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Showing posts with label @sbalich @willcountynews1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label @sbalich @willcountynews1. Show all posts
Saturday, November 17, 2018
Why Every Tesla on the Road Today Is Already Obsolete
Thursday, October 25, 2018
Judicial Watch Uncovers Soros/State Department Collusion!
Judicial Watch Uncovers Soros/State Department Collusion!
Judicial Watch has taken the lead in exposing the dubious ties between State Department and the radical Soros operation.
We just released 49 pages of new documents forced out from the State Department detailing the hand-in-glove relationship between the Obama Sate Department and Soros, Inc.
The documents deal primarily with the activities of Soros’ top operative in Albania, Andri Dobrushi, the director of Soros’ Open Society Foundation-Albania, who was actively engaged in channeling funding to what Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban calls Soros’ “mercenary army.” The documents show U.S. grant money flowing through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that profess to promote “civil society,” while in fact attacking traditional, pro-American groups, governments and policies.
We filed a May 26, 2017, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State and USAID after they failed to respond to March 31, 2017, FOIA requests (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development (No. 1:17-cv-01012)).
The records reveal that Soros operative Dobrushi was the first person on a list of invitees by then U.S. Ambassador to Albania Donald Lu to attend an “election rollout event” held at the U.S. Embassy on April 27, 2015. The event was intended to “launch U.S. assistance for the June local elections,” being held in Tirana, Albania. As we previously reported in an April 4, 2018, press release, Ambassador Lu has been closely associated with Soros and the socialist government in Albania, which he assisted by denying U.S. visas to conservative jurists from the conservative party in Albania. Lu has since been nominated by the Trump administration to become US Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan.
Additionally, a June 18, 2015, email from Ilva Cuko, a Program Specialist in the Public Affairs Office of the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, invites several people, including Dobrushi, to a “Donors Grant Reviewing meeting” at the U.S. Embassy, in which the participants would review applications for grants submitted by NGOs seeking U.S. taxpayer grant money from the State Department. Cuko says she would “like to invite you in a discussion on these proposals. Your valuable input and comments will be used by the U.S. Embassy’s Democracy Commission, which has the ultimate authority in awarding the grants.”
Cuko on August 28, 2015, also invited Dobrushi to attend another U.S. Embassy Democracy Commission Small Grants Program “Grant Proposal Technical Review” meeting on September 3 at the U.S. Embassy. At this meeting, Cuko said they would focus on applications dealing with “anticorruption.” Ironically, under the leadership of Soros’ close friend, socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama, who took power in 2013, corruption in Albania has soared, with cannabis trafficking in the country increasing 300 percent between 2016 and 2017.
In a February 22, 2016, email, Cuko again invites several people, including Dobrushi, to another “Donors Grant Reviewing Meeting” held at the U.S. Embassy on February 26 where Dobrushi would be able to influence Embassy officials who have “the ultimate authority in awarding the grants.”
Another document, titled “Guidelines for the Democracy Commission Small Grants Program,” shows that the applications for grants that Soros’ operative was reviewing are part of a program the State Department runs in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States called the “Democracy Commission Small Grants Program,” which is supposed to “promote grassroots democracy.” The guidelines also say that the program “supports initiatives of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in building the social and intellectual foundations of democracy, the democratic resolution of problems, strengthening civil society watchdog activities, and the institutionalization of open, pluralistic political processes.”
In addition to Albania, Judicial Watch also has filed FOIA lawsuits against the State Department and USAID for records about funding and political activities of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations in, Macedonia, Romania and Colombia.
In an earlier document production connected to this lawsuit, we obtained 32 pages of records showing that the Obama administration sent U.S. taxpayers’ funds to a Soros-backed group that used the money to fund left-wing political activities in Albania. That included working with the country’s socialist government to push for highly controversial judicial “reform.”
The records also detail how the Soros operation helped the State Department review grant applications from other groups for taxpayer funding. USAID funds were funneled to Soros’ left-wing Open Society Foundations in Albania, particularly the Soros operation efforts to give the socialist government greater control of the judiciary. USAID reportedly gave $9 million in 2016 to the “Justice for All” campaign, which is overseen by Soros’ “East West Management Institute.”
The Obama administration turned over key State Department activities to George Soros, especially in Albania. The Deep State continues to be aligned with Soros and uses the State Department in countries such as Albania to push his radical agenda. And, of course, tax dollars for Soros abroad frees up resources for his activities here in the United States.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Democrats turn impartial fact-finding into taxpayer-funded opposition research.
Democrats turn impartial fact-finding into taxpayer-funded opposition research.
The Left ruins everything.
That’s because the Left stands ready to eradicate any norm at any time if there is political advantage in it. The latest to be cast aside are the precepts that we never tolerate unbridled, abusive investigations, nor do we abide full-blown criminal investigations without solid evidence that a crime has been committed — and even then, we demand adherence to time-honored limits.
In the probes of Donald Trump and, now, Brett Kavanaugh, these norms have been wiped away by the simple expedient of rebranding criminal investigations. Now the sleuths are unleashed under the guise of “counterintelligence” and “background checks” — whatever pretext is needed to get their foot in the door. Once they’re in, the earth is to be scorched, as if the crime of the century had occurred.
Of course, we want criminal investigators to be aggressive. But that has always meant aggressive within strict parameters. These are dictated by the degree of certainty that a crime has been committed, and by due-process rules with which the FBI must comply or be held to account when the case gets to court.
By contrast, when the Left criminalizes political opposition, no crime is required; just gossamer-thin, incoherent, uncorroborated, often unverifiable allegations: perhaps multiple-hearsay innuendo against a Republican presidential candidate, passed on by anonymous foreigners to a hyper-partisan, left-wing foreign spy working for the opposition Democratic political campaign. Or maybe a 36-year-old claim of sexual assault by an alleged victim who cannot remember basic details or keep straight the details she claims to remember; whose named witnesses do not back her account; who declines to address whether her accusation has been influenced by the controversial psychotherapeutic process of “recovered memory”; who refuses to disclose highly relevant therapy notes and polygraph information; and who is a Democrat advised by a prominent Democratic strategist and represented for free by Democratic activist lawyers, who were recommended to her by a senior Senate Judiciary Committee Democrat even as that Democratic senator concealed the sexual-assault claim from her Republican counterparts.
The Left requires no solid evidence of a crime, because solid evidence — the kind that truly justifies a criminal probe — narrows a good-faith investigator’s focus. To the contrary, the Left wants all the aggressiveness of a criminal investigation but none of the limits. The criminalization of politics leans on counterintelligence and background investigations; it wants no part of criminal courts, where due-process safeguards are enforced and allegations must be proved.
Political progressives will tell you this is just “good government” in action. Republican presidents and their appointees may not technically be criminal suspects, but they must be investigated as if they were, in order to protect our institutions.
In reality, this is the antithesis of good government. It is an ugly process in which the new Democratic party — the party that prefers Bill Ayers to Joe Lieberman, “social justice” to patriotism, and “change” to the Constitution — menaces decent people and their attachments to American traditions until they retreat from the public square.
The world has changed. People who care nothing about norms can no longer be dismissed as a fringe. For generations, left-wing activists have instructed students and other groups that norms are the building blocks of a rigged system that deprives them of power and denies their “selfless” desires.
We don’t want to acknowledge what this has wrought. We have norms because they safeguard foundational principles, such as due process, the presumption of innocence, and freedom from unreasonable and unwarranted police prying. But the Left is no longer attached to those principles. Far from protecting what we must preserve, norms are seen as the redoubts of adversaries who must be not merely defeated but humiliated. Defeat is fine for the enemy at hand, but humiliation is what suppresses prospective challengers. Would you put your family through what the Kavanaugh family has been put through?
Under the pretext of carrying out its counterintelligence mission or conducting a background check, the Left turns the FBI loose to do an aggressive investigation that leaves no stone unturned. Except now there is no crime — no proper trigger, no identifiable criminal transaction with essential elements on which the FBI can get a quick, definitive handle. Instead, the bureau is being told to leave no stone unturned until it finds something on which the president can be impeached. Democrats demand that Judge Kavanaugh’s life be scrutinized until the FBI finds some misconduct — no matter how old, ambiguous, and remote from his developed adult character — that might be used to brand him unfit for the High Court.
COMMENTS
Counterintelligence is not an excuse to subject someone to what is actually an aggressive criminal investigation in the absence of a known crime. A background investigation is not an occasion for a deep dive into every nook and cranny of a person’s life, much less for a full-blown criminal investigation, as if the person were on trial. A background check is just an exercise in gathering enough information so that we can judge whether a person is a good fit for the responsibilities of an office. If a Democratic senator has already decided against a conservative nominee over philosophical differences about abortion and gun rights, the senator should simply vote against the nominee, not exploit a background check as an abusive fishing expedition.
The Left is destroying investigative norms. If we do not insist on these norms and defend them, then investigations become a political weapon from which only the Left will be spared. The moral of the story: When politics is involved, we can no longer presume that investigations are being sought and will be conducted in good faith. We should not agree to them in the absence of enforceable norms that limit scope, protect privacy, and ensure that decent people of all ideological persuasions are not discouraged from participating in the political life of a free, pluralistic society.
Monday, October 15, 2018
The Cultural Civil War Continues: Results vs. Resistance
The Cultural Civil War Continues: Results vs. Resistance
Originally published at Fox News by Newt Gingrich
We are living through a historic turning point in American history.
Many Americans want to keep building on the tremendous results we have seen since Republicans took control in Washington, while others, who are seeing their power and elite status wane, are bitterly fighting to resist, obstruct, and distort the Republicans’ success.
It is part of the same political-cultural civil war that I discussed in my New York Times best seller Trump’s America: The Truth About Our Nation’s Great Comeback.
You can see this fight over results versus resistance vividly in the assault Senate Democrats have executed to destroy Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who has decades of exemplary service across the government. Many in the mainstream media are pretending that the Democratic attack was prompted by last minute, uncorroborated, 36-year-old allegations of sexual assault, but the offensive started much earlier – and quickly reached fever pitch.
The moment Justice Anthony Kennedy announced he would retire in June, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democrats said President Trump’s nominee to replace him should not be confirmed until after the midterm elections. They were trying to fabricate a false equivalence between Kennedy’s replacement and the Republican refusal to hold confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Once Kavanaugh was nominated by President Trump, Schumer, seeing his first effort was ineffective, simply made clear that he was going to “oppose Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with everything I have.” So far, he’s kept his word.
Democrats – including some on the Senate Judiciary Committee – quickly banded together for a joint press conference to get out the message that they opposed Kavanaugh because they suspected he would not support left-wing policies. There, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told the victims of the school shooting that took place in Parkland, Florida, that "Judge Kavanaugh is your worst nightmare."
At a press conference with Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Senator Cory Booker said anyone who supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation was “complicit in the evil.”
In July – the same month Kavanaugh was nominated – Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office received a letter containing the sexual assault allegations by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Feinstein then conspired to keep the allegations secret and allowed Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing – and numerous interviews with senators – to carry on without raising the allegations. According to Feinstein, she was honoring Ford’s request that her identity remain confidential. At the same time, Democrats recommended lawyers to Ford who, according to Senator Tom Cotton, will now be investigated for blatantly lying to Ford and telling her that Senate Judiciary Committee staff wouldn’t come to interview her in California.
Then, when it became clear that Kavanaugh would be confirmed, Feinstein’s office apparently went into resistance mode, discarded Ford’s request for privacy in the name of political gain, and may have leaked her letter to the press. The leak, which is now being investigated, created the chaotic media circus that forced Ford and her family – as well as the Kavanaugh family – into the center of the political-cultural turmoil. And make no mistake: This is exactly what the leak was meant to do.
The uncorroborated allegation spurred more, which became more and more salacious and unbelievable. For a moment, the Democratic fear was replaced by hysterical rage.
Finally, with regard to the allegations, Senator Mazie Hirono told all “the men of this country” to “just shut up.” Then, Schumer said publicly that nominees being considered for the political appointments have “no presumption of innocence” – the most basic concept of the American justice system.
Now, the Democrats are beginning to realize that the uncorroborated allegations aren’t going to work, so they are going after how Kavanaugh characterized his drinking in high school.
This level of resistance is breaking the Democrats’ grip of reality – and it’s a pattern.
There are clear similarities between the Kavanaugh smearing and the investigation into so-called Russian collusion. It’s not about evidence. It’s not about facts. It’s not about what’s good for America. It’s about doing anything possible to support resistance against President Trump and the Republican agenda.
What the Democrats don’t realize is that the election this fall is not going to be about President Trump — it’s going to be about what kind of America we want to become.
This is a big, historic choice for American voters. They will have the opportunity to choose between Republican results and Democratic resistance.
They will choose between having a better, fairer international trade system (see Trump’s success with replacing NAFTA) or the old international-interest trade regime that closed American factories and drove jobs out of our country.
They will choose between continuing massive job growth in almost every industry or returning to the special interest, high-regulation policies that killed job growth for eight years under Obama.
They will choose between tax cuts that allow families of four earning the average median income to keep over $2,000 annually or a left-wing, high-tax bureaucratic system that will keep more taxpayer money and distribute it according to Washington’s wishes.
They will choose between a practical, common-sense approach to lowering the cost of health care while keeping your choice of doctor and insurance and a one-size-fits-all government system that costs too much and is controlled by Washington bureaucrats.
They will choose between having safe borders and safe children or having lawlessness and so-called sanctuary cities – which are safe havens for MS-13 and other dangerous multinational gangs that are helping to fuel the opioid epidemic, which is killing more than 40,000 Americans per year.
Make no mistake: This is a big choice about what kind of country we are going to become, what kind of history we want to make, and whether we want results or resistance.
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