer price index for December at 8:30 a.m. The Hill hosts “The Right to a Roof: Tackling Homelessness” at 8:30 a.m. in Washington. Information HERE. Lawmakers scheduled to participate with housing experts to discuss housing security include Reps. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), Danny Davis (D-Ill.) and Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.). The Hill also hosts an event next Tuesday, “Mayors Matter: Deepening the Generational Compact in Communities,” in Washington from 2 to 4 p.m. with influential mayors from Michigan, Kansas and Florida and community leaders who describe contributions of older adults and the societal benefits of intergenerational bonds. Find information HERE. The Democratic National Committee hosts the first presidential primary debate of 2020 televised by CNN from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, at 9 p.m. (Des Moines Register). It will soon be U.S. Census season around the country, and Mayor Bill de Blasio at 10:30 a.m. welcomes representatives from 157 community-based organizations for a planning conference at New York University about census education, outreach and mobilization. The work is funded through New York City’s “Complete Count Fund.” The 2020 Census begins March 12. ELSEWHERE➔ Trade: The powerful pharmaceutical industry is trying to get U.S. senators on record in support of including protections the industry lost in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement into future trade deals with other countries (The Hill). ➔ Courts: Pharmaceutical makers were in court on Monday to argue against a Trump administration rule that would require the companies to disclose to consumers in their ads the list prices for drugs. The companies assert such a federal requirement would violate the First Amendment (The Hill). ➔ Major League Baseball cheating & punishments: Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch were fired by owner Jim Crane on Monday after the league’s announcement of discipline following an elaborate scheme to use cameras to decode opposing catchers’ signs in real time and relay the intelligence to players during games. “We need to move forward with a clean slate,” Crane said. A league investigation confirmed the Astros had cheated during the regular season and playoffs of their World Series-winning 2017 season. As part of the league’s penalty, the Astros will also lose first- and second-round draft picks in 2020 and 2021, and the organization was fined a record $5 million. MLB said in its statement that if Luhnow or Hinch “engage in any future material violations” of MLB rules, they will be placed on the league’s permanently ineligible list (ESPN). ➔ College Football Championship: The Louisiana State Tigers are the 2019-20 College Football Playoff champions after defeating the Clemson Tigers, 42-25, and nabbing it’s fourth national title and first since the playoff was instituted in 2014. The Tigers were led by quarterback Joe Burrow, the likely No. 1 pick in the upcoming NFL Draft, who tossed five touchdowns and ran for another one. In the process, Burrow set a record with 60 touchdown passes in a single season (ESPN). The president watched the game alongside first lady Melania Trump and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and was cheered when he took the field for the national anthem (The Hill). ➔ Oscars: The 92nd annual Academy Awards nominations for best picture, announced on Monday for a Feb. 9 presentation on ABC, include films representing a wide range of genres and the dark comic book smash “Joker” leading the field with 11 nominations. In the top lineup: the World War I epic “1917,” Quentin Tarantino’s 1960s fantasia “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” and Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic “The Irishman” (Netflix). Other nominees for best picture are “Ford v Ferrari,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Little Women,” “Marriage Story” (Netflix) and “Parasite.” The nominations proved to be a shutout for female directors, with potential nominees such as Greta Gerwig (“Little Women”), Lulu Wang (“The Farewell”) and Marielle Heller (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) failing to get a nod from the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (The Los Angeles Times). The Hollywood Reporter has a list of all the nominees HERE. © Getty Images THE CLOSERAnd finally … In the pantheon of British history, restless royals have wandered the empire from castle to fortress, engineered marital mergers and escaped the drudgery of good works with bad behavior. Who knew that Canada would represent emancipation for renegade Prince Harry, American wife Meghan Merkle and their adorable son Archie? On Monday, Queen Elizabeth II presided over a historic summit among her son and his sons, and decided to back the new “progressive” roles Harry and his wife already publicly announced — as part-time royals who want to live in North America and occasionally return to Great Britain. Hinting at unresolved “complex matters,” including income, employment, security and tradition, the Queen released a statement in which she emphasized “family” at least seven times (The Associated Press). “Today my family had very constructive discussions on the future of my grandson and his family. My family and I are entirely supportive of Harry and Meghan’s desire to create a new life as a young family. Although we would have preferred them to remain full-time working members of the royal family, we respect and understand their wish to live a more independent life as a family while remaining a valued part of my family.” The British press, with all its intense opinions about the monarchy, did not hold back. The Guardian said the queen’s message was a “reluctant blessing.” The Daily Mail served up breathless details — Prince Charles talked money and Meghan did not participate— behind what headline writers call “MEGXIT.” © Getty Images The Morning Report is created by journalists Alexis Simendinger and Al Weaver. We want to hear from you! Email: asimendinger@thehill.com and aweaver@thehill.com. We invite you to share The Hill’s reporting and newsletters, and encourage others to SUBSCRIBE! TO VIEW PAST EDITIONS OF THE HILL’S MORNING REPORT CLICK HERETO RECEIVE THE HILL’S MORNING REPORT IN YOUR INBOX SIGN UP HEREMORNING REPORT SIGN UPFORWARD MORNING REPORTPrivacy Policy | Manage Subscriptions | UnsubscribeEmail to a friend | Sign Up for Other NewslettersThe Hill 1625 K Street, NW 9th Floor, Washington DC 20006©2020 Capitol Hill Publishing Corp., a subsidiary of News Communications, Inc. |
DAYBREAK
| Your First Look at Today’s Top Stories – Daybreak InsiderHaving trouble viewing this email? View the web version.SPONSORED BYDaybreakInsider.com @DaybreakInsiderTUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 20201.Warren and Sanders Spar Over Comment that a Woman Can’t Win Sanders denies accounts that he told Warren a woman can’t win the presidency (CNN). In a passive-aggressive response, Warren says he did (Twitter). From David French: I don’t want a President Sanders, but this is lame and petty. I’d also bet – if past practice is predictive of present performance – that it’s embellished. Looks like she’s trying to smear Sanders and attain victim status, all while pretending that’s not what she’s doing (Twitter). From AP Chief political reporter Steve Peoples: NEWS: A senior Bernie Sanders’ adviser tells me they believe that Elizabeth Warren’s campaign intentionally leaked a false description of their 2018 meeting. Says it’s a recent pattern of Warren attacking the Dem front-runner (Twitter). 2.Iran Journalists Quit One apologized for “the 13 years I told you lies” (Fox News). From Jim Geraghty: We’ve witnessed the Iranian people marching in the streets against the regime back in 2009 and 2017, but this latest round of angry protests feels a little different. Sometimes these are just flares, brief releases of tension, and sometimes they signify a genie being let out of a bottle (National Review). Advertisement3.New Poll Gives Biden Lead in First Four States Sanders is within striking distance in Iowa and New Hampshire (Hot Air). The primary calendar (US Presidential Election News). Meanwhile, Bernie supporter actress Susan Sarandon told a gathering “Everyone deserves to be in a union. Without unions, who knows what life would be like? We’d be right back to slavery probably with no ability to negotiate” (Twitter). 4.Shooting at Naval Base Declared Terrorist Attack A Royal Saudi Air Force cadet killed three at a Florida naval base. Attorney General William Barr explained “The evidence shows the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology.” Washington Times 5.Gun Permit Applications Surge for Jewish Community in New York’s Rockland County Where the recent stabbing took place. From the story: The Rockland County Clerk’s office reported a nearly 1,000% increase in gun permit applications in the week following the Dec. 28 attack. The county clerk received 65 new gun permit applications, according to the New York Post. Before the attack, the office received an average of about six applications a week. Washington Examiner Advertisement6.Glacier National Park Quietly Replacing Signs Predicting Glaciers Gone by 2020 The story notes “The signs in the Montana park were added more than a decade ago to reflect climate change forecasts at the time by the US Geological Survey, park spokeswoman Gina Kurzmen told CNN.” The CNN story then becomes typical for CNN – full on environmental nonsense. CNN 7.Trumps Get Big Applause at Football National Championship He and Melania entered to cheers and chants of “USA” (Twitter). Journalist Timothy Burke was upset to see actor Vince Vaughn having a pleasant conversation with the President (Twitter). 8.Start Trek Star: New Series Will Hate on People Like Trump And it will also be anti-Brexit, according to Patrick Stewart, who sees himself as the hero to the universe. Daily Wire Advertisement9.Academy Nominees Lacking Women and Minorities Remember when that was a big deal, so they added a cluster of minorities and later, more women as Academy members? Apparently, those people also voted for a lot of white men. Red State Copyright © 2020 DaybreakInsider.comSUBSCRIPTION INFO This newsletter is never sent unsolicited. It is only sent to people who signed up from one of the Salem Media Group network of websites OR a friend might have forwarded it to you. We respect and value your time and privacy. Unsubscribe from The Daybreak Insider OR Send postal mail to: The Daybreak Insider Unsubscribe 6400 N. Belt Line Rd., Suite 200, Irving, TX 75063 Were you forwarded this edition of The Daybreak Insider? Get your own free subscription Copyright © 2020 Salem Media Group and its Content Providers. All rights reserved. |
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THE FLIP SIDE
| View this email in your browser Tuesday, January 14, 2020Cory Booker Drops Out“Democrat Cory Booker dropped out of the presidential race Monday.” AP NewsFrom the LeftThe left notes Booker’s strengths and is surprised that he didn’t make more headway with voters.“Booker is a mesmerizing orator — in my view, more compelling a speaker than any of the other Democrats running. He presents the story of his own life as an allegory of the best that this country can be. His destiny was changed by a white man, a volunteer lawyer, who helped his parents buy the home of their dreams at a time when New Jersey real estate agents steered African Americans away from white neighborhoods. Booker uses the word ‘grace’ frequently and calls for a ‘courageous empathy’… “His problem was not that he lacked a solid operation. Booker had a talented campaign team, and a good organization, albeit one that ran out of money as his prospects dimmed. What was really misplaced, sadly, was faith that his uplifting message could be heard in the ugly moment we are in.” Karen Tumulty, Washington Post Dated but relevant: “Maybe it’s that he can come off like he’s trying too hard… Maybe he’s just too weird a confection of traits—a vegan Star Trek fanboy who still lives in inner-city Newark while courting Wall Street and dating the actress Rosario Dawson—to connect with a broad cross section of voters. Or maybe he’s being subjected to a kind of second-order racism: it’s not that voters are opposed to putting another black man in the White House; it’s that they’re afraid other voters won’t be willing to put another black man in the White House—a sort of racist Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Edward-Isaac Dovere, The Atlantic Many posit that “Despite introducing notable policies on gun control, criminal justice reform and the racial wealth gap, [Booker’s] candidacy lacked a defining issue or position on the ideological spectrum in a contest defined more by the divide between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic Party. But his campaign also suffered from factors beyond its control. In a historically diverse field, Mr. Booker struggled for attention amid the excitement of new candidates like Senator Kamala Harris of California, who allowed voters to imagine a black woman as president, or Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., whose campaign as an openly gay man is also historic.” Nick Corasaniti, New York Times “[There is also] the unusual nature of the incumbent. [Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer] insist that it will take an unconventional candidate to defeat Trump. Meanwhile, middle-of-the-road candidates such as [Joe] Biden and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) say voters are hungry for a return to normalcy. Booker and the other folks who’ve fallen by the wayside represented neither a complete break with convention (except for Williamson, who proved that simply being unconventional isn’t enough) nor a pendulum-swing back to the salad days of pragmatic policymaking and bipartisan governing of the Clinton presidency.” Jon Healey, Los Angeles Times “There is a moral radicalism to the way Cory Booker lives out his politics. He lived for years in a housing project. He leads hunger strikes. He challenges political machines. He’s a vegan. He has a more ambitious policy vision than is often discussed, but beneath that is a far more radical ethical vision than he gets credit for. The problem is that while he’s comfortable saying what that ethical vision demands of him, he’s very uncomfortable saying what it demands of the rest of us… “Booker is trying to craft a politics of love and reconciliation in a time of conflict and confrontation. But how do you fight and heal simultaneously? If you need to create friction to get attention, how do you not feed the thing you think is ripping the country apart?… The race will be poorer for Booker’s absence. There’s something he was trying to say that I think the country would benefit from hearing. I hope he figures out how to say it more clearly, and we get more opportunities to listen.” Ezra Klein, VoxFrom the RightThe right is critical of Booker’s campaign strategy and the media’s focus on his race.“Perhaps the most interesting thing to say about Booker’s campaign is that he’s a vivid illustration of how the traits that make a politician interesting for media profiles don’t always translate into actual support on the trail. Booker was the multiracial, vegan, former standout Stanford tight end who had been the subject of Oscar-nominated documentaries [and] generated tales of heroics as mayor of Newark… “Despite all that, Booker could often come across as boring. His debate one-liners and applause lines were so perfectly rehearsed that they came across as cloying. His signature move in the debate was to wait until an argument between two other candidates had started to get interesting and impassioned, and then interject with a disapproving: ‘this kind of infighting is just what the Republicans want to see.’ But ‘this kind of infighting’ was also a serious disagreement about which policy direction was right for the Democratic party, which is precisely the sort of thing a presidential primary is supposed to sort out.” Jim Geraghty, National Review “Booker’s campaign failed to make a significant impression — on black voters, progressive voters, or older, establishment voters. Perhaps that’s because his message was so unoriginal. Even his signature policy, gun control, was associated more with Beto O’Rourke’s campaign than with Booker’s. And many of Booker’s other proposals have been dominated by Warren and Sanders.” Kaylee McGhee, Washington Examiner “Here’s a guy who was a high-school football all-American, went to Stanford, earned a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, graduated from Yale law school, served two terms as the mayor of a medium-sized city (almost three times larger than South Bend, Ind.) and has twice been elected to the United States Senate. But what the [mainstream media] really wants you to take away here is that he’s a black guy. He did all those amazing things, and the [media’s] response is to reduce Booker to his race. No wonder he had to drop out… “By a literal interpretation of identity politics, the debate ended up as quite diverse by any empirical standard when compared to recent history: two women, two men of Jewish ancestry, the son of Taiwanese immigrants and one Roman Catholic. But as the [media] says of Booker and as Booker said of Harris and Julian Castro before him, some diversity is more diverse than others.” Chris Stirewalt, Fox News “Are rank-and-file black Democrats distressed by the absence of debaters who share their skin color? I doubt it. Black Democrats have not supported black presidential candidates in this cycle. They prefer the very white Joe Biden… The fact is that if black Democrats supported Booker in large numbers, he would be on the stage. If they had supported Kamala Harris in large numbers, she wouldn’t have seen the need to quit the race, and she would be on the stage. But black Democrats seem to be largely color blind when it comes to evaluating this cycle’s crop of candidates. Bless them for that.” Paul Mirengoff, Power Line Blog “Cory Booker has run a campaign centered on ‘love’ in a political era with little time for it. Most of the Democratic candidates vie to see who can denounce President Donald J. Trump in more florid terms. For former Vice President Joe Biden, Mr. Trump is destroying the soul of America. For Mr. Sanders, he is a racist. Mr. Trump hits right back, accusing the Democrats of embracing socialism, crime and even terrorism. Mr. Booker, on the other hand, says he ‘loves’ Donald Trump — not his policies, or his personality. He just says he won’t be drawn into the hateful morass that constitutes American politics in the year 2020. Love manifestly isn’t selling, alas.” Editorial Board, Washington TimesOn the bright side… 17-year-old discovers planet 6.9 times larger than Earth on third day of internship with NASA. CNBCThe Flip Side team spends hours each night scanning the news, fact-checking, and debating one another, so your 5 minutes each morning can be well spent. If you’ve found value in our work, we welcome you to help sustain our efforts and expand our reach. Any support you can provide is greatly appreciated!Were you forwarded this by a friend? Sign up hereOur ArchivesShareTweetForwardCopyright © 2020 The Flip Side, All rights reserved. You can unsubscribe from this list here. |
THE WASHINGTON POST MORNING HEADLINES
| Sign up for this newsletterRead onlineThe morning’s most important stories, curated by Post editors. (Reuters)Russian spies hacked Ukrainian gas company at heart of impeachment trialThe operation targeting Burisma Holdings began in November, according to a cybersecurity firm, and coincided with an impeachment inquiry into President Trump and whether he abused his office by seeking to press Ukraine to announce a probe of Burisma and Hunter Biden.IMPEACHMENT ● By Ellen Nakashima ● Read more » Top Senate Republicans reject Trump’s renewed call for immediate dismissal of chargesSenior Republicans said such a dismissal could not win approval in the chamber, where the GOP holds a 53-seat majority. And even some staunch Trump allies argued the president’s legacy would benefit from a robust trial.IMPEACHMENT ● By Seung Min Kim, Mike DeBonis and Elise Viebeck ● Read more » Trump planning to divert additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funds for border wallThe move would give his administration five times more money than Congress authorized in the 2020 budget for barrier construction — and add hundreds of miles of new barriers — according to figures obtained by The Post.EXCLUSIVE ● By Nick Miroff ● Read more » In saying Iran aimed to attack ‘four embassies,’ Trump puts U.S. in credibility crisisAt a perilous moment for the nation’s security, President Trump is unable to rely on trustworthiness to justify killing a top Iranian general.By Philip Rucker, John Hudson, Shane Harris and Josh Dawsey ● Read more » Australia’s ruinous fire season can be seen from spaceNASA’s satellites have spotted more than a million infrared heat signatures — telltale signs of fires — across the country since the beginning of September.By Harry Stevens ● Read more » OpinionsShe moved to Texas for safety. Now the state wants to keep out refugees like her.By Catherine Rampell ● Read more » Suddenly Trump has lost enthusiasm for his trialImpeachment Diary ● By Dana Milbank ● Read more » The health-care industry is letting surgeons behave like muggersBy Cynthia Weber Cascio ● Read more » Democrats seem to be mistaking progress for prejudiceBy Matt Bai ● Read more » The 2020 Oscar nominations didn’t have to look like thisBy Franklin Leonard ● Read more » Xi Jinping’s approach to Taiwan and Hong Kong has backfiredBy Editorial Board ● Read more » More NewsSanders-Warren feud takes a turn onto the dangerous turf of genderThe two presidential candidates disputed each other’s accounts of a dinner at which Bernie Sanders was said to have impugned the ability of a woman to defeat President Trump — an allegation the senator heatedly denied.Campaign 2020 ● By Annie Linskey and Sean Sullivan ● Read more » The Astros were disgraceful, but MLB should have seen this comingEvery team had the tools and the motive to cheat. Why did no one pay attention?Perspective ● By Barry Svrluga ● Read more » Burrow, LSU shred Clemson’s vaunted defense to capture college football’s national titleLSU capped off an undefeated season with a 42-25 victory, led by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Joe Burrow. The win ended Clemson’s bid for back-to-back championships.By Chuck Culpepper and Desmond Bieler ● Read more » An airline employee took a woman’s number from her bag tag, then harassed her via text, lawsuit saysThe disturbing encounter unfolded over more than 100 text messages and spurred a lawsuit over allegations of negligent hiring, sexual harassment and stalking.By Reis Thebault ● Read more » We think you’ll like this newsletterCheck out The Trailer for news and insight on political campaigns around the country, from David Weigel. 435 districts. 50 states. Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday evenings. Sign up » |
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POITICO PLAYBOOK
POLITICO Playbook: The Democratic primary just got real
By JAKE SHERMAN and ANNA PALMER
01/14/2020 05:51 AM EST
Presented by
DRIVING THE DAY
THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY is set to enter a new phase tonight, 20 days before the first caucus, with tenuous non-aggression pacts breaking down and the president sharpening his attacks and focus on a field that’s finally getting pared down to its top tier.
THE CNN/DES MOINES REGISTER DEBATE tonight in Des Moines — moderated by Wolf Blitzer, Abby Phillip and Brianne Pfannenstiel — happens with this backdrop: ELIZABETH WARREN and BERNIE SANDERS are warring, with the Massachusetts senator’s allies and aides seemingly leaking damaging information about her colleague from Vermont and their supporters battling over it on Twitter; two prominent black leaders, Sens. CORY BOOKER and KAMALA HARRIS, are out of the field; and MIKE BLOOMBERG has turned on a gusher of money, looming large on the sidelines and attracting the president’s ire and attention.
THAT’S NOT TO MENTION JOE BIDEN versus the field. The rest of the candidates are trying to gingerly make the case that the former VP is out of step with the party’s voters and of a different generation of Democratic leaders. BIDEN, meanwhile, has proved a durable frontrunner who has run his own race and largely ignored most of the fireworks around him.
IT COULD BE THE MOST momentous debate yet.
THE INTERNECINE WAR between SANDERS and WARREN is hitting an absolute fever pitch, sparked by this CNN report by MJ LEE, which had Sanders telling Warren a woman could not win. SANDERS denies it, but WARREN is on the record saying it’s true. This seems certain to play a major role in tonight’s tilt.
MEANWHILE, as SANDERS and WARREN eat at each other, a super PAC that supports BIDEN is going up on the air in Iowa with an ad touting the former VP’s experience on the world stage. “We need somebody in the Oval Office who understands the gravity and the consequences of their decisions,” the ad — paid for by Unite the Country — intones. The 32-second spot… Marc Caputo on the ad… David Siders previews the debate
BACK ON CAPITOL HILL … MUST READ … BURGESS EVERETT and JOHN BRESNAHAN: “Republicans face reckoning on impeachment witnesses”: “The GOP has tried to stay focused on its game plan to shut down Democratic hopes of locking in witnesses at the outset of the trial, but it’s become increasingly clear the party will face an internal reckoning during the trial as it defends its Senate majority and faces a president who demands complete loyalty.
“Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has sent GOP leaders a message that they can’t assume she will try to move through the trial as quickly as possible and ignore the possibility of hearing new evidence. And she’s not alone.
“Take Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who is retiring at the end of the year. He says he might vote to hear witnesses ‘if I needed to. Or I might not. Or I might.’ ‘My view is we should hear the case, ask our questions and then have a vote on whether we need to hear additional witnesses or call for additional documents,’ said Alexander. ‘It’s important to have a vote on whether we have witnesses or not.’” POLITICO
TO BE CLEAR … THE SENATE GOP LEADERSHIP line on witnesses has softened in recent days. They clearly don’t want to be boxed in, and want to see how the process goes and how members feel in a few weeks.
SENATE REPUBLICANS TO TRUMP: SHUSH … via Burgess and Bres: “‘I would vote against a motion to dismiss immediately. Absolutely,’ Sen. COLLINS says … Sen. MITT ROMNEY: “‘I will not be supporting a motion to dismiss’ … Says the Ukraine allegations are ‘serious and deserve to be given consideration’ and that Trump team needs to make its case too.”
… via NBC’s Frank Thorp:“Sen [Roy] BLUNT: ‘I think our members are generally not interested in a motion to dismiss. The argument for a motion to dismiss was there, was one in Clinton rules. But I think I’m safe in saying there’s almost no interest in a motion to dismiss.’”
— WAPO’S SEUNG MIN KIM, MIKE DEBONIS and ELISE VIEBECK put it all together: “Top Senate Republicans reject Trump’s renewed call for immediate dismissal of impeachment charges”
HAPPENING TODAY … HOUSE DEMOCRATS have their weekly caucus meeting at 9 this morning, in which they are expected to discuss sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate. We expect a vote in the next two days, and an announcement of managers soon.
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As lawmakers consider legislation and regulations around data privacy, it’s important for consumers to be informed about the categories of personal data that businesses collect and how that data is used. Learn more about the importance of transparency and other key privacy law principles at
BIG NYT SCOOP … “Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment,” by Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg: “With President Trump facing an impeachment trial over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter Biden, Russian military hackers have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the affair, according to security experts.
“The hacking attempts against Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company on whose board Hunter Biden served, began in early November, as talk of the Bidens, Ukraine and impeachment was dominating the news in the United States.
“It is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for. But the experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens — the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment.” NYT
— EVERY NEWS OUTLET will now have to decide: If we get information about the Bidens and Burisma obtained by Russian hackers, do we publish, and under what circumstances and with what guardrails?
TRUMP’S DEFENSE PLAN, via DARREN SAMUELSOHN: “In the Senate, White House counsel Pat Cipollone will deliver opening arguments and take the lead. He’ll be flanked by two of his deputies, Michael Purpura and Patrick Philbin … Then there’s Jay Sekulow, the longest-serving member of the president’s personal legal team, who is expected to make his own trial presentation delving into the Ukraine scandal … Outside the chamber, [Rudy] Giuliani will remain his omnipresent self, whether Trump’s in-house legal team likes it or not.”
Good Tuesday morning.
SPOTTED: Chris Christie on the same Washington-bound Amtrak train Monday as Bridget Anne Kelly, his former deputy COS who sent the infamous “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” email. Kelly and her Bridgegate co-defendant, Bill Baroni, are set to argue their case before the Supreme Court today. Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, left the train hand in hand.
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NOTABLE QUOTABLE … JASON GREENBLATT SPEAKS … The former Trump Middle East peace envoy gave an interview to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. QUESTION: “Are you hopeful about peace between Israel and the Palestinians?”
GREENBLATT: “I think they have a lot of very tough issues to work out. I don’t know if the two sides will come to agreement on those tough issues. I don’t think anybody can be sure. These are complex issues that the two sides are extraordinarily divided on, and even within the two societies, so I don’t think anybody can sit here and say peace can be achieved. But I think it would be a shame if we didn’t continue to try desperately.” Full Q&A
WHAT CONGRESS? … WAPO’S NICK MIROFF: “Trump planning to divert additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funds for border wall”: “President Trump is preparing to divert an additional $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for border wall construction this year, five times what Congress authorized him to spend on the project in the 2020 budget, according to internal planning figures obtained by The Washington Post.
“The Pentagon funds would be extracted, for the second year in a row, from military construction projects and counternarcotics funding. According to the plans, the funding would give the government enough money to complete about 885 miles of new fencing by spring 2022, far more than the 509 miles the administration has slated for the U.S. border with Mexico.” WaPo
— WAPO’S KEVIN SEIFF in Guatemala City: “The U.S. is putting asylum seekers on planes to Guatemala — often without telling them where they’re going”
2020 WATCH … CHRIS CADELAGO and SALLY GOLDENBERG: “Bloomberg’s campaign snowballs to 1,000 staffers and counting”: “Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has brought on more than 700 staffers spread out across 33 states, with a growing number of organizers joining his ranks in states that vote on Super Tuesday, aides told POLITICO.
“All told, the former New York mayor’s operation totals more than 1,000 people, a figure that includes hundreds of staffers who work out of his Manhattan headquarters.
“The unprecedented scale and scope of the campaign — he has also spent over $200 million on TV ads — gives Bloomberg a massive footprint in states that hold their primaries on March 3 or later. Bloomberg is also working to provide a Democratic counterbalance to President Donald Trump in parts of the country that are vital to his party in November.” POLITICO
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BATTLE FOR THE HOUSE — WMUR’S JOHN DISTASO: “Former NHGOP executive director, U.S. State Department official Matt Mowers running for Congress”
— NEW HAMPSHIRE’S 1st Congressional District is one that insists on moderation. It flip-flopped between Republican Frank Guinta and Democrat Carol Shea-Porter between 2007 and 2019. It was a Trump +1 in 2016, and an Obama +1 in 2012.
TRUMP’S TUESDAY — The president will receive his intel briefing at 2:45 p.m. in the Oval Office. He will leave the White House at 4:40 p.m. en route to Milwaukee. He will speak at a campaign rally at 7 p.m. CST at the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena. He will depart at 8:30 p.m. en route back to Washington. He’ll arrive at the White House at midnight.
PLAYBOOK READS
AP: “Iran announces arrests over downing of Ukrainian plane,” by Aya Batrawy in DuBai, United Arab Emirates: “Iran’s judiciary said Tuesday that arrests have been made for the accidental shootdown of a Ukrainian passenger plane that killed all 176 people on board just after takeoff from Tehran last week. The announcement came amid an upswell of anger and protests by Iranians in recent days over the downing of the jetliner last Wednesday and apparent attempts by senior officials in Iran to cover-up the cause of the crash.” AP
— THE BIG PICTURE: “Iran’s crisis of competence,” by POLITICO Europe’s Christian Oliver: “This is dangerous territory for Iran’s rulers. Accusations that the leader is mismanaging the country (and fomenting corruption) plays to a fury that unites the reformist camp with many more conservative Iranians. At both ends of the political spectrum, there’s intense frustration that the Islamic Republic never delivered, and that neighbors like Turkey, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates put themselves on the map in a way that Iranians always aspired to, either politically or economically.”
THE POST USES THE L WORD: “‘Four embassies’: The anatomy of Trump’s unfounded claim about Iran,” by WaPo’s Philip Rucker, John Hudson, Shane Harris and Josh Dawsey: “‘I can reveal I believe it probably would’ve been four embassies,’ he said in an interview Friday with Fox News Channel. …
“Based on what is known so far, Trump’s statement was at best an unfounded theory and at worst a falsehood. At each turn in the commander in chief’s rapidly evolving narrative of why he authorized the Jan. 3 drone strike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the machinery of government scrambled to adapt and respond.
“The result is a credibility crisis for an administration that has long struggled to communicate factual information to the public. At a perilous moment for the nation’s security, with the United States at the brink of war with Iran, Trump is unable to rely on trustworthiness to justify his decision to take out Soleimani, both because of his lengthy record of exaggerations and lies and because of his ever-shifting rationales.” WaPo
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Federal privacy legislation should include transparency for consumers, so they know exactly what personal data is collected and how it’s used.
BARR’S SCRAPPLE WITH APPLE — “U.S. Calls Pensacola Attack Terrorism; Pressures Apple Over Gunman’s Locked Phones,” by WSJ’s Sadie Gurman, Dustin Volz and Nancy Youssef: “Attorney General William Barr called the December attack by a Saudi aviation student that killed three people at a Florida Navy base an act of terrorism, escalating pressure on Apple Inc. to help unlock a pair of the gunman’s iPhones that could provide more information about his radicalization.
“Mr. Barr called on Apple to find a way to crack the encrypted phones in a high-profile request that ramped up a long-simmering fight between tech firms and the government over how to best balance digital security with the imperatives of criminal investigations. … Justice Department officials said only a look at data and communications on the gunman’s phones could help them say for certain whether he discussed his plans with others.” WSJ … Barr’s remarks
— BUT, BUT, BUT … @dnvolz: “DoJ and FBI officials had a phone briefing w/ congressional staff this morning and acknowledged they were aware there was nothing Apple could do to unlock the Pensacola shooter’s iPhones, per aides familiar with the call.”
— @joshgerstein: “Very important. What feds are seeking is not simply technical assistance in accessing these phones, but the right to build-in access in advance.”
HMMM … “Zinke gives $11K in campaign cash to foundation he started,” by AP’s Matt Volz in Helena, Mont.: “Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has closed his congressional campaign account and given nearly all of the fundraising cash that was left to a charitable foundation he started and his wife now runs.
“Federal Election Commission reports show that Zinke, a former Republican U.S. representative from Montana, terminated his House campaign fundraising account earlier this month. The last transaction is a Dec. 8 payment of $11,594 to the Great Northern Foundation.
“Zinke founded that nonprofit organization to maintain a park in Whitefish, Montana, his hometown. He is no longer on the foundation’s board, but his wife Lola is the president of the foundation, previously known as the Great Northern Veterans Peace Park Foundation.” AP
MEDIAWATCH — “Jitters at MSNBC as Brass Eyes Moving Chuck Todd and Talks to Shep Smith: Chuck Todd’s daily show could move to mornings, causing angst among the show’s staff. Other potential changes could alter weekends and, eventually, the network’s primetime roster,” by The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani, Lloyd Grove and Lachlan Cartwright
— LAWRENCE LESSIG is suing the NYT for defamation. Medium post
— Matt Bai is now a politics contributing columnist at WaPo. He previously was national political columnist for Yahoo and a longtime NYT Magazine writer. Announcement
— Victoria Chow is now a consumer communications manager at Reddit. She previously was communications director for The California Sunday Magazine and Pop-Up Magazine.
— Andrew Thorne will be COS at Klik Media. He is currently editorial operations manager at POLITICO.
PLAYBOOKERS
IN MEMORIAM — “Roger Scruton, R.I.P.,” by National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty: “The most important conservative thinker of his generation, the philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, has died. He was 75 and suffering from cancer. In his life he published scores of books on a dizzying number of topics, ranging through politics, art, music, the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant, religion, and fox hunting. He also wrote fiction, including the novels Notes from Underground and The Disappeared and the collection Souls in the Twilight. He composed an opera (The Minister) and a handful of songs.” National Review
SPOTTED: Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) getting off a Frontier Airlines flight at DCA on Monday.
OUT AND ABOUT … SPOTTED at a party Monday night for Lee Drutman’s new book, “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” ($25.16 on Amazon), hosted by Peter Ackerman: Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), David Brooks, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Tom Glaisyer, Avik Roy, Chris Shays, Karlyn Bowman, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Soren Daytn, Kerry Healey and Jerry Taylor.
TRANSITIONS — Former Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.) is now a co-chairman at Mercury Public Affairs. He most recently was a senior legislative adviser at McDermott Will & Emery. … Stephanie Ryska is joining Koch Industries as manager of digital content strategy. She previously was senior manager of social media and digital marketing at the Chamber of Commerce. …
… Stacy Rich and Charles Carithers are joining Cornerstone Government Affairs. Rich currently is leadership staff director for Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Carithers previously was a professional staff member for the House Homeland Security Dems.
BIRTHWEEK (was Monday): Andrew Yang turned 45 … Ken Pollack turned 54
BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Susan Glasser, New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst. A trend she thinks doesn’t get enough attention: “Anti-corruption protests spread around the world over the last year, toppling governments and conventional wisdoms everywhere from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq to Hong Kong and Russia, Indonesia, Bolivia and Ecuador.” Playbook Q&A
BIRTHDAYS: Shepard Smith is 56 … Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is 58 … Maureen Dowd … Bill Plante is 82 (h/t Ben Chang) … LCV President Gene Karpinski is 68 … Michael Reed, RNC deputy COS for comms (h/t Cassie Smedile) … Eric Alterman is 6-0 … Toby Harnden is 54 … Colin Milligan, senior associate director for media relations at the American Hospital Association … Frank Raines is 71 … Jack Torry … Margaret Chadbourn … Michael Block … Karl Beckstein … WaPo’s Molly Gannon and Jen Liberto … CAP’s Marcella Bombardieri … David Vyorst … Alexandra Shapiro … Mary Kusler … Sean Johnson of the Maryland State Education Association (h/t Brian Dunn) … Amanda Callanan,VP of communications at the Claremont Institute …
… Nina Totenberg, NPR legal affairs correspondent … Teddy Eynon … Andrea Seabrook,managing editor at Countable … Michael Tuchin is 55 … Ben Koltun, senior research analyst at Beacon Policy Advisors … Christina Daigneault … William Johnson … former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue is 73 … Francisco Martin-Rayo … Duncan Currie … Sinead Casey … Ellen Wulfhorst, chief correspondent for the Americas at the Thomson Reuters Foundation … John Ellsworth … Regina Schofield … Jeffrey Webb … Marc Schloss … Andy Gussert … Mary Jane Cobb (h/ts Teresa Vilmain) … Megan Milligan … Brennan Moss … Doug Michelman, president of the Sprint 1Million Project Foundation … Erin Haber (h/ts Jon Haber) … Hugh Kaufman … Andrew Baris
A message from the National Retail Federation:
Why is a comprehensive federal privacy law important to enact now? As businesses leverage new technologies to meet consumers’ growing expectations for personalization and a seamless experience between online and in-store shopping, consumers are sharing an increasing amount of data. But states are crafting and enacting privacy laws that don’t require all businesses – such as third-party businesses which consumers don’t even know exist – to protect consumers’ personal information. If this trend continues, it’s American consumers who stand to lose the most. It’s time for federal data privacy legislation that will provide a uniform and fair framework for consumers and businesses alike, across all industry sectors. Learn more at
- Anna Palmer @apalmerdc
- Jake Sherman @JakeSherman.
BRIGHT
| Share with a friend you think would love this!Tuesday, January 14, 2020 Some Iranian State TV Anchors Are Quitting: They Don’t Want to Lie Anymore Following the Iranian regime’s downing of Ukrainian Flight 752, massive protests erupted as the mullahs attempted to conduct damage control. But it seems some in the media, tasked with disseminating the regime’s lies likely at the risk of bodily harm, are no longer interested in doing so. From Fox News: “At least two Iranian journalists at a state-owned media outlet reportedly resigned from their jobs, and another left a while back, apologizing for “the 13 years I told you lies” to her supporters as Tehran grapples with the fallout from protests stemming from a cover-up of its accidental downing of a Ukrainian airliner. Gelare Jabbari posted an apology on an Instagram that appears to have been deleted. “It was very hard for me to believe that our people have been killed,” the post read, according to The Guardian. “Forgive me that I got to know this late. And forgive me for the 13 years I told you lies.”… Thank you for accepting me as anchor until today,” said [former anchor] Zahra Khatami. “I will never get back to TV. Forgive me.” Fellow anchor Saba Rad said she was leaving journalism after 21 years. “Thank you for your support in all years of my career,” she said. “I announce that after 21 years working in radio and tv, I cannot continue my work in the media. I cannot.” Did Sanders Tell Warren that A Woman Couldn’t Beat Trump? Leading up to the impending debate, the left is embarking upon a new game of “he said, she said,” where the integrity of Sen. Elizabeth Warren may be pitted against the integrity of Sen. Bernie Sanders. From Tristan Justice of The Federalist: “Anonymous sources allegedly told CNN Monday that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders told Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren that a woman can’t beat President Donald Trump in November. CNN reports that four people confirmed Sanders’ statement to Warren, including two people Warren allegedly spoke with directly after the meeting and two others familiar with the conversation that took place at Warren’s Washington D.C. apartment in December 2018 before the two senators had officially entered the presidential contest. Sanders denied the comments to CNN. “It is ludicrous to believe that at the same meeting where Elizabeth Warren told me she was going to run for president, I would tell her that a women couldn’t win,” Sanders said in a statement.” AG Barr Wants Apple to Help Unlock iPhones Used by Penascola Shooter As a lawyer who’s fairly comfortable expanded executive power, Attorney General Bill Barr is pushing Apple to help unlock the iPhones used by the Penascola shooter, setting the stage for yet another battle in the long-term war between the government and big tech. From CNBC: “We have asked Apple for their help in unlocking the shooter’s iPhones. So far Apple has not given us any substantive assistance,” Barr said, next to a poster with a picture of the iPhones. “This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that investigators be able to get access to digital evidence once they have obtained a court order based on probable cause.”… Apple has designed its devices with encryption, which means that it cannot access personal information on locked iPhones without the password to the phone. In the San Bernardino case, Apple said that in order to retrieve data that hasn’t been uploaded to the company’s servers, it would have to build special software. Last week, an Apple employee focused on privacy who was speaking at a trade show defended Apple’s use of encryption. She said the company has a team working around the clock to respond to requests from law enforcement but that she doesn’t support building “back doors.” What I’m Reading TodayIs Bernie a Candidate of Destiny or an Incredibly Lucky Oddball? (National Review)Ben Rhodes Attacks Trump to Obscure Obama’s Complicity in Iran’s Forever War (The Federalist)Jeopardy! Contestant from Viral ‘What is Israel?’ Video Tells Full Story (The Daily Wire)Why Harry and Meghan’s Gambit Endangers the Throne (The Federalist)Every Sane Person Saw This Coming. Now a Pedophile Claims He Identifies as an 8 Year-Old Girl. (The Daily Wire) Pop Culture Roundup (New Year, New Theme) President Trump and First Lady Melania sit with Vince Vaughn at the national championship football game (People) and Trump gets standing ovation at the game. (Fox) Gigi Hadid called as potential juror in Harvey Weinstein Trial (E News) Chris Harrison alludes to a “gut-wrenching” season of the Bachelor (US Weekly)…but isn’t every season “never before”? Meatloaf is suing massive hotel chain for his recent fall that left him hospitalized for over a month (People) Meghan Markle’s life in Canada is very average (E News)BRIGHT is brought to you by The Federalist.Today’s BRIGHT Editor Erielle Davidson is a law student at Georgetown University Law Center. She previously was an economic research assistant at the Hoover Institution and a Publius Fellow at the Claremont Institute. She enjoys Chick-Fil-A, her pug, and Russian literature. Find her on Twitter at @politicalelle. Copyright © BRIGHT, All rights reserved. www.GetBRIGHTemail.com Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list Note: By using some of the links above, Bright may be compensated through the Amazon Affiliate program and Magic Links. However, none of this content is sponsored and all opinions are our own. |
DESERET NEWS
THE BLAZE
CONSERVATIVE DAILY NEWS
| CDN’s Daily News Blast delivers the day’s news first!View this email in your browserCDN Daily News Blast01/14/2020Excerpts:President Donald Trump’s Schedule for Tuesday, January 14, 2020By R. Mitchell -President Donald Trump will receive his daily briefing then head to Wisconsin to hold a Keep America Great rally. Keep up with Trump on Our President’s Schedule Page. President Trump’s Itinerary for 1/14/20 – note: this page will be updated during the day if events warrant All Times EST 2:45 …President Donald Trump’s Schedule for Tuesday, January 14, 2020 is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Ex-Treasury Department Official Pleads Guilty To Leaking Trump Associates’ Financial Documents To BuzzFeedBy Chuck Ross -A former Treasury Department official pleaded guilty in federal court in New York City on Monday to leaking sensitive financial records of multiple Trump associates and figures in the Trump-Russia investigation to a reporter at BuzzFeed News. Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, who served as a senior adviser at the Treasury …Ex-Treasury Department Official Pleads Guilty To Leaking Trump Associates’ Financial Documents To BuzzFeed is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Exposing the real “Why” of Leftists and Media Tropes of “Orange Man Bad” – Draining the SwampBy Bekahlyons -Do you feel like you are watching a preordained script packaged for consumption yet? The Leftist Media Hybrid is standing in the pulpit proselytizing “Orange Man ALL Bad,” therefore Iran must be good. Why? We will address the why later, but for now, behold flimflam Speaker Nancy Pelosi pontificating as …Exposing the real “Why” of Leftists and Media Tropes of “Orange Man Bad” – Draining the Swamp is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Apple Refusing to Provide DOJ Encrypted Information from Pensacola Gunman’s iPhoneBy Chris White -Apple is refusing to provide Attorney General William Barr access to the two phones a gunman used before killing three sailors in Florida. Apple gave investigators materials from Second Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani’s iCloud account. Alshamrani is a Saudi who killed three sailors during a Dec. 6 shooting in Pensacola, …Apple Refusing to Provide DOJ Encrypted Information from Pensacola Gunman’s iPhone is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Supreme Court Rejects Appeal Of Michelle Carter, Convicted For Encouraging Boyfriend’s SuicideBy Kevin Daley -The Supreme Court declined Monday to hear the appeal of Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted of manslaughter in connection with her boyfriend’s 2014 suicide. A state court said that Carter engaged in a “systematic campaign of coercion” that culminated in Conrad Roy’s suicide. Carter counters that the contested speech …Supreme Court Rejects Appeal Of Michelle Carter, Convicted For Encouraging Boyfriend’s Suicide is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Iran’s Unfriendly Skies – Grrr Graphics – Ben Garrison CartoonBy Ben Garrison -Last week Iran apologized for launching a Soviet-made missile that killed 176 people aboard Ukraine International Flight 752. President Hassan Rouhani said, “The Islamic Republic of Iran deeply regrets this disastrous mistake.” That’s not what the Iranian leaders said at first. They claimed it was due to a mechanical malfunction. …Iran’s Unfriendly Skies – Grrr Graphics – Ben Garrison Cartoon is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Taking a Stand – A.F. Branco CartoonBy A.F. Branco -Trump has placed his support for the Iranian people protesting the tyranny of the Iranian Dictators, while Democrats seem to support the dictators. Political cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020. See more Branco toons HERETaking a Stand – A.F. Branco Cartoon is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » The Weird, the Wacky, the Just Plain Cool: Best of CES 2020By Vanessa Bates Ramirez -As you know if you’ve ever been to, heard of, or read about the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, there’s no shortage of tech in any form: gadgets, gizmos, and concepts abound. You probably couldn’t see them all in a month even if you spent all day every day …The Weird, the Wacky, the Just Plain Cool: Best of CES 2020 is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » Information Indicated ‘Broad Scale’ Attack Within ‘Matter of Days’By C. Todd Lopez -Defense Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper reiterated his belief on Sunday morning talk shows that elimination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani would prevent an attack that could lead to more dangerous, open conflict with Iran. “We had information that there was going to be an attack within a matter of …Information Indicated ‘Broad Scale’ Attack Within ‘Matter of Days’ is original content from Conservative Daily News – Where Americans go for news, current events and commentary they can trust – Conservative News Website for U.S. News, Political Cartoons and more. Read on » See all breaking news, conservative commentary, political cartoons and more posted to CDN at our Home Page. Follow on TwitterFriend on FacebookAdd on Google PlusCopyright © 2020 Conservative Daily News, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list |
CAFFEINATED THOUGHTS
| Connect: Facebook Twitter YouTubeView this email in your browser“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves,” (James 1:22, ESV).Iowa Senate Republican Leadership 2020 Opening RemarksBy Caffeinated Thoughts on Jan 13, 2020 03:58 pm Read the transcripts of the 2020 opening remarks given by Iowa Senate Majority Leader Jack Whitver and Iowa Senate President Charles Schneider. Read in browser » Iowa House Republican Leadership 2020 Opening RemarksBy Caffeinated Thoughts on Jan 13, 2020 03:42 pm Read the transcripts of the 2020 opening remarks given by Speaker Pat Grassley, House Majority Leader Matt Windschiltl, and Speaker Pro Tem John Wills. Read in browser » Buttigieg Discusses Faith, Interrupted by Protesters At Des Moines RallyBy Shane Vander Hart on Jan 13, 2020 03:08 pm Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg attracted 750 Iowans to a town hall event in Des Moines, three weeks out from the Iowa Caucus. Read in browser » Cory Booker Suspends His Presidential CampaignBy Shane Vander Hart on Jan 13, 2020 10:38 am U.S. Senator Cory Booker, D-N.J., announced he would suspend his presidential campaign cutting the Democratic presidential candidate field down to 12. Read in browser » Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller Endorses Joe BidenBy Caffeinated Thoughts on Jan 13, 2020 09:47 am Attorney General of Iowa Tom Miller announced his endorsement of former Vice President Joe Biden for President three weeks out from the 2020 Iowa Caucus. Read in browser » Property Taxes for Climate Change. What’s Next?By Shane Vander Hart on Jan 13, 2020 08:32 am Chris Ingstad: Iowa City serves as an example of why being aware of what your city is doing with your tax dollars is so important. Read in browser » Recent Articles: Wiggins to Retire from the Iowa Supreme Court We Don’t Need Paternalistic Public Policy Iran Shoots Down Airliner, Buttigieg Suggests Trump Shares Blame Grassley on Iranian Aggression: ‘Sometimes You Have to Stand Up to the Bully’ Ernst: U.S. Must Remain Vigilant Against IranLaunched in 2006, Caffeinated Thoughts reports news and shares commentary about culture, current events, faith and state and national politics from a Christian and conservative point of view. Caffeinated Thoughts P.O. Box 57184 Des Moines, IA 50317 (515) 321-5077 Editor, Shane Vander Hart Connect: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.ShareTweetShareForwardCopyright © 2020 Caffeinated Thoughts, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. |
LIBERTY NATION
| Daily BriefingCONSERVATIVE NEWS | LIBERTARIAN NEWS | COMMENTARYVISIT LibertyNation.com FROM OUR NEWSROOMVirginia Democrats Betray Agreement and Move Ahead on Gun ControlBy Scott D. Cosenza, Esq.A red flag law, new background checks, and one-gun-a-month bills advanced.Click Here What America’s Thinking44% of likely U.S. voters say their views are closest to the average Democratic member of Congress.Just 13% identify most with the average Republican member of Congress, but 37% say their views are closest to GOP President Trump.40% of voters think the country is heading in the right direction. Down one point from last week but up four from December.48% of voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. SAY WHAT? Princess Di, Elvis, Martin Luther King — and SoleimaniBy Tim DonnerReactions to Trump’s strike on Soleimani ranged wide, and Hollywood took incoming on its hypocrisy.Click Here Washington WhispersComing down the pipeline:A judge ruled that the Trump administration acted within its authority when it separated from their parents at the border after determining the parents to be unfit or dangerous.Sen. Roy Blunt told said that the Senate Republican caucus likely doesn’t have the votes to dismiss the articles of impeachment against President Trump.Sen. Rand Paul insisted that if necessary, he will force witnesses to come forward that conservatives want to hear from, including Hunter Biden.Elizabeth Warren has thrown Bernie Sanders under the electoral bus by saying that in 2018, the Vermont socialist told her a woman could not win the White House. Liberty Nation GenZBy Liberty Nation StaffClick Here Your Daily Political DevotionalA Glimpse at What’s Hot in the PolitisphereWith Senator Roy Blunt suggesting that Republicans don’t have the 51 votes needed to dismiss the articles of impeachment, recent polling should act as a dire warning to the members of the GOP who think their party can go it alone without President Trump. 44% of voters feel more closely aligned with the average Democrat compared with just 13% who favor the Republican outlook. However, 37% share the same values as Donald Trump. If the GOP has ideas of jettisoning the president and trying again in 2024, they should seriously consider what 13% represents in terms of holding power. Political Horse Race: Warren’s Disaster and Biden Under PressureBy Mark AngelidesThe Democrat field flips as crunch time arrives.Click Here News RoundupWe’ve Surfed The Web for YouThings Mike Bloomberg Could’ve Spent $200 Million On Instead Of His Pointless CampaignEither Bernie Is A Sexist Or Warren Is A LiarBurrow, LSU Cap Heisman Season, Beat Clemson 42-25 for TitlePresident Trump, Melania Trump cheered by crowd at LSU-Clemson national championship gameBarr and Wray agree: Investigations into presidential campaigns must be approved Liberty Nation On The Go: Listen to Today’s Top News 01.14.20By Liberty Nation StaffConservative News – Hot Off The Press – Audio Playlist – AD FREEClick Here WATCH NOWFEATURED LNTVLNTV: Illinois Lets Gun Owners In On New Marijuana Rules – WATCH NOW!LNTV: Bernie Closing In On Biden – WATCH NOW!LNTV: 2019 Moments Haunting 2020 Democrats – WATCH NOW! The Uprising Podcast: Aiming At The NRA Check out one of our podcasts!Subscribe and get notified of new arrivals.SUBSCRIBELNTV: Robert Kraft Now Facing Felonies In Prostitution Arrest – WATCH NOW! Check out one of our videos!View the latest Liberty Nation videos on YouTube.WATCH NOW |
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ROLL CALL
Morning Headlines
Impeachment articles’ path to Senate governed by rules and precedent
The expected House vote this week to name impeachment managers for the Senate trial and authorize them to spend House funds will set in motion a set of established steps that will guide the articles of impeachment from the House to the Senate. Read More…
Hoyer: House priorities for 2020 include health care, infrastructure, climate, redistricting
House Democrats in 2020 plan to pass legislation on top party priorities like health care, infrastructure and climate as well as more under-the-radar subjects like modernizing Congress and redistricting — all while trying to fully fund the government on time for the first time in 24 years, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer said. Read More…
Think impeachment has been a self-defeating crusade for Democrats? Think again
[OPINION] DES MOINES, Iowa — TV talking heads say Democrats may force vulnerable GOP senators to cast a few potentially embarrassing votes on impeachment witnesses but the entire charade will be mostly forgotten by November. The latest Iowa Poll, however, pokes holes in the conventional wisdom. Read More…Click here to subscribe to Fintech Beat for the latest market and regulatory developments in finance and financial technology.
Dems say GOP broke ethics rules using video trackers in House office buildings
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is accusing its GOP counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee, of violating ethics rules by sending trackers to video record members of Congress in House office buildings. Read More…
Rep. Billy Long fractures shoulder chasing daughter’s poodle
Rep. Billy Long returned to Capitol Hill last week with a new accessory — a sling. While he was in his hometown of Springfield, Missouri, for the holidays, the congressman fractured his shoulder while “wrangling” the family puppy. Watch the video here…
Ukraine aid legal ruling could shake up impeachment trial
Congress’ investigative arm may be about to add a wrinkle into the Senate trial of President Donald Trump sparked by the holdup of aid to Ukraine. The Government Accountability Office could soon release its legal opinion on whether Trump and senior officials violated a 1974 law aimed at preventing presidential “impoundments.” Read More…
Cyberattackers lurking longer inside computers, report finds
Online attackers are becoming so good at hiding themselves that they can remain undetected in victims’ computers for months before being found, potentially giving these criminals more time to inflict greater damage than if they were detected earlier, according to cybersecurity research firm CrowdStrike. Read More…
OPINION — Once again, there’s a new “hot” candidate, and this time it’s billionaire Tom Steyer. But there is plenty of reason to believe this Steyer boomlet isn’t very meaningful and that if and when Democrats look at him at greater length, they’ll find him unappealing as the party’s standard-bearer in November. Read More…
Hunter Duncan still wants you to know he’s not Duncan Hunter
Hunter Duncan is just an aspiring comedian in Austin, Texas, who’s tired of being mistaken for the embattled former congressman from California. Read More…
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THE EPOCH TIMES
“The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.” NAPOLEON BONAPARTEEducation Spending Tops California’s $220 Billion State Budget Proposal Harvard Professor Sues New York Times Over Epstein Article Attorney General Barr Says Pensacola Shooting Was an ‘Act of Terrorism’ Pompeo Will Not Attend Congressional Hearing on Killing of Iran’s Soleimani: Engel The internet was awash on Jan. 13 with disturbing videos of rubber bullets and teargas fired on Iranian people protesting against the shooting down of an Ukrainian passenger jet that was carrying at least 82 Iranian citizens. Read moreThe U.S. intelligence community’s inspector general, who reviewed the anonymous whistleblower complaint that triggered the House Democratic-led impeachment effort, previously served under then-acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord, who herself worked as the top outside counsel supporting the impeachment effort. Read moreThe Jan. 14 Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa, will be the last significant chance for the candidates to impress voters before Iowans take a stand in their caucuses. Read moreChicago area jails released 1,070 inmates who were in the country illegally in fiscal 2019, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Read moreDefined benefit plan participants should be allowed to sue plan administrators for fiduciary breaches even when the retirement plan is overfunded and participants have not lost money, a lawyer for participants told the Supreme Court. Read moreThailand authorities said a visiting Chinese tourist has been diagnosed with a new strain of pneumonia that’s the first confirmed case outside of Wuhan City, China. Read more See More Top StoriesConfronting Iran: US is Taking the Right Approach By Barbara Kay In March 2004, an Israeli missile strike killed Islamist zealot Sheik Ahmed Yassin, founder of Hamas, which has been classified as a terrorist movement in Canada since 2002 and in many other countries, including some Arab nations. Read moreBeware Putting Political Power in the Hands of Children By Gerry Bowler If you go to your dictionary for a definition of the word “obscurity” you might well find a picture of Andrew Bonar Law. Who? Despite being briefly the prime minister of Great Britain, Law is really known only for two things: he was the only British PM to be born in Canada, and to him is attributed the phrase: “I am their leader; I must follow them.” Read more See More OpinionsKraft and Heinz Merge: Is It Worth It? By Valentin Schmid (March 25, 2015) Warren Buffett usually outperforms the market and makes a lot of money for his shareholders. That’s good. When it comes to the merger of Heinz and Kraft, he might be overdoing it. Read moreAt Turning Point USA’s 2019 Student Action Summit, we sit down with Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States, which seeks to limit the power of the federal government by returning some of that power to the states. Meckler is also co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. How to Curb Federal Government Overreach With A Convention of States—Mark Meckler ExplainsCopyright © 2020 The Epoch Times, All rights reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can unsubscribe from this list or remove my account. |
THE WASHINGTON POST MORNING MIX
| Sign up for this newsletterRead onlineStories from all over. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., greet each other before the first of two Democratic presidential primary debates hosted by CNN.Alleged sexist comment, Warren statement, reopen feminist grievances against Bernie SandersOn Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential ambitions and the aspirations of women, who have long desired to see themselves in the White House, clashed yet again.By Allyson Chiu and Katie Shepherd ● Read more » St. Louis’ top prosecutor, claiming a racist conspiracy, is suing the city under a law created to fight the Ku Klux KlanWhen St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner was elected in 2016, she became one of several progressive prosecutors nationwide who successfully campaigned on promises to rethink tough-on-crime policies, and aggressively investigate police violence.By Antonia Farzan ● Read more » Who could hate ‘Goodnight Moon?’ This powerful New York librarian.The woman credited with inventing children’s libraries “hated” one of the most universally beloved children’s books.By Meagan Flynn ● Read more » After leading a viral protest against drag queens, a gay college student took his own lifeThe 21-year-old had emerged as a young voice for conservatism in Australian politics.By Teo Armus ● Read more » ‘We’re not sure how it got through’: Utah investigates whether to recall a driver’s ‘DEPORTM’ vanity license plate“How does this plate I just saw not violate your guidelines?” he asked in a tweet.By Timothy Bella ● Read more » We think you’ll like this newsletterCheck out Must Reads for a curated selection of our best journalism in your inbox every Saturday, plus a peek behind the scenes into how one story came together. Sign up » |
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CHICAGO TRIBUNE
| VIEW IN BROWSERJANUARY 14, 2020CHICAGOTRIBUNE.COMDAYWATCH1DuPage officials ID killer of 16-year-old girl in 1976 cold case. They believe the suspect, now dead, may have been a serial killer.TUESDAY, JAN 14An unsolved string of killings of young suburban women in the 1970s frustrated police for decades. Now authorities in DuPage County believe that by cracking one of those cold cases, they may have uncovered the trail of a serial killer.By digging up the remains of the suspect, and matching his DNA to the crime, investigators were able to identify Bruce Lindahl as the killer of 16-year-old Pamela Maurer in Lisle in 1976. Though Lindahl died a violent death himself long ago, police believe they may have uncovered a series of his victims.2Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s agriculture chief resigns over ‘rape in Champaign’ email, governor’s office saysTUESDAY, JAN 14Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s top agriculture official resigned this weekend after the administration learned he knew in 2012 of an email in which a powerful lobbyist and close confidant of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan sought leniency for a state worker who he said had “kept his mouth shut” about a “rape in Champaign.”The resignation is the first tangible political fallout since the email was first reported last week by WBEZ, leading to a chorus of condemnation and calls for investigation.Column: How did Springfield lobbyist Michael McClain ingratiate himself with so many in Springfield? A very large expense account, writes Tribune columnist Kristen McQuery.Citing the departures of those who resigned while under federal scrutiny, Illinois state Comptroller Susana Mendoza is pitching a plan to prevent lawmakers from drawing a state paycheck after officially leaving office.3Chicago aldermen reject proposed $125,000 lawsuit settlement for Laquan McDonald shooting witnessTUESDAY, JAN 14Aldermen took the rare step of rejecting a proposed legal settlement, denying a $125,000 payout to a woman who witnessed the fatal shooting of black teen Laquan McDonald by a white Chicago police officer and said authorities afterward belittled her and accused her of lying about what she saw.The proposed payment drew the ire of several aldermen when city lawyers recommended it last month, with some questioning why the city should pay her after she sued because of her treatment by investigators following the infamous 2014 shooting.In remarks to civic leaders, interim Chicago police Superintendent Charlie Beck called the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald a “tipping point” that must lead the department toward reform.Speaking of Chicago’s top cop, only two dozen people are vying for the position, drawing significantly less interest than the last time the city offered the job four years ago.4How the recreational marijuana sold in Illinois is grownTUESDAY, JAN 14Wondering why Illinois keeps running out of legal weed? The law says everything sold in the state has to be grown in Illinois — and no one’s been approved to open a new facility since recreational marijuana was legalized. Here’s what you need to know.Amid statewide marijuana shortages, an Illinois regulator warned dispensaries they are required by law to keep enough product on hand for medical patients.Marijuana shops sold more than $19.7 million in recreational weed the first 12 days of sales in Illinois.Chicago hospitals are bracing for more weed-related visits. The Illinois Poison Center is already taking calls on more cases, including some involving small children.5Aviation commissioner says O’Hare rehab is on schedule, and will pose minimum fuss for travelersTUESDAY, JAN 14Chicago’s aviation commissioner is promising that the massive $8.5 billion rehabilitation of O’Hare International Airport will get done on time, and with minimal disruption for both travelers and airlines. The pledge from Commissioner Jamie Rhee comes despite a major delay on an ongoing airport project — the reconstruction of the “people mover” light rail system.6Megamansions of Michael Jordan, Richard Marx among 9 priciest languished listings in Chicagoland — here’s where they standTUESDAY, JAN 14With the decade having just concluded, it’s a good time to take stock of the status of some high-priced and high-profile mansions that sold — or, in some cases, languished on the market — during the 2010s.Clearly, there were some record-shattering sales in the 2010s — not just of the combined $58.75 million that billionaire Ken Griffin paid for four separate units atop the building at 9 W. Walton St., but also of mansionssales in the city and the suburbs. However, for the owners of some megamansions in Chicago and beyond, the 2010s concluded with far more uncertainty. Here is a look at the status of nine megamansions in the city and suburbs that drew attention during the 2010s.The North Shore still rules the Chicago area’s most expensive ZIP codes, but the city now has nine of the top 25.7Column: Thanks to the cheating Astros, the Black Sox finally have some company on the list of infamous baseball scandalsTUESDAY, JAN 14The Houston Astros fired manager AJ Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow after MLB suspended the pair for the team’s sign-stealing during its run to the 2017 World Series title and during the 2018 season.Unlike the Black Sox, who had eight players banned from baseball after throwing the 1919 World Series to the Reds, the Astros got off relatively easy, says Tribune baseball writer Paul Sullivan.Editorial: The Houston Astros are now stained by baseball’s biggest scandal in years.8Oscar predictions: Why Antonio Banderas should win best actor instead of Joaquin Phoenix for ‘Joker’TUESDAY, JAN 14Women were shut out of the best director category at the Oscars again, but that’s not all — 19 of the 20 actors and actresses nominated were white. Tribune film critic Michael Phillips breaks down this year’s Oscar nominees and makes his picks in a few key categories.Commentary: Chicago native’s “Hair Love” receives Oscar nomination. The Tribune’s Christen A. Johnson is glad the academy got this one right.advertisement UNSUBSCRIBE | NEWSLETTERS | PRIVACY POLICY | TERMS OF SERVICECopyright © 2020 | Chicago Tribune | 160 N. Stetson Ave., Third Floor, Chicago, IL 60601ABOUT THIS EMAIL You received this email because you are following the Daywatch newsletter. |
AMERICA THINKER
| View this email in your browserRecent ArticlesAnatomy of a Clinton ScamJan 14, 2020 01:00 am The Clinton Foundation was never ‘organized’ as a public charity, independent of the Clinton family Read More… An Introduction to QJan 14, 2020 01:00 am Q first appeared in October 2017 on an anonymous online forum called 4Chan, posting messages that implied top-clearance knowledge of upcoming events, creating a disturbing, multifaceted portrait of a global crime syndicate that operates with impunity. Read More… The Score: US 10, Iran 0Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am If any Democratic president had achieved what President Trump has with Iran, he’d be praised to the high heavens by a fawning press and foreign policy establishment. Read More… Now Is the Time to Stay in Iraq, Not LeaveJan 14, 2020 01:00 am If Obama’s foreign policy failures taught us anything, it is that pulling out troops in Iraq only makes things worse. Read More… Why Is the Gay Presidential Candidate Silent about Iran Hanging Gays?Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Pete Buttigieg trips over his own feet again. Read More… Vermont Attacks the US Constitution (Again): Closing the ‘Charleston Loophole’Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am The tiny socialist state’s gun grab stretches the limits of constitutionality. Read More… Recent Blog Posts First, the purges: Comrade Chesa Boudin fires prosecutors for … prosecuting Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Apparently, it takes Stalinist tactics to produce the kind of chaos San Francisco should be bracing for. Read more… Whoa! GOP does not have 51 votes to dismiss? Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Why are people such as Susan Collins in the Democrat camp alongside Bernie Sanders these days? Read more… When it comes to the ‘news’ media, their anti-Trump narrative is relentless Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am In a breaking story about Russian hacking in Ukraine, the media’s bias is on full display. Read more… Wisconsin Democrats held in contempt for refusing to purge voter rolls Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Who’s taken in when Democrats insist on grossly swollen voter rolls to protect against “vote suppression”? Read more… Even Leftists are fighting back against the media’s viciousness Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am This time, it’s a Leftist professor taking on the New York Times for implying despicable things about him in a headline. Read more… Trump had Soleimani in his crosshairs for a long time Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am In their efforts to indict Trump for Soleimani’s death, the media keep switching narratives, and they’re doing it again Read more… Did he or didn’t he? It’s hard to believe what Warren alleges about Bernie. Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Only Warren and people “familiar with the meeting” support Warren’s bizarre accusation about Bernie’s sexism. Read more… Bloomberg not so popular as presidential candidate Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Millions of dollars got 45 followers in Texas. Read more… Taco Bell trumps Biden and Bernie Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am With news of Taco Bell paying managers six figures, it’s getting harder for Dems to make the case that working poeple are suffering under President Trump. Read more… Don’t be fooled by liberal dark money influence Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am As the election season advances into 2020, we must expose the liberal dark money operations that threaten the Trump administration’s progress. Read more… Washington Post speaks about antisemitism from ivory tower, misses the cure Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am A “concerted community response”? Really? Read more… Progressives sure do admire the Iranian terror regime, don’t they? Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am The Democrats’ Hollywood proxies are saying things that the most radical of the Dem elected officials can only dream of saying publicly regarding radical extremists in Iran. Read more… Is France beyond reform? Jan 14, 2020 01:00 am Before becoming too smug about the French predicament, ask yourself if America is very different. Read more… FISA Court judge signals cover-up underway with outrageous appointment of lefty Lawfare blogger to oversee ‘reform’ Jan 13, 2020 01:00 am If you are 100% certain that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, then you will be delighted by the appointment of David Kris to oversee a review of the FBI’s practices in seeking FISA Court approval of its applications to spy on American citizens. Read more… Depart-acus! Jan 13, 2020 01:00 am The fiercely heterosexual Corey Booker’s departure reveals how hollow the Democrat Party’s focus on diversity really is. Read more… View this email in your browserAmerican Thinker is a daily internet publication devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans. |
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NBC
| From NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray and Carrie Dann. FIRST READ: Before tonight’s debate, Democrats need to have an honest conversation why they lost in 2016A debate about gender has erupted right before tonight’s Democratic debate in Iowa. Can a woman defeat Trump in 2020? (Elizabeth Warren claims Bernie Sanders told her no in a Dec. 2018 meeting; Sanders denies saying it.)Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesBut this question sidesteps an important question about 2016: Did Hillary Clinton lose because of her first name (Hillary)? Or her last name (Clinton)? Or both? Because what happened in the last month of the 2016 election – the Comey letter, the WikiLeaks disclosures (especially regarding “Clinton Inc.”), the Trump campaign parading Bill Clinton’s accusers after the “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump – certainly suggests that her last name played a big role. Clinton’s last name, despite her qualifications for the job, screamed establishment, scandal and controversy – all of which the Trump campaign seized on to its benefit in 2016. And yes, the Trump campaign also created an environment where ugly gender commentary was hardly stifled. (Remember the “Trump that ****” swag? The “woman card” and “nasty woman” lines? Trump’s talk about Clinton’s “look” and “stamina”?) Gender politics played a role. But it wasn’t the whole ballgame, especially regarding what happened in the final weeks of the 2016 race.Three questions for tonight’s debateAs for tonight’s debate, both Sanders and Warren are playing with matches regarding their increasing tension. Can Warren really be seen as the “unity candidate” when she and her supporters were quick to divulge this story ahead of tonight’s debate? Can Sanders afford to rekindle memories from 2016 by picking fights against both Warren and Biden? (And in the gender debate above, Sanders needs to be careful of implying that he’s the candidate who can win over sexists. The suggestion here: There are voters who might support Dem policies but who don’t want a woman as president?) And how does this Warren-versus-Sanders feud NOT benefit Joe Biden – with just 20 days before the Iowa caucuses) and right before the likely start of the Senate impeachment trial against Trump?DATA DOWNLOAD: And the number of the day is… four.Four. That’s the number of candidates Monday’s Monmouth poll of Iowa reduces the Democratic field to – in asking likely Iowa caucus-goers whom they would support if the only viable Democrats (reaching the required 15 percent support) were Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg. The horserace numbers when the race boils down to just four candidates: Biden: 28 percentButtigieg: 25 percentSanders: 24 percentWarren: 16 percentTWEET OF THE DAY: Why second choice matters – and why it doesn’t“Russia, if you’re listening…”Another subject ahead of tonight’s debate: “The Ukrainian natural gas company that prompted President Donald Trump to seek investigations from Ukraine’s president over its hiring of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son was hacked by Russian spies, security experts said in a report released Monday,” per NBC News. The Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Army, or GRU, “launched a phishing campaign targeting Burisma Holdings” as early as November, according to the cybersecurity firm Area 1 Security. What was going on in November? Answer: The House impeachment inquiry into Trump over Ukraine?“It doesn’t really matter”Well, so much for the all the attempts by Trump administration officials to argue that the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was based on an “imminent” security threat. The president yesterday tweeted out that whether it was “imminent” or not doesn’t really matter. “The Fake News Media and their Democrat Partners are working hard to determine whether or not the future attack by terrorist Soleimani was “imminent” or not, & was my team in agreement. The answer to both is a strong YES., but it doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past!”2020 VISION: Dem debate – plus a Trump rallyOn the campaign trail today: The Democratic debate from Iowa starts at 9:00 pm ET… President Trump holds a rally in Milwaukee at 8:00 pm ET… Also today, Andrew Yang has a town hall in Ames, Iowa… Julian Castro campaigns for Elizabeth Warren in Clive, Iowa… Jill Biden, also in the Hawkeye State, stumps for her husband in Rockwell City and Boone… And Tulsi Gabbard is in New Hampshire. Dispatches from NBC’s campaign embeds: Deval Patrick, who is now the only African-American candidate remaining in the 2020 Democratic race, yesterday reacted to both Cory Booker ending his presidential campaign and what Tuesday’s debate stage will look like, NBC’s Amanda Golden reports. “America needs to know that America is not going to see itself on that debate stage, and sadly I think the debates have become a marker of the progress of campaigns,” Patrick said. He added, “I mean there was always going to be a winnowing. Like, that’s supposed to happen, but I don’t think that the rules are necessarily serving as a way to demonstrate this broad talent in the field reflecting the Democratic Party and reflecting America today… It’s certainly concerning to me that the candidates who’ve been leaving are highly talented voices and overwhelmingly voices of color.” And three weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Joe Biden is stressing to caucus-goers that the race is a toss-up, NBC’s Marianna Sotomayor reports from Des Moines: “’I think we’re going to do well here in Iowa. It’s because of you. People are beginning to make up their minds now and this is a critical moment,’ Biden said at his campaign office. He remarked on the latest Iowa polls too, saying, ‘All the polling data that I’ve read and seen is all – it’s a toss-up. The latest Monmouth poll out which has me ahead now. But they’re all close. This is a real toss-up. And the last couple weeks here makes a gigantic difference.’”Talking Policy with BenjyPresident Trump has a long history of misrepresenting his health-care position, but even by those standards a tweet on Monday stood out in which he claimed he had “saved” protections for pre-existing conditions. In fact, he’s actively trying to overturn them in the courts and has sought to weaken them through legislation, NBC’s Benjy Sarlin writes. Current law requires insurers to take on customers regardless of any pre-existing condition and charge them the same premiums as healthy clients. But these rules were part of the Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama — and the Trump administration is currently asking courts to throw the law out in its entirety. In addition, the president previously backed several ACA repeal bills in Congress that would have rolled back at least some related protections, and his administration has championed new rules that expand the use of short-term plans that don’t cover pre-existing conditions. While “Obamacare” has long been divisive, polls have found majority support even among Republicans for its rules on pre-existing conditions, giving Trump plenty of motive to misrepresent his position in an election year. Recently, the administration’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court to hold off on a ruling on the pending ACA lawsuit, which would push a final decision on its fate until after November. THE LID: Good news, bad newsDon’t miss the pod from yesterday, when we broke down the good news and the bad news for major candidates in the latest Des Moines Register poll.ICYMI: News clips you shouldn’t miss Here’s what you need to know from that new Monmouth poll out of Iowa yesterday. Jim Clyburn’s grandson cut a radio ad for Pete Buttigieg. (And Buttigieg picked up an endorsement from the mayor of Iowa’s most diverse city.) No, Trump did not “save” pre-existing conditions. What might the Senate impeachment trial look like? We’re starting to get some answers. One thing we do know about the trial: Even Trump’s allies don’t want a vote to dismiss the charges entirely.Thanks for reading. If you’re a fan, please forward this to a friend. They can sign up here. We love hearing from our readers, so shoot us a line here with your comments and suggestions. Thanks, Chuck, Mark and Carrie.Follow |
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REALCLEARPOLITICS
01/14/2020Share: Carl Cannon’s Morning NoteDems and Start-Ups; Ed Orgeron; Deadly Flu Good morning. It’s Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020, and we have a new national champion in college football. I just knew it was going to be the Tigers. I’d have put money on it. In any event, although I’m still out on assignment, I am sending you historical essays on topics I’ve written about previously. Today’s concerns events that happened a century ago, but they might make you run out and get a flu shot, if you haven’t already.On this date in 1919, readers of the New York Times awoke to the chilling news that the worldwide flu pandemic was reaping its grim harvest in a home for disabled children. Six children and a nun at a Catholic institution in Port Jefferson, N.Y., had died, the Times reported. Of the 350 children in the home, some 250 had contracted the illness, the paper added.Much worse news lay ahead.I’ll revisit this grim epidemic in a moment. First, I’d point you to RealClearPolitics’ front page, which presents our poll averages, videos, breaking news stories, and aggregated opinion pieces spanning the political spectrum. We also offer original material from our own reporters, columnists, and contributors, including the following:* * *How Would Democratic Candidates Reinvigorate Entrepreneurship? Ahead of tonight’s debate in Iowa, Dane Stangler spotlights a topic that’s received little attention during the campaign.The Ed Orgeron Story Teaches Economic Lessons. RealClearMarkets editor John Tamny writes that LSU’s football championship Monday night is a classic example of someone learning from failure.Russia’s Nuclear Arms Breakout. In RealClearDefense, Mark B. Schneider warns that extending the New START Treaty will play into the Kremlin’s plans to increase its arsenal.What the Largest Nuclear Test in Space Did to Hawaii. RealClearScience editor Ross Pomeroy revisits the consequences of the 1962 Starfish Prime detonation.STEM Skills and the Workplace: Falling Behind. In RealClearPolicy, Brent Orrell spotlights a study showing that those working on the frontiers of technology are at the greatest risk of skills obsolescence. * * *As it circled the globe, the “Spanish flu” hit port cities first, often striking densely crowded housing facilities — notably military barracks — the hardest. In New Orleans, the influenza epidemic peaked on Jan. 14, 1919, with 524 new cases reported on this date alone.Although it earned its name because it spread so rapidly in Spain, the pandemic of 1918-1920 did not start in Europe. It may have originated in China, although one recent theory is that it began here, in the United States. What is clear is that somewhere along the line a genetic shift in the virus’s makeup took place, with catastrophic consequences for the human race.It’s also evident that the spread of it around the globe was aided by world war. As horrifying a toll as World War I took on human life, the flu was even deadlier. Worldwide, an estimated 50 million people are thought to have died in the two-year pandemic. Some 650,000 of them were Americans, six times as many as died in the “Great War.”The first wave of the onslaught was mild, and it was noticed in the spring of 1918. Noticed, but not acted upon, as federal authorities preoccupied with war were insufficiently attentive: American soldiers shipping out from Fort Riley, Kan., took the flu with them to Europe. By October, President Wilson was urged to halt troop deployments overseas, but the Army brass argued, not unreasonably, that the war was at a crucial crossroads and that U.S. reinforcements were needed to bring it to a conclusion.Nonetheless, it was a fateful decision. The flu was being spread in the trenches, yes, and that was bad enough. But the strain that returned from Europe in the autumn and winter was a far more lethal version of the virus.In August of 1918, at Chelsea Naval Hospital near Boston Harbor, a Navy physician named J.J. Keegan began seeing returning sailors with flu symptoms of frightening severity: The illness often killed its victims within days — and sometimes hours — of them becoming sick. Thousands of personnel were stricken, and Keegan worried that it would spread to the civilian population.This fear was realized quickly. Three Bostonians died in September. A “Win the War for Freedom” parade in the city featuring some 1,000 sailors served as a veritable highway for the flu. As PBS noted in a riveting documentary on the pandemic, “This rousing display of patriotism did little to end the war and much to spread the deadly flu.”Fearing the worst, Massachusetts Department of Health officials warned that “unless precautions are taken, the disease in all probability will spread to the civilian population of the city.”By then, it was too late. The deadly strain was already racing up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and it would quickly migrate to every corner of this country. And, since viruses do not recognize human beings’ sovereign borders, the same grim pattern was repeating itself all over the globe.“Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century,” John M. Barry, author of the most definitive book on the pandemic, wrote in 2004. “It killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years.”In the ensuing century, science learned a great deal about the spread of such contagions during those grim years. On this date in 1920, when a single official of Chicago State Hospital — a person who had had no contact with patients — contracted the flu, the entire facility was quarantined.But the astonishing death toll of the pandemic was not primarily because poor medical practices were followed. It was because the strain of that virus, which was brought back from extinction in 2005 for study, was at least 100 times more lethal than typical flu viruses.This should give us pause. Influenza pandemics have spread through the world three times since then (in 1957, 1968, and 2009) with nothing like the 1918 death rate. But if it happened before, it can happen again. Perhaps the best thing human beings have going for us is our collective memory.“Having gone through it once, having seen how bad it could be, has made people in the public health and governmental sphere aware of how bad flu can be,” Dr. Nicole Bouvier, a New York City professor of infectious diseases, told the Chicago Tribune on the 100th anniversary of the pandemic’s start. “That may be the biggest lesson we have learned, to not underestimate how bad flu can be.”Carl M. Cannon Washington Bureau chief, RealClearPolitics @CarlCannon (Twitter) ccannon@realclearpolitics.com Having trouble viewing this email? | [Unsubscribe] | Update Subscription Preferences Copyright © 2020 RealClearHoldings, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email becuase you opted in at our website. Our mailing address is: RealClearHoldings666 Dundee RoadBldg. 600Northbrook, IL 60062 Add us to your address book |
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THE FEDERALIST
| Your daily update of new content from The Federalist Be lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray January 14, 2020 If Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Win Iowa, Joe Biden Will Be The NomineeBy John Daniel Davidson If Biden runs away with the nomination, it could have huge implications for the future of the Democratic Party—especially its activist left wing. Full articleCanadian Appeals Court Rules Father Can’t Stop Teen Daughter From Taking Male HormonesBy Jeremiah Keenan Last Friday, the highest court in British Columbia, Canada, ruled that a father could not prevent doctors from giving his 15-year-old daughter testosterone injections to ‘affirm’ her transgender male identity. Full articleNo, Joe Rogan, Jesus Was Not A Psychedelic MushroomBy Hans Fiene The idea that Jesus came into the world as a communal acid trip is itself far more likely to be the result of people like Joe Rogan tripping on ‘shrooms than the truth. Full article5 Times Media Spin Biased The Government’s Crossfire Hurricane InvestigationBy Margot Cleveland The recent inspector general report revealed that the Crossfire Hurricane team and Department of Justice and FBI leaders fell for many of the false Russia collusion narratives the press pushed. Full articleFBI Director Wray’s FISA Abuse Response Flips Justice The BirdBy Adam Mill Wray is expecting us to believe that FBI agents lied to a court because they didn’t have the right form. A normal court would consider his response an act of defiance towards its constitutional authority. Full articleIt’s True, The Oscars Snubbed Jennifer LopezBy Emily Jashinsky In ‘Hustlers,’ Jennifer Lopez transformed into a difficult character, masterfully conveying layers of class tension and womanhood that less capable actresses wouldn’t have grasped. Full article9 Reasons You Should Have A Baby This Year If You’re Young And MarriedBy Joy Pullmann Growing a family may be the number one contribution you can make to a happy life for yourself. And you only have about a quarter of your adult life to make it happen. Full articleTrans Activist: It Isn’t Fair That Women Still Have Periods While Living As MenBy Chad Felix Greene According to trans activists, transmen can menstruate and become pregnant but also require acceptance as men in all traditional male activities and social roles. How is this supposed to work? Full articleWhy Michelle Williams Had To Justify Sacrificing Her Child For FameBy Noelle Mering Michelle Williams averted her eyes to the humanity of her child, a child whose face she could not see. But though she does not know the child, the child is known, as is she. Full articleRoger Scruton Was The Patron Saint Of Common SenseBy Marion Smith Sir Roger Scruton was a warrior for Western culture. Culture was, for him, everything: ‘a vessel in which intrinsic values are captured and handed on to future generations.’ Full articlePeople Who Must Testify If The Senate Calls New Witnesses In Impeachment TrialBy Tristan Justice If Democrats had taken their job seriously in the House, the following people already would have come forward to testify during impeachment proceedings. Full articleCardi B Might Just Be More Qualified For Congress Than AOC IsBy Chrissy Clark While Cardi B’s grammar is far from perfect, her life experiences suggest she’s more qualified to be in Congress than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Full articleHere’s Your Guide To The Seventh Democratic Primary DebateBy Tristan Justice The top six Democratic candidates will face off on stage tonight for the seventh and final debate before the first primary votes are cast in the 2020 election. Full articleAnonymous Sources Claim Sanders Told Warren A Woman Couldn’t WinBy Tristan Justice Anonymous sources allegedly claimed Sanders said a woman could not beat Trump in 2020. Warren has a long track record of making false claims. Full articleElizabeth Warren: Let’s Put Men In Women’s PrisonsBy Chrissy Clark Sen. Elizabeth Warren announced a bold new plan for criminal justice reform and a striking blow for gender equality: let’s put men in women’s prisons. Full articleSanders’ Team Shares Video Of Joe Biden’s Support For Iraq War In 2003By Chrissy Clark A Bernie Sanders speech writer released footage of Joe Biden criticizing anti-war Democrats back when George W. Bush initially entered the Iraq War. Full articleThings Mike Bloomberg Could’ve Spent $200 Million On Instead Of His Pointless CampaignBy Chrissy Clark Former New York City Mayor and 2020 contender Mike Bloomberg has already spent $200 million on his campaign in advertisements alone. Full articleCory Booker Drops Out Of Presidential RaceBy Tristan Justice Since jumping into the crowded Democratic contest last year, Booker failed to crack into a top-tier candidate and struggled for resources. Full article SANDERS SURGES, WARREN SPIRALS There are two points that could be made in virtually any television appearance discussing 2020 for the past two months: first, that increasingly this campaign situation looks like one that might resemble 2004, where there was a lot of upheaval in the primary season that ultimately came to naught when John Kerry ran the table and ended everything in a little more than a month. And second, that Bernie Sanders absolutely has a better chance at the nomination than almost any media commentators give him, including a much clearer path than Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and media dark horse Amy Klobuchar. Read more of The Transom by signing up for a free trial today. follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend Copyright © 2020 The Federalist, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences |
ARRA NEWS SERVICE
- Leftists Are Wrong: US Killing of Iran’s Suleimani a Legal Action
- Obama vs. Bernie
- US to Iraq: ‘Vote All You Want, We’re Not Leaving!’
- Notice Served To 5 States About Voter Registration Irregularities
- Saudis Expelled, Iran’s Unbelievably Bad Terrible Week, The Left’s Spin Machine
- Don’t be Fooled By Liberal Dark Money Influence
- Rep. McCarthy Explains Pelosi’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ in Delaying Senate Trial
- Trump’s Average Unemployment Rate Is The Lowest In Recorded History
- Hate Crime Absurdity
- Conservatives Should Stop Blindly Defending Law Enforcement, The Clergy, & Big Business . . .
- Friends . . .
- Vermin Competition
- Tulsi Gabbard Proves Again She’s an Apologist for Terrorists
- Tents, Homelessness & Misery: 9 Things I Saw in San Francisco
- Iran
- Donald Trump and the Mythmakers
- Cheap Labor Will End When Welfare Begins
- Jane Fonda Saves the Planet From Herself
- Nearly 300 Years Later, Gulliver’s Travels Is Still the Satire We Need
| Leftists Are Wrong: US Killing of Iran’s Suleimani a Legal ActionPosted: 13 Jan 2020 09:39 PM PSTDemonstrators protest the possibility of war with Iran from a pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive in Chicago during rush hour Jan. 9, 2020.by Hans von Spakovsky: The War Powers Resolution passed Thursday by the House in an effort to restrict President Donald Trump’s ability to take military action to defend America against attack from Iran is a meaningless political document designed only to embarrass the president. The nonbinding resolution criticizes the president for not “consulting” with Congress and receiving its “authorization” before ordering the killing of Iranian general and terrorist mastermind Qassim Suleimani. The resolution also orders Trump to stop using military force against Iran until he gets congressional approval. Trump acted fully within his constitutional authority when he ordered the drone strike against Suleimani, a mass murderer responsible for thousands of deaths—including over 600 Americans—who was engaged in planning additional imminent and ongoing deadly attacks. Trump told Fox NewsChannel’s Laura Ingraham in an exclusive interview Friday that Suleimani was planning attacks on four U.S. embassies. Nine other terrorists traveling with Suleimani were also killed in the U.S. drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport in Iraq last week. Imagine how much better off we would be if U.S. forces had been able to kill al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and nine of his fellow terrorist leaders while they were planning the horrific Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Can anyone seriously argue that preventing those tragic deaths would not have been the right thing to do if a past president had the opportunity? We’ll never know how many more people Suleimani would have murdered if he had lived longer, but it’s a safe bet that the number would be a big one, and that Americans would be among the dead. Trump should be applauded for eliminating this very real threat. The framers of the Constitution understood we needed a strong president to defend our country. One reason they replaced the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution was to create the office of president with the powers it currently possesses. Article 2 of the Constitution makes the president the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” He is also vested with all of “the executive Power” and the duty to execute the laws. The text, structure, and history of the Constitution make it clear that this article gives the president broad constitutional authority to use military force to support our foreign policy and to respond to threats to our national security. And that’s the way it has been interpreted by successive administrations and the courts since the very beginning of our nation As the U.S. Justice Department said in a 2001 legal opinion issued after the 9/11 attacks, the “power of the President is at its zenith under the Constitution when the President is directing military operations of the armed forces, because the power of Commander in Chief is assigned solely to the President.” No law and no congressional resolution—such as the one passed Thursday by the House—“can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make,” according to the Justice Department legal opinion. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Congress has done so five times in our nation’s history and also authorized the use of military force over 40 times. But the commander in chief is charged with defending the country. He—and he alone—has the authority to use the armed forces for our defense. In cases such as the killing of Suleimani—a situation calling for self-defense based on a verifiable, ongoing, and imminent threat—a president can clearly act based on his constitutional authority. Neither Trump—nor any other American president—need ask for a congressional declaration of war or even an authorization for the use of military force in cases like this. Trump acted wisely, quickly, and constitutionally to save American lives. That’s something we are entitled to expect all our presidents to do—regardless of their political party. You can be sure that if Trump had done nothing and Suleimani had gone on to stage a nightmarish terrorist attack that claimed hundreds or even thousands of American lives, the president’s critics would be screaming at the top of their lungs that Trump was incompetent and derelict in his duty for failing to prevent the mass murder. The simple fact is that the authority of Congress to declare war does not limit the ability—in fact, the responsibility—of the president to direct the armed forces to respond either defensively or offensively to terrorist threats. If Congress wants to flex its constitutional muscles on this, it can cut off funding for the military. After all, Congress has the power of the purse. If it really wants to stop specific military actions, it can use its budget authority to withhold appropriations and to ban the use of any public funds for specific purposes. The War Powers Resolution passed by the House Thursday does not do that. The fact that the House is not willing to use its actual authority in this matter strongly suggests that this resolution is just political theater meant to score points against the president. In addition, the nonbinding resolution puts members of the House in the embarrassing position of seemingly defending a terrorist mass murderer. It may give the rest of the world—including our most dangerous enemies—the impression that our government is in disarray and doesn’t want to respond to attacks on our embassies, our citizens, and our armed forces. This, in turn, could invite further attacks. Suleimani was unquestionably a legitimate target—someone who could have and should have been taken out years ago by a past president in the interests of our national security. Had that happened, an untold number of innocent civilians and members of the U.S. armed forces whose deaths were caused by Suleimani would still be alive today. Those condemning Trump for taking out Suleimani should answer this question: How many American military personnel and others is a terrorist allowed to kill before you think he is a legitimate military target? And Trump’s critics should be willing to sit down with the widows, widowers, orphans, and parents who lost loved ones because of Suleimani’s barbarism and explain to them why it was a good thing than an earlier American president did not rid the world of this monstrous mass murderer. ——————————- Hans von Spakovsky (@HvonSpakovsky) is an authority on a wide range of issues—including civil rights, civil justice, the First Amendment, immigration, the rule of law and government reform—as a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. More ARRA News Service articles by or about Hans von Spakovsky Tags: Hans von Spakovsky, The Heritage Foundation, The Daily Signal, Leftists Are Wrong, US Killing, Iran’s Suleimani, Legal Action To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Obama vs. BerniePosted: 13 Jan 2020 09:20 PM PST. . . Two socialists. One party. Only one can survive. by Daniel Greenfield: In November, Barack Obama paid a call on George Soros. After maintaining a low profile since leaving office, the former chosen one showed up at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington D.C. where the Democracy Alliance was having its annual conclave to decide how to destroy the United States. After a long Friday afternoon of hearing from assorted minions, members of the Democracy Alliance, who had contributed at least $200,000 to be part of Soros’ real-life SPECTRE alliance, minus the white cat, trooped into the Grand Ballroom for a “fireside chat” before a private dinner with Valerie Jarrett. And Obama had a simple message for the mandarins in the Mandarin Oriental who had spent fortunes to elect lefties and transform the country. “The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it,” he told his radical audience. And warned that the Democrat agenda should not be driven by “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party.” Soros and the Democracy Alliance’s activist wing elected Obama to implement a radical agenda. Now he was warning his old backers that they were in danger of backing agendas that were just too radical. The outreach was striking because Obama had tried to keep his distance from George Soros. In an interview, Soros had complained about being frozen out by Obama. “He made one phone call thanking me for my support, which was meant to last for five minutes,” the leftist billionaire whined. Obama had no interest in letting Soros set his agenda. But now he was trying to set Soros’ agenda. His sudden call for moderation had a target. A Politico writeup in November, ‘Waiting for Obama’, noted that, “Obama said privately that if Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to stop him.” “If Bernie were running away with it, I think maybe we would all have to say something. But I don’t think that’s likely. It’s not happening,” an anonymous Obama adviser said. Bernie supporters furiously shot back. Headlines like, “The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself”, popped up on Jacobin: the Sandernista equivalent of Pravda, Der Sturmer, and Al Jazeera. That same month, Deval Patrick, a favorite potential candidate of Valerie Jarrett and other Obamaworlders, suddenly and disastrously jumped into the 2020 race. With a Patrick event attracting two people, Obama switched his focus and began working behind the scenes to support Warren. By December, Obama was urging Wall Street donors to back Elizabeth Warren. It didn’t work. Bernie Sanders shot up to second place. And Obama was not counting on Biden to stop him. “And you know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden,” he had privately observed. It’s January and Obamaworlders keep grousing about how to stop Bernie. And going nowhere. “The strongest argument against Bernie will be showing that you can defeat Donald Trump,” one recently complained. “And he cannot.” That’s certainly one problem. Bernie Sanders has zero appeal to anyone except the white lefties who once backed Obama. Meanwhile Obama’s black voters remain solidly behind Biden. Obama’s only real way to stop Bernie would be to call on black voters to solidly support Biden creating a deep racial divide within an already divided party. But there’s also the personal element. It’s not just Hillary who hates Bernie. The average Democrat operative views the socialist as a foreign element who undermines the party when he doesn’t need it, and is bringing in a ragged mob of radicals to take it over and fundamentally transform it. And, unlike Obama’s radicals, they have no social skills and little interest in working together with anyone else. The Bernie base views Obama as a sellout. His signature policy trashes ObamaCare. And Obama cares. Bernie’s rise is Obama’s nightmare. A race between Bernie and Trump leads to two bad outcomes. Either Trump wins, becomes a two-term president, and trashes Obama’s legacy. Or Bernie wins, and trashes Obama’s legacy while purging his allies and staffers from the DNC and the government. The return of Bernie divides the party the same way he did in 2016. Either he loses and many of his voters stay home. Or he wins and more moderate Democrats become the ones to sit out the race. And yet the man who had turned the party into his own cult can’t stop the next cult of personality. The lightworker, the anointed one, the messiah has discovered that not only George Soros, but the earnest young lefties who once swooned for him have moved on. The arc of history is no longer his. Obama’s comments at the Democracy Alliance’s shindig also a reflect tactical difference between his preference for remaking the system without tearing it down, and Bernie’s call for socialism now. It’s the same old division between working within the system or destroying it that divided the American Left. The Obama era was the greatest triumph for the radicals, including the Weathermen, who ultimately decided that they could achieve more by working within the system than by setting off bombs. It was also the subject of that ancient argument between Vladimir Lenin and H.G. Wells about revolutions. That consensus bypassed Bernie, once an obscure socialist crank, whose political life got a new lease when some ex-Obama marketers decided they need a way to cash in when Hillary wouldn’t hire them, and who was then embraced by a new generation of radicals who saw Obama as insufficiently radical. Bernie’s political philosophy has been massaged to make it more appealing for a new era. But underneath the new embrace of identity politics and open borders, things he once opposed, he’s an unreconstructed radical with no interest in tactics, strategy, and how things work in the real world. He just wants a revolution. That revolution threatens the hard work of Obama, Soros and many others. And what does George think? Earlier, Soros had been hinting that he might support Elizabeth Warren. He picked Hillary over Sanders in 2016. But Our Revolution, Bernie’s dark money organization, planned to solicit money from Soros. Due to the secrecy of both Soros and Our Revolution, it’s hard to know whether Soros ponied up. But we do know that Our Revolution got its largest contribution of $100,000 from the Sixteen Thirty Fund which is partly funded by George Soros. And the activists powering Sanders, like Zack Exley, have often come through Open Society and other Soros network organizations. Obama’s pitch to Soros and the rest of the radical donor class was that Bernie’s approach was outside the comfort zone of most Americans. Bernie, in George’s terms, was a bad investment who wouldn’t connect with voters and would hand President Trump another four years in the White House. Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the squad, and the rest of the old new and new old radicals don’t actually do anything except talk. Bernie’s Medicare-for-All scam was so inept that it unintentionally brought down the campaigns of Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Kamala Harris. Our Revolution lost a quarter of a million to an email scam. So much for that investment. The single real-world accomplishment that Cortez has to her name took place outside the House, when she helped scuttle Amazon’s New York City HQ and the tens of thousands of jobs that came with it. George Soros likes to invest in organizations and people who get things done. Obama wants a successor who will lock in and expand on his legacy. Neither of the two men are likely to get what they want. Soros has already suggested that he won’t be supporting a primary candidate. Obama has tried two. Obama is testing the waters. He’s hesitant to act openly because if he comes out against Bernie, and Bernie still sweeps through New Hampshire and Iowa, his credibility will be in ruins. Ever since leaving office, Obama has secretly nurtured the idea that he is the wise man and kingmaker of the party. But what if he’s not? Obama’s very real fear is that he’s irrelevant. Black voters will still follow him. Few others will. An endorsement from him would not be a profound game changer, but worth a few percent at best. Coming out against Bernie would mean testing his brand against, not only Bernie, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and dozens of radical Bernie proxies scattered across social media. While Obama vacationed, millennials like Cortez built social media cults of radical narcissism. And Obama, the former radical narcissist-in-chief, has been out-radicalized and out-narcissicized. The man who had once defined a political generation of Democrats has, like Bill Clinton, grown old and tired. The routines that Barack and Bill once pulled to seem hip, are passé. The celebrities they posed with are yesterday’s news. Their attempts to revive Kennedyesque political cool have become as antiquated as Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat and JFK’s preppy yachting outfits. Worse still, Barry hasn’t been bypassed for a younger politician, but a formerly obscure elderly radical. When your power is rooted not in ideas or principles, but hipness, then you live by the trend and die by it. George picked up Barry as his boy toy when he was a young crush. Now Barry’s old and only good for sonorously reciting clichés in the Mandarin Oriental while Soros uses him to collect another few million. Obama so often spoke of the future, whom it would belong to, and whom it wouldn’t. Now he faces the fact that the future has passed him by. Whomever the future belongs to, it will not belong to him. ———————– Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism on FrontPage Mag. Tags: Daniel Greenfield, FrontPage Mag, Obama vs. Bernie To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| US to Iraq: ‘Vote All You Want, We’re Not Leaving!’Posted: 13 Jan 2020 08:53 PM PSTDr. Ron Paulby Dr. Ron Paul: President Trump’s decision earlier this month to assassinate Iran’s top military general on Iraqi soil – over the objection of the Iraqi government – has damaged the US relationship with its “ally” Iraq and set the region on the brink of war. Iran’s measured response – a few missiles fired on an Iraqi base after advance warning was given – is the only reason the US is not mired in another Middle East war. Trump said his decision to assassinate Gen. Qassim Soleimani was intended to prevent a war, not start a war. But no one in his right mind would think that killing another country’s top military leader would not leave that country annoyed, to say the least. Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rand Paul (R-KY) said the Trump Administration’s briefing to Congress on its evidence to back up claims that Soleimani was about to launch attacks against the US was among the worst briefings they’d ever attended. After initially claiming that Soleimani had to be taken out immediately because of “imminent” attacks he was launching against the US, Trump Administration officials including Secretary of State Pompeo and Defense Secretary Esper have been busy walking back those claims. Esper claimed over the weekend that he had not seen the intelligence suggesting an attack on US embassies was in the works. If the Secretary of Defense did not seen the intelligence, then who did? No doubt the Iraqi leadership recognized these kinds of deceptions: the same kinds of lies were used to push the US into attacking their own country in 2003. So it should not have come as a big surprise that the Iraqi government met last week and voted that all foreign military personnel should leave Iraqi soil. Then a funny thing happened when the Iraqi prime minister attempted to communicate to the US government the will of the Iraqi people through their democratically-elected officials. On Thursday Iraqi Prime Minister Mahdi phoned Pompeo to urgently request that Washington enact a US troop “withdrawal mechanism” in Iraq. American troops are in Iraq by invitation of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi government had just voted to revoke that invitation. The State Department responded with a statement titled “The US Continued Partnership with Iraq,” in which it essentially said that the US would not abide by the request of its Iraqi partners because the US military is a “force for good” in the Middle East and that as such it is “our right” to maintain “appropriate force posture” in the region. The US invaded Iraq based on Bush Administration lies and a million Iraqis died as a result. Later, President Obama ramped up the drone program and also backed al-Qaeda affiliated terrorists to overthrow the secular Syrian government. Obama also attacked Libya based on lies, leaving the country totally destroyed. Trump is assassinating foreign officials and threatening destruction of Iran. And the State Department calls that a “force for good”? The United States can be a true force for good, however. End the military occupation of the Middle East, end foreign military aid, stop using the CIA to overthrow governments. Allow Americans to travel and do business in any country they wish. Lead by example and demonstrate how free markets and peace benefit all. A “force for good” means not forcing others to bow to your will. —————— Dr. Ron Paul (@ronpaul), Chairman of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, is a former U.S.Congressman (R-TX). He twice sought the Republican nomination for President. As a MD, he was an Air Force flight surgeon and has delivered over 4000 babies. Paul writes on numerous topics but focuses on monetary policies, the military-industrial complex,the Federal Reserve, and compliance with the U.S. Constitution. Tags: Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute, US to Iraq, Vote All You Want, We’re Not Leaving To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Notice Served To 5 States About Voter Registration IrregularitiesPosted: 13 Jan 2020 08:45 PM PSTby Free Press International News Service: Five states have been put on notice that their voter rolls are beset with irregularities. They have been warned not by government, but by a private legal watchdog. Judicial Watch has warned California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia that they must clean up their voter rolls or face a federal lawsuit. The five states called on to comply with the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) by sending notice-of-violation letters to counties which Judicial Watch intends to sue unless the jurisdictions take steps to comply with the law and remove ineligible voter registrations within 90 days. Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act requires jurisdictions to take reasonable efforts to remove ineligible registrations from its rolls. “Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections and Judicial Watch will insist, in court if necessary, that states follow federal law to clean up their voting rolls,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “Previous Judicial Watch lawsuits have already led to major cleanups in California, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio – but more needs to be done. It is common sense that voters who die or move away be removed from the voting rolls.” According to Judicial Watch’s analysis of data released by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC), there are 378 counties nationwide that have more voter registrations than citizens living there and old enough to vote. Although San Diego County removed 500,000 inactive names from voter rolls following Judicial Watch’s settlement with Los Angeles County, San Diego still has a registration rate of 117 percent, one of the highest registration rates in the country. In the latest round of warning letters, Judicial Watch explains that implausibly high registration rates raise legal concerns: An unusually high registration rate suggests that a jurisdiction is not removing voters who have died or who have moved elsewhere, as required by [federal law]. Judicial Watch also considers how many registrations were ultimately removed from the voter rolls because a registrant [had moved]. If few or no voters were removed…the jurisdiction is obviously failing to comply . . . States must report the number of such removals to the EAC.In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a massive voter roll clean up that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio. California also settled a similar lawsuit with Judicial Watch that in 2019 began the process of removing up to 1.5 million “inactive” names from Los Angeles County voting rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of up to 250,00 names last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit. —————— Free Press International News Service, aka: Free Pressers (@FreePressers). Tags: Free Press International, News Service, Free Pressers, Notice Served To 5 States, About Voter Registration Irregularities, Judicial Watch, warned, California, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Saudis Expelled, Iran’s Unbelievably Bad Terrible Week, The Left’s Spin MachinePosted: 13 Jan 2020 08:28 PM PSTAG William Barrby Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: Saudis Expelled Attorney General William Barr confirmed this afternoon that as many as 21 Saudi military students are being deported from the United States. Their expulsion comes in the wake of increased vetting following the December shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station. Just over 10 years ago, 14 people were killed at Fort Hood. That attack wasn’t perpetrated by a foreign student. Virtually everyone knew that Nidal Hasan was more loyal to Islam than he was to America. But military bureaucrats passed the buck because Hasan was playing the race card and the Islamophobia card. Sadly, too many military leaders were more afraid of jeopardizing their own careers than protecting our soldiers. Ten years have passed since the atrocity at Fort Hood, and the problems of political correctness have only compounded during most of that time. Don’t forget the Bergdahl trade, in which Barack Obama traded five Taliban leaders for a deserter. Fast forward to December 6, 2019. While the FBI was using its vast intelligence capabilities to monitor the Trump campaign and wiretap various aides, several Saudi military students were visiting jihadist websites and sharing extremist materials, and apparently no one was monitoring them! When Donald Trump suggested that we didn’t know enough about what was going on within radical Islam and should pause immigration from nations known to be hotbeds of jihadism, the roof caved in on him. Politicians from both parties condemned him. I wish I saw that kind of outrage after three American personnel were murdered, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq, but in their own country because a jihadist managed to get a gun where they were not permitted to have one. It is impossible to come up with a better example of how political correctness multiplied during the Obama years has put us in jeopardy. Thank God we are beginning to rein it in under President Donald Trump, Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Iran’s Unbelievably Bad, Terrible Week It all began at approximately 5:00 PM EST on Thursday, January 2nd when a drone took out Gen. Qassem Soleimani because the Iranians still hadn’t figured out who Donald Trump was. In retaliation, Iran fired 15 missiles at Iraqi bases on January 8th trying to kill U.S. soldiers. They missed. Iran does have good missiles because a few hours later we discovered that they are very capable of shooting down civilian airlines with 176 passengers on board. Iran’s leaders spent the next 48 hours lying about the incident, but they eventually had to admit that they did shoot down the plane. Then Iran’s only Olympic medalist defected, saying she could no longer tolerate the regime’s oppression and that she was tired of wearing the hijab. I’m still waiting for press releases from American feminist organizations praising this brave woman, but I’m not holding my breath. Thousands of Iranian students soon took to the streets. Were they chanting, “Death to Israel”? No. “Death to America”? No. They were chanting “Death to the dictator,” and “Death to liars” in protest of the ayatollah’s regime. Then the regime was hit by another American super weapon – a Donald Trump tweet in Farsi expressing America’s solidarity with the Iranian people who seek freedom. It quickly became the most liked Persian tweet in history. We’ve seen Trump tweets destroy the careers of professional politicians. We’ll see what effect his tweet has on the mullahs of Iran. The Left’s Spin Machine Once the left decides what its talking points will be, within 24 hours virtually every progressive leader begins using the same arguments. It is extraordinary to watch, and we saw it last week with the left’s response to events in Iran. But it is even more disturbing and not because “Democrat Central” ordered it. What concerns me is that the left is echoing the mullahs of Iran. After the president took out Soleimani, Iran said he was a national hero, that his death was an act of war and that the Iranian nation was united against America. Within hours, various Democrat presidential candidates, politicians and left-wing commentators were saying, “Soleimani was a beloved hero.” They called his death “an act of war,” and suggested that Trump only succeeded in uniting Iranians against us. Then the Ukrainian airliner was shot down. Iran is caught in a lie when the regime eventually admits that it was responsible. But the mullahs insist that Trump is ultimately responsible because they wouldn’t have shot down the airliner without the strike on Soleimani. Incredibly, Pete Buttigieg and others parrot Tehran by blaming Trump for the downing of the airliner. It’s not just the coordinated spin. It’s also what the left isn’t saying that is so revealing. I’ve not heard one liberal commentator or politician express support for the Iranian Olympic defector. And the same media that gave such glowing coverage to Soleimani’s funeral barely covers the growing discontent among Iranian youth when they chant, “Death to the dictator!” It’s odd that so many progressives, who are eager to attack faith in America, are unwilling to take a stand against the ayatollah and his theocratic regime. They seem more committed to attacking the president than they are to attacking America’s enemies. When Iran interferes in the 2020 election, as it surely will, guess which side Tehran will be on. Meanwhile, Back In The Swamp. . . Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to send the articles of impeachment against President Trump to the Senate in the next day or so, kicking off a trial that could last several weeks. Needless to say, that dynamic is creating some strange optics. Not only does the president have Iran on the ropes, he’s benefiting from a booming economy, and will likely get a major new trade deal through Congress soon. Overseas, protesters in Hong Kong are marching with U.S. flags and posters of Trump as Superman. In Taiwan, there are celebrations as the nation’s anti-communist China president was just reelected by a landslide. In Britain, there is a resurgence of populist conservatism. As Steve Bannon so aptly put it, President Trump bucked the established order, which was to appease China, appease Iran and undercut U.S. workers. In short, this president has a tremendous record of accomplishment for which I and many other conservatives are deeply grateful. In fact, I was pleased to join scores of conservative leaders today in sending a letter to the White House thanking the president for what he has accomplished for our country. You can read our letter here. ——————- Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer) is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families Tags: Gary Bauer, Campaign for Working Families, Saudis Expelled, Iran’s Unbelievably Bad Terrible Week, The Left’s Spin Machine To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Don’t be Fooled By Liberal Dark Money InfluencePosted: 13 Jan 2020 07:38 PM PSTKen Blackwellby Ken Blackwell, Contributing Author: Hypocrisy in politics is typical, but every so often it reaches a new low. Such is the case with a recent political ad attacking dark money’s influence in politics, an ad funded by dark money. The group Future Majority did exactly that as part of their 2018 efforts to elect Democrats to Congress. Now groups like Future Majority are focused on denying President Trump reelection in 2020. Democrats have no good response to the President’s popularity and his accomplished record, so they turn to dark money funded smear campaigns to try and discredit him and his supporters. Politico reports one such dark money group – Future Majority – is prepared to invest $60 million in swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan in 2020 to try and defeat the President. Another dark money group is Arabella Advisors, orchestrators of many supposed “grassroots” campaigns on issues ranging from climate change to President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. But in reality, Arabella doesn’t organize actual grassroots opposition to the Trump administration, it creates fake groups that pump out phony opposition through subsidiaries such as the Sixteen Thirty Fund. One Arabella campaign focuses on President Trump’s tax cuts. Liberals want to replace the Trump tax cuts with tax hikes to finance more spending. But repealing the Trump tax cuts would be disastrous to the economy as they allow working people to keep more of what they earn and they are incentivizing businesses to re-invest in America. According to Edwin Feulenr, the founder of the Heritage Foundation, “The tax cut contributed to the strong economy we’ve been enjoying, leading many businesses to hire more and more workers. The United States added more than 2.6 million new jobs in the year following the passage of the tax cut — nearly a 25 percent increase from the previous year.” Another area where dark money groups oppose the Trump administration is the battle over government regulation of business and industry. President Trump repealed many Obama era regulations and is working with Congress to simplify the regulatory system. For example, liberal groups are fighting deregulation in the lending industry and are actively working to limit the efforts of people who are struggling with bad credit to get loans. They claim short term loans offered by payday lenders are predatory, and they continually press for artificial controls – rate caps – placed on this one segment of the lending industry – not large banks, credit unions, credit card companies, etc. But when government regulators attempt to control one segment of a market or industry, the exact opposite of the desired goal usually occurs. The Taking away lending choices for consumers, without providing viable alternatives, serves no one. Those who take out payday loans understand the risks and need a short-term cash infusion. Government meddling in free markets usually hurts consumers. The Employment Policies Institute analyzed Georgia and North Carolina after both states implemented a rate cap and found, “When compared to other states, a November 2007 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings and the number of costly bounced checks both rose in North Carolina and Georgia.” Liberal dark money groups consistently support proposals expanding the scope of government while limiting consumer options. Arabella Advisors’ backing of the Affordable Care Act fits this pattern, as the ACA expanded the size of government while eliminating many private healthcare options. Instead of admitting the ACA failed, these groups are proposing even more government interfering to try and fix problems they created. If candidates backed by these groups gain power, they will likely push for Medicare for All further expanding the role of government. Medicare for All would eliminate private healthcare and force everyone into a one size fits all system that cannot meet the needs of the sick. Enacting Medicare for all would decrease the quality of care and increase patient costs. What are Liberals so afraid of? Perhaps it’s the president’s record of lowering taxes, eliminating needless and costly government regulations, and working to find ways of lowering healthcare costs. Tax cuts, deregulation, and improving healthcare are three critical issues that will drive voters to the polls next year. If the President loses re-election, dark money Democrats will work tirelessly to roll back the President’s accomplishments and return to the days of big government inefficiency and a flatlined economy. The President’s actions are boosting the stock market, raising consumer confidence and drawing fresh investment in American business and industry. That means millions of higher paying jobs for working class citizens and improvement of quality of life. As the election season advances into 2020, we must expose the liberal, dark money operations that threaten the progress of the Administration’s last four years and jeopardize our revived free market system. —————— Ken Blackwell (@kenblackwell) is a former ambassador to the U.N., a former Domestic Policy Advisor to the Trump/Pence Presidential Transition Team, and former Ohio State Treasurer and mayor of Cincinnati who currently serves on the boards of numerous conservative policy organizations including being an adviser to the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.; and serving on the boards of directors of both the Club For Growth and the National Taxpayers Union. He is a contributing author to the ARRA News Service Tags: Ken Blackwell, Don’t be Fooled, Liberal Dark Money Influence To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Rep. McCarthy Explains Pelosi’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’ in Delaying Senate TrialPosted: 13 Jan 2020 07:29 PM PSTHouse Minority Leader Kevin McCarthyby Susan Jones : House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Sunday she withheld articles of impeachment from the Senate in an attempt to build public pressure for the Senate to subpoena first-hand witnesses. “What we did want, though, and we think we accomplished in the past few weeks, is that we wanted the public to see the need for witnesses, witnesses with firsthand knowledge of what happened, documentation which the president has prevented from coming to the Congress as we review this,” Pelosi told ABC’s “This Week.” But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) had a different explanation on Sunday: He said Pelosi delayed the Senate trial to impede the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Remember where the Democrats said this was so urgent, that they had to move this so quickly, before end of the year. And now Nancy Pelosi has been holding the papers,” McCarthy said. McCarthy said it would be “very difficult” for the Senate to start the trial this week, even if — as expected — Democrats vote on Tuesday to deliver the articles in the next few days. “And what happens with impeachment is, the senators have to be in their desks,” McCarthy continued:They cannot have a phone. They cannot talk to one another. And they stay in their desks. With the Clinton impeachment, it lasted five weeks. And this is the dirty little secret that nobody is talking about, why the speaker held these papers. Remember what happened in the last nomination process, where the DNC chairman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, had to resign the night before the nomination convention started, because they had found out they had cheated Senator Bernie Sanders from the opportunity to become the nominee. They are doing the exact same thing right now. The Iowa caucus is on February 3. Bernie Sanders is in first place. And what this does is, this benefits Joe Biden. This harms Senator Sanders, who is in first place and could become their nominee, because he will be stuck in a chair, because Nancy Pelosi held the papers, different than what she said to the American public why she had to move so urgently.Maria Bartiromo, host of “Sunday Morning Futures,” asked McCarthy, “So, you think that it’s by design that Nancy Pelosi is sending the articles now, slow-walking, really, slow-walking the impeachment trial, to have the senators in the room? I mean, that is collusion. That is obstruction, once again keeping Bernie Sanders at bay, and clearing the decks for Joe Biden? Is that what you’re saying?” “That is exactly what I’m saying,” McCarthy responded:Remember what the Democratic Party did this time. They removed the super-delegates from the first round of voting because of what they had done to Senator Sanders. Now they don’t have the power, had he got to the convention fairly. So, what power does the Speaker have? Remember, when she first started impeachment, I sent her a letter about process, could we have a fair process, laying out 10 questions, the exact same process for Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon. She ignored that and didn’t care about process. Now she tries, in hypocrisy, to bring up process in the Senate, where she has no power? She told the American public it was urgent. She had to move so fast. The only reason why she should be — that she is doing this that no one is talking about, it is harming the — Bernie Sanders, the senator, who has been coming into first place, who could win Iowa and propel himself to be the nominee. It’s the exact same thing they did to him four years ago.President Donald Trump tweeted on Sunday: “Wow! Crazy Bernie Sanders is surging in the polls, looking very good against his opponents in the Do Nothing Party. So what does this all mean? Stay tuned!” ————————- Susan Jones (@SJonesCNS) writes for CNSNews a division of the Media Research Center, a not-for-profit 501 (c)(3) organization. Tags: Susan Jones, CNSNews, Rep. McCarthy, Explains, Pelosi’s ‘Dirty Little Secret,’ Delaying Senate Trial To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Trump’s Average Unemployment Rate Is The Lowest In Recorded HistoryPosted: 13 Jan 2020 07:12 PM PSTby Philip Klein : President Trump starts off 2020 having presided over a lower average unemployment rate than any president at a comparable point in office in recorded history. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate held steady at a historically low 3.5% in December. Since February 2017, Trump’s first full month in office, the monthly unemployment rate has averaged 3.9%. No prior president has averaged less than 4% over the first 35 months of his presidency. The closest was Dwight Eisenhower, when the rate averaged 4.3% between February 1953 and December 1955. Modern unemployment statistics did not start being kept until 1948, after Harry Truman’s first 35 months in office, so this analysis only starts with Eisenhower. Nonetheless, it does point to the unprecedented nature of this consistently low level of unemployment. To be sure, this statistic isn’t predictive of the election outcome. The economy is only one of many factors that voters use to evaluate incumbent presidents. Also, voters tend to weigh the trend of the economy, which is not reflected in the average. For instance, George H.W. Bush averaged lower unemployment during the first 35 months of his presidency than his predecessor, Ronald Reagan. But the Reagan economy started weak, then expanded rapidly in the run-up to his reelection, whereas Bush inherited an economy in decent shape and was voted out of office when it had declined. But Trump’s case is unique because he took over a recovering economy with unemployment already at 4.6%, and the rate continued to go down and stay low. So now he starts off his potential reelection year with a record of consistently low unemployment that’s currently holding steady at 3.5%. It’s still possible the economy will decline in time for it to hurt Trump in the election. And the Trump presidency has been polarizing for many other reasons. Despite the economic news, more Americans still disapprove of his performance than approve of it. Nevertheless, the job market has been objectively good under Trump, and it’s one factor that he has going for him even as other factors cut against him. ——————— Philip Klein (@philipaklein) is the executive editor of the Washington Examiner. Tags: Philip Klein, Washington Examiner, Trump’s Average Unemployment Rate, Lowest In Recorded History To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Hate Crime AbsurdityPosted: 13 Jan 2020 06:45 PM PSTby Kerby Anderson, Contributing Author: Should a person who burns a gay pride flag be sentenced to 16 years in prison? I would hope that most of us would agree that the sentence is extreme. On more than one occasion I have been asked to comment on this absurd sentence from Iowa. I waited until I could get all the facts. And the facts illustrate why we need to reconsider hate crime legislation. The man sentenced to 16 years has a long criminal history. He took a rainbow flag from a church and burned it in public. It is difficult to see how he should have been sentenced to much time behind bars considering that the Supreme Court ruled years ago that burning an American flag is akin to constitutionally protected free speech. He was originally sentenced to prison for harassment and reckless use of fire. But the judge ruled that his action was a hate crime since he did say on TV that he “burned down their pride, plain and simple.” The hate crime charge is considered a felony and that became “strike three.” He was sentenced to 15 years in prison with an additional year for the reckless use of fire. None of us like what he did or even what he said, but he didn’t deserve 16 years in prison. And that’s what is wrong with hate crime legislation. We should focus on what a perpetrator does with his hands without regard to what he thought in his mind. On some occasions we need to know what is in the mind of a criminal. For example, was the action intentional or accidental? Can the person distinguish right from wrong? But in most cases, we should focus on the act, not the thought. Too often hate crime legislation blurs into the idea of a thoughtcrime George Orwell warned about in his book 1984. As a guest rightly noted, Orwell was right about the idea of big brother. He just got the date wrong. This absurd sentence for burning a gay pride flag illustrates the problem with hate crime legislation. —————- Kerby Anderson (@kerbyanderson) is a radio talk show host heard on numerous stations via the Point of View Network (@PointofViewRTS) and is endorsed by Dr. Bill Smith, Editor, ARRA News Service. Tags: Kerby Anderson, Viewpoints, Point of View, Hate Crime Absurdity To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Conservatives Should Stop Blindly Defending Law Enforcement, The Clergy, & Big Business . . .Posted: 13 Jan 2020 06:35 PM PST… Time To Examine The Moral Order Of Institutions by Richard McCarty: It is time for fine-brush conservatism. For too long, broad-brush conservatism has defended certain institutions — including law enforcement, the clergy, and Big Business — to the hilt without demanding too many facts. To be clear, these are institutions worthy of vigorous defense, but it is not enough to just signal support. To defend society, bad actors must be rooted out. There is a moral order of institutions serving the nation that cannot be ignored and must be vigorously enforced in order for there to be prosperity. Rather than defend people based on who they purport to represent, we should choose whom we defend based on their individual character and actions. By doing this, Republicans and conservatives should gain more respect in their communities and should find more support for their policies and politicians who are doing it right. For starters, Republicans can no longer afford to reflexively defend every law enforcement officer assuming that they must have had a good reason for their actions. Yes, we want officers to go home safely at the end of their shift, and, yes, we want them to solve crimes; but we also want them to only use deadly force as a last resort, and we want them to respect our Constitutional rights. By blindly defending law enforcement, Republicans appear hopelessly out-of-touch. Whenever there is an officer-involved shooting, Republicans should demand a full, independent investigation. Law enforcement officers have tough and important jobs, but the bad apples and the incompetent officers must be weeded out — for our protection and the good of the other officers. In addition, Republicans should stop blindly defending the clergy. In the past, the faithful — many of whom are conservative — have defended corrupt religious leaders or failed to hold them accountable as they have abused their positions. Most likely this was done out of fear that bad press would harm their faith or cause people to lose their faith in God. In the short-term, membership at a particular house of worship might fall after a scandal. But what is far worse is when the public finally finds out that religious leaders have committed serious crimes and that precious little was done to make it stop even after the crimes were discovered. That is far more likely to shake people’s faith rather than the crimes of a single individual. Fortunately, in recent years, we have largely seen a reversal of this view, and now more people of faith are demanding answers as well as personnel and policy changes. Republicans should also stop automatically defending Big Business. These days, Big Business is incredibly powerful, is not opposed to selling the country out for a fast buck, and is only too happy to fund the abortion lobby, radical environmentalists, and socialists. Here are few examples of indefensible corporate behavior: A profitable Fortune 500 company closes a factory in Wisconsin and ships the jobs to China;A failed corporate CEO is handsomely rewarded on his way out the door;A multibillion-dollar company lays off hundreds of American employees and requires them to train their foreign replacements who just arrived in the country on their H-1B visas; andA gigantic corporation intentionally overworks its employees and gives them too little time to eat or take bathroom breaks.Not only should we not defend these actions, we should blast these companies for their lack of patriotism and decency. At the end of the day, we need to remember that greed at the expense of the nation is not good, and it should be discouraged. Some currently defending the disgraceful actions of Big Business probably do so, not because they agree with the behavior, but, rather, because they believe that they must defend this behavior or socialism will advance. These people have it exactly backward. By defending outrageous behavior, these conservatives push people toward the socialists; instead of halting socialism, they are fueling it. On the other hand, by refusing to defend corporate America’s bad behavior, conservatives just might be able to help rein in some of the most egregious behavior; and when there are fewer instances of corporations taking advantage of customers or workers, there should be less interest in the left’s “solutions” — like 90 percent tax rates, maximum wages, and more unions. In recent years, Republicans have overextended themselves blindly defending institutions without assessing the value they bring to improving and extending traditions. Without examining the moral order of our society, we fail to offer firm prescriptions to the issues we face. This situation is untenable, and it is time pull back the defensive lines and let the bad actors we have foolishly been sheltering finally face the consequences of their actions. When you think about it, it is rather odd that a party that values the individual and deemphasizes group membership would defend people based on their institutional line of work. In other words, our criteria for choosing whom to defend is not consistent with our values. This must change. ——————— Richard McCarty is the Director of Research at Americans for Limited Government. Tags: Richard McCarthy, Americans for Limited Government, Conservatives, Should Stop Blindly Defending, Law Enforcement, The Clergy,, Big Business, Time To Examine, The Moral Order Of Institutions To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Friends . . .Posted: 13 Jan 2020 06:14 PM PST. . . Trump has placed his support for the Iranian people protesting the tyranny of the Iranian Dictators, while Democrats seem to support the dictators. Editorial Cartoon by AF “Tony” BrancoTags: Editorial Cartoon, AF Branco, Friends, Trump, placed his support, for the Iranian people, protesting, tyranny, Iranian Dictators, while Democrats, seem to support, dictators To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Vermin CompetitionPosted: 13 Jan 2020 06:06 PM PSTby Paul Jacob, Contributing Author: Should Lincoln Chafee invert a boot and place it on his head? It might help him compete. The famous Republican turned Democratic politician from Rhode Island — former U.S. Senator and Governor, both, and sometime presidential hopeful — has filed to run for the presidency. But as a Libertarian. The Libertarian Party started out nearly fifty years ago as a venue for libertarians disgusted with Richard Nixon and the Republican Party to make a pitch to the American people to abandon the lying, thieving, murderous statism of our times and swap it for freedom. In the words of its first presidential nominee, philosopher John Hospers, the idea was to “challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual.” The Libertarian Party has pulled in supporters from left, right and center, but mostly from the GOP, as seen in a solid one third of its past presidential runs: former Republican elector Roger MacBride (1976)former and future Republican U.S. Representative Ron Paul (1988)former Republican U.S. Representative Bob Barr (2008)former Republican New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson (2012; 2016)The Libertarians are an earnest lot, trying to get the attention of earnest American voters by putting up men with political credentials. In the case of Gary Johnson’s last campaign, the strategy “paid off” with over 4.4 million votes. The LP attracts ambitious politicians and publicity seekers who do not quite fit in with the two parties, in no small part because Libertarians have done a great job of obtaining all-important ballot status in most if not all 50 states in presidential elections. Libertarian Party members have so far avoided non-political celebrity candidates, such as the late activist and actor Russell Means (1988) and gonzo millionaire John McAfee (2012). Chafee would be the first Democratic pol to get the nomination. But he is running against some strong libertarian activists (Kim Ruff, Jo Jorgensen, Jacob Hornberger, et al.) as well as a return bid from McAfee (who also happens to be on the run from the IRS). A parody candidate calling himself “Vermin Supreme” and running on a joke (and quite anti-freedom) platform (mandatory ponies for everyone!), has just won the Libertarian position in the New Hampshire Primary’s non-binding preference poll — 26 to Chafee’s 4, perhaps because he wears a boot on his head. Tough competition for Chafee, who seems only a little more libertarian than Vermin. This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. —————— Paul Jacob (@Common_Sense_PJ ) is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacob is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service. Tags: Paul Jacob, Common Sense, Vermin Competition To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Tulsi Gabbard Proves Again She’s an Apologist for TerroristsPosted: 13 Jan 2020 05:51 PM PSTPresidential candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., & Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, at a Democratic primary debate, June 26, 2019, in Miami, FLby Peter Heck: On so many issues, Tulsi Gabbard has positioned herself as the somewhat moderated voice of reason in the Democrat Party, and certainly among those vying for the presidential nomination. But there has always been a tragic flaw for any conservative or rational American when they were tempted to consider Gabbard the most preferable of the Democrat candidates: her confused and backwards approach to geo-politics and the bad actors therein. In the past, Gabbard had outed herself as a near apologist for the despicable Assad regime in Syria. The Washington Post noted months ago:Among the Democratic candidates, there’s consensus that it’s time to end “forever wars.” But only Gabbard consistently struggles to admit that Assad is one of the worst war criminals in history. Only Gabbard asserts that the United States (not Assad) is responsible for the death and destruction in Syria, that the Russian airstrikes on civilians are to be praised, that efforts to protect Syrian civilians are wrongheaded and that the United States must side with Assad. That terrific failure colors Gabbard’s vision of the entire region. Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, has expressed his own shocked dismay with Gabbard’s treachery on the subject:“Like the Russians, Iranians and the Assad regime, Tulsi sees the Syrian people struggling for dignity as terrorists, despite the facts.”Siding with the Russians, Iranians, and Assad is not exactly a ringing endorsement for her candidacy. But, some have contended, there was always the possibility that Gabbard approaches the situation with nuance that is ignored and exploited by her enemies, thereby making her position appear more radically un-American than what it really is. Unfortunately for Gabbard-apologists, that argument has been utterly undermined by Gabbard’s recent response to the Iranians shooting down a civilian airliner. Inexplicably, the Democrat candidate refused to blame the Iranians. Behold the madness: Rep. Gabbard refuses to blame Iran for shooting down Ukrainian airplane, blames U.S. instead https://t.co/70pV3IeIPE pic.twitter.com/By2njJXKhQ— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 10, 2020Let’s see if we can follow this absurd logic. Apparently we are supposed to believe that rather than raging incompetence on the part of a terrorist regime, this tragedy is somehow the consequence of the United States’ retaliatory strike against a man who had killed hundreds of our soldiers? Iran shot down a passenger plane that took off from its own international airport because they were so upset about us killing Soleimani and therefore the United States bears some of the blame here? I get that all of her Democratic rivals are a long way from being champions on this issue, none of them having even commented on the courageous Iranian protests currently occurring. But this kind of twisted thinking is precisely why Gabbard has been dogged by accusations from Republicans and Democrats alike for being an apologist for terrorists and rogue regimes. If the Syrian people are responsible for the terror brought on them by a war criminal (Assad) then of course the U.S. is responsible for the passenger plane being shot from the sky by criminally incompetent Iranians. It’s both shocking and unconscionable that these people are ever trusted in positions of power. ——————- Peter Heck (@peterheck) writes for The Resurgent and PeterHeck.com. Tags: Tulsi Gabbard, Proves Again, She’s an Apologist, for Terrorists, Peter Heck, The Resurgent To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Tents, Homelessness & Misery: 9 Things I Saw in San FranciscoPosted: 13 Jan 2020 03:32 PM PSTI wanted to see for myself what conditions are really like in San Francisco, the nation’s most liberal city. (Photo: Katrina Trinko/The Daily Signal)by Katrina Trinko: SAN FRANCISCO — Call me a poop skeptic. After years of reading about the alleged horrors of San Francisco, I decided I wanted to see for myself if the City by the Bay was really in such dire conditions. I’d grown up 30 miles south of San Francisco, occasionally popping in for field trips or shopping or sightseeing. Sure, the city had always had homeless people, but the conditions I read about—needles everywhere, “poop maps” documenting the location of human feces—seemed absurd. How bad could it actually be in one of America’s most famous cities? Could one of the most famously liberal cities in the nation have disintegrated into disaster? In 2009, I’d moved away from California. In the decade and change since, San Francisco has undergone a radical transformation. A new wave of top Silicon Valley companies—Twitter, Uber, Facebook—opened headquarters or offices in the city. And while San Francisco hadn’t ever been inexpensive, housing costs soared, with the median housing price more than doubling since 2010. The 49ers, a football team, retained “San Francisco” in their name, but left famed Candlestick Park, now demolished, for Santa Clara, a California town south and in the middle of Silicon Valley—although San Francisco did gain the Golden State Warriors, a basketball team. Uber and Lyft, which first came to San Francisco in 2010, now dominate ride-sharing services, their drivers swooping up and down the city’s famous hills. Yet one change hadn’t occurred: The city has proudly remained a liberal bastion. Home to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district, San Francisco is reliably and overwhelmingly blue in every election (with perhaps a few votes going to the Green Party). In just the past year, the city’s Board of Supervisors declared the National Rifle Association to be a “domestic terrorist organization,” and the school board voted first to paint over, and then to hide, a mural of George Washington in one of the city’s high schools—a mural, incidentally, painted by a leftist who strove to show both Washington’s greatness and flaws. Such actions are just par for the course for San Francisco, a city of more than 884,000 that in the past decade also banned fast-food restaurants from including toys with most children’s meals; prohibited city-funded travel by local employees to 22 pro-life states; raised the minimum wage from $9.79 to $15.59 an hour; and, after banning plastic bags in 2007, first set a 10-cent fee for each nonreusable bag at stores, and then a 25-cent fee per bag. Yes, leftist insanity has long been the norm for San Francisco. But the liberal would-be-utopia had once been seen as a great city, not a filthy environment full of struggling people. In a tweet in December, President Donald Trump wrote: “Nancy Pelosi’s district in California has rapidly become one of the worst anywhere in the U.S. when it come[s] to the homeless and crime. It has gotten so bad, so fast.” Nancy Pelosi’s District in California has rapidly become one of the worst anywhere in the U.S. when it come to the homeless & crime. It has gotten so bad, so fast – she has lost total control and, along with her equally incompetent governor, Gavin Newsom, it is a very sad sight!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2019Showing it wasn’t just some “right-wing conspiracy” that San Francisco was falling apart, Oracle, one of the huge tech companies in the region, announced in December that its annual OpenWorld conference was going to Las Vegas for the next three years—costing San Francisco an estimated $64 million in potential revenue. An email from the San Francisco Travel Association, obtained by CNBC, mentioned “poor street conditions” as a factor. So two days before Christmas, I left my parents’ house and made my way over to San Francisco. I wanted to see for myself what conditions were really like. Was the middle class being driven away? Was the city as liberal as its politicians suggested? How many people were living on the streets? Twenty-two thousand steps and four Uber and Lyft drives later, here’s what I saw. 1. Tents on Sidewalks Before arriving in the city, I’d read that the Tenderloin neighborhood—just blocks from a major mall and retail area—is one of the worst. Sure enough, as soon as I drift away from the retail and go a couple blocks into the Tenderloin, things get, well, smelly. To my surprise, there are tents everywhere in the neighborhood. Years ago, during the Occupy Wall Street movement, I’d visited an Occupy encampment in Boston. This seemed similar, although there is one key difference. In Boston, the tents were set up in a park. In San Francisco, the tents are openly obstructing the sidewalk—and not just on one block. In the course of my day, I see several blocks like this clustered in the Tenderloin neighborhood and vicinity. Some are just a block or two away from a police station. San Francisco’s new district attorney, Chesa Boudin, told the ACLU in a candidate questionnaire: “Crimes such as public camping, offering or soliciting sex, public urination, blocking a sidewalk, etc. should not and will not be prosecuted.” I also notice something that I hadn’t seen much during my years in New York City and Washington, D.C.: homeless women, although far fewer than homeless men. Nationally, homelessness increased by 2.7% in 2019, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Homelessness in California is at a crisis level,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said in a formal statement. Residents of San Francisco likely agree: Three-quarters of respondents to a survey said homelessness in the city was getting worse, and a little over half mentioned it as a top issue, according to a 2019 report from the San Francisco Office of the Controller. 2. 24-Hour Public Restrooms In 2019, San Francisco decided to try keeping three public restrooms open 24 hours a day in the worst areas. It’s not cheap—to keep them clean, one attendant is present during daytime hours and, presumably for safety, two are present at night. “History has shown that without attendants, public toilets in some of San Francisco’s most challenging neighborhoods are used for drug activity and prostitution, and become targets of vandalism,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Phil Matier. Matier also did the math: After looking at the cost of funding the toilets and the amount of times the toilets were used at night, he calculated each restroom use cost the city $28.52. In addition to three 24/7 toilets, another 21 public toilets are available at certain hours, funded by the city. “The popular program … provides an alternative to using our streets and sidewalks as a toilet,” states the San Francisco Public Works website. The toilets advertise that people can dispose of needles there, another sign of San Francisco’s relaxed approach to drugs. Thomas Wolf, a former drug addict who lived on the streets of San Francisco for a few months in 2018, is among those now advocating the city change its approach toward drugs. Wolf “thinks the city is too wedded to harm reduction—making it safer to use drugs—rather than encouraging people to stop using,” the Chronicle reported in December. “He said he was offered free, clean drug paraphernalia by outreach workers, but doesn’t remember ever being offered a treatment bed or even being asked whether he wanted help quitting. Not once.” Wolf, who has ceased using drugs and now serves on San Francisco’s Street-Level Drug Dealing Task Force and works for the Salvation Army’s Railton Place as a case manager and life skills coach, estimated that 90% of the homeless he lived with in Tenderloin and the adjacent South of Market neighborhood were addicted to drugs or alcohol. “With harm reduction, the whole point is to use less while respecting your civil liberties,” Wolf told the Chronicle. “When I was out there homeless and leaving my needles in the street and defecating in the street and urinating in the street, was I protecting your civil liberties?” 3. Washing Sidewalks Walking around the Tenderloin neighborhood in the morning, I encounter workers washing a sidewalk—and asking homeless people to move. A worker sprays water right up to the brink of a homeless man’s stuff on the sidewalk. The homeless man, who is shoving his belongings into a bag or backpack, starts shouting at the worker, saying (and I’m editing this since we’re a family news outlet), “The f—, man?” He keeps shouting, bellowing sentiments along the lines of “Who the f— do you think you are, f—ing my stuff, man?” as he continues to pack up. In early December, the Tenderloin Community Benefit District and San Francisco Supervisor Matt Haney announced the beginning of weekly power-washings in the district, instead of monthly. David Elliott Lewis, a local who is a community organizer, said, per the press release: “Even though seeing human and animal feces on our sidewalks is a common occurrence, I find it upsetting and disturbing every single time.” According to RentHop.com, “Tenderloin has been on a winning streak for the ‘poopiest neighborhood’ contest for the past three years. The neighborhood saw 8,644.2 animal/human waste incidents per square mile in 2017, 7,722.8 in 2018, and 6,887.9 so far in 2019.” Washing sidewalks is hardly the only way the city is addressing the crisis. In the past decade, San Francisco has been on a spending spree to help the homeless. “Between 2011 and 2012, SF spent $157 million on homeless services. By the 2015-2016 fiscal year, it was up to $242 million. In the most recent 2019-2020 budget proposals, the figure hit more than $364 million. But the consensus remains that more is needed,” reports Curbed San Francisco, which estimates the homeless population now could be as high as 17,600. 4. Tourist Areas What’s going on with the tourist areas, attractions that long have drawn people from around the country and the world to San Francisco’s shores? “The loveliness of Paris seems somehow sadly gay/The glory that was Rome is of another day/I’ve been terribly alone and forgotten in Manhattan/I’m going home to my City by the Bay,” Tony Bennett famously warbled in “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” But local business owners are concerned tourists aren’t so tempted these days to explore what was once dubbed the “Paris of the West.” For years, Pier 39—a mix of kitschy shops, restaurants, a carousel, and the odd street entertainer—has been a top tourist destination. Now, businesses fret, times are a-changing. “We saw a pretty sharp decline since [2016-2017],” Brian Hayes, who owns seven shops and kiosks on the pier, told ABC7 (KGO-TV). “A lot of it is attributed to the homeless.” “I know myself I’ll go on vacation, I’ll spend more money, but I have to have a good experience and I don’t want to have to look at the homeless and I don’t want to have to see needles on the ground and human feces. It’s not where you want to go on vacation,” Sandra Fletcher, president of Simco Restaurants, which owns five restaurants on the pier and also is facing more trouble drumming up business, told ABC7. The day I am there, Pier 39 appears to have its usual hustle and bustle. A pack of people gather around an entertainer boasting that he can pull out the balloon he’s swallowed. A kid shrieks on a bungee flying ride. In a store that sells products only for left-handed people, customers browse. The women’s restroom is decently clean, given that it’s a free public one in a high-traffic area. A little outside Pier 39, I see a man in a wheelchair gliding along, plaintively asking people if they could help him out. He wears a 49ers cap and a red scarf and a checked sports coat, which I hope keeps him warm in this neighborhood right on the water. In the few blocks between the Pier and Fisherman’s Wharf—another frequent tourist stop, essentially a line of bayside restaurants and food counters selling seafood—I notice one man sleeping on the ground. In the area around Fisherman’s Wharf, souvenir shops sell swag and gifts that capitalize on the city’s liberal reputation also browse Union Square, rimmed by some of the top shopping destinations of San Francisco: a gigantic, eight-story Macy’s, a Saks Fifth Avenue boasting of carrying “faux fur” in one of its windows, a Tiffany’s with sparkling jewelry in its whimsical Christmas displays, and a sleek Apple Store. A Christmas tree is lit in the square, and an ice skating rink is open for Californians wistfully wanting to capture some taste of a white Christmas. About a week before my visit, Union Square was where San Francisco strained to restore its reputation. On the heels of the news of the Oracle convention’s move to Vegas, Mayor London Breed declared that San Francisco is a “world class city” and pledged further steps to address homelessness. Yet as the Chronicle’s Matier noted, Breed’s comments in Union Square came at the same time that “an image of a man with his pants around his knees defecating in a [San Francisco] Safeway aisle was rocketing around the internet and TV.” For San Francisco, the Oracle convention wasn’t even the first blow. In 2018, tourism and convention bureau SF Travel announced that a medical association, never named, was looking for another location for its conferences after 2023, despite holding the gatherings in the city since the 1980s. “Postconvention surveys showed their members were afraid to walk amid the open drug use, threatening behavior and mental illness that are common on the streets,” reports the San Francisco Chronicle. I see a couple of homeless people around Union Square, but nothing unusual for an urban area. The Union Square neighborhood effectively borders the Tenderloin, however, meaning a confused tourist could easily end up there. 5. A Church for the Homeless At lunchtime, I pop into a church—one with the glorious architecture, high ceilings, and impressive art characteristic of so many older Catholic churches in the United States. As the church’s bells chime, the sound of a vigorous snorer fills the lulls in between. St. Boniface Church, in the Tenderloin neighborhood, allows the homeless to sleep in the pews every weekday through a nonprofit program called the Gubbio Project. Around since the 1860s, the parish originally was the religious home of Germans in the city. The current church was built in 1902, and although it escaped the 1906 earthquake, it was ravaged by the subsequent fires. Rebuilding was completed in 1908. “The Gubbio Project uses the back two-thirds of the sanctuary; the church uses the front one-third to celebrate the daily Mass,” the program states on its website. “This sends a powerful message to our unhoused neighbors—they are in essence part of the community, not to be kicked out when those with homes come in to worship. It also sends a message to those attending Mass—the community includes the tired, the poor, those with mental health issues and those who are wet, cold and dirty.” The day I arrive at St. Boniface’s, the front of the church glitters with Christmas decorations. During the Communion service—there isn’t a Mass that day—the church is mostly quiet. During one brief moment, someone starts babbling, only to be told to be quiet by others. When I look back, I don’t see any of the homeless people actively participating in the religious rites. After the service, I explore the rest of the church. Most of the wooden pews—with no padding for comfort—are occupied by a sleeping person. Three people are lying on the floor in the back. I speak briefly to Michael Bonner, a new employee of the Gubbio Project. When I ask Bonner how the homeless can be helped and what should be done, he speaks of a lack of motivation, of people “going down a path of not caring anymore” instead of having “a fire burning in you.” Bonner talks about the need for a work ethic, and how it’s too simplistic to say the homeless problem is an effect of the city’s expensive housing. But he’s also adamant that people need help: “We just can’t give up on the willing,” he says. I ask him if the homeless people he encounters have loved ones or families who could help. Bonner says most of them are “probably embarrassed to go home” because “you don’t want to hear it from your family anymore” after presumably failing in previous tries to get off the streets. 6. No Place for the Middle Class One of the big tensions in San Francisco—and in the wider Bay Area region—in recent years has been the perceived gulf between the affluent and everybody else. As my colleague Jarrett Stepman has chronicled, California increasingly is becoming a place for the poor and the rich, not the middle class. So out of curiosity, I walk over to Twitter’s headquarters, just a few blocks away from St. Boniface’s, passing City Hall. Twitter is just one of several companies—others include Salesforce, Facebook, Square, and Uber—that have come to San Francisco in recent years. No doubt the city has seen a business boom: “Citywide, the unemployment rate fell from 9% in 2011 to 2.6% this year, and the number of jobs grew from 543,600 in 2011 to an estimated 730,900 last year, according to state data,” reports the Chronicle. The area around Twitter is quiet the day I am there, and there is no sign of anyone living—or begging—on the streets. Beneath Twitter’s headquarters is a bougie food hall and a grocery store that, incredibly, makes Whole Foods seem like an affordable option. In the food hall, I stop for lunch at The Organic Coup—which was basically everything you’d expect from a shop in a Francisco food hall. It brands itself as the first “organic fast food restaurant” and urges me to “taste the revolution.” Apparently, fast-food prices don’t apply in the revolutionary era: My lunch of chicken strips and tater tots, and nary a drink, costs $12.81. However, the food hall offers plenty of options beyond organic tater tots, including—I kid you not—caviar. One of my Lyft drivers, whose name I’m not using because I didn’t get his permission to quote him on the record, calls San Francisco a “ridiculous city.” As we pass a gas station, where regular gas is going for $3.99 a gallon, he notes in frustration that gas where I live is probably significantly cheaper. My Lyft driver also complains that affordable housing is a joke, saying it means something like a $900,000 for a two-bedroom condo instead of a million. The driver, who moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco 10 years ago, blames San Francisco residents for not allowing more housing, noting it had created a situation where people made a fortune on their own homes’ going up in value but where their children could not afford to buy a home and stay. The Lyft driver’s attitude isn’t an anomaly: A 2019 survey conducted by the controller’s office found that 35% of respondents were somewhat or very likely to leave the city in the next three years, including 48% of those 35 or younger. Although the city notes that the 35% number is in line with statistics for the past 14 years, data suggests people aren’t merely talking about leaving the city. According to real estate firm Redfin, San Francisco was second only to New York City among American cities with the dubious distinction of losing the most residents in the third quarter of 2019, the most recent period tracked. And my driver isn’t wrong to be concerned about housing prices. “In 2010, the median sale price for a single-family house in SF came in at $751,000 … But by October of 2019, the California Association of Realtors estimated that a median-priced SF house sold for $1.65 million, more than double the value of a home the same time ten years ago,” reports Curbed SF. 7. Life on the Sidewalk Toward the end of the day, I speak to Anthony Rodriguez, who is sitting on a box next to a man smoking in a tent. Next to the tent is a sofa. Neither Rodriguez nor the tent man, who doesn’t want to be quoted, knows where the sofa originated. Rodriguez is from Oakland, a city across the Bay, but says he’s been in San Francisco for about a month. “That’s one thing about San Francisco,” he observes. “You won’t starve.” The 51-year-old says he’s been homeless since 2015, when his mother died, and that he had been homeless at times prior to that as well. Rodriguez tells me a complicated story I have trouble following—and entirely believing—about being discharged from a hospital too soon for an injury he incurred on his knee. “I started drinking again because it’s cold out,” he mentions. Overall, he likes San Francisco, especially because he meets so many people. “If I’m lonely and sad, I always like to come out here,” Rodriguez, who doesn’t want his photo taken, tells me. He says he has seven children, and that he’s outlived two of his ex-wives. It doesn’t appear that he is in regular touch with any family now. The company he finds in San Francisco “fills a void for me,” he says, noting that he’s less depressed here. “The police will wake you up,” Rodriguez says, but adds that it’s usually OK to just go across the street when that happens. 8. Poop and Needles So am I still a poop skeptic? After walking all over the city, I’ve seen only one instance of poop (in the Tenderloin neighborhood) and one possible needle (I wasn’t anxious to get close enough to verify)—despite the fact that I kept diligently studying the sidewalk to see if I would spot either feces or needles. My anonymous Lyft driver, however, says that he regularly sees people shooting up heroin, and notes you can spot the dealers by noticing who has backpacks. #SanFrancisco politicians have been among the most vocal proponents of reducing inequality… Perhaps, their struggle should start closer to home. https://t.co/4nzW2iNLvf pic.twitter.com/uVqDMHfQre— OpenTheBooks (@open_the_books) August 22, 2019“In San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ producers filmed drug dealers operating in broad daylight. In the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood, where many apartments rent for nearly $4,000 a month, the sidewalks were lined with used syringes,” writes Fox News’ Charles Couger. And in the course of my research, I encounter Twitter accounts that portray a dirtier reality than what I happened to observe. {Images available} 9. Misery In the weeks since I visited San Francisco and started writing this article, I’ve caught myself often thinking about the homeless people I saw—from the man who was barefoot on the street in the Mission District, to those I saw on the sidewalks from my passing car, to the man rushing to pack up his belongings as a worker sprayed the sidewalk near him. I don’t pretend to know the exact policy solution that will “solve” homelessness—although I hope to do further reporting and interviews this year at The Daily Signal to talk to experts who have insightful ideas on ways to help. But any visitor to San Francisco can tell the current situation isn’t working—for tourists, for residents, and perhaps most importantly, for the homeless themselves. No doubt, mental health and addiction, perhaps both in many or most cases, make helping the homeless while respecting individual rights uniquely challenging. But as clichéd as the term is, it’s genuinely heartbreaking to walk through blocks of people, spending their lives on the streets, often seemingly in a drugged haze—and sometimes passed out entirely. I can’t imagine tents provide much shelter against the chilly, Bay-driven winds of San Francisco, or that anyone who feels driven to defecate on the street is truly in his right mind. Seeing this at Christmastime—when most of the country was on the cusp of days of joyful celebrations, ample family time, presents galore, and gourmet meals—was especially upsetting. The status quo in San Francisco has a real human cost. The left long has prided itself on having more compassion for, and solutions for, the poorest Americans than the right does. But if one thing is clear when walking around San Francisco, it’s that this liberal bastion has absolutely failed some Americans who are struggling the hardest right now. ————————– Katrina Trinko (@KatrinaTrinko) is managing editor of Heritage Foundations’s The Daily Signal and a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors. All photos in this article were taken by the author. In a few photos, faces have been blurred to respect privacy. Tags: Tents, Homelessness, and Misery: 9 Things I Saw in San Francisco, Katrina Trinko, The Daily Signal, Heritage Foundation To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| IranPosted: 13 Jan 2020 02:04 PM PSTby Rep. Rick Crawford: Tensions between the United States and Iran are near an all time high. President Trump ordered a drone strike killing Iranian Major General, Qasem Soleimani, who commanded militias responsible for mob attacks against the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Soleimani was a major conductor of the destruction and unrest that has plagued the Middle East and his death marks the end of his reign of terror. Iran escalated tensions by attacking US airbases in Iraq, however no Americans were harmed. While Iran is backing down, President Trump has indicated that he will retaliate if Iran takes further military action, and that he will be placing additional economic sanctions on Iran. Despite the President’s message of peace, my colleagues have rung the alarm on war with Iran and caused public panic by going so far as to pass a resolution that would attempt to hinder the President’s ability to deter further conflict without Congressional approval. By definition the resolution is non-binding and doesn’t have any legislative backing, and therefore would have done nothing to prevent the killing of Soleimani. The President has the Constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to engage in military conflict and it appears my friends are simply resentful that they were too focused on impeachment to remain current in foreign affairs. ————————- Rep. Rick Crawford serves the 1st District of Arkansas and is the the ARRA News Service Editor’s Congressman. Tags: U.S. Representative, Rick Crawford, Arkansas, Iran, military action To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Donald Trump and the MythmakersPosted: 13 Jan 2020 01:55 PM PSTby Caroline Glick: For the past 40-odd years, two narratives have guided American Middle East policy. Both were invented by the Carter administration. One relates to Iran. One relates to Israel. Both narratives reject reality as the basis for foreign policy decision-making in favor of delusion. Over the past two months, President Donald Trump has rejected and disavowed them both. His opponents are apoplectic. As far as Iran is concerned, as journalist Lee Smith explained in Tablet online magazine this week, when Iranian “students” seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, they placed the Carter administration in a dilemma: If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the “students” weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the US would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn’t want to do that. So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander who, try as he might, couldn’t get a bunch of “students” in central Tehran to free the hostages. At the base of their decision to prefer fantasy to reality in regards to Iran was the hope that Khomeini and his “students” would be satisfied with a pound or two of American flesh and wouldn’t cause Washington too many other problems. So too, as Smith noted, the Carter administration was propelled by guilt. The worldviews of many members of the administration had been shaped on radical university campuses in the 1960s. They agreed with the Iranian revolutionaries who cursed Americans as imperialists. They perceived Khomeini and his followers as “authentic” Third World actors who were giving the Americans their comeuppance. Khomeini and his “Death to America” shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it, “plausibly deniable” doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter’s decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression and war it carried out against America through proxies. During the Iraq War from 2003-2011, Iran’s aggression reached new heights. Iran organized the Shiite militias that waged war against the US forces in Iraq. It also supported Al-Qaida in Iraq which organized in Iran and used Iran as its logistical base for operations. More than six hundred American forces were killed and thousands were wounded in attacks carried out with Iranian-made improvised explosive devices, (IADs). Yet rather than confront Iran for its aggression and take action against it, the Bush administration tried to make a deal with the mullahs. Under Obama, reaching an accord with Iran was the singular goal of US foreign policy. Every other goal was subordinated to Obama’s burning desire to appease Iran at the expense of Israel and the US’s Sunni Arab allies. This then brings us to President Trump. Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who as commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force was the head of all of Iran’s regional and global terror apparatuses – destroyed the Carter administration’s Iran narrative. Soleimani was killed in Baghdad along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of one of the Soleimani-controlled Shiite militias in Iraq. Iraqi protesters, who have been demonstrating against Iran’s control over their government since last October claim that Soleimani was the one who ordered al-Muhandis to kill the demonstrators. More than 500 demonstrators have been killed by those forces in Iraq over the past three months. By killing the two together, the Americans exposed the big lie at the root of 40 years of American deliberate blindness to the reality of Iranian culpability and responsibility for the acts of terror and aggression its surrogates have carried out against America and its allies. By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions. From now on US policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on escapism. The second false narrative that has formed the basis of US Middle East policy since Carter is that Israel and the so-called “occupation” are responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East. Moved largely by Carter’s hostility towards the Jewish state, his administration was the first to call Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria an “occupation.” It determined, through a 1978 memo authored by Herbert Hansell, the State Department’s legal adviser, that the mere existence of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria constituted a breach of international law. Because the Hansell memo was based on a wholly specious interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949, and had no basis in actual international law, the Reagan administration refused to adopt it. But that didn’t stop Ronald Reagan from adopting the anti-Israel substance of Carter’s policy narrative. Just as Reagan turned a blind eye to Iran’s responsibility for the terror attacks its proxies carried out against the United States – including the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983, and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in November 1983 – so he substantively accepted Carter’s anti-Israel narrative which blamed Israel for the absence of Middle East peace. Reagan appointed veteran diplomat Philip Habib to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace. Habib put together a “peace plan” predicated on the notion of Israeli guilt. The first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush administration and of course, the Obama administration all held to the Carter line that blamed Israel and its control over Judea and Samaria, (and Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and – until 2005 – Gaza), for the unrest and instability of the region. Obama, of course, went full circle. He adopted the Hansell memo as US official policy and enabled the UN Security Council to pass a resolution criminalizing the existence of Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines. The fact that the Carter narrative was self-evidently ridiculous and destabilizing made no impression on these successive administrations. PLO aggression and refusal to either disavow terrorism or accept Israel’s right to exist in any borders were brushed aside as irrelevant and unwelcome information. Israel’s profound concessions for peace were pocketed, poo-pooed and forgotten. Last November, the Trump administration put paid the phony narrative of Israeli avarice with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that the administration was disavowing the Hansell memo and replacing it with an accurate international law-based assessment that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are not inherently illegal. Wednesday, while the world was awaiting Trump’s response to Iran’s failed missile attack against Iraqi bases housing US forces, the Kohelet Policy Forum held a conference on the legal and diplomatic significance of Pompeo’s announcement. In a pre-recorded message for the conference, Pompeo briefly explained why he decided to disavow the Hansell memo. His explanation could be equally applied to the Trump administration’s policy towards Iran. In Pompeo’s words, “It is important that we speak the truth when the facts lead us to it. And that’s what we’ve done.” For the American foreign policy establishment, Trump’s refusal to continue their forty-year marriage of policy to delusion is an unforgivable transgression, and a threat. Not only has he committed the crime of rejecting their collective “wisdom,” his reality-based policies might actually be working. The threat to them is obvious. If Trump’s reality-based policies succeed, he will dismantle their foreign policy legacy. All their protestations of wisdom, all their fancy resumes and titles as former senior officials will lose their allure and market value. Since Pompeo’s statement regarding the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria related to an issue which, while critical, is less in the headlines today than it was under Obama, aside from a few peremptory condemnations, the foreign policy aristocrats ignored it. As they saw it, once they return to power and start working with an Israeli government led by someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the anti-Israel phony narrative will be restored to its rightful place as the foundation of US policy. The Iran story is different. Days before the drone strike that killed him, Soleimani tried to re-enact the 1979 “student” takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran with “protesters” in Baghdad. But this time it didn’t work. And Soleimani paid with his life for his failure. Iran’s half-hearted, failed missile attack against US forces in Iraq showed that the Iranian regime is terrified of Trump and their reversal of fortune. Trump’s policies expose the mendacity and rank insanity of his predecessors’ policies towards Iran and Israel. Since Obama’s policies were particularly radical, divorced from reality and devastating, Trump has reasonably singled them out for particular rebuke and condemnation. Among other things, Trump rightly said the missiles Iran shot at US forces in Iraq were paid for by the 150 billion dollars in sanctions relief and 1.8 billion dollars in cash that flowed to the coffers of the IRGC through the 2015 nuclear agreement. Rather than keep quiet as their signature policy was exposed as a strategic disaster, Obama administration officials and their supporters in Congress and the media went into very public paroxysms of rage. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief propagandist, who sold the nuclear deal to a credulous and eager media, said Trump’s move would lead to war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the US strike against Soleimani was “disproportionate,” hinting it was a war crime to kill the terrorist who had just ordered the seizure of a US Embassy. She scheduled a Congressional session to curb Trump’s power to confront Iranian aggression and nuclear proliferation. On cue, a group of psychiatrists wrote an open letter to Congress insisting that Trump is crazy and must be restrained. (The same group has written several nearly identical letters since Trump took office.) To protect and preserve their 40-year old delusion-based policy, Trump’s domestic opponents are effectively supporting the Iranian regime against the United States. And as they see it, they have no choice. They are in a race against time. The more successful Trump’s reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power. Given the stakes, we can assume that their attempts to clip Trump’s wings and debase him will increase in intensity, churlishness and irrationality as time goes by and as his successes mount. —————————– Caroline Glick is the Senior Contributing Editor of Israel Hayom and the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Israel Security Project. For more information on Ms. Glick’s work, visit carolineglick.com. Tags: Caroline Glick, Donald Trump, the Mythmakers To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Cheap Labor Will End When Welfare BeginsPosted: 13 Jan 2020 01:17 PM PSTDebbie Pelleyby Debbie Pelley, Contributing Author: Just how long do those businesses, farmers, and advocates of Cheap Labor think these 12 to 20 illegal aliens will work for these cheap wages when they are eligible for the 60 plus government welfare programs – which will happen when they become legal. It won’t take them very long to catch on that they can do as well or better without working. We will just have another 20 million plus people on the government dole. The welfare wages are simply too high to get people to do the cheap labor for any length of time. Then we will need another 20 million illegals who are not yet eligible for all the government benefits to do the unpleasant work for cheap wages. Never fear! After this amnesty phase, the rush on the border will guarantee cheap labor will be available, but will there be any jobs left for the Americans and how much will this influx depress American wages? In other words, they want that cheap labor even if it means developing a slave labor market in our country. And hawkers of “Cheap Labor” pretend they have more compassion than we do for the illegal aliens. And the labor has never been cheap; the expense is just borne by the taxpayers who pay all those welfare benefits for the children of the illegal aliens born on American soil and the emergency medical benefits for the illegal alien adults as well. Heritage Foundation reports that the average cost to the taxpayer of the household of a low-skill laborer is $19,588 a year. That will be the cost to the taxpayers for most of these 12 to 20 million illegal aliens once they become legal. See this link: ” The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Immigrants to the U.S. Taxpayer” And there won’t be any more under the table wages lower than minimum wage! And the new illegal aliens once legalized will have to pay taxes and compete for business on the same basis as the Americans with legal license and other various government mandates which will prevent them from working as cheaply as they could when they were illegal. We believe we have as much compassion on the poor and illegal aliens as any citizen, not ever having been of the economically privileged in our country. But we are not doing anyone any favors by creating dependency and getting our disadvantaged hooked on welfare. And we are not helping those illegal aliens by allowing our country to become as lawless and as corrupt and as economically disadvantaged as the country from which they are fleeing. —————— Debbie Pelley is Retired Arkansas Teacher of 27 years. She is presently a grassroots citizen activist, researcher and writer who advocates for Arkansans and for transparent and limited government. She is a contribution author on the ARRA News Service. Tags: Debbie Pelley, Cheap Labor, Will End, When Welfare Begins To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Jane Fonda Saves the Planet From HerselfPosted: 13 Jan 2020 12:56 PM PSTFonda a Traitor To the USA! by Daniel Greenfield: Last year, Jane Fonda sold her “eco-conscious” Beverly Hills mansion, with its 7,102 square feet on a 36,000 square foot lot enclosing a his and her master suite, a glass elevator, 5 bathrooms, glass walls, fireplaces, a fountain, a meditation garden, a fully stocked gym, a pavilion with heat lamps, and a huge pool for $8.5 million after she found no takers at its original $13 million sale price. “This was the first time in my 79 years,” Fonda enunciates with the deep pathos of an orphan finally getting a full meal as the camera zooms through the cavernous interior of a walk-in closet the size of some people’s homes , “that I have had a closet that you could walk in and see everything you have.” As Gaia is my witness, If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill, I’ll never go without a walk-in closet again. Heartfelt music more appropriate to the reunion of a lost child and her mother plays in the background as the socialist actress describes her “amazing glass elevator, it’s like a gem”. Then she gushes about having a party with 150 people in the house. “We could have had another 50,” she brags. Then there’s her pool. “It’s so beautiful at night when it’s lit up.” Fonda didn’t sell her mansion because she suddenly realized that two people living on a 36,000 square foot estate was bad for the environment. Even if the pool was solar heated. She had just broken up with her record producer boyfriend and was looking to scale down by getting something for the single life. And so, the environmentalist activist went all the way down from a 7,102 square foot mansion to a 6,679 square foot luxury townhouse. The $5.8 million three-story home has 4 bedrooms, 7 bathrooms, and a semi-subterranean three car garage which no doubt only stock Teslas. The master suite has its own fireplace, two walk-in closets, a marble bathroom, and its own balcony. There are staff quarters for the servants. And an elevator for a convenient way to get around the three-story condo. The complex also offers indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and a tennis court. For the environment. Every so often, Fonda leaves her Century City luxury condo to fly 2,311 miles to Washington D.C. to protest for the environment. Each of these trips by Fonda generates more CO2 than an average person in Madagascar produces in one year. At these ‘Fire Drill Fridays’, she arranges to get herself arrested (with all the CO2 emissions that entails) along with other California celebrities to demand that everyone save the planet by submitting to the poverty, misery, and destruction of the Green New Deal. Fonda urged protesters to “take the next step beyond individual actions to reduce our carbon footprint”. She could have reduced her carbon footprint by getting rid of 6 of her 7 bathrooms. But that wouldn’t have gotten the haggard leftist has-been another 15 minutes of fame. “These are life-and-death decisions,” she falsely claimed before a silent meditation, three “hi-yahs”, and the vanity arrests in a city already overburdened by crime that largely affects its poor population. Also arrested was Ted Danson, who last year bought a second compound next to his first compound in Santa Monica with a walk-in wine cellar (don’t call it a cave), he already owns a cottage in Nashville, a ten-acre place in California, and a six-acre multi-residence spread on Martha’s Vineyard. The Cheers star and blackface impresario is naturally concerned about the environment. He owns so much of it. Brooklyn Decker, the Sports Illustrated model, also came to D.C. to fight for the environment. Decker and her husband have two homes, a 7,300 square foot mansion in West Austin, Texas on 15 acres of land with an infinity pool, and the other, a 4-acre spread with 7 bedrooms in North Carolina. Joining them in the Legion of Environmentalist Mansion Crusaders was Rosanna Arquette, an actress who lives in a Pacific Palisades 1.36 acre ocean-view walled and gated estate with 7.5 bathrooms, floor-to-ceiling glass walls, and a 10,000-bottle wine cellar with its own tasting room. “As Greta Thunberg said, ‘Our House Is On Fire’, and we need to act like it,” Fonda wrote. Or our 10,000-bottle wine cellar anyway. “You see this coat? I needed something red and I went out and found this coat on sale. This is the last article of clothing that I will ever buy,” she boasted at a Capitol Hill rally while showing off a $500 luxurious red coat. The red coat is appropriate for the nation’s most famous celebrity traitor who flew to show solidarity with the Viet Cong who were murdering Americans with nary a carbon offset in sight. “‘We don’t need more stuff,’ then I have to walk the walk too. So I’m not buying any more clothes.” And to prove it, Fonda wore the same black sequin suit to the Glamour Women of the Year Awards in New York City and then to the GCAAP Empower Party in Atlanta three days later. How did she get from New York to Atlanta in three days? Probably teleportation. And buying new clothes in Atlanta would have had less environmental impact than dragging her sequin suit on a flight from New York to Atlanta. But it’s not about actually making a difference. It’s about pretending to. You can have your indoor elevators, wine cellars, and massive estates, and look good by getting briefly arrested to show how much you care about the environment, even while heating, cooling, and powering houses and lands that consume more energy and emit more carbon than millions of third worlders. “Proud of @Janefonda’s commitment to save our planet,” an environmentalist site tweeted. An actual commitment would have meant moving to a 1,500 square foot apartment. Instead of commuting between California and Washington D.C. (not to mention Atlanta and New York City) while also having a place in D.C. While the media has widely reported on her temporary sojourn in D.C., none have bothered to ask or report on what sort of environmentally sustainable quarters she’s occupying. “I made personal changes,” Fonda said. “Electric car, get rid of single-use plastic, less meat — cut it out altogether — recycle, all those kinds of things.” But keep the 6,679 square foot luxury home. And have your luxury coats shipped over from China. “I decided that the last article of clothing that I will ever buy is a red coat. Sure enough, I found one at Neiman Marcus on sale for $500. And that’s the coat,” she had insisted. “I’m speaking out against consumerism and so I have to walk the talk. And so that’s the last thing I’ll buy.” By Fonda’s standards, paying only $500 for a coat is a protest against consumerism. There’s nothing like protesting consumerism by buying a $500 coat “on sale” at Neiman Marcus when you live in California.The coat, worn exclusively by Meghan Markle and working-class comrades of the Viet Cong, normally sells for $750, is virgin wool with lambskin trim and imported from China. There’s nothing like buying a discounted $500 slave labor coat that had to be shipped all the way over from China to protest consumerism and fight for the environment. This is Fonda’s single greatest moral statement since she sat on a Viet Cong anti-aircraft gun while hanging out with America’s enemies. China has been known to get its lambskin by skinning lambs alive. And its leather often comes from dogs and cats boiled alive. But it’s not as if Fonda cares about the planet, animals or anyone except herself. Fonda’s only doing these protests until her Netflix series, Grace and Frankie, starts shooting again. At a protest that came too close to the resumption of shooting on her TV series, she avoided being arrested. “I have to be careful not to get to a point where they’re going to keep me for 90 days, because I have to begin preparing for Grace and Frankie in January,” the heroic activist explained, after previously saying, “Everybody’s gotta get used to this new normal, getting beyond our comfort zone.” It’s one thing to get headlines for being arrested. Just so as long as it doesn’t interfere with your closeup and the millions of dollars that allow you to afford the good things in life that you want to take away from the rest of the country. Fonda wants her 7 bathrooms and tiny hovels for the rest of us. After Fonda returned from collaborating with the enemy in Vietnam, she slandered American POWs as “hypocrites and liars”. But she’s always been the real liar and hypocrite. The pampered celebrity posing with Communist killers and cheering on the murder and torture of American soldiers because it was good for her career. And now championing the Green New Deal while commuting to her massive home, and getting visibly arrested, so long as it doesn’t interfere with her Netflix shooting schedule. Fonda spoke glowingly of the Communists of Vietnam in propaganda broadcasts. The Green New Deal promises a brutal revolution, with cold and hunger, the breakdown of industry and life, that appeals so much to leftists who believe that people deserve to suffer for social justice. And Jane Fonda hopes to enjoy it from the balcony of her master suite and its fireplace if it gets too cold in Los Angeles County. ——————- Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. ARRA Editor’s comment: As Jane Fonda said,‘We don’t need more stuff,’ We also don’t need Jane Fonda’s attempt at redemption by downsizing her lifestyle! Tags: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish blog, Jane Fonda, Saves the Planet, From Herself To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
| Nearly 300 Years Later, Gulliver’s Travels Is Still the Satire We NeedPosted: 13 Jan 2020 12:51 PM PSTby Casey Chalk: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.” So wrote Qoheleth in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes. The Hebrew Bible, some of its books written more than three thousand years ago, proves that there is a repetition, or at least a rhyme, as Mark Twain is said to have noted, to human experience. Yet it is not only in divine texts or literature or historical data that you find contemporary analogues to past events. Satire, even when difficult to interpret based on shifts in humor, also illuminates current times and cultures. So it is with Gulliver’s Travels, written by Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift in 1726. Penned largely as a critique of the British Whig Party, Gulliver’s Travels was an immediate success. “It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery,” said English poet and dramatist John Gay. Its influence is still felt in our language: Lilliputian (trivial, very small), Brobdingnagian (gigantic), and Yahoo (a rude, noisy person) all originate with Swift. There are several cinematic adaptations of the story, two of which starred, separately, Ted Danson (Cheers, The Good Place) and Jack Black (Shallow Hal, King Kong). In 2015, Robert McCrum, a popular British editor and literary critic, labeled Gulliver’s Travels “a satirical masterpiece” and one of the one hundred best novels ever written. I didn’t try reading the original text until 2019, when I was thirty-five years old. I was largely deterred because I had read a children’s version as a boy, and as an adult I figured the story was intended for kids. How terribly misinformed I was. Gulliver’s Travels, though not as culturally significant as the best of Shakespeare and Dickens, should be far more widely read and taught in our schools. A few examples of how its satire exposes contemporary culture will show you why. TECHNOLOGICAL AND SCIENTIFIC ABSURDITIES One consistent theme throughout Swift’s story is a skepticism toward technological and scientific progress as a panacea for all society’s ills. In Lilliput, the land of six-inch-tall people, a group of scholarly observers takes copious notes on Gulliver, a shipwrecked sailor who to them is a terrifying giant. Of his pocket watch, they write:Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain, with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. . . . He put this engine into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did anything without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action of his life.Some clever commentators have noted the similarity between Gulliver’s comical dependence on his watch and that of many today on their Apple Watch. Just as much, if not more, could be said of our obsession with other present-day technologies, especially “smart” devices. Not only can such tools become idolatrous in our “worship” and overreliance on them, but mounting evidence also indicates that they, ironically, may be making us stupider. Who needs to know timetables, a knowledge of geography or history, or really anything whatsoever when an iPhone is in reach? Swift also censures scientific progress in his depiction of Gulliver’s visit to the island of Balnibarbi. There he encounters a people obsessed with “new rules and methods” and “new instruments and tools” aimed at creating a utopian society. Gulliver notes, however, that “the only inconvenience is that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and, in the meantime, the whole country lies miserably waste.” Gulliver meets one man who for eight years had been engaged in a project to extract “sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers.” Granted, science has brought unprecedented improvements and comforts. Yet, as Gulliver himself observes, we can be so narrowly focused on finding scientific solutions to all of life’s problems that we neglect the more essential, universal, and eternal answers to alleviating ours and society’s ills. Such answers include strong familial and community relationships; an altruistic, sacrificial sentiment toward our neighbor; and the dignity and inherent value of labor. As even secular research is recognizing, human beings find fulfillment and meaning in work of a physical nature. Any technological or scientific endeavor that aims to eliminate these completely from our lives is contrary to human flourishing. THE FICKLE IRRATIONALITY OF POLITICS Politics is also a frequent target of Swift’s—unsurprisingly, given his own misfortunes, as he was effectively exiled to Ireland because of his political leanings. During Gulliver’s visit to Lilliput, he writes, “Of so little weight are the greatest services to princes, when put into the balance with a refusal to gratify their passions.” You feel Swift’s cynicism when Gulliver, playing the role of the sensible diplomat, steals the miniature navy of Lilliput’s militaristic archenemy Blefuscu, but refuses to conquer and enslave them. For this he is accused of high treason by members of the Lilliputian court, who conspire to murder the giant who just saved their nation from destruction. So Gulliver flees to Blefuscu, resolving “never more to put any confidence in princes or ministers.” Years later he travels to Brobdingnag, a land of giants about twelve times as large as the average human. Upon entering the court of the king of these colossuses, Gulliver is queried regarding the politics of his native Europe. The Brobdingnagian king is perplexed that men would go to such “a great trouble and expense, often to the ruin of their families,” to enter politics. Following a description of politicians, the monarch concludes: “You have clearly proved that idleness, and vice, are the proper ingredients for qualifying a legislator.” The king is further shocked to learn that nations go into debt: “He was still at a loss how a kingdom could run out if its estate like a private person. He asked me, who were our creditors? And where we found money to pay them?” National security is likewise a conundrum: “He wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and extensive wars; that certainly we must be a quarrelsome people, or live among very bad neighbours.” When Gulliver offers to provide knowledge of the modern arts of war—gunpowder, firearms, cannons—he is met with revulsion. “The king was struck with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made . . . he would rather lose half his kingdom than be privy to such a secret, which he commanded me, as I valued my life, never to mention any more.” Swift indicts the political utilitarianism that fosters various forms of deviance. Gulliver, unable to see the corrupting forces of Machiavellian political theory himself, perceives the Brobingagians’ disgust at such machinations as a weakness. We the reader appreciate, with delicious irony, how Gulliver mourns sucha strange effect of narrow principles and short views! That a prince possessed of every quality which procures veneration, love and esteem; of strong parts, great wisdom and profound learning; endued with admirable talents for government, and almost adored by his subjects; should from a nice unnecessary scruple, whereof in Europe we can have no conception, let slip an opportunity put into his hands, that would have made him absolute master of the lives, the liberties and the fortunes of his people. SATIRE AND SKEPTICISM Swift had a healthy skepticism toward any political science that promotes the centralization of governmental power, and any technology that undermines, rather than promotes, human well-being. And he was disenchanted with Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, who prioritized the individual vis-a-vis the “social contract”—separating and alienating him as a result. The genius of Gulliver’s Travels is that it offers illuminating commentary regarding society and human experience by making you a dispassionate observer. Through this literary buffer, you are able to contemplate with greater acumen our own contemporary weaknesses and failings. You see the inconsequence of so many vain strivings. As the king of Brobdingnag says, “How contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as [Gulliver].” This does not mean that you should become a cynic or misanthrope, as many readers have interpreted Gulliver’s development over the course of the novel. The Brobdingnagian king concludes the “bulk” of humanity “to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Maybe he’s right. But the race that produced Swift’s satire also gave us Shakespeare’s sonnets. However deep our faults and intractable our problems, Swift’s humility in the face of technology, science, politics, and human nature would serve us well today. ——————— Casey Chalk is senior writer for Crisis magazine and a contributor at the American Conservative and New Oxford Review. The Intercollegiate Review (IR) is published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) and is dedicated to advancing the principles that make America free, virtuous, and prosperous. ISI shared this article with the editor of ARRA News Service. Tags: Casey Chalk, Nearly 300 Years Later, Gulliver’s Travels, Still the Satire We Need, Intercollegiate Review, Intercollegiate, Studies Institute To share or post to your site, click on “Post Link”. Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and “Like” Facebook Page – Thanks! |
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NOQ REPORT
- Delay backfire: After Pelosi’s gambit, does anyone outside of DC care about impeachment?
- #RefundWarren: The sudden war between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, explained
- Video: Jessica Yaniv appears to assault journalist Keean Bexte outside of courthouse
- Yes, the Evangelical Immigration Table is Soros-backed
- In a stunning rebuke to leftists, Iranian protestors blame their oppressive regime instead of Trump
- Denzel Washington is what Hollywood really should be
- New Jersey’s Declan O’Scanlon commends protesters’ success stopping vaccination bill
- 7 vs 1: Andrew Yang is the only person of color with a shot among Democrats
- Far Eastern storytelling: Why ‘Parasite’ is like a Quentin Tarantino movie
| Delay backfire: After Pelosi’s gambit, does anyone outside of DC care about impeachment?Posted: 14 Jan 2020 06:03 AM PSTFor three months, newsrooms across the nation were feeding us story after story after story about impeachment. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi played coy after she got her Articles following a rushed and “urgent” set of hearings in the House of Representatives. It was a fatal mistake.Many of us were following along with rapt attention to the debacle of the impeachment hearings in the House as well as the anti-climactic conclusion to them that led to Articles of Impeachment for “Obstruction of Congress” and “Abuse of Power.” But instead of passing it off to the Senate, as prescribed by the vast majority of scholars and judges reading the Constitution and the accepted rules of engagement between the two chambers of Congress, Pelosi sat on them. There’s still no apparent strategy behind the maneuver, and as Democrats flail around to spin it, mainstream media is trying to make people care.But we don’t.All Pelosi has done is make herself look bad for making demands that were beyond her power to make. Impeachment is a power of the House, but trying impeachment is a power of the Senate. There is no crossover. The Senate could vote 100-0 to impeach a President, but it would hold zero legal weight. Conversely, the House could vote 435-0 on protocols to be used by the Senate in the trial, at which point the Senate would be compelled to adopt exactly zero of their proposed ideas. The founders were smart to keep this process split between the chambers. Pelosi, apparently, never got the memo.The Senate “was never going to allow the Speaker to dictate” how to handle a trial. “The Senate will not be sucked into this precedent-breaking path,” McConnell said touting the separation of powers between the two chambers of congress. https://t.co/OwA3d8I7Wv— Bill Mitchell (@mitchellvii) January 13, 2020The real question isn’t whether the President will be exonerated. He will be. As it seems less and less likely the Articles will be dismissed from the outset, we appear to be heading towards a singular conclusion to the debacle. Everything between the moment Pelosi delivers the Articles and the moment Chief Justice John Roberts declares the trial adjourned is all about scoring political points through spinning of the narrative. It will continue all the way to election day, but the crucial period of time will be from bell-to-bell during the trial itself. How will the people perceive the proceedings? Will they believe it’s a giant coverup from the White House, as the media is going to attempt to make us believe? Will they see it as partisan hacking from Democrats?Or, will they simply not care at all. Since Pelosi allowed all of the steam to spit out of her impeachment engine, it seems less likely people will pay much attention to what she or any Democrats have to say about it all.With Iran tensions in a strange sort of limbo, news outlets and buzz around virtual water coolers continue to focus on the protests in the country following the downing of a Boeing 737-800 by the Middle Eastern nation’s air defenses. Progressive media is still trying to paint it as a mistake by President Trump to have Quds leader Qasem Soleimani killed while conservative media is highlighting the unified call from both patriotic Americans and patriotic Iranians for leaders in Tehran to step down.The last thing we’re worried about is a set of trumped up charges that have no chance of succeeding but that will be spun as political fodder ahead of the 2020 election. Apparently, Pelosi never got that memo, either. Now, she’s stuck with a series of terrible decisions.As Sean Hannity noted on his show last night, Pelosi has done nothing but embarrass herself with her failed impeachment gambit. She’s done worse than that, though. She’s actually lulled most of America into a state of impeachment tedium.American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post Delay backfire: After Pelosi’s gambit, does anyone outside of DC care about impeachment? appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| #RefundWarren: The sudden war between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, explainedPosted: 14 Jan 2020 03:56 AM PSTIt was bound to happen. As Democrats contend with each other for the presidential nomination, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have remained cordial and oftentimes complimentary to each other. But that has changed overnight, three weeks before the Iowa caucus, as the two radical progressive champions of the hyper-leftist movement have unofficially declared a cold war on each other.This has been building up for a couple of weeks as Warren’s campaign has begun painting her as the more moderate of the two far-left candidates. Where once she was all-in for Medicare-for-All immediately, she has since softened her view with a layered plan that may or may not address single-payer healthcare in her first term. But the real “softening” has been happening through campaign messages since the new decade began as her team has promoted her electability over the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist from Vermont.It all came to a sudden boiling point when CNN reported Sanders told Warren in a private meeting in December, 2018, the he didn’t believe a woman could win against President Trump. That in and of itself is just CNN being CNN; they have clearly sided with former Vice President Joe Biden and have quietly subverted his more radical challengers. But the war between the two went public when Warren confirmed the story, leading some to speculate it was her campaign that leaked the news in the first place.Sanders followed up by calling it all ludicrous. “It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened,” he said.Then, the Washington Post posted a generally neutral take on the issue, saying the two sides disagree over the content of the meeting that happened over a year ago. But they did some digging of their own and found one person who was present at the time refute the allegation.#RefundWarren Peter Daou is scolding Warren.Nate Silver says it’s obvious Warren leaked the story.The Washington Post, that famously ran 16 hit-pieces against Bernie in 16 hours, is reporting that two people refute Warren’s story.Jesus. Bernie’s gonna win isn’t he? pic.twitter.com/QaCC93wxs8— Nate’s Liver – Commentary (@SilERabbit) January 14, 2020Late yesterday and into today, #RefundWarren was trending on Twitter. Many of the Tweets in it gave instructions on how to receive a refund for donations made to the Warren campaign, while anecdotal reports indicate the ActBlue website was being hit hard with traffic based on errors and general sluggishness. But the hashtag was mostly filled with “Bernie Bros” calling Warren a liar and Warren supporters claiming it was Sanders supporters who were actually promoting the hashtag.#RefundWarren Elizabeth Warren’s plan to get attention is going exceedingly well. No one will forget the first negative donation day in history. Brilliant move. https://t.co/vBxx4vypVh— Nate’s Liver – Commentary (@SilERabbit) January 14, 2020One thing that should be considered: Warren has proven herself to be a liar time and time again. While I find Sanders’s policy proposals to be the most heinous things ever espoused by a presidential candidate, he has been mostly truthful about his radical ways.What does this mean? Warren has been slipping in the polls while Sanders has been rising. It’s beneficial for Sanders that the first contest is in Iowa where he seems likely to do better than Warren. A big win or second-place finish will help him make the case that the progressive movement needs to consolidate under him in order to stop the Democratic Establishment embodied by Biden.Much of it will depend on how mainstream media covers this. They already landed a blow on Sanders by pushing the anti-woman narrative. If they do not pay much attention to followups that demonstrate Sanders probably didn’t say what he’s accused of saying, it will play poorly for him. But social media is blowing up about Warren’s apparent leak followed by a confirmation lie. Though many Twitter users seem to think Warren is done based on the hashtag trending, it’s likely they’re overestimating the influence of Twitter. The social media site is only as powerful as mainstream media allows it to be, so when they echo or report on the sentiment, it’s a huge swaying factor. When they ignore it, so does most of America.We’ve always known the radical progressives would have to unite behind a single candidate to have a chance. I expected that wouldn’t happen until around Super Tuesday, but it may be happening already. We’ll see how much the media mentions Warren this week.American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post #RefundWarren: The sudden war between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, explained appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Video: Jessica Yaniv appears to assault journalist Keean Bexte outside of courthousePosted: 14 Jan 2020 02:25 AM PSTAs a general rule, when you’re already facing weapons charges, it’s best not to attack a reporter outside of the courthouse. But transgender provocateur Jessica Yaniv appears to do just that, and it’s all on video.The Rebel‘s Keean Bexte was attempting to cover the trial. Law enforcement wasn’t having it, prohibiting him from entering the courthouse even though the trial is public. Undaunted, he waited outside to ask Yaniv, who is facing charges for brandishing a taser in a YouTube video despite acknowledging that it’s illegal.BC Courthouse Sheriffs prioritize a predator’s (J. Yaniv) ego over a reporter’s right to be in – and report on – an open courtroom of international significance. Yaniv is currently seeking a publication ban, and the sheriffs are happy to assist with that, even in public places. pic.twitter.com/uP523kjO4n— Keean Bexte (@TheRealKeean) January 13, 2020After the hearing, Bexte walked up to Yaniv asking if she would be pleading guilty. Yaniv turned and confonted Bexte, screaming expletives before, during, and after apparently punching him in the back of the head. Bexte kept the video going the whole time, backpedaling as Yaniv continued to come after him.J. Yaniv just punched me in the back of the head. Just spoke to police. Luckily there are two security cameras directly overhead at the courthouse. I need an advil. pic.twitter.com/3hfm2CfYhq— Keean Bexte (@TheRealKeean) January 14, 2020“Following Yaniv’s court appearance at the courthouse in Surrey I approached him outside – where filming was allowed. I had one question, I wanted to know if he would be pleading guilty or not,” Bexte told The Daily Wire. “Within several seconds, Yaniv charged me and punched the back of my head while holding me down. Police have been reluctant to charge him before, and so I’m speaking to legal council to figure out my options to make sure this menace sees justice.”Bexte is likely to press charges, noting there were two cameras outside of the building that likely caught the incident. Between that an his own footage, it would appear he likely has a case against the transgender activist.Journalists have increasingly become subjected to violence in recent years, particularly if their subjects are progressive activists. Yaniv’s problems continue to manifest in potentially illegal ways. Will transgenderism be a shield for him/her?American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post Video: Jessica Yaniv appears to assault journalist Keean Bexte outside of courthouse appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Yes, the Evangelical Immigration Table is Soros-backedPosted: 14 Jan 2020 01:30 AM PSTIt came to the attention of the Capstone Report that it was possible that the Midwest Baptist Theological Seminary President Jason Allen lobbied Governor Mike Parsons to participate in the refugee resettlement program. This accusation was corroborated by Jason Allen’s support for the Evangelicals Immigration Table (EIT). Capstone Report had also shown evidence that the EIT had been lobbying for governors to participate in the refugee resettlement program via Christianity Today. Jason Allen would later deny the Soros ties and denounce the publication that brought about the accusation. While the direct accusation came from an anonymous source, the purpose of this is not to dive deeper into the otherwise unfounded allegations against Jason Allen, but to rebuke the denigration of orthodox Evangelical publications that we refer to as the Evangelical Dark Web.The Baptist Press, the media arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, hit back at the reporting by publishing their pravda level explanation of the Evangelical Immigration Table. In this “explainer” they detail how the EIT is a nonpartisan Christian organization that is supported by many figures in Big Eva including SBC President JD Greear, the champion of “Pronoun Hospitality“. The report bluntly denies that the EIT receives any funding from George Soros.However this denies a settled matter. In fact, the matter is so settled, the Baptist Press admitted this fact while trying to deny it.Some accusing EIT, or member groups of EIT, as being “Soros-funded” point out that EIT is supported by the National Immigration Forum, and that an organization chaired by George Soros had awarded grant money to the National Immigration Forum — which is true.Additionally, the Baptist Press relies on Snopes, lauding it as a credible fact checking website. Snopes “debunked” this claim, and Christians are supposed to trust the “fact-checkers” who fact-check the Babylon Bee. Once again the Soros ties to the Evangelical Immigration Table are a settled matter and have been since June 2013.The year is 2013 and Congress is debating the amnesty bill better known as the “Gang of 8”. Christian author and commentator Eric Metaxes leaves the EIT citing Soros funding, setting off these allegations and debates. National Review explains:The Evangelical Immigration Table’s backstory is of interest here. The EIT is a project of the National Immigration Forum, which (according to its 990s, the IRS form for tax-exempt organizations) receives a substantial portion of its funding from groups backed by George Soros. Although the NIF’s executive director says Soros’s money hasn’t been funneled to the EIT and that it doesn’t endorse any specific legislation, the connection between the two was enough to raise eyebrows.This establishes a basic connection between George Soros and the EIT through the NIF. The ties between the National Immigration Forum and the Evangelical Immigration Table need more explanation. Still in 2013, the EIT was not a real organization in and of itself. Breitbart reported:the EIT is made up of a coalition of (c)3’s and (c)4’s but isn’t itself a legal non-profit organization or corporation. How did it launch the ad campaign reported in the Huffington Post? Loose, informal coalitions cannot purchase advertising. There are also strict limitations on what activities (c)3’s and (c)4’s can undertake, and clear prohibitions on them coordinating on an issue campaign.EIT says it selected National Immigration Forum to “facilitate” its work. That statement makes it likely that the ad campaign was paid for by NIF. They are certainly free to undertake an issue ad campaign, but not in someone else’s name.The Institute of Religion and Democracy goes on to explain more about the National Immigration Forum.So if the EIT is just a front, then what exactly is the National Immigration Forum? NIF received over three million dollars from Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI) in 2009-2010 alone, as well as one million dollars from the left-wing Ford Foundation. Furthermore, Sojourners is also a recipient of Soros’ money, and their President and CEO, Jim Wallis, is prominent within EIT.All roads seem to lead to Soros, as a cursory glance into the funding of many religious organizations that have publicly advocated for the recent amnesty legislation find their way back to the Hungarian-American’s bountiful leftist check book. Take, for example, the so-called Nuns on the Bus.The establishment between the NIF and George Soros is agreed upon by everyone, yet some would be so bold as to claim that the ties between the NIF and the EIT does not also mean that George Soros is funding the EIT even though the EIT is not a real organization and is an extension of Soros backed-NIF.It seems the next categorical response is to deny that money is fungible. Where have we heard this argument before? Abortion. The Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding for abortions, but the federal government funds Planned Parenthood that not only operates baby killing factories but super PACs as well. To say that the money going to the NIF does not touch the EIT would be like saying the money going to Planned Parenthood does not go towards their baby killing operation. The money provided allows Planned Parenthood to use their other finds directly on baby killing operations if we are to believe there is any real separation between the two. Essentially, those denying the Soros funding of the Evangelical Immigration Table are using arguments that would suggest that the government does not fund abortion.It’s naivete at best and slander at worst for the Baptist Press and Jason Allen to treat the Soros ties to the EIT as a debunked conspiracy theory to beat independent alternative Christian media over. TheBlaze did a deeper investigation into the ties. Their investigation ultimately points out that Soros has funded many faith based groups, including direct competitors to the EIT that have a much stronger connection.While the EIT’s funding may be more indirect, it’s founding organization — the NIF, a non-religious group — is most definitely an Open Society recipient. As a result, EIT’s ties to Soros money are valid to point out, however the extent to which the funding is touching EIT outreach projects may not be as strong and direct as it was with these other groups.The history of the EIT would suggest that Soros money to the National Immigration Forum provided much of the seed money to establish the Evangelical Immigration Table which has since been able to sustain itself through politically leftist donors, thereby limiting the need for as much money or attention that Open Society would give to Sojourner or others. Since Soros money had a deeper ties to the founding of the EIT, it’s certain that the message and purpose of the EIT are skewed in favor of the open borders policies that Soros supports as evident in 2013 and today.Once again, while the Soros ties to the Evangelical Immigration table aren’t direct as they are with other faith-based organizations, the EIT isn’t as real of an organization as the others.American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post Yes, the Evangelical Immigration Table is Soros-backed appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| In a stunning rebuke to leftists, Iranian protestors blame their oppressive regime instead of TrumpPosted: 14 Jan 2020 12:08 AM PSTProtests erupted all over Iran Saturday night after the regime admitted to shooting down a Ukrainian jetliner by accident, killing all 176 people aboard. What began as a candlelight vigil for the victims, many of which were Iranian, quickly turned into an angry protest. Large number of Iranian security forces in uniform and plain clothes were deployed across the country in an attempt to suppress the protests.Donald Trump tweeted his support of the protests in English and Farsi.As reported in the Washington Examiner his tweet was ‘the most liked Persian tweet’ in the history of Twitter:“To the brave and suffering Iranian people: I have stood with you since the beginning of my presidency and my government will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely. Your courage is inspiring,” Trump wrote.به مردم شجاع و رنج کشیده ایران: من از ابتدای دوره ریاست جمهوریم با شما ایستادهام و دولت من همچنان با شما خواهد ایستاد. ما اعتراضات شما را از نزدیک دنبال می کنیم. شجاعت شما الهام بخش است.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2020 After just one hour, the tweet had received over 100,000 likes and has since more than doubled that number.Leftists responded with anger at the president encouraging this outpouring of support for liberty. They attempted to correct Iranians desirous of freedom to blame the president for eliminating a known terrorist, responsible for the deaths of over 600 American servicemen.The common theme of leftist support of authoritarianism.Consider the reaction of the national socialist media to this story, along with the brewing crisis in Virginia along with the protests against the government of Hong Kong. We submit it’s not just a case where it’s just a coincidence that the left happens to be on the wrong side of history against the people and the cause of liberty.These three cases, as well as many others, lay bare the leftist predilection for control. In two of these cases, it’s not that they are in opposition to the people and in favor of an oppressive regime because of President Trump. They are siding with the authoritarians because they are their ‘fellow travelers’ in a desire for control.American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post In a stunning rebuke to leftists, Iranian protestors blame their oppressive regime instead of Trump appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Denzel Washington is what Hollywood really should bePosted: 13 Jan 2020 10:07 PM PSTTwo-time Academy Award winning actor Denzel Washington is a blessed man. He knows it, and while his cronies in Hollywood glorify themselves or the progressive gods they worship, Washington stands among a tiny crowd of Tinseltown royalty who unambiguously thanks God for his blessings. Moreover, he tells the world of his faith and encourages all, especially young people, to appreciate the source of their blessings and tribulations.He’s one of the few actors who I like for both his willingness to express his faith as well as his tremendous skills. He’s not just an A-lister at the box office. He’s a true artisan in his trade, skillfully crafting the characters he portrays into the essence of what they’re supposed to communicate. That’s why he has seven other nominations to go with his two Oscar wins.This inspiring video of Denzel Washington clips is a must-watch for anyone who needs a lift. It’s good to hear others express what they’ve learned in their walk with God. And just as Washington does, we should turn to the Bible in our hours of need.Mixi.Media NewsThe post Denzel Washington is what Hollywood really should be appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| New Jersey’s Declan O’Scanlon commends protesters’ success stopping vaccination billPosted: 13 Jan 2020 09:20 PM PSTSenator Declan O’Scanlon (R-13) issued the following statement today after legislation to repeal the religious exemption for mandatory vaccines stalled in the Senate:Sen. Declan O’Scanlon called the failure of the vaccine bill to pass today ‘a case of Democracy working as it should’ and applauded the opposition for their successful efforts. (SenateNJ.com)“The failure of the vaccine bill to pass today is a case of Democracy working as it should. There was enough opposition to this version of the bill to block it. I applaud the opponents for their tremendous, ultimately successful effort.“The question now is what happens next. We should all hope that the issue of resurgent, vaccine-preventable diseases will simply go away, as has been predicted by the folks who opposed the bill. God willing that’s the case. But our experience to date suggests that’s not likely.“With that in mind we should work to bring all sides together to discuss what might be a path forward that can both pass the legislature and ensure we maintain high vaccination rates so as to protect some of the most vulnerable among us, as has been my goal all along. I stand ready to participate in that effort.”American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post New Jersey’s Declan O’Scanlon commends protesters’ success stopping vaccination bill appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| 7 vs 1: Andrew Yang is the only person of color with a shot among DemocratsPosted: 13 Jan 2020 09:09 AM PSTNow that Senator Cory Booker has officially ended his campaign for President, the only persons of color left in the field are businessman Andrew Yang, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and former Governor Deval Patrick. Gabbard’s only hope is to run as an Independent and nobody’s really sure why Patrick joined the race so late, which means Yang will have to defeat former Vice President Joe Biden, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg.All of them are Caucasian. Yang, and Asian-American, must continue to rise in the polls and fundraising numbers if he’s going to have a chance of preventing an inevitable white candidate from facing President Trump in November. It’s a daunting task considering the amount of anti-Yang bias there is in progressive mainstream media. They won’t give him as much attention as they do Klobuchar, Steyer, or Bloomberg who are all behind Yang in the polls. Booker’s exit won’t change the standings much.Booker Drops Out of Presidential RaceBooker’s departure from the crowded race was ultimately due to a lack of ability to fundraise; the New Jersey native never truly saw momentum and ultimately failed to differentiate himself within the field of presidential hopefuls. Booker never broke 5 percent in a national poll.The irony of it all can be seen if we take a look at the 2016 election. All six Democratic candidates who qualified for the debates initially were Caucasian. Meanwhile, the final five Republican candidates were Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson.Yang will need a major boost to make up ground. While he had his best debate in December, so too did Klobuchar behind him and Biden in front of him in the moderate lane. Buttigieg has been steady but is showing some signs of slowing down despite a phenomenal fundraising quarter. As for the radical progressive lane, both Sanders and Warren are holding on strong with their base.Booker’s exit was expected as he’s been struggling at both fundraising and keeping media relevance for months. Once considered a frontrunner after his “Spartacus” moment during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, he never really materialized as a popular candidate. He tried to be both tough and likable at the same time. It didn’t play.If Yang can figure out a way to get his message out despite being essentially blacklisted by mainstream media, he is appealing to Democrats both in demographic and policy. If he can’t, it will be another white person versus President Trump in November.American Conservative MovementAs we prepare for the 2020 election, we are joining with fellow patriots to form a grassroots movement to advance the cause of conservatism. We will focus on two priorities until election day: Stopping Democrats from winning elections and promoting strong conservative candidates wherever they are viable. After the election, we will shift to focusing on educating America about the tenets of conservatism. We currently have 7500+ patriots with us in a very short time. If you are interested, please join us to receive updates.First Name Last Name Email Address Comments SubmitMixi.Media NewsThe post 7 vs 1: Andrew Yang is the only person of color with a shot among Democrats appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
| Far Eastern storytelling: Why ‘Parasite’ is like a Quentin Tarantino moviePosted: 13 Jan 2020 06:59 AM PSTWhen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon swept through America and earned Oscar nominations across the board, it was heralded as the east finally invading Hollywood and bringing their distinct brand of storytelling with them. But this was not entirely true. Ang Lee’s tale at the turn of the millennium had an eastern backdrop and storyline, but the storytelling itself was east-lite. Or, to be more accurate, it was what happens when Greek-style storytelling is inserted into an eastern tale. The results were magnificent.Parasite by Bong Joon-ho is a completely different animal. It’s purely eastern storytelling through-and-through. At no point does it try to mimic the plot structure western audiences have grown accustomed to, and this more than anything else is why it was nominated for Best Picture and a slew of other Academy Awards. In Hollywood, all-too-often we see directors trying to be clever by subverting expectations. This singular trend can be blamed for the downfall of the great Star Wars storyline that, after a solid foundation with Episode 7, turned to dust quickly in Episode 8 and failed to recover in Episode 9.If you plan on seeing Parasite already, read nothing about the story, Read nothing from critics that may hint of spoilers. I’ll tell you upfront that I won’t spoil a thing for you here. It’s just not my style. All I’ll do is warn you: It’s rarely what you’d expect, and just as you think you know where it’s going, it doesn’t. And in the end we have the perfect depiction of purely eastern storytelling encapsulated not in an epic like the very western-influenced Crouching Tiger, which I loved, but in a sordid tale that is reminiscent of certain qualities in Quentin Tarantino movies.That brings me to those who aren’t sure if they want to watch it. Here’s the smell test. If you like Tarantino movies because they take your for a ride of unexpected resolutions and not just because they’re pretty darn cool, then you’ll probably enjoy this movie. It’s ironic that the Parasite is going up against Once Upon a Time in Hollywood because of all the Tarantino movies, this is the one that’s closest in pace to Parasite. Granted, Parasite isn’t nearly as long and drawn out, but sometimes it feels like it is. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of humor and intrigue to keep you moving along despite not knowing where you’re heading.Will it win Best Picture? Probably not. 1917 and The Irishman seem to have the most Oscar-buzz while Joker and Marriage Story are this year’s dark horses. But the first Korean film nominated has a chance because it’s the first. If quality is the only criteria, it’s hard to argue against Parasite. It was flawless.Mixi.Media NewsThe post Far Eastern storytelling: Why ‘Parasite’ is like a Quentin Tarantino movie appeared first on NOQ Report – Conservative Christian News, Opinions, and Quotes. |
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NATIONAL REVIEW
| WITH JIM GERAGHTYJanuary 14 2020Warren Breaks Her Truce with BernieOn the menu today: On the eve of the last debate before the Iowa caucuses, Elizabeth Warren accuses Bernie Sanders of saying a woman can’t beat Donald Trump; as Cory Booker departs the race, most Democratic candidates demonstrate that they learned the wrong lessons from 2016; the outlook grows darker for the Iranian mullahs; and the weirder bits and pieces of Sanders’s life.Elizabeth Warren Tries to Nuke Bernie SandersElizabeth Warren, back in July, discussing her friendship with Bernie Sanders: “Bernie and I have been friends for a long, long time,” said Warren in an interview, insisting their civil relationship will carry over to the debate stage. “I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t.”I guess she didn’t have much of an imagination:Senator Elizabeth Warren of … READ MORE |
| ADVERTISEMENTTRENDING ON NATIONAL REVIEW1. Taiwan’s Presidential Election Highlights the Failure of China’s Aggressive Foreign Meddling2. The Fourth-Best Reason to Overturn Roe3. The New Post-Trump ConstitutionTOP STORIESHOWARD HUSOCKBernie Sanders, the Defense Budget, and the Lessons of VeniceMany centuries ago, the city-state of Venice knew that a strong military was a necessary prerequisite for peace …NR PLUSOf Course Artificial-Intelligence Startups Are Helping Businesses Fake DiversityWhere “identity” is commoditized, diversity becomes just another product to buy and sell. RICH LOWRYBernie Is Not NormalSanders is a socialist continuing his takeover attempt of the Democratic party to forge what he aptly calls a …NEWSDHS to Fly 250 Migrants Per Week to Central Mexico Rather Than Releasing Them at BorderUnder Trump’s policies, migration numbers have steadily declined in recent months, with 32,858 apprehensions at …MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTYCan Conservatives Go Green?The Green movement is often enough another attempt at finding a replacement for Christianity, where previous …KATHERINE TIMPFPublic University’s Ban on ‘Sexually Suggestive’ Posters Is Insanely PuritanicalAnd the policy wording is very …NEWSEuropean Powers Trigger Dispute Mechanism with Iran over Nuclear Deal ViolationsThe mechanism allows for a disputation time of 15 days. If no solution is agreed upon, Iran may face the …WHAT NR IS READINGThe Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and FreeBY RICHARD LOWRY“Makes an original and compelling case for nationalism . . . A fascinating, erudite—and much-needed—defense of a hallowed idea unfairly under current attack.” — Victor Davis HansonLEARN MOREPODCASTSEpisode 281: The Essential Works… Episode 69: Legal and Strategically… PHOTOSPhilippines Volcano Eruption Sylvesterchlausen in Sweden VIDEOElizabeth Warren Speaks… Michael Bloomberg Defends… NRPLUS ARTICLESAnti-Semitic Attacks Shine… What Was It For? Ready for Election Season?National Review subscribers get the most out of National Review. Don’t miss out.SEE MY OPTIONSADVERTISEMENTFollow Us & Share19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, NY, 10036, USA Your Preferences | Unsubscribe | Privacy View this e-mail in your browser. |
MANHATTAN INSTITUTE
| January 14, 2020Featuring the latest analysis, commentary, and research from Manhattan Institute scholarsENERGY & ENVIRONMENTPhoto: RoschetzkyIstockPhoto/iStockLiz Warren’s Green Agenda Means Disaster for Housing Costs“The only thing Warren’s proposed mandate would accomplish is raise the cost of all new construction, making housing less affordable and commercial rents higher.” By Jonathan A. Lesser New York Post January 14, 2020 MENTAL ILLNESSPhoto: coldsnowstorm/iStockIn Defense of Stigma“Mental-health advocates blame stigma for a variety of challenges faced by mentally ill individuals … Yet while opposition to stigma is commonplace, it is worthwhile to assess its role and influence, and, even assuming it could be eradicated, consider what tradeoffs that might entail.” By Stephen Eide National Affairs Winter 2020 Issue PENSION REFORMPhoto: Sean Pavone/iStockUsing a Review Board Model to Fix Public PensionsPublic pensions across the country face serious funding challenges, and with a potential recession on the horizon, their future sustainability is increasingly tenuous. In a new report, Josh McGee explains how states can increase oversight, limit shortsighted decision-making, and increase financial stability by implementing pension review boards. CITY JOURNALCity Journal Winter 2020 Our new issue explores the needless panic over disposable plastic, Los Angeles’s epidemic of drug addiction, how the incarceration of fathers affects children, the promise of next-generation nuclear power, ideological purity tests for artists, and more. Get your print copy today! IN MEMORIAMPhoto: Ian Gavan/Getty ImagesSwimming Always Against the TideRoger Scruton, R.I.P. By Theodore Dalrymple City Journal Online January 13, 2020 CIVIL SOCIETYPhoto: mixetto/iStockNew Year’s Resolution: Improve Our Communities and Not Just Ourselves“Our nation thrives when diverse individuals come together to improve their communities. The new year is an important time to reflect upon the role of nonprofits—and civil society leaders—in strengthening communities and helping the disadvantaged.” By Annie Dwyer Philanthropy Daily January 14, 2020 Part of MI’s Civil Society Fellows Program Nominations are open for the Manhattan Institute’s 2020 Civil Society Awards. This fall, four winners will each receive a $25,000 award for their efforts to keep our social fabric from fraying, assist those who need it most, and help people change the course of their lives. Nominate an outstanding nonprofit by March 20, 2020. Learn more at civilsocietyawards.com.SUBMIT A NOMINATIONPOLITICSPhoto: Scott Olson/Getty ImagesBernie Sanders, the Defense Budget, and the Lessons of VeniceThe Venetians knew their civilization could flourish only with a strong military to protect it. By Howard Husock National Review Online January 14, 2020 BOOK REVIEWPhoto: metamorworks/iStock‘Fully Grown’ Review: Pumping the BrakesThe rate of economic growth has slowed over the past two decades. Structural changes in the labor force could be to blame. By Edward L. Glaeser The Wall Street Journal January 13, 2020 CULTURE & SOCIETYPhoto: Dia Dipasupil/Getty ImagesLittle Women Goes to War“Woke” critics express outrage that men stay away from a movie with little to offer them. By Kay S. Hymowitz City Journal Online January 13, 2020 PODCASTPhoto: deberarr/iStockRent Control: Unjust and IneffectiveManhattan Institute’s Michael Hendrix interviews Mayer Brown partner Andrew Pincus, the lead attorney in a lawsuit taking on New York State’s sweeping rent-regulation laws. FEATURED BOOKPhoto: Manhattan InstituteDigital CathedralsToday’s global Cloud is society’s first foundationally new infrastructure in nearly a century. It is comprised of thousands of warehouse-scale computers and history’s biggest network of “information superhighways.” Powering this data behemoth consumes more energy than all global aviation. Yet, as disruptive as the Cloud has already become, we are only at the end of the beginning of what digital masons are building for the 21st century. In Digital Cathedrals, Mark Mills explores this new infrastructure through the lens of energy demand, and the implications for policymakers and regulators, who will be increasingly tempted—or enjoined—to engage issues of competition, fairness, and even social disruptions, along with the challenges of abuse of market power, both valid and trumped up.Buy NowManhattan Institute is a think tank whose mission is to develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility. 52 Vanderbilt Ave. New York, NY 10017 (212) 599-7000SUPPORT MICopyright © 2020 Manhattan Institute, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Manhattan Institute52 Vanderbilt Ave.New York, NY 10017 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list View this email in your browser |
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THE RESURGENT
| The Resurgent’s Morning Briefing for January 14,2020View this email in your browserShareTweetForwardThe Media Can’t Keep Its Story Straight on Trump Supposedly Not Keeping His Story StraightWe’ve heard this anecdote before. The military or some group in government gives President Trump the most extreme option in a list of options knowing that it will make the other options seem more reasonable. Then damned if Trump doesn’t go with the most extreme option.I can’t remember where we’ve all heard that one before, but I know we have. I think it was the so-called Muslim travel ban. Or maybe it was shutting down the government to get border wall funding. But we have heard this anecdote.Then it made it into this New York Times story that sought to undermine the President’s justification for killing Qassim Soleimani…Read More… The Latest Democratic Infighting: Warren Vs. SandersAs the Democratic race for the White House draws closer to its agonizing conclusion, the infighting between candidates is heating up. This time, it’s Elizabeth Warren going after the Bernie Sanders campaign. Warren claims that the campaign has distributed talking points to volunteers with the purpose of painting her as an elite candidate.Read More… The Difference Between Iran And North Koreaall it “A Tale of Two Dictatorships.” There are two rogue nuclear states in the world (now that Saddam Hussein is gone) and the approach that President Trump (and past American presidents) differs starkly between the two. That difference was on display in recent weeks as the president attacked Iran, both literally and figuratively, while proposing new talks with North Korea.Two weeks after a drone strike on Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani brought the two nations to the brink of war, Axios is reporting that President Trump has proposed new talks with North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. The story cites national security advisor Robert O’Brien, who is quoted as saying, “We’ve reached out to the North Koreans and let them know that we would like to continue the…Read More… Notable the “Genius Pelosi” Nonsense Has FadedFor weeks now the American political press has told us what a genius Nancy Pelosi is. She pulled a Trump, got an idea from a talking head on cable television, and ran with it. That idea was to withhold the articles of impeachment.All it did was give Mitch McConnell and the Senate GOP time to unite on a common strategy. That strategy was to change the rules of the Senate to be able to reject delayed impeachment articles.In the process, House Democrats began to go wobbly and started to defect as grumbling Senate Democrats began to complain that Pelosi herself said the matter was urgent, but then refused to act urgently.Read More…Bernie Picks Up Two Major BoostsWe are at 21 days to the Iowa caucuses, and 29 days until the New Hampshire primary, and Bernie Sanders is on a roll. Sanders just picked up two major boosts, one in each of these initial events.The latest Selzer & Co. poll for Iowa shows Sanders ahead of Elizabeth Warren by 3 points — 20 to 17 percent, with Pete Buttigieg at 16 and Joe Biden at 15 percent. This puts Sanders slightly ahead of a statistical dead heat among the others.After initially playing coy, the powerful, 10,000+ member SEA/SEIU New Hampshire Local 1984 has endorsed Sanders.As FiveThirtyEight notes, Selzer & Co. is a respected pollster, and offers one of the few glimpses into Iowa, where there aren’t a lot of polls being done. According to Nate Silver and his cadre of statistical savants’ model, the Iowa poll doesn’t change the outcome much: Biden still has a 38% chance of getting the DemocraticRead More… Don’t Lose the Grace You’re LosingI noticed a friend on Twitter today who was blowing up an acquaintance over supporting the President’s justification for the Soleimani killing. The thing is the friend and acquaintance are friends. But standing by the President on this seems to have been a bridge too far. When I asked, my friend said it was all too much.This is, actually, increasingly common. I don’t want to name this reporter, whose work I respect a great deal, but when President Trump tweeted, “all is well,” she connected it to Animal House. Then there was the NBC reporter who threw “all is well” back in the President’s face after the Ukrainian airline went down. The first reporter I referenced too went beyond subtweet against the President when he called for a free press in the streets of Iran because of how he treats the media here…Read More…Remember, as always, to go check out The Resurgent and be sure to like us on Facebook. Thanks for reading and tuning in. Erick EricksonTHE RESURGENTFacebookTwitterInstagramCopyright © 2020 The Resurgent Media Group, LLC, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences |
CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY
| Highlighted Articles/InterviewsIran’s red flag of war flies over JamkaranVOA talked to Clare Lopez about Kataeb Hezbollah boss before drone strikeFleitz: In terminating Soleimani, Trump ‘laid down a marker’ for Iran’s mullahsHow a CIA officer should file a whistleblowing complaint against the PresidentAs Iran planned attacks on US, Russia & China held naval maneuvers with IranTrump was ‘resolute’ in striking Iran terror chief – but the regime won’t stop“We’re very glad that there’s not going to be any war in the Middle East. There aren’t going to be any American boots on the ground,” the Center’s Clare Lopez told One America News. Watch the interview with Clare Lopez.The United States is restoring deterrence!Yesterday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has embarked upon a vital mission vis a vis Iran and other actual and prospective enemies: We are in the business of restoring deterrence.By eliminating the world’s top terrorist, Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, the Trump administration has not only removed from the battlefield one of our most dangerous adversaries. It has changed the calculus upon which the mullahs have attacked our forces, diplomatic personnel and others with impunity.While the President’s critics generally fail to appreciate this benefit from Soleimani’s liquidation, it seems the people of Iran have gotten the message. They have courageously returned to the streets to support his killing and denounce their regime. As they are the best hope for an enduring peace with Iran, we must continue supporting them – through restoring deterrence and otherwise. This is Frank Gaffney.With Robert Charles, Gordon Chang, Rosemary Jenks, and Richard PollockROBERT CHARLES, Former Assistant Secretary of State at the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in the Bush Administration, Author of Eagles and Evergreens:Should US forces withdraw from Iraq?Why Soleimani was the “epitome of evil”GORDON CHANG, The Daily Beast contributor, Author of The Coming Collapse of China and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World, Latest book: Losing South Korea (2019):Recap of the Taiwanese electionThe consolidation of democracy in Hong KongHow the election of Tsai Ing-wen is a rejection of BeijingROSEMARY JENKS, Director of Government Relations at NumbersUSA.com, Former Senior Legislative Analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies:The state of immigration in the United StatesAn update on the border wallAn overview of E-VerifyRICHARD POLLOCK, Senior Investigative Reporter at One America News Network:Who is Lanny Davis?A preview of the upcoming impeachment trial in the senateTWEET OF THE DAYRetweet, like, and comment!DONATEView this email in your browser Copyright © 2020 Center for Security Policy, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 2020 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Suite 189 Washington, D.C. 20006 (202) 835-9077 Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. |
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