The Democratic Senate Immigration Disaster

Originally published at Fox News  By Newt Gingrich

Republicans have the chance to secure a significant victory in the U.S. Senate this fall – largely because the Democrats’ radical immigration positions could lead to their catastrophic downfall.

As more and more Democrats throw their support behind so-called sanctuary cities, abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and promoting open borders, more and more Americans are expressing their vehement opposition to these positions.

Most recently, in their fervor over the child detention issue, every Senate Democrat scrambled to co-sponsor Senator Dianne Feinstein’s Keep Families Together Act (partly to rebuke the president and partly to appease the growing radical wing of the Democratic party) despite the bill proposing half-baked, open-border policies that very few Americans support.

Gabriel Malor wrote an eye-opening piece for The Federalist describing how devasting the Feinstein bill would truly be for our country it were passed. Malor notes that, “Every Senate Democrat has now signed on to cosponsor a bill written so carelessly that it does not distinguish between migrant children at the border and U.S. citizen children already within the United States. The bill further does not distinguish between federal officers handling the border crisis and federal law enforcement pursuing the ordinary course of their duties.”

The bill would negatively impact virtually the entire United States because it sloppily defines its geographic scope as “at or near the port of entry or within 100 miles of the border.” As Malor pointed out, “That’s roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population. Even more live near ports of entry, including in places far from the border crisis, like Salt Lake City, Utah (nearly 700 miles from the nearest border crossing), Tulsa, Oklahoma (more than 600 miles from the nearest border crossing), and Nashville, Tennessee (nearly 600 miles from the nearest border crossing). All major U.S. metropolitan areas fall within either 100 miles of the border or are near a port of entry or both.”

A recent Harvard-Harris Poll conducted by Mark Penn (who is not Republican) clearly shows that most Americans overwhelmingly disagree with the radical Democratic immigration agenda. To illustrate just how wide this gulf is, I’ve included the below chart that describes the percentage results of Penn’s poll by issue (click the image for a larger view).

The results are clear. Sixty-four percent of registered voters said people who cross the border illegally should be sent back to their home countries. Only 36 percent said they should be allowed to stay. This result doesn’t significantly change when children are involved (61 percent to 39 percent).

Additionally, 61 percent of voters said current border security was inadequate – and 70 percent support more strict enforcement of immigration law. An astounding 84 percent of voters said sanctuary city policies should end, and 69 percent oppose the idea of abolishing ICE. These numbers show how radical and out of sync the central planks of Democratic immigration platform truly are.

Byron York with the Washington Examiner has done an excellent job of describing the disconnect between the views of radical Democrats (including the media) and those of the American people – particularly with regards to the wide American support of President Trump’s immigration policies.

I have written a strategy paper citing the work of York and Malor[will add link] that describes how Republicans must use the facts about what Americans think about immigration policy and clearly communicate how and why the Republicans are right and the Democrats are wildly wrong.

The elite media is so biased that it is (and will no doubt continue) artificially propping up an increasingly radical Democratic Party while artificially suppressing the issue popularity of the Trump team.

So, the key purpose of the fall 2018 Republican Senate campaign is to communicate how totally unacceptable the radical Democratic views are and how radically they would change America if they succeed.

For example, radical Democrats support for sanctuary cities (and any Democrat who supports sanctuary cities is a radical) is deeply unpopular. Ending sanctuary cities is an 84-16 issue. Furthermore, Americans believe sanctuary cities increase crime by 64 percent to 36 percent. This is something that the House and Senate should vote on as often as possible.

The abolition ICE movement is also a completely looney Democratic idea that is completely rejected by the American public 69 percent to 31 percent. Republicans should point out that ICE has been an important part of combatting the opioid crisis and fighting drug cartels – which is destroying American families and communities across the country. In 2017 alone, the agency seized roughly 2,400 pounds of deadly fentanyl. Democrats should be made to answer why they think dangerous drugs that are tearing American families apart should be allowed to come in the country.

Every Republican challenger should get a copy of Feinstein’s open-borders bill and carry it to every event, press conference, and debate. Democratic incumbents should be forced to explain why they agreed to cosponsor a bill that will gut our ability to enforce immigration laws when 70 percent of Americans support more stringent border enforcement.

Across the board, Republicans range from a high of 84 percent to low of 60 percent for our immigration positions. These are winning positions. The Democrats cannot win on these issues if Republicans have the courage to ignore the elite media and focus on the American people.

Work requirement should be mandatory for healthy Medicaid recipients

Work requirement should be mandatory for healthy Medicaid recipients

·         By Dan McCaleb | Illinois News Network

Jul 18, 2018

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Requiring healthy, childless welfare recipients to work – or undergo job training – to continue receiving taxpayer-funded benefits is practical.

It's in the best interests of the taxpayers who fund the programs – whether that be Medicaid, food stamps or the like – and it's in the best interests of the individuals receiving the benefits, who by working or receiving job training have more and better opportunities to improve their own situations.

Medicaid is a government-run health insurance program initially intended for the disabled, the elderly and the poorest of the poor. Under Obamacare in 2012, states were allowed to voluntarily expand their Medicaid rolls to include many previously ineligible residents, including healthy, working-age adults with no minor children. Illinois was one of 31 states to jump on board.

Unfortunately, Medicaid expansion came with no work requirement.

A new study on the expansion, released last week, reveals the overall impact. The results are predictable, but still alarming.

Nationwide, 55 percent of the more than 12 million able-bodied people who joined Medicaid under the Obamacare expansion reported no income, meaning they're not working.

In Illinois, where about one of every four residents is on Medicaid, more than 400,000 out of the 580,00 Medicaid expansion enrollees reported no earned income, or 70 percent overall.

What's worse, the taxpayer funds that go to support Medicaid for nonworking, healthy adults are not going to those individuals who need it most.

“Based on this data, an estimated 6.8 million of the 12.4 million expansion enrollees nationwide are not working at all,” the report, from the Foundation for Government Accountability, states. “While these able-bodied adults remain on the rolls – refusing to work and consuming resources – nearly 650,000 individuals with developmental disabilities, spinal cord injuries, and other conditions remain trapped on Medicaid waiting lists for needed home-based services. Since expansion began, at least 21,904 individuals languishing on Medicaid waiting lists in ObamaCare expansion states have died.”

The FGA, a Florida-based public policy think tank, supports reasonable work requirements for healthy welfare beneficiaries. It cites research that shows that "the longer able-bodied adults spend on welfare, the more difficult it is for them to re-enter the workforce."

"Research has further shown that, after work requirements were implemented in other welfare programs, able-bodied adults went back to work in more than 600 different industries and their incomes more than doubled, on average," FGA's report says. "Higher wages more than offset lost welfare benefits, leaving individuals financially better off and spurring greater economic growth."

Critics say work requirements prevent those in need of health care from receiving it, particularly in rural areas. That's only the case if those seeking Medicaid benefits who are able to work aren't interested in trying to find it.

Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued new rules that allow states to apply for waivers to implement work requirements into their Medicaid programs. Since then, four states – Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky and New Hampshire – have been granted permission to implement the work requirements. Twelve other state have are either submitted or are preparing waiver applications.

Illinois isn't one of them, but it should be.

Even better, Congress should make Medicaid work requirements the law.

Taxpayer-funded welfare programs such as Medicaid are needed, make no mistake. They're needed to help those who can't help themselves.

It's reasonable to expect those who are able to help themselves do so if they want a taxpayer-funded benefit.

That's common sense.

Dan McCaleb is news director of Illinois News Network and the digital hub ILNews.org. He welcomes your comments. Contact Dan at dmccaleb@ilnews.org.

IMRF is not the only unsustainable pension fund taxpayers are on the hook for

Joe Kaiser
Writer  Illinois Policy

While Kane County homeowners suffer one of the heaviest tax burdens in the state, at least one retired municipal employee has benefited greatly from taxpayer funds. Albin Pagorski has received more than $3.5 million in pension payments since retiring in 1998 at age 58 from the Fox River Water Reclamation District, or FRWRD, which serves 180,000 residents in Elgin, South Elgin and West Dundee, as well as portions of Sleepy Hollow, Streamwood, Hoffman Estates and unincorporated St. Charles Township. Pagorski’s current annual pension benefit is nearly $211,000, despite having only contributed $93,900 to his retirement during his 40 years of work, according to documents from the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, or IMRF. His is not the only expensive government worker retirement straining Kane County taxpayers. As many as 38 other local government pensioners in Kane County enrolled in IMRF are receiving six-figure annual payouts. One of those pensioners, Gregory Hergenroeder, was also a 40-year FRWRD worker and has already accumulated $2.1 million in just 12 years of retirement.

These benefit levels, while unaffordable, are not the fault of government employees themselves. State lawmakers set the rules. However, the benefits these employees receive contrast starkly with the reality local taxpayers face. Typical homeowners in Kane County pay higher property taxes than the state average and more than double the national average, when measured as a share of home value. The average single-family home in Kane County had a property tax bill of $6,517 in 2017, according to ATTOM Data solutions, a property data company. The average home value for the county was estimated at nearly $235,800, bringing the average effective property tax rate up to 2.76 percent. The national average, meanwhile, was 1.17 percent. Taxpayers contribute far more to IMRF retirements than employees themselves, and benefits are growing at a rate far too fast for taxpayers to keep up with. IMRF accrued pension benefits have been growing at the pace of 7.2 percent per year since 2000. Worse yet for taxpayers, IMRF is not the only unsustainable pension fund they’re on the hook for. Many local police and fire pension liabilities throughout Kane and across the state have been growing far faster than taxpayers can manage. For example, in the Cook County village of Streamwood – one of the towns FRWRD serves – taxpayer contributions to its fire and police pension funds increased 135 percent and 197 percent, respectively, from 2006 to 2016. Despite these massive increases in taxpayer contributions, the Streamwood fire pension fund has an even lower funding ratio today than it had in 2006. Taxpayers know this, and many are getting out before more pain comes. Cook and the collar counties each lost more residents to other counties across the nation than they gained from other counties. If lawmakers want to retain and attract residents, and see them thrive, they must rein in property taxes by controlling the growth of pension liabilities. In the short term, lawmakers should implement 401(k)-style retirement plans for new workers. This would be a fair and promising proposal for taxpayers and government workers alike. In the long term, lawmakers must amend the Illinois Constitution in order to adjust future, unearned retirement benefits for government workers.

Stocks Rise and Fall because of Central Banks

By Bob Livingston

There has been a lot of confusion lately in the mainstream economic media as well as in independent media circles as to the behavior of stock markets in the wake of the recently initiated global trade war. In particular, stocks suffered one of the longest runs of negative days in their history in June, only to then spike just after Donald Trump “officially” began trade war tariffs in July. The expectation by many was that the headlines would cause an immediate and continued downturn in equities markets, but this was not the case. Many analysts have been left bewildered. This is an issue I have touched on multiple times since the beginning of this year, and it is something I predicted long before Trump's election in 2016. But it is obvious that the schizophrenic nature of stocks needs to be addressed in a very concise, no-holds-barred fashion, because there are still far too many people who are looking at all the wrong causes and correlations. First, let's be clear: stock markets are not tracking the news headlines. The past month should have proved this if there was any previous doubt. It is hard for investors and some analysts to grasp this fact, primarily because for at least the past few years it appeared as though stock markets were utterly dictated by headlines out of Bloomberg, Reuters and other mainstream media outlets. Once investors and analysts became used to this narrative it was difficult for them to adapt when the dynamic changed. They are still living in the past based on an assumption that was never quite correct to begin with. In reality, headlines never actually dictated stock prices; it was always the Federal Reserve among other central banks. As I and others have noted consistently, stock market valuations for the past several years have tracked almost perfectly with the Fed's balance sheet. That is to say, every time the Fed purchased more assets and increased the balance sheet, stocks went up.   After years of the notorious “Fed Put,” we now have an entire generation of investors and market writers that have never experienced a stock environment in which equities actually fall according to the health of their corresponding companies or the economy at large. The past year has been a bit of a shock for them, and it's only going to get worse. The Fed's interventions in stocks are now essentially over, which is exactly why stocks are no longer hitting new historic highs every month as they used to. The massive bull market rally of the post credit crash world of 2008 has stalled, and here are the reasons why. Central Banks tapering QE The Federal Reserve was only the first to begin tapering its purchases of treasury bonds. Japan is now in the midst of what many are referring to as a “stealth taper” of its own bond purchases. The European Central Bank has announced it will likely end its QE program by the end of this year. Bond purchases helped first to support the ever growing debt burden of the governments and nations in question, but along with artificially low interest rates, it made bond investment less desirable in terms of profits. This pushed the majority of investors into stocks, where profits were essentially guaranteed by the central banks. Now that QE is ending around the world and rates are rising along with yields, bonds are becoming a competing asset, luring investors away from stocks once more. Central Banks raising interest rates The Federal Reserve has been raising rates consistently since the end of 2016, exactly as I predicted they would before the U.S. election.  Interest rates are a direct influencing factor in stocks — low interest rates and cheap overnight loans to corporations by the Fed allowed these companies to continually buy back their own stocks, thereby decreasing the number of stock offerings available on the market and artificially boosting the value of the stocks that were left circulating. Corporation have taken on a historic level of debt not seen since 2007 in order to keep their stocks prices high. Now that interest rates are rising, the party is almost over. The only source of capital left to fuel the stock buyback bonanza has been the Trump corporate tax cut.  Instead of using this cut as a means to increase employment, innovation and to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., companies have instead squandered it on boosting the stock market yet again. However, as we have seen this year so far, without the aid of cheap money from the central bank the effects of stock buybacks are diminishing. How long will it take for corporations to completely exhaust this last revenue stream? I predict stock buybacks will die off by the end of this year. And with rising interest rates, all that debt they took on in order to keep stocks elevated will now become rather expensive to hold onto. Once stock buybacks diminish, markets will crash. It's important to note that the Fed is not the only central bank that is raising interest rates. The Bank of Canada and the Bank of England among others are beginning to push higher rates as well. Federal Reserve cutting balance sheet The Fed has been the single most important trigger for stock markets. Period. As noted above, it was the Fed that created the historic bull market rally after the derivatives collapse. Jerome Powell, the current chairman of the Fed, noted back in 2012 that this was the case, and also made statements on what would happen is the Fed ever raised interest rates and cut asset purchases, ending the central bank's “short position.” What did Powell predict in 2012? Essentially, a stock market crash. And, yet, as the new Fed chair, he is implementing the exact measures he warned about back in 2012. With every new balance sheet cut and rate hike, the Dow Jones in particular tends to lose 1,000 points or more. The damages have been mitigated by continued stock buybacks from corporations, but as already mentioned, this stop gap will be ending shortly. In May, we saw an exaggerated market spike, but the Fed slowed cuts that month and also added a small amount of purchases, which only supports my assertion that the balance sheet is the primary indicator of where stocks are headed. I should also note that the St. Louis Fed recently ended its reporting of data on cuts from week-to-week. There are other sources for this data, but they mainly show how much was cut per month, not when in the month those cuts were made. The St. Louis data was originally reported on a weekly basis. I believe the Fed is not attempting to hide the size of its asset dumps, but it is attempting to hide the exact timing of when the cuts occurred.  In this way, they hope to distance themselves from any blame as it becomes more difficult to connect Fed cuts to specific plunges in stock markets. Trade war distraction The trade war continues as the most effective possible distraction from central bank activities. In every instance of a stock market decline, which takes place after every instance of a Federal Reserve cut in the balance sheet or an interest rate hike, Donald Trump also seems to make yet another trade war announcement. The only outlier has been the “official launch” of the trade war with China, which saw stock markets suddenly rise.  I have witnessed numerous analysts and commentators frantic over the fact that stocks did not fall on the headlines. Some have even suggested that the investment world “loves the trade war.” What these commentators do not understand is that the headlines are meaningless and the trade war has little to do with the behavior in equities. It is the Federal Reserve and to some extent other central banks that are controlling stock market prices, along with corporate stock buybacks which are facilitated by the Federal Reserve. I've said it before and I'll say it again — what we are witnessing is a controlled demolition of the U.S. economy, and stock markets are merely an extension of this process. They are a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator. Stocks fall when the Fed dumps more assets, and these cuts are growing larger and larger as 2018 drags on. Stocks rise when the Fed slows asset cuts in a particular week, or when companies initiate more stock buybacks. That's it. That is all there is. There is nothing else to look at when predicting what stocks will do at any given time. The facade will end when balance sheet cuts expand to a point at which buybacks cannot keep up and the slack in markets grows too fast.  Or when stock buyback cash runs out (probably by the end of this year). The trade war can and will cause various problems within the global economy, but the greater cause of fiscal distress will always be central banks. They are to blame for any future crisis.

Homeland Security Secretary Nielsen doesn’t believe Russian election interference favored Trump

From Personal Liberty

President Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on Thursday echoed President Donald Trump’s insistence that Russia did not seek to aid his White House bid in 2016 — a claim directly contradicting the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of the Kremlin’s election interference, according to an article published by New York Daily News.

From the article:

“I haven’t seen any evidence” that Russian meddling was intended to help Trump, Nielsen said during an interview with NBC News’ Peter Alexander at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

Nielsen’s stunning claim comes days after Russian President Vladimir Putin said outright he wanted Trump to beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because he believed the political neophyte’s policies would be more friendly to the Kremlin.

Nielsen said she had not seen any evidence that Russian hackers’ intentions were “to favor a particular political party.”

Daily News then tells us that the CIA, the FBI and the National Security Agency released a “damning report” in January 2017 that outlined the Kremlin’s clear favoritism for Trump. But what Daily News fails to mention is that the sum of that interference claimed by the intelligence community involved spending some $250,000-$300,000 on ads on Facebook and “propaganda” from Trump operatives appearing on the Russia-sponsored RT news service.

More from the article:

It’s not the first time that Nielsen has claimed she wasn’t aware of Russia’s love of Trump.

In May, she said she was unaware of intelligence assessments concluding that the Kremlin was clearly playing favorites.

Nielsen on Thursday attempted to clarify her remarks, saying that Russia’s efforts against the 2016 election were to “attack certain political parties … more than others.”

When pressed by Alexander, she said she agreed with the intelligence community’s assessment “full stop.”

“I agree with the intel community’s assessment full stop — any attack on democracy, which is what that was, whether it is successful or it is unsuccessful, is unacceptable,” Nielsen said.

The DHS chief also admitted that Russia still poses a threat, especially in the upcoming midterm elections.

“I think we would be foolish to think they’re not. They have the capability, they have the will. We’ve got to be prepared,” she added.

Despite two and a half  years of claims – and searches both high and low — that Russia helped to elect Trump and Trump somehow colluded with Russia, no concrete evidence has yet been delivered by the intelligence community or the mainstream media that such a thing occurred.

This entry was posted in Election Informer, Hot Topics and tagged Donald Trump, Election 2016, Russiagate. Bookmark the permalink.

Theft comes in many forms

By Bob Livingston

Theft comes in many forms. The most obvious occurs when a thug sticks a gun in your face or a knife in your back and demands you hand over your wallet or when a burglar enters your property and absconds with your valuables while you are away. It also happens much more covertly. A person or a business may commit fraud. One of the greatest fraudsters of all was Bernie Madoff. His scheme made Charles Ponzi’s look like penny-ante poker. Ponzi offered investors an opportunity to earn profits of 50 percent to 100 percent by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries — primarily Italy — and redeeming them at face value in the United States. Like all pyramid schemes, promised profits materialized for initial investors. Because of that — along with a favorable article about his scheme printed in the Boston Post — new investors were flocking to his door at such a pace that he was raking in $250,000 a day. But he was paying initial investors with money from his new ones. The scheme collapsed, costing his “investors” $20 million ($237 million in today’s dollars). Madoff’s scheme involved computer programs creating phony trades and manipulated account statements. He later told investigators that he was depositing client money into a bank account rather than investing it and paying clients who wanted to cash out with money from the new deposits. Estimates of his total fraud range from $17 billion to $65 billion, depending on who is estimating. Government/banker paper money (now mostly computer symbols) is just another Ponzi scheme, a system of organized theft. Paper money/credit was created to transfer wealth to the government/banker establishment without payment. Every new dollar put into circulation dilutes your dollars and your imagined savings. But the process is so slow. When coupled with a steady saturation of propaganda about our high-sounding democracy, few people ever catch on. The crowd has been dumbed down. Even most bank employees don’t understand they are engaged in theft. They, like most of the rest of Americans, don’t understand and they don’t care as long as they have bread and circuses. Fractional reserve banking is a government-approved Ponzi scheme. Banks hold only a fraction of your money in an account, and they do not have reserves on hand to cover all the debt owed them by their customers and all the savings customers have deposited. In other words, banks are bankrupt, except for their ability to “create” money. Here’s how the Federal Reserve explains it: The fact that banks are required to keep on hand only a fraction of the funds deposited with them is a function of the banking business. Banks borrow funds from their depositors (those with savings) and in turn lend those funds to the banks’ borrowers (those in need of funds). Banks make money by ch… Here is what else the Fed says about reserve requirements: Reserve requirements are the amount of funds that a depository institution must hold in reserve against specified deposit liabilities. Within limits specified by law, the Board of Governors has sole authority over changes in reserve requirements. Depository institutions must hold reserves in the for… Those reserve amounts are set by complicated formulas depending on the net transaction amounts of the bank in question. Based on the formula, a new bank can open with a small amount of invested capital, have zero net transaction accounts (no money on deposit) and immediately “lend” up to $9.3 million by simply creating new money on a computer. In a column he wrote in 1995, the late economist and author Murray N. Rothbard explained a bank’s operation this way: I set up a Rothbard Bank, and invest $1,000 of cash (whether gold or government paper does not matter here). Then I “lend out” $10,000 to someone, either for consumer spending or to invest in his business. How can I “lend out” far more than I have? Ahh, that’s the magic of the “fraction” in the frac… So let’s say that you borrow $200,000 at 5 percent interest on a 25-year note from the bank mentioned above (the one with no money on deposit) to buy a house. You make a monthly payment of $1,169.18 to the bank in the form of your mortgage payment. By the time you have paid off your loan, you have paid the bank a total of $350,754.02. In other words, the bank has now profited to the tune of $350,000 from you on money that never existed. And should you have defaulted on your loan, not only would you have lost whatever money you had paid prior to the default, the bank would own your home outright through a repossession. The Federal Reserve (which is neither a federal agency nor does it hold any reserves) works this way, by “lending” money to other banks, through either a mark on a ledger sheet or by computer transfer. Real money never changes hands. But rather than create actual wealth (except for themselves), central bankers, as money creators, always destroy the currency. This is inflation. Inflation is not rising prices, which most people are led to believe. Rising prices are a symptom of inflation, not the cause. Inflation is an expansion of the money supply, i.e., the creation of money out of thin air. So how does inflation steal your wealth? It is the perfect crime. It is as simple a concept as supply and demand. With more money chasing fewer goods, more and more money is required to make a purchase. And if you put your money in a certificate of deposit in the bank that pays less interest than the rate of inflation, then your bank savings lose money. It is like pouring water into milk. The more water you pour, the less milk is left. Everyone is hurt, particularly those on a fixed income. The more money that is spewed out, the more worthless each one of those paper dollars is. In the past 100 years, the dollar has lost 96 percent of its value. Put another way, it now takes more than $25 to buy what would cost $1 in 1913. Since your pension or Social Security comes in U.S. dollars, what happens during a period of hyperinflation as we certainly expect to occur as a result of the massive Fed money-printing adventure? It loses value because it is nominal dollars, not real money (dollars) like precious metals. Social Security represents a “debt” of the federal government. Governments get rid of “debt” by inflating it away (printing more money). In short, the government can and will kill the Social Security liability by inflating it away. Ditto for savings. A study of monetary history shows that hyperinflated currency destroys the purchasing power of savings accounts and Social Security. That is why I recommend you preserve your labor, your savings and retirement with gold and silver in your possession. Precious metals don’t pay interest, you say? This is conventional thinking backed by the paper money myth. Gold and silver are the only real money in existence. They are real money as well as intrinsic wealth. Moreover, gold and silver appreciate in purchasing power as paper money depreciates. That is your real interest. All understanding of hard money has been lost down the memory hole of the fiat paper world money regime. Look at it this way. If you had taken two silver half dollars and a $1 bill in 1964 and placed them in a box for safekeeping, what would they purchase today? With the silver coins you could buy about $12 worth of goods or services, say seven gallons of milk or six loaves of bread. With the dollar you could buy only $1 worth of goods. So which is real money? I love my country, but I hate my government. I know that my government and my country have been stolen by the money creators.

Facebook and Fake News

The week's news that wasn't 

Demonetizing, wiping (like with a cloth), hacking, enslaving and state's righting the most hateful, Russiaphobic, indictable, demagogic and murderous fakeries in the week's fake news. 

Poynter doesn't ask about CNN

Facebook execs recently held a little "on-the-record shindig for media and tech reporters in New York City" in which they discussed the technical and policy changes they've made to combat what the elites and once-and-future gatekeepers perceive as fake news.

During a question-and-answer session, CNN reporter Oliver Darcy asked a question: "Why does Facebook allow InfoWars, a regular purveyor of hateful and damaging conspiracy theories, to use the platform as a channel to disseminate its odious misinformation?"

"I guess just for being false that doesn't violate the community standards," was one answer from the recently appointed head of News Feed John Hegeman.

Well that answer seems to have set off The Poynter Institute's Alexios Mantzarlis, a former UN propagandist who heads up Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network. It prompted him to ask some questions of his own in a piece in which he notes that InfoWars has been flagged by fact-checkers — of which Poynter is one — as distributing "false content" and suggesting that InfoWars should be banned from advertising and monetizing on Facebook. 

Who is Poynter, you might ask. We've written about them before. It is the world's leading journalism "instructor, convener and resource for anyone who aspires to engage and inform citizens." As such, Poynter touches every American journalist in mainstream media — and most of the world's — in various ways. It happens through its control over the standard curriculum, school instruction and influence on journalism schools and within the industry. On its website, Poynter claims:

We teach leadership, ethical decision-making and fact-checking; we teach editing, writing, reporting and digital media skills; we teach those in broadcast, print, online and mobile; we teach those trying to remake their organizations and those trying to remake their journalistic skills set.

What it doesn't teach, apparently, are the concepts of liberty enshrined in the 1^st Amendment or how to really spot bias. If it did, Mantzarlis would point out the hypocrisy in Darcy's question.

Without even trying we've caught CNN lying as many as 2,000 times a month, by our very unscientific analysis. The network spends all day every day promoting the false notion that Russia colluded with President Donald Trump to get him elected. And its hosts and guests utter the most hateful and vile things imaginable about him. The completely unhinged CNN contributor John Brennan— spymaster under Barack Obama, admitted communist during the Cold War and likely one of the instigators of the phony "Trump dossier" — called Trump a traitor just this week and suggested the GOP should expel him from office. CNN treats Trump even worse than the mainstream media treated Ronald Reagan, and that's saying something.

Aside from the fact that if Facebook is a neutral platform — as it claims — it should "allow" anyone to post their information whether the muckity-mucks at Poynter like it or not, one would think that an organization that purports to support journalism would want as many viewpoints as possible to be "allowed" in the public sphere.

There are really three questions that need to be asked:

• Why does Facebook allow CNN, a regular purveyor of hateful and damaging conspiracy theories, to use the platform as a channel to disseminate its odious misinformation?"
• Why does Poynter hold people in such low esteem that it thinks they aren't smart enough to discern for themselves what is fake and what is not and thus have need of some nanny organizations deciding what they should see and hear?
• And why does Poynter (and CNN) so fear InfoWars, a website with only 3.1 million unique visitors a month in a world of 7.6 billion people?

Trump and those servers

A lot of sound and fury erupted after Trump's appearance alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin this week, so some little gems got overlooked. Like this one, from Trump on the indictments of 12 Russians for hacking the DNC server:

Let me just say that we have two thoughts. You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server; why haven't' they taken the server. Why was the FBI told to leave the office of the Democratic National Committee? I've been wondering that. I've been asking that for months and months and I've been Tweeting it out and calling it out on social media. Where is the server? I want to know where is the server and what is the server saying?

Those fine folks at Politifact didn't miss it, however, and labeled Trump's claim that the FBI never saw the server as false. Politico called the statement "unmoored from reality." So what's the truth?

The truth is the DNC denied the FBI access to the servers, so Trump is correct. Former FBI Director James Comey admitted as much in Congressional testimony, though it should be noted that Comey has been caught, shall we say, stretching the truth in some of his testimony. But here's what he said under questioning:

Well we never got direct access to the machines themselves. The DNC in the spring of 2016 hired a firm that ultimately shared with us their forensics from their review of the system.

Later he said:

[A]though we got the forensics from the pros that they hired which — again, best practice is always to get access to the machines themselves, but this — my folks tell me was appropriate substitute.

So Politifact was wrong again. Trump's statement was the opposite of false. It was true, and Politifact — used as one of Facebook's fact-checkers — is once again publishing fake news.

And speaking of those "pros" working on the DNC's servers…

Crowdstrike, the "pros" hired by the DNC to clean its servers of the effects of Russian hackers, claimed more than year ago in a blog post that after the DNC retained its services it "immediately identified" and took action against the Russian intruders.

As The Daily Caller notes:

DNC officials and security experts told The Washington Post in June 2016 that all hackers were expelled from the DNC's network in a "major computer cleanup campaign" earlier that month. "When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network," Wasserman Schultz told The Post. The New York Times expanded on CrowdStrike's cleanup campaign in a December 2016 article, saying the security firm replaced the DNC's entire computer system "in total secrecy" within six weeks of being retained in April 2016. "All laptops were turned in and the hard drives wiped clean, with the uninfected information on them imaged to new drives," The Times reported.

But the indictment of 12 Russian hackers handed down by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tells a different story.

Again from TDC:

The indictment, filed by the office of Special Council Robert Mueller, reveals that CrowdStrike was unsuccessful in expelling intruders from the DNC's networks in June and that a malicious program "remained on the DNC network until in or around October 2016." The hackers also gained access to DNC computers hosted on a third-party cloud-computing service around September 2016, which enabled them to steal data from the DNC by creating backups, or snapshots, of the DNC's cloud-based systems.

The boss told you a little about Crowdstrike more than a year ago.

And this is the company the FBI is relying on to provide it with prosecutable evidence on the DNC hack?

Hillary Clinton claims Brett Kavanaugh's nomination will bring back slavery

In a speech before the American Federation of Teachers last week, twice-failed and likely future presidential candidate Hillary Clinton — or as we've come to fondly know her, the Witch from Chappaqua — warned of dire consequencesshould Brett Kavanaugh, Trump's pick for associate justice of the Supreme Court, be confirmed to the bench:

"Let me say a word about the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court," Clinton said in her speech. "This nomination holds out the threat of devastating consequences for workers rights, civil rights, LGBT rights, women's rights — including those to make our own health decisions." "It is a blatant attempt by this administration to shift the balance of the Court for decades and to reverse decades of progress," Clinton continued. "I used to worry that they [the Republicans] wanted to turn the clock back to the 1950s. Now I worry they want to turn it back to the 1850s," Clinton said.

What was going on in the 1850s? Well, women couldn't vote and black people were enslaved. There was also no income tax, Abraham Lincoln hadn't yet started a war that would kill 650,000 people, there was no social media or CNN and there was no Hillary Clinton, so it wasn't all bad. But I digress.

Hillary, being a former lawyer and all, certainly knows that Kavanaugh cannot roll us back to the 1850s because he can't roll back the 13^th and 14^thAmendments — even if they were ratified under dubious circumstances. Besides, the social justice warriors on Twitter would never let us even propose a plan to bring back slavery, much less create a plan, even if we wanted to. We don't, by the way, though we'd probably be better off if most women didn't vote.

All Kavanaugh wants to do — ostensibly, at least — is return the Supreme Court to a time when it sought to restrain government to its enumerated powers and cease its practice of the last 100 years or so of legislating from the bench.

The left has used the courts to create laws that could not be passed by Congress or the states because they went against the will of the electorate. Hillary — and all of the left — sees that practice ending if Kavanaugh is confirmed. That's what they fear most.

I think they're overreacting. The court has been activist almost since its inception. It's practice of judicial review – something not granted it under the Constitution — is judicial activism.

Recall that ominous warning from Thomas Jefferson:

"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body, (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one."

Finally a leftist understands the 10th Amendment

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is threatening to sue if the Supreme Court rolls back Roe v. Wade. From his statement:

For years, what the Republicans in the Senate have said, "well, we don't need New York law because we have Roe v. Wade and nobody's crazy enough to try to roll back Roe v. Wade." Yeah, accept the man they nominated for President of the United States who wound up winning the election. But that was always the answer, you don't need a New York law. We have Roe v. Wade. Well now we know we're not guaranteed Roe v. Wade. And the New York law, my friends does not currently go as far as Roe v. Wade. Roe v. Wadehas the protections that we now rely on in New York. We never passed the New York State law because we relied on Roe v. Wade and everyone assumed it would always be there and because the Republicans wouldn't pass it, using that as an excuse. We now need to codify Roe v. Wade, which will actually increase the protections in New York. God forbid they do what they intend to do. I want to get it done before the Supreme Court does that because I don't want any gaps in a woman's right to protection and we have a better legal case when the Supreme Court acts because I will sue when the Supreme Court acts and I want the New York State law in place.

Before the Supremes fabricated a national right to murder babies, such topics were considered to be a state issue, where it belonged. Abortion would currently be illegal in many, if not most, states if not for Roe v. Wade. That means that hundreds of thousands of babies never given a chance would still be with us.

But I'm quite curious who it is that Cuomo thinks he's going to sue in order to overcome a SCOTUS decision.

— Jay Baker