‘We are subsidizing something that already happened absent the subsidy…’
Photo by UnitedSoybeanBoard (CC)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A report released by a tax-reform advocacy group said the federal government propped up the dubiously efficient biodiesel fuel industry with $12 billion in subsidies over the past decade.
Taxpayers for Common Sense noted in the report, titled “Biodiesel Bonanza,” that the biggest offender, the biodiesel tax credit, has since expired but that some lawmakers were trying to resurrect it and even apply it retroactively.
Corn, soy, palm and and other crops cultivated as renewable energy sources may also pose potential environmental and health consequences, said a statement accompanying the report’s release.
Among the issues they create are greater land-use demands that result in habitat loss, water pollution, water treatment costs and a detrimental effect on public health.
“With more than half of US biodiesel sourced from virgin soy this massive tax credit not only negatively impacts taxpayers, it also harms food production and the environment,” said TCS president Ryan Alexander.
“At the end of the day, biodiesel subsidies distort energy markets, raise fuel prices and waste taxpayer dollars, and do little to promote long-term sustainable energy policy,” she said.
Nonetheless, following an extensive lobbying campaign by biodiesel backers, the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committees may take up a proposal to renew the subsidy when Congress reconvenes from its spring recess, TCS said.
“It is no surprise lawmakers are pushing expensive plans to extend the biodiesel tax credit backwards and forwards,” it said. “Industry boosters have been heavily lobbying for months.”
One proposal, TCS said, would cost taxpayers $19 billion by extending the credit retroactively for 2018 and continuing it for the next five years.
Alexander said such a retroactive extension for an agricultural enterprise defied logic since there is no way to retroactively change last year’s crop production.
“[W]e are subsidizing something that already happened absent the subsidy,” she said.
TCS also accused the biodiesel producers of playing political games with their past production numbers, drastically boosting their crop in three years when they knew they would benefit from the subsidy, then leveling off in subsequent years.
“[A]fter more than ten years of lavish taxpayer support, it’s time for the biodiesel industry to stand on its own two feet,” Alexander said.
2018 midterm election spending increased by $300M over 2016 general election….
Photo by K. Kendall
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In spite of—or perhaps because of—a landmark Supreme Court ruling that cut into their involuntary base of dues-paying members, labor unions doubled down during the 2017-18 election cycle, spending more than $2 billion, according to an analysis of government records.
The National Institute for Labor Relations Research compared filings from the Labor Department, Federal Election Commission and Internal Revenue Service to determine that Big Labor had bet heavily on the 2018 midterms—even after the devastating legal decision.
Last June, the high court’s landmark Janus v. AFSCME decision determined that public-sector employees could not be forced to pay dues to unions whose political activities they opposed.
The ruling threatened to purge possibly millions of members from their ranks—and even more from their coffers. However, many cases have arisen of unions actively resisting the law by setting narrow withdrawal windows or simply refusing to comply.
The NILRR determined that of the $2 billion invested in lobbying and electioneering activities during the most recent election cycle, more than $1.3 billion came directly from general treasury funds that were paid by union-member dues, often forcibly imposed on non-members.
But the group said that its spending figure was likely a conservative estimate.
“On balance, then, the aggregate $2 billion in political and lobbying expenditures by labor union[s] since the 2018 election cycle reported here is likely an understatement because NILRR chose to mostly ignore the $500 million of union contributions, gifts, and grants that are heavily misclassified,” it said in a release.
Shockingly, the $2 billion reflected an increase of at least $300 million over the 2016 presidential race, when the union rolls were not in jeopardy. However, the amount of general treasury funding did not increase between the two election cycles.
Union contributions historically have gone almost exclusively to Democrats, and the most recent cycle was no exception, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The top 20 recipients of 2018 campaign donations from unions were all Democrats.
Unfortunately for the unions, several of their biggest “investments” in the U.S. Senate were for naught.
‘Which came first, President Trump or the degradation of our political system…?’
Andrew Cuomo (screen shot: CNBC/Youtube)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has spent the bulk of his career raising more questions than providing answers or solutions.
He’s been known to point fingers and cast glances more often at Washington, D.C., than Albany.
Like rats on a sinking ship, many are now fleeing the tax-onerous Empire State, and others appear to be poised to do the same as the once-vaunted Democratic Party finds itself splintering into pieces.
In a Washington Postop-ed posted Thursday Cuomo addressed those worries by asking an additional 35 questions.
Although he previously ‘ruled out’ having any designs on the 2020 presidential race, the article seemed to clearly signal otherwise.
Intending to target opponents such as President Donald Trump with the rhetorical barrage, however, his questions seemed equally effective in highlighting Cuomo’s own deficiencies and myopic, far-left perspectives.
Political Degradation
In his leadoff question, Cuomo asked: “Which came first, President Trump or the degradation of our political system: Which was the cause, and which was the effect?”
He either was in denial about the answer, or at least had a very short memory—and hoped his audience did also.
The word “degrade” was, in fact, used often in the context of President Barack Obama—notably over his brazen insertion of partisan politics in areas where other presidents had sought to unify the country and build national consensus.
Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a blistering attack against Obama following his 2016 State of the Union address for pettily turning it into a campaign stump-speech even though he wasn’t running.
As New York’s governor, Cuomo likewise has done his share of dividing, such as lighting up the World Trade Center—a symbol of national unity and resilience—in pink to celebrate his state’s passage of a late-term abortion bill in January.
Of course, one could argue that President Bill Clinton with his Oval Office conquests was the ultimate degrader of the Office of the Presidency—at least in the modern era.
Barack Obama/IMAGE: theleeoverstreet via Youtube
But the rancor that Obama brought to his eight years—after the relentless political attacks on quintessentially moderate GOP leaders like President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and Gov. Mitt Romney—led Republicans to draw a red line in 2016.
One of the most effective qualities Trump has embraced as a political figure is his willingness to return fire when the Left “goes low” and to answer them in kind with an offense taken directly from their political playbook.
In the series of questions that follows Cuomo took aim at the president’s use of social media, evidently forgetting again how scores of obsequious reporters and all-around Obama fanboys dubbed Trump’s predecessor “the social media president.”
Scholarly-looking books were churned out that fawned over this bold new way for Obama to take his message directly to the people, a modern-day equivalent of FDR’s fireside chats.
Naturally, the advantage lay with Democrats as social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Google were openly rooting for Team Obama.
But of course, whenever Democrats’ own weapons are used against them, they quickly become anathema, eliciting on the Left a derisive bitterness for the same qualities that once made them magical.
Fake News
The governor directed his next set of questions at the media—specifically the cable-news media, bemoaning the fact that it has become partisan and click-based, as well as unreliable.
Chris Cuomo/IMAGE: YouTube
Question No. 6: When did we stop believing what we read in the press?
Perhaps his brother, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, would be in the best position to instruct him on the inner workings of fake news.
The left-wing media has only itself to blame for its exponential decline in credibility—there is not, nor should there be, a political solution to the First Amendment dilemma.
But politicians like Gov. Cuomo are complicit in the mainstream media’s downfall for tacitly abiding such irresponsible journalism when they benefited from it, torquing up the debate with hyperbolic exaggerations and making an entire cottage industry out of spinning the press—often with debunked or discredited talking points.
Competitive Advantage
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez / IMAGE: The View via Youtube
Cuomo next pivoted from Trump-bashing to an underhanded slap at some of his Democratic colleagues.
As he desperately attempted to carve out his own centrist path, ignoring his record of radical leftism and corruption, Cuomo asked obliviously why unions that operate as partisan political machines had become an enemy of the middle class.
But there seemed to be no connection between the stifling regulations and demands that liberal big-government imposes on private enterprise and the decline in competitive innovation and visionary undertakings.
Ironically, Cuomo also puzzled over the fact that America has lost “our competitive advantage” in efforts to build bridges and skyscrapers—a day after New York City officials voted to ban many of the city’s skycrapers if they failed to become environmentally compliant with Green New Deal demands over the next few years.
The governor himself even followed up his article in short succession with a press release touting his goal of 70-percent renewable energy in keeping with the Green New Deal.
Cuomo was at odds not long ago with GND’s champion, the socialist-spouting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez, over the catastrophic withdrawal of Amazon from its New York headquarters plans.
Perhaps an unequivocal condemnation of the radical anti-capitalist movement would be much more effective than asking, “Gee whiz, how did that happen?”
Identity Politics
Cuomo seemed genuinely confused by the divisiveness that has overtaken the Democratic Party as its own interest groups find their agendas at odds with one another.
Antifa/ IMAGE: Stumptown Matters via Youtube
He asked: When did the political left become an enemy of the political left and the Democratic Party become a circular firing squad?
Cuomo bemoaned the infighting between the radical Left and the even more radical Left—which has manifested itself in conflicts over Islamophobia versus anti-Semitism; trans-rights versus feminism; unemployment versus immigration; and an elitist power-structure of moneyed, dynastic career politicians like the Cuomos against the populist, anti-establishment uprising.
Such is the natural and inevitable conclusion of building one’s platform around divisions instead of unity, promising to make the majority assimilate to meet the demands of the fringes rather than the other way around.
And yet, for all his puzzling over divisiveness, Cuomo couldn’t help but deploy some of the loaded hate-think that is woven into the very fabric of leftist dogma.
His article invoked the perennial boogeyman–canard of white supremacy, while making no mention of parallel violence from radical leftist hate groups like Antifa.
When did white supremacists become so emboldened that when they rally in our streets they no longer feel the need to cover their faces with hoods?
Theater of the Absurd
Cuomo’s last volley of questions veered into more cerebral and abstract territory, pondering when we, as a country, lost our sense of humor, our respect for history, our political courage, and when Democrats began to abandon many of their self-declared virtues.
But once again, the man doing the complaining—implying that he is somehow the antidote to it all—has spent eight years in an executive state-level office pandering to political acrimony and inviting it.
Cuomo’s first step to solving the country’s problems would be to practice what he preaches by stepping down from the New York governorship, giving all his family money to charity and disappearing into obscurity.
His series of questions ultimately raised one more: Is he that oblivious, or purely hypocritical?
‘Refusing to review the report you demanded as soon as possible amounts to dereliction of duty….’
Rep. Jerrold Nadler/IMAGE: PBS NewsHour via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) After House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, repeated inaccurate talking points about the Mueller Report, ranking minority member Doug Collins, R-Ga., seemed to wonder if Nadler actually read—and fully understood—it.
The nearly 450-page, two-volume tome—the result of almost two years of investigating—was submitted to the Attorney General’s Office in March and publicly released in redacted form last Thursday.
After much ballyhooing from House Democrats over the fact that Attorney General William Barr was taking too long with redactions—and calls from partisans such as Nadler to provide a full, unredacted report to Congress—the Justice Department took pains to meet as many of the demands as were legally permissible.
Both Collins and Nadler received offers to view the unredacted version, though Nadler allegedly refused.
Still, the Judiciary chairman—who decisively declared before the investigation was over that his committee would continue to investigate, regardless of the findings— seemed more intent on rehashing false, pre-ordained conclusions than addressing the report’s substance.
“You claim the Report states the Special Counsel wanted Congress to decide whether the President committed obstruction of justice,” wrote Collins in a letter to Nadler on Monday.
“However, a plain reading of the Report does not at all indicate—let alone make ‘very clear,’ as you claim—the Special Counsel intended for Congress to decide whether President Trump obstructed justice,” Collins said. “In fact, it is the exact opposite.”
Nadler’s assertions that Mueller was calling on Congress to pursue charges of obstruction of justice were roundly repeated throughout the mainstream media echo chamber.
“I trust by now you have thoroughly read the entire Report from the Special Counsel’s 22-month investigation,” Collins prodded the New York liberal.
Referring to a lengthy legal discussion at the start of the report’s second volume—which partisan Democrats pointed to as a justification for the probes they already had committed to, even hiring full-time investigative staffs—Collins said the “passages are not, in fact, an invitation for Congress to pick up where the Report left off.”
He noted that the constitutional division of powers authorizes Congress to write the laws, not to enforce or evaluate them.
Doug Collins/IMAGE: C-SPAN via YouTube
“This simple maxim from Civics 101 has become a casualty of false claims Special Counsel Mueller asked Congress to decide whether President Donald Trump obstructed justice,” he said.
“The Special Counsel did not say that—and would not say that—because Congress is neither a prosecutorial nor judicial body.”
Mueller’s report declined to say whether Trump had obstructed justice in his May 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Democrats have claimed that Trump’s May 2017 firing of Comey constituted obstruction since the FBI was investigating the president at the time—under what were later proven to be false pretenses.
But others contend that Comey’s firing fell well within the new president’s executive purview.
The fact that there was no actual collusion underlying the investigation also makes matters more complicated. It is difficult to prove an attempted cover-up of a crime was intended if the actual crime did not occur.
Collins said that the Mueller Report had concluded that Congress would be permitted to pass a future law prohibiting the president from firing the FBI director under such circumstances—not that it had the power to re-investigate a matter already settled by the proper legal authorities.
“This isn’t a matter of legal interpretation; it’s reading comprehension,” Collins said.
Undeterred, Nadler and other Democratic leaders have pressed forward, seeking perhaps to exact revenge for the impeachment of Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice two decades ago.
Although Congress does have the power to impeach the president, Collins added that was an entirely different matter from appropriating the role of prosecutor simply because the political outcome of the original investigation did not favor them.
“Your deliberate misrepresentations to the American public threaten the fundamental separation-of-powers doctrine, are dangerous, and need to stop,” Collins told Nadler.
He noting that the current rules for DOJ-led special-counsel investigations were written by Democrats in the aftermath of the Clinton impeachment and criticized the baseless political attacks on the attorney general’s credibility.
“Moving forward, I urge you to be accurate in your claims before the American public and encourage you to take the Attorney General up on his offer to read the full report,” Collins said. “Given the stakes, dismissing this offer and refusing to review the report you demanded as soon as possible amounts to dereliction of duty.”
‘This is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The sleazy, partisan lawyer commissioned by President Bill Clinton to rewrite the rules for independent investigations whined Thursday about how unfair those rules were after the Mueller Report exonerated President Donald Trump.
“There’s a couple things that we didn’t anticipate, you know, we thought about corrupt attorneys general and nefarious ones, but Barr’s actually more nefarious in some ways than anything we anticipated.”
Katyal, who briefly became the Obama administration’s acting solicitor general after Elena Kagan was nominated to the Supreme Court, said nothing during the interview about Eric Holder, the abjectly crooked DOJ chief he had served under.
Although the post-Starr Report rules that Katyal drafted in 1999 effectively gave more influence to the attorney general over Congress in independent investigations, he claimed the opposite on Thursday.
“The special counsel regulations were written to deal with the central problem that our constitution creates, which is, the president and his attorney general control prosecution entirely,” Katyal said. “So if you have a corrupt attorney general, there isn’t a way to stop him from doing the president’s bidding.”
Attacks on the current attorney general were an oft-repeated talking point in the liberal media following the Mueller Report’s release, despite clear indications that both Barr and Trump took unprecedented measures to provide transparency and access.
While both Clinton and Obama claimed “executive privilege” to block investigations into their dubious conduct, Trump declined to use it and asked for no redactions beyond what were legally mandated.
Prior to Barr’s becoming attorney general for the second time (he also filled the role under President George H. W. Bush), he had penned a legal analysis pointing to constitutional guidelines that prevent a sitting president from indictment.
Katyal and Colbert claimed Thursday that, contrary to being a reflection of fact-based judicial interpretation, this was his “audition” for the Trump AG spot.
“You can read this Mueller Report as, like, a 400-page, epic subtweet of the Barr memo saying the president can’t obstruct justice,” griped Katyal.
Even while saying that the report “parroted” Barr’s views, though, Katyal also claimed that the attorney general had completely misread and misinterpreted the conclusions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
“I kind of feel like with Barr if he tells you, ‘Don’t see this movie,’ you probably should see it because he saw a different movie than the one that actually exists,” he said.
William Barr/IMAGE: YouTube
Katyal desperately clung to footnote 1,091 of the Mueller Report, asserting that Mueller may have been secretly begging Congress to investigate further—and possibly to indict Trump after his presidency had ended.
“I’m feeling pretty good tonight because, basically, I feel that this is the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end,” Katyal said.
Although the rules he wrote were ostensibly intended to diminish the influence of partisan politics on investigations, Katyal said the ball is now in the court of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her legion of left-wing radicals in Congress to keep the witch hunt alive “at least until the president is no longer president.”
Shockingly, Katyal did acknowledge that he had been wrong about one prognostication in the lead-up to the report’s release.
Mueller found that the Trump campaign had resisted overtures from Russia to conduct election interference on its behalf—at least some of which actually stemmed from coordination between the Kremlin and the Clinton campaign through the Fusion GPS firm.
The report’s conclusion proved a far cry what Katyal had suggested the outcome would be in a February hit piece for The New York Times.
Under the false auspices of his legal expertise, he made a wildly off-the-mark prediction that members of the Trump inner-circle, including the president’s own son, would be arrested for collusion.
But rather than recognize that his assumptions were not evidence-based, Katyal used his supposed mea culpa instead to snipe at both Trumps.
“I plead guilty—I got this wrong,” he said. “Basically, there’s two variables here: Who has a greater proclivity to lie, and who has less respect for the rule of law—and between Trump and Trump Jr., Senior trumps Junior.”
Perhaps Katyal should consider including himself in that equation.
The Committee for Justice, a pro-Constitutionalist policy think-tank, said in a statement Thursday that, when put into perspective, the efforts by Russia’s Internet Research Agency to spread misinformation online actually seemed downright paltry.
Mueller’s findings concluded that the IRA had the capacity to reach millions of U.S. social-media users by the end of the presidential campaign.
This “gives the mistaken impression that the Russian operation had a substantial impact on the 2016 election,” said CFJ. “But while the operation is alarming, it was actually quite modest in its scale and sweep.”
The CFJ said it previously noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last August that the Russians reportedly spent a mere $46,000 on Facebook ads during the 2016 race. The official Clinton and Trump campaigns spent $81 million on Facebook ads by comparison.
“For every 25,000 items the typical Facebook user saw in his news feed, only one came from the Russians,” said the op-ed.
Vladimir Putin / IMAGE: Al Jazeera English via Youtube
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai, while testifying at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, said that what committee chair Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, claimed was “a massive disinformation campaign to influence the 2016 election” in fact amounted to a couple thousand dollars.
Meanwhile, it has long been reported that Clinton campaign surrogates Robbie Mook and John Podesta took active measures to concoct the fraudulent Russian narrative as a scapegoat for the campaign’s failures and to deflect against its own scandals.
Clinton’s own Russia collusion included working with sources in the Kremlin to devise the now-debunked Steele Dossier—which in turn was elevated by the Obama administration’s partisan intelligence community, then used to justify spying on the Trump campaign, leaked to the media and promoted by Trump opponents to form the basis of the nearly two-year Mueller investigation.
Attorney General William Barr said last week that he intends to investigate the spying that occurred and the circumstances surrounding the origins of the Russia-collusion probe.
Now facing the likelihood of investigation—possibly criminal—into their own actions, several of the key players in those efforts have pointed to the Russian interference confirmed by the Mueller Report as providing justification and vindication for their misconduct.
In a speech last week to technocrats in Sausalito, Calif., just across the bay from San Francisco, former FBI Director James Comey—who has openly encouraged followers to vote for Democrats—attacked Trump by saying his disregard for Russian interference may cause it to happen again in 2020.
It was only in relation to the hoax against Trump that the Obama-led agencies appeared to make any effort to follow through on concerns about Russia prior to Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
But Comey claimed, contrary to the actual evidence of what Russia did, that the FBI had drastically underestimated the threat on his watch. “I failed to push us to the decision point of how do we want to deploy against this threat effectively,” he said.
As for Barr’s charges of spying, Comey coyly pleaded ignorance: “I have no idea what he’s talking about, so it’s hard for me to comment.”
While assessing the release of the Mueller Report on Thursday, CNN correspondent James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, agreed that the conclusions about Russian interference were “devastating.”
However, Judicial Watch, a nonprofit government-accountability and transparency advocate, recently submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act seeking records that may implicate Clapper and disgraced former CIA Director John Brennan in leaking the phony Russia narrative to left-friendly media outlets.
“Clapper and Brennan were key proponents of the big lie, exposed by the Mueller report, that President Trump colluded with the Russians,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “… FOIA litigation is the best hope for getting full accountability on this attack on our constitutional republic.”
‘I think that will be a big plus sign for President Trump and the integrity of the campaign…’
Ken Starr / IMAGE: Face the Nation via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Unlike President Donald Trump—who never asserted executive privilege even as members of his campaign inner-circle faced jail time—the administration of impeached President Bill Clinton actually took his investigator, Special Counsel Kenneth Starr, to court.
Clinton sued Starr repeatedly in order to block access to witnesses like the shady communications adviser Sidney Blumenthal, as well as to overturn criminal convictions of White House associates, according to a May 1998 article from The Washington Post.
“While Starr has been criticized by the White House for spending four years and more than $30 million on his investigation, yesterday’s ruling underlines how much of his resources have been absorbed fighting various court challenges,” wrote The Post.
Even though Clinton’s effort largely failed in the courtroom, The Post‘s coverage—like much of the media’s coverage at the time—never once raised the specter of a possibility that challenging the special prosecutor would itself warrant accusations of obstruction or arouse suspicion of guilt.
Rather, the coverage characterized Starr’s probe as something like a footrace in which hurdles randomly sprung up—or perhaps as an equal clash of forces in which justice happened casually to fall with the prosecutor appointed to investigate the president.
“The executive privilege dispute has been one of many legal hurdles erected in Starr’s path as he investigates whether Clinton lied under oath about having a sexual relationship with [White House intern Monica] Lewinsky and asked her to do so as well,” The Post wrote.
“But Starr has won a string of victories in recent weeks,” the two-decades-old report continued. “[Chief U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway] Johnson has also sided with Starr by ordering Lewinsky’s first attorney to comply with a subpoena and by rejecting the former White House intern’s claim of a binding immunity agreement with prosecutors.”
The newly released Mueller Report delivered the goods some in the current partisan press had hoped for, recounting moments in which Trump put up a strong resistance to the Russian collusion witch hunt. The President used choice profanities to rail out former Attorney General Jeff Sessions over his recusal, and he also attempted to get White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller due to his conflicts of interest.
However, both might have seemed reasonable measures to the one person who was acutely aware from the start that no Russian collusion had occurred and that deep-state political forces were, in fact, making an active effort to undermine his presidency.
In light of that, the more surprising revelation is the degree to which Trump lent support to the probe, despite his public spectacle of almost daily denunciations.
Starr, whose investigation into Clinton resulted in his impeachment by the House of Representatives for obstruction of justice and perjury, said in a recent Fox News appearance that Trump’s cooperation stood in stark contrast.
“For the White House counsel to spend 30 hours answering questions of Bob Mueller and his staff is extraordinary, talk about unprecedented,” Starr said. “That’s an unprecedented level of cooperation with a special counsel investigation.”
During his Fox News segment, Starr went on to observe that not only did Trump not seek to collude with Russia, but he actively resisted Russian overtures to do so.
“I think that will be a big plus sign for President Trump and the integrity of the campaign,” he said.
Robert Mueller, James Comey and Barack Obama / IMAGE: The Obama White House via Youtube
On the contrary, some have noted that Russians were working, to a degree, with Fusion GPS, the company hired by the Clinton campaign to compile the notorious, since-debunked Steele Dossier.
Both the Attorney General’s Office and the Senate Judiciary Committee have signaled their intention to investigate the circumstances under which FBI spying on the Trump campaign occurred.
The fraudulent and unvetted information in the dossier, likely from sources within the Kremlin itself, was promoted by deep-state partisans to the upper ranks of the intelligence community and then leaked to the media.
As to whether any of the revelations in the Mueller Report deserved additional scrutiny following the nearly two-year probe, Starr said the petty, partisan snipes would only continue to weigh in Trump’s favor after his having endured it all and come through unscathed.
“Here is a key that no one should lose sight of—Bill Clinton committed crimes. Richard Nixon committed crimes,” Starr said.
“Whatever this report shows, the bottom line is no crimes are being charged by those who are charged with making that decision—that’s the Justice Department.”
‘As hard as it was to spend the roughly $350,000 defending ourselves in this case, it was worth every penny…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Project Veritas, the undercover, conservative journalism operation headed by James O’Keefe, announced Wednesday that it won a defamation suit brought against it by the head of the Wichita Teacher’s Union.
Steve Wentz’s suit sought an injunction, claiming the organization had slandered him when it surreptitiously recorded comments he made that were verbally abusive to students.
“As hard as it was to spend the roughly $350,000 defending ourselves in this case, it was worth every penny,” said a statement from the group. “We could have settled this case out of court. But that is not what we do. We fight, we fight for the 1st Amendment and the truth.”
A Florida federal judge ruled that Wentz had failed to establish the statements made by Project Veritas were false.
“Wentz is unable to sufficiently identify a false statement published by defendants that plausibly supports his defamation claims,” ruled Judge G. Kendall Sharp, who noted that Wentz testified to making the statements and was clearly shown making them.
Other accusations from Wentz included the claim that the videos were misleadingly edited and that they violated his privacy by recording him.
Sharp ruled against both, saying that the footage of conversations that took place in a bar and a Panera restaurant were clearly stated and in public locations.
“[I]t is clear that Wentz did not privately communicate … with the reasonable expectations that his statements would not be intercepted,” said Sharp.
It is not the first time Project Veritas has faced down lawsuits or criticism.
O’Keefe previously settled a $100,000 suit brought by the group ACORN after a video depicting him dressed as a pimp portrayed a worker seeming to agree to help him smuggle girls across the southern border.
The video both put O’Keefe’s work on the map and brought down the radical leftist organization.
But according to Politico, the settlement revealed that the ACORN worker had, without O’Keefe’s knowledge, contracted police after their conversation.
‘To continue to use SPLC’s politically-driven labeling will be an endorsement of SPLC’s blatant racism and bigotry…’
SPLC’s ‘Hate Map’/IMAGE: Screenshot via splcenter.org (Fair Use)
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A pair of Christian-based, conservative groups sought to turn the tables on the embattled Southern Poverty Law Center this week with an ad campaign that echoed the many attacks the SPLC has itself launched in the past.
On Wednesday, the FRC and AFA, in collaboration with the #SPLCExposed campaign, ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal to highlight the storied civil-rights group’s sharp left turn toward hypocrisy in the wake of its own intolerable misconduct.
The SPLC’s internal scandal became public after the resignations of co-founder Morris Dees and group President Richard Cohen.
Allegations from staff members suggested that Dees had behaved inappropriately with female staff members and that others had attempted to cover up the behavior.
The complaints also criticized the racist culture at the top of the organization, dominated by white men.
The Wall Street Journal ad included six actual quotes attributed to SPLC staff members about the troublesome charges.
“The bigotry and racial discrimination described by its former employees is evidence of SPLC’s hypocrisy,” the ad said. “The SPLC has become a hate-for-cash machine that has weaponized its hate labeling of groups and individual people.”
It specifically called on six major companies—Spotify, MSNBC, CNN, YouTube, Amazon and PayPal—to stop citing and using the SPLC as an authority on hate and extremism.
“Now that employees of SPLC have pulled back the curtain on the organization’s hypocrisy, what will members of the media and big tech who aligned themselves with SPLC do?” asked FRC President Tony Perkins in a press statement accompanying the ad’s release.
“To continue to use SPLC’s politically-driven labeling will be an endorsement of SPLC’s blatant racism and bigotry,” he said.
Meanwhile, another major media company, Twitter, said it was no longer using the SPLC as one of the resources included on its Trust and Safety Council, according to The Daily Caller.
“It is long overdue that social media companies stop using the hypocritical SPLC as a reliable source to police their content and discriminate against pro-family and conservative nonviolent organizations,” said Mat Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, in response.
Liberty Counsel, another of the groups targeted by the SPLC, dedicated a page on its own website to exposing the SPLC lies. It said Facebook, Google (the parent company of YouTube) and Amazon all continued to rely on the SPLC as an authority with the power to de-platform groups that offended its radical sensibilities.
“The rest of the tech companies should follow Twitter’s lead and divorce from the SPLC,” said Staver. “It appears to have taken a major implosion within the SPLC for others to finally see what organizations like Liberty Counsel have been saying all along.”
Already, several of the groups and individuals targeted by the SPLC have sued and won cases against it—including a multi-million-dollar defamation award to Maajid Nawaz, a Muslim whom the SPLC dubbed anti-Islamic for his stance against jihadist terrorism.
However, with a half-a-billion dollars in assets, some tied in offshore accounts in Caribbean nations, the so-called nonprofit SPLC is not likely to simply dissolve.
After the resignation of Dees, it announced that it was bringing in Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, to help it “restructure.”
Some, including Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., suspect this may entail not only a cultural re-alignment but also a financial one—shifting it from a nonprofit public-interest advocacy group into a full-fledged political-action committee that could use its immense resources in the upcoming 2020 presidential campaign.
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As Michelle Obama drew controversy Tuesday for outrageously comparing the current Trump administration to a “divorced dad,” it is becoming increasingly clear the former first-lady may be gearing up for a run in 2020.
If so, she would pose the most formidable challenge yet to President Donald Trump, while falsely framing herself as a ‘centrist’ option over radical leftist contenders such as current fundraising powerhouse Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.
Despite flying under the radar, courtesy of a complicit media echo-chamber, the Obama camp has quietly focused in recent weeks on building an infrastructure of super-PACs to support it—and possibly laying the campaign scaffolding in more nefarious ways.
National Democratic Redistricting Committee
Former President Barack Obama cleverly converted his own campaign arm, Obama for America, into the nonprofit Organizing for Action during the period of political dormancy.
Originally established to combat gerrymandering, the NDRC now comprises a network of organizations, including its own super-PAC.
Although they cannot technically coordinate with a campaign, there is nothing that bars these independent political-action committees from using Obama surrogates and allies, like Holder, who could spend unlimited funds on the candidates of their choice.
The group’s massive OFA database also could enable unprecedented mobilization—whether involving volunteer get-out-the-vote efforts or the seedier dispatching of activist radicals to deploy intimidation tactics—all under the stewardship of a man whose endorsement of “kicking” his ideological adversaries was among the less provocative statements he has made lately.
Eric Holder & Barack Obama/PHOTO: WhiteHouse.gov
Of course, Michelle Obama deftly repudiated the ex-attorney general for advocating violence while invoking her speech from the 2016 DNC convention, but she can’t control what a super-PAC may do, even if it is linked with her husband’s self-declared “wing-man.”
Likewise, other examples of Michelle Obama’s recent rhetoric, such as her “divorced dad” comments attacking Trump, would seem to play up the narrative that she is less of a dynamic bringer of “hope and change” and more of a moderating, motherly influence who could unite the warring factions in this false dichotomy.
Southern Poverty Law Center
After the recent ouster of its top leaders in a wave of scandal, some may think that the Southern Poverty Law Center is on the ropes.
Perhaps the storied civil-rights-litigators-turned-conservative-attack-dogs, might be gasping their last breath.
If that were the case, though, they certainly would not exit without a swan song befitting their half-a-billion dollars in assets—among them, offshore accounts in at least three Caribbean countries.
Tina Tchen / IMAGE: Bloomberg Markets and Finance via Youtube
As Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., recently observed, the announcement that the SPLC planned to bring in Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, to help it “restructure” amid claims of sexism and racism from its top brass should raise plenty of red flags.
Cotton noted in a recent letter to the IRS, asking it to investigate the SPLC’s book-keeping and its nonprofit designation, that the group’s current status has allowed it to operate a tax-sheltered slush fund to launch defamation attacks on conservative groups.
With super-PAC restructuring similar to what OFA and the NDRC underwent, the SPLC could soon free itself to launch direct political attacks on candidates as well.
“I think it says something about the Southern Poverty Law Center that they recently hired Tina Tchen … to come on and fix their workplace culture,” Cotton said, “or perhaps take advantage of the $500 million they have and form a super-PAC to attack the president and the Republican party next year during the election.”
Jussie Smollett and Chicagoland
Jussie Smollett/IMAGE: ABC News via YouTube
When a former president known for narcissistic grandstanding and inappropriately interjecting commentary into local law-enforcement matters (see: Henry Louis Gates, Trayvon Martin) chooses to remain mum on a major race hoax—one in which the imaginary assailants refer to his adopted hometown as “MAGA country”—the silence should be a deafening alarm.
When the aforementioned Tina Tchen inserts herself into the legal case, calling on Chicago prosecutor Kim Foxx to drop the charges against “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett without so much as a plea deal, conspiracy is obviously afoot.
And when the out-going mayor of said metropolis—who happens to be Obama’s former chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel—and Obama’s chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, come out as two of prosecutor’s sharpest critics, it smacks of a long-con worthy of Obama idol Saul Alinsky himself.
The “Rules for Radicals” author promoted the precept that “if you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
That has been interpreted to mean that if you provoke the other side enough to foment violence then it may be spun to your advantage—particularly when you have former Obama flunkies like deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes, now a CNN correspondent, manipulating the national media narrative.
Test cases—including Ferguson, Baltimore and Charlottesville—all resulted from figures on the Left pushing negatives until they became liabilities for the opposition.
Saul Alinsky
While the country appeared unified in its condemnation of the Smollett hoax, a dedicated faction has maintained Smollett’s innocence—and kept the controversy alive in the headlines.
Dueling protests between police and black activists, led by Jesse Jackson, have already brought the Windy City to the brink of violence.
On “Fox and Friends,” Martin Preib, a vice president with the Chicago lodge of the the Fraternal Order of Police, said the city’s police force was outraged and disgusted by the perversion of justice, which is far from an isolated case in Chi-Town.
“It’s kind of like a wave that keeps building, but this one got so much national attention,” Preib said. “It was nice to see one of the scandals get some attention.”
He said he was encouraged by Trump’s vow to step in.
“I truly hope the federal authorities conduct a thorough investigation and they follow the evidence where it leads,” Preib said. “We’ve noticed a significant change in the Department of Justice from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, and we believe Chicago desperately needs that.”
The stage is now potentially set for a well-timed race-riot, pitting one group of Obama cronies against another, and forcing Trump to take ownership—which in turn will exacerbate the violence being pushed by a coalition of community organizers.
Any guesses as to who might offer to help “heal” the rift?
