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BLOOMBERG, by Patricia Laya — February 21, 2019

Excerpt:

(Bloomberg) — Venezuelan troops have begun disobeying orders from Nicolas Maduro’s top officers and are unlikely to heed calls to crack down on a humanitarian-aid caravan scheduled to enter the country this weekend, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio said.

“Saturday’s a day when we’re going to find a lot about the Maduro regime,” Rubio, who’s been helping set U.S. policy toward Venezuela, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “I have reason to believe that rank-and-file military are not going to violently suppress aid workers.”

Juan Guaido, the National Assembly leader battling Maduro as legitimate head of the country, has been pushing aggressively for soldiers and generals alike to recognize him as president, something the U.S. and more than 30 other countries have done. While only one general and two colonels — among thousands of top officers — have broken ranks in the past weeks, Rubio says Maduro’s grip is loosening.

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The article can be viewed at:

https://news.yahoo.com/maduro-apos-soldiers-begun-disobeying-003938041.html

Stilton’s Place, by Stilton Jarlsberg — February 20, 2019

Excerpt:

So many Democrats are currently throwing their hats into the presidential ring, it’s like watching lemmings cascading from a fiscal cliff.

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View the complete post including images, links and comments at:

http://stiltonsplace.blogspot.com/2019/02/berned-again.html

MEDIA ITE, by Ken Meyer — February 18, 2019

Excerpt:

In a recent interview, CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan critiqued the international “liberal” media while holding up outlets like Breitbart and Fox News as the opposite side of the coin.

Logan spoke to retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland about a variety of topics on Friday for his Mike Drop podcast (h/t Breitbart), and the conversation eventually turned toward her agreement with Ritland that “the media everywhere is mostly liberal, not just the U.S.” As Logan lamented that voter registration among journalists shows that the media is out of balance, she came with a metaphor to explain how she believes the press is tinged by the sameness of opinion.

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Logan continued by saying President Donald Trump‘s press coverage is a case in point of how the media produces a “distortion” by boiling things down so that “there’s no grey. It’s all one way.”

“If it doesn’t match real life,” Logan said, “something’s wrong.”

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View the complete article including video, links and comments at:

https://www.mediaite.com/online/cbss-lara-logan-calls-media-mostly-liberal-in-scorched-earth-interview-im-committing-professional-suicide/

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* Mike Ritland , YouTube, Published on Feb 15, 2019

To say this episode was humbling is a gross understatement. 6 years ago, Lara Logan interviewed me in my living room for a 60 minutes piece. In a twist of amazing fate, and almost 6 years to the day, I had the incredible opportunity to interview her in her living room in similar fashion. Like you’ve never heard or seen her before, she shares her amazing journey and career as a world renowned journalist for some of the biggest news agencies in the world, in some of the most dangerous places on earth. The bravery and courage she shows in this interview sharing details of being in war zones as well as being sexually assaulted in Egypt is impossible to overstate. Sit back and enter the world of one of the most badass women to ever grace the news world for an amazing compilation of stories.

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American Thinker, by Jack Cashill — February 18, 2019

Excerpt:

Good constitutional arguments can be made for and against President Trump’s evocation of emergency powers to address the crisis at our southern border.  But the notion that such a declaration would encourage a future Democratic president to do something similar borders on the comic.  Democrats don’t need encouragement.

Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the faithful cheered every violation.  In early 2014, New Yorker editor and Obama groupie David Remnick wrote about his experience accompanying Obama on a west-coast fundraising tour.

At one stop, when Obama walked out on stage, “It happened again: another heckler broke into Obama’s speech.  A man in the balcony repeatedly shouted out, ‘Executive order!’ demanding that the President bypass Congress with more unilateral actions.

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View the complete article including links and comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/02/for_the_record_obama_made_mincemeat_of_the_constitution.html

American Thinker, by Thomas Lifson — February 15, 2019

Excerpt:

William Barr had no obvious reason to want to become the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — again.  He already has that office on his résumé and no doubt has been making millions every year as a high-powered partner at one of the nation’s highest-powered law firms, Kirkland & Ellis, in the lucrative specialty of advising big corporations on law enforcement and regulatory issues.  So I will assume that public service, particularly a desire to straighten out the “hot mess” (Kimberly Strassel’s apt term) at the Justice Department and its subsidiary, the FBI, is what motivated him.

If he succeeds in getting to the bottom of what looks like the biggest political scandal in the nation’s history, he will enter the history books as a great hero of the Republic, the man who uncovered and prosecuted the villains who sought to overturn a presidential election in what is could be termed a coup, perhaps prosecutable under the sedition statute.

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View the compete article including image and comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/02/congratulations_new_ag_barr__now_get_to_work_investigating_and_prosecuting_the_coup_plotters.html

Patrick J. Buchanan Official Website, by Patrick J. Buchanan — February 15, 2019

Excerpt:

Both of America’s great national parties are coalitions.
But it is the Democratic Party that never ceases to celebrate diversity — racial, religious, ethnic, cultural — as its own and as America’s “greatest strength.”
Understandably so, for the party is home to a multitude of minorities.
It is the domain of the LGBTQ movement. In presidential elections, Democrats win 70 percent of Hispanics, Jews and Asian-Americans, and 90 percent of African-Americans.
Yet, lately, the party seems to be careening into a virtual war of all against all.
Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring of Virginia have both admitted to using blackface.
Northam imitated Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” in a 1984 dance contest. Herring, in 1980 at the University of Virginia, did a blackface impression of rap icon Kurtis Blow, who called it ugly and degrading.
The resignations of both have been demanded by Virginia’s black leadership. Northam and Herring, however, are defying the demands.
Meanwhile, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, only the second black ever to win statewide office, has been charged by two women with rape. And the demands for his resignation are growing louder and most insistent.
Yet if Fairfax is forced out, while the white governor and white attorney general get a pass, black leaders warn, all hell is going to bust loose.
The Democratic Party of Virginia was already convulsed over all the monuments, statues, schools, parks, highways and streets that bear the names of slave owners, Confederate soldiers and 19th- and 20th-century segregationists.
Across the Potomac, Ilhan Omar, the first ever Somali-American to serve in Congress, and a Muslim, ignited a firestorm last week when she gave this as the reason Congress faithfully votes the AIPAC line on Israel: “It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.”
The reference is to $100 bills, on which Ben Franklin’s face appears. The line is a rap lyric from a 1997 song by Puff Daddy.
Omar was saying Congress has been bought.
The House Democratic leadership demanded and got an apology from Omar for her use of an “anti-Semitic trope.”
But Omar now has company in the House. Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib, also a Muslim, shares and airs her views on Israel.
The problem for Democrats?
These provocateurs are magnets for media. They speak for a rising minority in the party that regards Israel as an apartheid state that oppresses Palestinians. And they find an echo among millennials on the party’s socialist left.
As Thursday’s Washington Post headlined, this Omar flap “could forecast a Democratic divide on Israel.”
Indeed, it may have already done so.
When Senate Republicans proposed legislation to allow states to refuse to hire individuals or contractors who support the BDS movement to boycott Israel, Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders all voted no.
The four say they are supporting freedom of speech to condemn Israeli policy. But to others it looks like a progressive Democratic blessing for those urging that Israel be treated the same way Ian Smith’s Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa were treated.
Within the Democratic coalition, Asian-Americans are now in conflict with blacks and Hispanics over admission policies at elite schools and universities.
Asian-Americans are “overrepresented” where students are admitted based on test scores or entrance exams. Black and Hispanic leaders are demanding that student bodies, regardless of test scores, look like the community. And if this requires affirmative action based upon race and ethnicity, so be it.
The LBGTQ community is now in court demanding all the rights and protections of the civil rights laws of the ’60s. This will bring gay groups into constant collisions with religious communities that adhere to traditional moral views on homosexuality.
The minorities of color in the Democratic coalition are growing, as the base of the GOP is aging and shrinking. But these minorities are also becoming more rivalrous, competitive and demanding. And the further they move left, they more they move outside the American mainstream.
The pledge of allegiance this writer recited every day of school, reads: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Today, the antifa left desecrates the flag, as liberals praise NFL players who “take a knee” during the national anthem. Militant migrants march under Mexican flags to protest border security policies. The “republic” has been by “our democracy.”
We are no longer “one nation … indivisible” We have almost ceased talking to one another. As for “under God,” added in 1954, Democrats at their Charlotte Convention sought to have God excised from the party platform.
“Liberty” has been supplanted by diversity, “justice” by equality.
But as Revolutionary France, Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba and Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela proved, regimes that promise utopian and egalitarian societies inevitably reveal themselves to be undertakers of freedom, America’s cause.

View the complete article including image and links at:

https://buchanan.org/blog/will-diversity-be-the-death-of-the-democrats-136436

AMERICAN GREATNESS, by Julie Kelly — February 14, 2019

Excerpts:

As the perpetrators of one of the most shameful scandals in American political history begin slowly to retreat, we are left to ponder one overarching question:

What now?

The tale we’ve been told for more than two years—that Donald Trump’s campaign team, possibly even the candidate himself, colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—has been exposed as a lie. Various investigations into this alleged conspiracy are coming up empty and the accomplices are trying to change the subject. Even more pathetically, some still are clinging to the farce, desperate to salvage whatever still remains of their already sketchy credibility.

To describe it as a witch hunt, the president’s preferred term, is too generous. The American public has witnessed a seditious attempt by powerful interests garrisoned throughout our political complex to overthrow a sitting U.S. president. The orchestrated and failed coup has exceeded the routine combat of our two-party system, where out-of-power partisans disrupt and agitate the other side. No, this has been a full scale insurrection that has violated the boundaries of law, normalcy, and civility in an unprecedented way.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit. …

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The cast of villians in this national nightmare is long. At the highest echelon is the Obama White House; to date, no one knows how involved the former president was in executing this scheme because not one journalist has yet confronted Obama about what he knew or when he knew it. Think about that for a moment. Barack Obama’s Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement and intelligence powers to infiltrate and spy on a rival presidential campaign then leveraged that same authority after the election to raze an incoming administration, yet not one member of the press corps has asked him one question about it.

(bold and font size emphasis added in the paragraph above)

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View the complete article including links at:

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/14/after-the-coup-is-gone/

GATEWAY PUNDIT, by Jim Hoft — February 16, 2019

Excerpt:

President Trump is expected to declare a State of Emergency at the US southern border on Friday.

Declaring the immigration crisis a national emergency is overdue.
Presidents have declared national emergencies for nearly 50 years.

Barack Obama declared 13 national emergencies, 11 of which continue to this day.

The Obama emergencies included the Swine Flu, Flint water crisis and Iran.

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View the complete article including image, video, links and comments at:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/02/obama-declared-national-emergencies-13-times-including-swine-flu-iran-and-flint-water-crisis/

Gateway Pundit, by Jim Hoft — February 14, 2019

Excerpts:

Author and law professor Alan Dershowitz went on with Tucker Carlson on Thursday night following reports on Andrew McCabe’s interview with “60 Minutes.”

CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley teased the interview on Thursday. According to Pelley Andrew McCabe says the FBI and DOJ Democrats discussed wearing wires several times to spy on President Trump. This was AFTER they started spying on the Trump campaign, Transition team and Trump Administration illegally.

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Tucker Carlson:  Now the suspicions of many are confirmed by one of the players in it. The Department of Justice discussed trying to remove the president using the 25th Amendment. What’s your reaction to that?

Alan Dershowitz: Well, if that’s true it is clearly an attempted coup d’etat… Any justice department official who even mentioned the 25th Amendment in the context of President Trump has committed a grievous offense against the Constitution.

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View the complete article including image, video, links and comments at:

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/02/dershowitz-if-mccabes-interview-is-true-it-clearly-shows-an-attempted-coup-detat-of-trump-administration-video/

Column: Where it came from and how to stop it

THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON, by  Matthew Continetti — February 15, 2019

Excerpt:

“The most important political event of the twentieth century,” wrote Irving Kristol in 1976, “is not the crisis of capitalism but the death of socialism.” Plenty of self-described Marxist and socialist regimes existed throughout the world, Kristol recognized. It was rather the ideas behind such regimes that had reached a moral and intellectual endpoint. Nor was this passing away entirely to be cheered. “For with the passing of the socialist ideal,” Kristol went on, “there is removed from the political horizon the one alternative to capitalism that was rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition and in the Western civilization which emerged from that tradition.”

The inheritors of the socialist ideal were totalitarian states on one hand and stagnant social democracies on the other. By the end of the twentieth century, these too had passed. China (and later Vietnam) decided that to get rich is glorious, the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact states collapsed into squabbling nationalities and kleptocracies, the socialist autocracies that had depended on Moscow for support receded into irrelevance. What Kristol called “a dwindling band of socialist fideists” remained behind, the last remnant of a dwindling faith. “People who persist in calling themselves socialist, while decrying the three quarters of the world that has proclaimed itself socialist, and who can find a socialist country nowhere but in their imaginings—such people are anachronisms.”

Not any more. If the death of the socialist idea was the most important political event of the last century, then the rebirth of this ideal must rank high in significance in the current one. ……

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View the complete article including image and links at:

https://freebeacon.com/columns/what-to-do-about-the-rebirth-of-sohttps://freebeacon.com/columns/what-to-do-about-the-rebirth-of-socialism/