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Sunday, July 29, 2018
July Update from Orland Pk. Mayor Pekau
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Trump, Putin, and Obama
Trump, Putin, and Obama
Originally published at Fox News By Newt Gingrich
President Trump’s meeting with President Putin in Helsinki created a firestorm of controversy. The President seemed to be publicly siding with the Russian dictator against the American intelligence agencies.
The initial appearance was so bad that I tweeted, “President Trump must clarify his statements in Helsinki on our intelligence system and Putin. It is the most serious mistake of his presidency and must be corrected—-immediately.”
After flying home from Helsinki and reviewing the tape and transcript of his press conference with Putin, President Trump said he had, “full faith and support for America’s great intelligence agencies” and that he accepts “our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.”
In his address to Congress Tuesday, President Trump went on to admit that he realized he needed to clarify his statements in Helsinki:
“It should have been obvious — I thought it would be obvious — but I would like to clarify, just in case it wasn’t. In a key sentence in my remarks, I said the word ‘would’ instead of “wouldn’t.” The sentence should have been: I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t — or why it wouldn’t be Russia. So just to repeat it, I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t…’
“I have, on numerous occasions, noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections. Unlike previous administrations, my administration has and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts — and repel — we will stop it, we will repel it — any efforts to interfere in our elections. We’re doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018.”
“I have, on numerous occasions, noted our intelligence findings that Russians attempted to interfere in our elections. Unlike previous administrations, my administration has and will continue to move aggressively to repeal any efforts — and repel — we will stop it, we will repel it — any efforts to interfere in our elections. We’re doing everything in our power to prevent Russian interference in 2018.”
Anyone who has studied President Trump knows he hates to admit a mistake. His natural pattern is to move forward and ignore mistakes. For him, this was a big correction (and as I noted the day before, it was an absolutely necessary one).
President Trump then reminded everyone of the Obama Administration’s failures in dealing with Russian meddling in the election. Trump noted that Obama and his advisors had information that the Russians had been working to interfere in the election and they ignored it, because they thought Clinton was going to win:
“… President Obama, along with Brennan and Clapper and the whole group that you see on television now — probably getting paid a lot of money by your networks — they knew about Russia’s attempt to interfere in the election in September, and they totally buried it. And as I said, they buried it because they thought that Hillary Clinton was going to win. It turned out it didn’t happen that way.
“By contrast, my administration has taken a very firm stance — it’s a very firm stance — on a strong action. We’re going to take strong action to secure our election systems and the process.”
“By contrast, my administration has taken a very firm stance — it’s a very firm stance — on a strong action. We’re going to take strong action to secure our election systems and the process.”
There are two key facts in this statement.
First, the very people who have been loudest in attacking Trump about Helsinki are the people who failed to protect America from Russian meddling in 2016. The very intensity and nastiness of former CIA Director Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence Clapper is an attempt to distract attention from their failure to protect America. It was their duty in 2016 – not candidate Trump’s.
Second, the Trump Administration has been far tougher on Russia than Obama ever dreamed of being. The Trump Administration is taking real actions designed to weaken Russia and force Putin to change his aggressive behavior.
The Trump Administration has levied tough sanctions on Russia. Also, President Trump’s public lecture about Germany not buying natural gas from Russia was aimed at cutting Putin off from tens of billions in hard currency and further weakening the Russian economy.
Furthermore, President Trump’s efforts to get our European allies to increase their defense spending has a direct impact on Putin. The stronger NATO is, the less maneuvering room Russia has.
Beyond pressuring our allies consider these specific steps President Trump has taken against Russia:
Where President Obama refused to provide serious weapons to the Ukrainians to help them defend themselves (his response was weakness on a pathetic scale), President Trump has approved the sale of offensive weapons to enable the Ukrainians to increase the cost of Russian aggression.
When the Russians used chemical weapons in Great Britain, President Trump joined our allies and expelled 60 Russian intelligence officers from the United States.
When the Russians retaliated, the Trump Administration closed the Russian consulate in Seattle. Trump had previously shuttered the consulate San Francisco and smaller annexes in Washington and New York.
More than 100 Russian individuals and companies have been sanctioned for a variety of reasons.
Despite the hysteria of the Left, it is impossible to see the Trump Administration as anything but firm in its dealing with Russia.
Nothing done in Helsinki made life easier for the Putin regime in its continued economic decay and diplomatic isolation due to the sanctions regime.
Finally, a brief word about the strong language and vicious comments about the president.
We are in the early stages of a cultural civil war in which the Left sees itself losing. This is what led me to write my new New York Times bestselling book Trump’s America: The Truth About Our Nation’s Great Comeback. With each passing month the radical-extremist wing of the Democratic party dominates the progressive wing more and more.
With the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Kavanaugh, it was clear that anyone Trump nominated was going to be attacked. In fact, the demonstrators had signs for all four of the finalists and were instantly ready to oppose the president regardless of his choice.
Similarly, Obama-era national security officials seem determined to use the harshest possible language to attack President Trump. I think their strong words and hysteria are driven by their own guilt. Whatever the Russians did, they achieved their goals while Brennan was director of the CIA, Clapper was director of national intelligence, and Comey was head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These former officials attack Trump ferociously to hide their own failure and their own guilt. Just keep that in mind the next time you see one of them on TV.
My prediction is that President Trump will remain tough on Russia, and the Helsinki press conference will be seen as the aberration it was.
Rep. Davis calls Sen. Durbin hypocrite over Trump-Russia
Rep. Davis calls Sen. Durbin hypocrite over
Trump-Russia By Gregg Bishop |
Illinois News Network
U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, at a hearing in
Washington, DC.
Photo courtesy of U.S.
Customs and Border Protection
Members
of Illinois’ congressional delegation are pointing fingers back and forth on
the issue of who is obstructing what in the effort to get to the bottom of
whether Russia interfered with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.
While
Democrats herald allegations of possible collusion between Trump associates and
Russia, Republicans are holding hearings about the anti-Trump bias of some
high-ranking FBI agents involved in investigations.
The day
after President Donald Trump’s widely criticized summit with Russian President
Vladimir Putin, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Springfield, blasted Republicans on
the Senate floor.
+1
U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville
Photo courtesy of Rep.
Rodney Davis' office
“Sadly
the vast majority of congressional Republicans are actively working to
undermine the investigation,” Durbin said Tuesday.
Durbin
complained about Republicans confirming Brian Benczkowski the week before to
lead the U.S. Department of Justice criminal division. Durbin said Benczkowski
has ties to Alfa Bank, a financial institution with ties to Russia. He said if
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein were removed, as some Republicans have
called for, Benczkowski would take the oversight role of Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s investigation into Russia meddling in the 2016 election. Mueller’s
investigation is also reportedly looking into whether Trump obstructed justice
by firing FBI Director James Comey.
“Enough
is enough,” Durbin said. “Today is the day. I hope my colleagues, Democrat and
Republican alike, will come forward and speak up.”
Some of
Durbin’s Democratic colleagues have said Republicans holding hearings about
anti-Trump text messages that senior FBI agent Peter Strzok sent FBI attorney
Lisa Page, whom Strzok was having an affair with, is an attempt to undermine
Mueller’s investigation.
Strzok
was part of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s improper use of an email
server to process classified materials. Strzok is also the one who allegedly
changed the term “grossly negligent,” which has legal liability in the
Espionage Act, to “extremely careless” in Comey’s announcement of no charges
against Clinton.
Congressional
investigators and the FBI’s inspector general found Strzok also withheld
revelations of additional classified emails from Clinton on Anthony Weiner's
laptop for weeks.
Strzok
later went on to be part of Mueller’s Russia probe, but was removed from the
team when his profanity laden anti-Trump texts with Page were revealed. In one
of those texts, Strzok said, “We’ll stop him,” referring to Trump before the
election. Another one talked about an “insurance policy,” something Republicans
say refers to the fabrication of the Russia collusion story.
U.S.
Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Taylorville, said Durbin knows Congress needs to play its
constitutional oversight role.
“When
you have a senior member of the FBI texting another member of the FBI 50,000
times over a certain amount of time, that’s a work product question that needs
to be asked,” Davis said.
Davis
said he supports law enforcement, but oversight must take place.
While
Davis said Trump should have been more forceful against Putin this week in
Helsinki, he said Durbin’s criticism of Trump is typical partisan hypocrisy.
“We
didn’t see many comments out of him when the President of the United States
Barack Obama (in 2012) leaned over to (then Russian President) Dmitri Medvedev
and said ‘tell Vladimir that if we win this election I’ll have more
flexibility,’” Davis said. “That’s the hypocrisy of so many people out here in
Washington.”
Trump
further backtracked Wednesday, saying he holds Putin responsible for the 2016
election interference and he believe Russia remains a cyber threat.
Friday, July 27, 2018
The Moon Landing and Our Lost Half-Century
The Moon Landing and Our Lost Half-Century
Originally published at Fox News By Newt Gingrich
Forty-nine years ago, today, we had every reason to believe that Neil Armstrong’s “small step for [a] man,” was in fact the first part of a “giant leap for mankind.”
At the time, it was reasonable to expect that our space program would continue to move at the pace of the Apollo program. It was therefore reasonable to think that by 2018 we would have four to five colonies on the Moon, space-based outposts in various lunar and cislunar orbits, mining operations on several asteroids, and a preliminary habitat on Mars.
In fact, when Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, it made sense to mark 2001 as the timeframe in which humans would develop the technology and shape the reality that he described.
However, we have clearly fallen short of Armstrong’s and Clarke’s visions.
Instead of building a robust space program, we built a robust space bureaucracy. After nearly 50 years wandering in a mostly Earth-bound wilderness of red tape – and spending roughly $555 billion on risk averse, underwhelming, mostly unmanned space observation projects – we have not truly taken Armstrong’s giant leap.
I did an episode of my Facebook series "What If? History that Could’ve Been" about how different America – and humanity – would be had the U.S. continued to build on the John F. Kennedy-era space program. President Nixon’s decision to slow down and moderate the Kennedy space program amounted to one of the biggest hits to scientific advancement in our country’s history. It set us down the path of high costs and large bureaucracy that now dominates NASA.
However, we are currently at a turning point that could course-correct this misstep.
President Trump represents a fundamental change in thinking about space, just as he is a fundamental change agent in so many other areas.
In signing the re-establishment of the National Space Council after 25 years he said, “America will think big once again. Important words: Think big. We haven’t been thinking so big for a long time, but we’re thinking big again as a country. We will inspire millions of children to carry on this proud tradition of American space leadership — and they’re excited — and to never stop wondering, hoping, and dreaming about what lies beyond the stars.”
Vice President Mike Pence may be the perfect implementer of the “think big” space approach. Pence has always been fascinated by space. Before he won a congressional seat, he drove to Florida with his family to watch rockets being launched. Chairing the Space Council may be the assignment that makes him happiest.
Furthermore, in some ways, the Trump-Pence approach is even broader than the JFK approach. Kennedy was using space to influence a cold war on Earth. Trump and Pence want Americans to go into space permanently.
The interim post-Apollo, pre-Trump NASA system has focused on sending very-well trained astronauts on expensive, narrowly focused missions (look at their planning for a Mars trip nearly two decades from now).
Trump and Pence want ordinary Americans with modest training going into space as pioneers and colonizers. Their vision inherently requires dramatic drops in cost and increases in capability. It is the same model we followed while exploring the North American continent. First came the “professionals” and then came the settlers as soon as economic viability was established. Fifty years after the first human extraterrestrial landings, we are about to enter the second phase of American space exploration.
The amazing thing about this moment in space policy is that an entrepreneurial president can now turn to entrepreneurial leaders for less expensive, more accessible space assets.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, and Eren and Fatih Ozmen (the owners of Sierra Nevada Corporation) are leaders working to make access to space cheaper and more reliable for normal people.
The new approaches of Bezos’s Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX will lower costs by at least 40 percent (and the next generation of reusables with new materials technology may take that reduction even further). Equally important, these entrepreneurs are the forerunners of new systems that will have daily launches – instead of monthly launches.
When combined with 3D printing, robotics, artificial intelligence, and microminiaturization, the breakthroughs in launch cost and frequency will lead Americans to the Moon, Mars, and mining asteroids.
Under the Trump-Pence spacefaring vision, we could quickly expand the experience of few astronauts, to extraterrestrial habitats for dozens, hundreds, and eventually thousands of Americans.
After the extraordinary success of the Kennedy challenge, we unfortunately turned our attention back to Earth.
If the Trump-Pence challenge prevails, Americans will be living beyond Earth and looking toward the stars for the rest of our existence.
It is this tremendous effort to democratize space and turn access to space into an opportunity for everyone that will help us to finally achieve the “giant leap” that Armstrong knew would take us into a much brighter, more exciting future.
Urgent care centers over prescribing antibiotics for profit, not health
Urgent care centers over prescribing antibiotics for profit, not health
By Bob Livingston
People are often taken aback when they see me write that modern medicine is a killing machine for profit.
Believe me, I take no pleasure in stating it. It places me on the wrong side of conventional wisdom and subjects me to all manner of abuse. That’s because by the time people reach adulthood, the system has sealed their thought processes so that nothing is questioned. What the doctor says is gospel. The imperative to inquire and question is gone.
We are literally a prescription drug culture, and we accept the doctor’s advice on drugs without question, not suspecting that the drug the doctor prescribes is done so based on a monetary interest as much or more than a medical one. Hospitals and medical research centers have become virtual temples to human experimentation in the “quest for knowledge.”
The modern mind has been conditioned to equate medicine with health. If you get sick, so conventional wisdom goes, then you must need a drug or drugs to “cure” the sick… otherwise you will remain sick.
So the doctors prescribe a drug or drugs to address the symptoms. They practice symptomology. They doctor the symptoms, not the underlying cause of the disease. Sometimes these drugs make people feel better for a time. Sometimes they make the person feel better until the body manages to cure itself.
This is especially true when it comes to treating common and everyday illnesses like colds and flus and other upper respiratory infections. But the piper must eventually be paid. And we’re paying it in the form of the rise of antibiotic-resistant drugs.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tells us that each year at least 2 million people become infected and at least 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infectious agents. A 2015 report from Public Health England found that “significant antibiotic-resistant infection” rose significantly from 2010 to 2014.
Antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” are growing ever more prevalent and ever more deadly. This increase comes as a direct result of the growing and widespread use of general antibiotics across the human spectrum.
Antibiotics are pumped into the chickens we eat and that produce our eggs. Antibiotics are pumped into the cattle that we eat and that produce our milk. Antibiotics are pumped into the pork we eat. Antibiotics are pumped into the turkeys we eat.
On top of that, doctors are prescribing antibiotics pre-surgery and post-surgery, whether or not infections are present. And medical practitioners are not only prescribing antibiotics for common bacterial and fungal infections, but also for viral infections on which antibiotics have no effect. And this is often done, the doctors admit, in order to placate parents conditioned — as mentioned above — to equate medicine with health and who do not want to hear that the earache little Johnny is suffering from will heal on its own if Johnny’s immune system is made strong.
The worst offenders for over-prescribing antibiotics are urgent care centers, according to new analysis published in JAMA International Medicine.
Based on insurance claims from patients with employee-sponsored coverage, researchers estimated that about 46 percent of patients who visited urgent care centers in 2014 for conditions that cannot be treated with antibiotics—such as a common cold that’s caused by a virus—left with useless antibiotic prescriptions that target bacterial infections. That rate of inappropriate antibiotic use is almost double the rate the researchers saw in emergency departments (25 percent) and almost triple the rate seen in traditional medical offices (17 percent).The authors of the analysis—a team of researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Utah, and the Pew Charitable Trusts—concluded that interventions for urgent care centers are “urgently needed.”The data is concerning, the team notes, because such misuse of antibiotics can fuel the development and spread of drug-resistant bacteria, which can go on to become resistant to multiple types of antibiotic drugs and cause intractable, sometimes deadly, infections.
It’s also concerning because of the increasing number of the urgent care centers popping up across the country – there are more than 10,000 in existence and they’re doing a $15 billion business.
Researchers for JAMA Internal Medicine worry that getting doctors at these clinics to dial back their use of antibiotics will be difficult because judicious use of antibiotics doesn’t fit their business model. There’s quite a bit of a “pot-calling-the-kettle-black” going on here, as doling out pills is also the business model of the doctors doing the warning.
ArsTechnica notes that urgent care clinics are designed for convenience and to provide same-day service by funneling as many patients as possible through the doors at low out-of-pocket cost for ailments that don’t warrant an emergency room visit and for patients who don’t want to wait to see their primary doctor or don’t have one.
Lacking a relationship with the patients, who are seen in assembly line fashion, doctors lack the will or motive to try and dissuade the patients from getting the so-called “quick fix” antibiotic injection or bottle of pills, even for ailments the doctors know that antibiotics won’t affect. But they do have the financial incentive to keep patients happy and willing to return for another shot or bottle of pills next time they get sick.
Another study, published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, found that “[B]oth the number of physicians per capita and the number of clinics are significant drivers of antibiotic prescription rate… The increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written in wealthy areas appears to be driven primarily by increased competition among doctors’ offices, retail medical clinics and other health care providers as they seek to keep patients satisfied with medical care and customer service.”
This is especially true in wealthier areas where patients are able to shop around for care that offers them what they want – a quick fix — rather than what may be in their long-term best interests.
But beyond the danger of “superbugs,” taking too many antibiotics leads to a host of health problems. Antibiotics don’t discern which bacteria to kill and they wipe out the body’s good bacteria with the same abandon as the bad. Good bacteria in the gut play a positive role in promoting a healthy immune system. Antibiotics wipe them out.
If we are to survive modern medicine we must take charge of our own health. Question the doctor on all treatment suggestions and prescriptions. Check the medication’s side effects via a Physician’s Desk Reference or using an online source like Drugs.com. Make sure your health is the consideration rather than the physician’s profits.
You also need to make sure you’re as healthy as possible and have a strong immune system. Disease comes from within. When the body is overly fatigued with excess stress, toxins and malnutrition, there is a breakdown of immunity. So a body must be made healthy with proper hydration and proper nutrition(which means whole foods, mostly raw, and very little meat). It must have a healthy pH and it must have a proper level of essential nutrients, not antibiotics which are becoming less effective at killing the “bad” bacteria but continues to kill the “good” bacteria the body needs to remain healthy.
Turning Point fourth annual High School Leadership Summit in Washington, DC.
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Thursday, July 26, 2018
Illinois GOP candidates push to merge treasurer, comptroller
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| Darlene Senger Jim Dodge |
Candidates for Illinois comptroller and treasurer want to merge the offices, effectively putting one of them out of a job if they were both elected.
Darlene Senger, Republican candidate for comptroller, and Jim Dodge, a Republican looking to unseat Treasurer Michael Frerichs, say the state should merge their offices.
“Illinois is facing a budget shortfall and a politician surplus,” a joint statement from the two candidates says. “We urge the legislature to save taxpayer dollars by consolidating the offices of Treasurer and Comptroller.”
The Illinois Constitution would have to be changed to merge the offices. Senger and Dodge want to press the issue so lawmakers pass a constitutional amendment that would then be on the subsequent statewide ballot.
A spokesman for comptroller Susana Mendoza says the Republicans’ estimation of $12 million in savings isn’t accurate.
“The framers of the state constitution were familiar with the potential for corruption in having one officer in charge of receiving money, investing it and paying it out,” the spokesman, Abdon Pallasch, said. “That's because Orville Hodge embezzled $6 million in state funds in the '50's. That's $57 million in today's money – far more than the phony projected savings number.”
Senger said claims that the offices were separated to ward off corruption doesn’t make sense considering the technology that’s available to keep track of money.
“Everything’s online,” she said. “Things are now done with computers that will make sure that you’re doing things accurately.”
The Illinois state Senate voted to place the question of consolidation on the ballot in the 2014 election in 2012. Frerichs voted to put a consolidation measure on the ballot when he was a state senator. The measure never passed the House.
“We shouldn’t feel comfortable asking Illinois taxpayers to tighten their belts and hand over more of their hard-earned money when political leaders in Springfield aren’t willing to do the same thing,” Senger said.
A spokesman from Frerichs' office says the treasurer still supports evaluating the proposal but still has yet to see an explanation for the savings Senger and Dodge say are possible."In 2015, we reached out to the Comptroller Munger’s office to discuss such an evaluation," said Greg Rivara. "There was no response."
Illinois is one of only a handful of states to have both a comptroller and a treasurer as elected officials, Senger said. Many states have a “chief financial officer” position within the governor’s office. Mendoza has publicly clashed with Gov. Bruce Rauner over managing of Illinois’ debt, successfully pushing for multiple transparency measures that the governor’s office opposed.
Source:
https://www.ilnews.org/news/state_politics/illinois-gop-candidates-push-to-merge-treasurer-comptroller/article_4855b8a8-8fb4-11e8-9916-cb14ce055527.html
Check out Jim Dodge at www.jimdodge.com
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