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The New American

by Bob Adelmann
11/22/2017

Excerpt:

It took 41,000 bolivars of the Venezuelan currency to purchase a single American dollar on November 1. Three weeks later it took 84,000 bolivars. Back on January 1 Venezuelans could trade just 3,100 bolivars to purchase a dollar. Patrick Gillespie, writing for CNNMoney, did the calculation: Inflation in Venezuela is running at a rate of 4,000 percent a year.

Which explains why Venezuelans are increasingly turning to barter in order to survive. A loaf of bread can be traded for a handful of beans because each has intrinsic value and can’t be degraded through a printing press.

It’s also symptomatic of the end stages of every socialist enterprise which is allowed to run its course. First is the desire on the part of politicians to buy votes and support of the people by promising to give them things they didn’t earn. In Hugo Chávez’s case it was easy: the country’s massive oil reserves were being sold on the world market at great profit to PdVSA, the once privately-held oil company. It was nationalized in 1976 and its workers replaced by Chávez in 2006. Those workers were given a choice: support Chávez or lose their jobs. Chávez’s energy minister was explicit: “PdVSA’s workers are with this revolution, and those who aren’t should go somewhere else. Go to Miami!”

PdVSA became the primary funding source for Chavez’s red revolution: the huge expansion of the welfare state without requiring the people themselves to pay for it.

When oil prices headed south, so did PdVSA’s revenues. Off by 40 percent, Chávez had two choices: cut back on the welfare state, or print the money to continue to pay for it.

When Chávez died of colon cancer in 2013 at age 59, his protégé Nicolas Maduro took over and continued Chavez’s socialist experiment. He borrowed against the country’s oil reserves — some $150 billion against an economy that generated just $250 billion a year — and expanded the money supply to continue to fund it.

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

https://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/south-america/item/27440-tracking-socialist-venezuela-s-death-spiral-4-000-percent-inflation

Warrior for law and order shares the good and bad news from the Trump DOJ at Restoration Weekend.

FrontPage Mag

12/13/2017

Excerpt:

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of remarks given by J. Christian Adams at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2017 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 16th-19th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.

J. Christian Adams: I’m going to talk to you today about what’s going on at the Justice Department, is the topic of my talk, and of course, if you tune into Fox News on any given day, that seems to be the lead story.  So I’m going to talk a little bit about that.  Many of you have been asking me this weekend what’s going on at the Justice Department, and I told you, wait until Sunday and we’ll cover it in great detail. 

When I was at the Justice Department, I learned that the Justice Department has so much power over so many things.  If you’ve been to the pool, you’ve seen the chair that goes in and out of the pool, that’s a Justice Department mandate.  Civil rights, elections, on and on.  It is the fulcrum upon which Obama and Holder initiated a radical transformation of the country.  Everything went through the Justice Department, and that’s why it’s so important.  

When Holder dismissed my New Black Panther case in 2009, a few months after they were sworn in, those of us working at the Department began to see this radical transformation taking place, just starting at the time.  And you didn’t think it was possible, right?  You didn’t think that, okay, the men with billy clubs in front of a poll, and you bring a case and the case is dismissed, but you also didn’t think they would keep going.  And frankly, the New Black Panther case, with the benefit of hindsight, was just the beginning of a radicalized transformation of, frankly, the United States.  

Holder and Obama institutionalized this radicalism at the Justice Department.  They made it not radicalism to the people who work there.  To the people who worked there, my colleagues, this was simply this new, enlightened way of thinking.  It was progressivism meets power, and that’s what you saw over the course of 8 years.  They turned the law into a relativist, racialist, radicalism, and that’s what we saw time after time after time.  Now, I’m here to tell you about what’s happening now.  What has happened the last 10 months since the inauguration, and it’s a mixed bag, and we’ll go over some mixed things that are going on and some bad things that are going on still.  But first the good news.  I put at the top of the list the fact that Eric Holder’s war on cops is over.  It’s done.  Those of you who have read my book, it’s like listening to a Louie Gohmert talk though, which is very hard to follow by the way.  There are so many fanciful, farcical things that are totally true that you can’t believe it’s actually happening, and it gives you an insight into how nuts some of these people were.  For example, when I was at the Justice Department under Obama, they actually hired an organization, Northeastern University, to do police sensitivity training.  Now I’m not done with this.  One of the consultants working for this organization to do police sensitivity training — and by the way, they charged you, the taxpayers, a million dollars to produce these materials.  One of the women who worked for this organization was Angela Davis.  Do you remember this?  And of course Angela Davis is the communist who probably was involved in the murder of a judge in California, but this is the sort of world we lived in under Eric Holder, where federal tax money was moving to an organization, that has as part of its staff Angela Davis, to train police officers.  That’s the world we’ve left under President Obama. 

Another good thing that has happened since the inauguration, “sue and settle” is over.  What do I mean by “sue and settle”?  You guys got to give the progressives credit, they’re geniuses when it comes to leveraging power.  What Obama instituted was a series of lawsuits at DOJ against, for example, financial services companies, for redline mortgaging, or other housing firms for discrimination in mortgage lending.  And they would extract these gigantic settlements out of these corporations, and they would require the corporations to set aside millions of dollars for a slush fund that would then be used by progressive organizations.  Just think about that.  They would leverage federal power to fuel their far-left allies, and that’s what they did for 8 years and Jeff Sessions ended it.  Immediately terminated the program, so “sue and settle” is over, good. 

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

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/268707/j-christian-adams-whats-happening-justice-frontpagemagcom

People with tight connections to Facebook are going public with a critique of the company and social media more broadly. They say Facebook and social media systems undermine democracy and exploit the human psychology to get people addicted to their platforms.

Associated Press

POSTBULLETIN

by Barbara Ortutay, Associated Press
12/12/2017

Excerpt:

NEW YORK — Some of Facebook’s former friends are starting to express some serious doubts about the social network they helped create.

Facebook exploits a “vulnerability in human psychology” to addict its users, Sean Parker, the company’s first president, said in a public forum last month. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook vice president who joined the company in 2007, recently told an audience at Stanford that the company is “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

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View the complete article including image and comments at:

http://www.postbulletin.com/business/some-of-facebook-s-early-friends-now-its-sharpest-critics/article_0461a02c-19c6-5e5f-ba66-82b35ffd9b9f.html

Gateway Pundit

by Joshua Caplan
12/12/2017

Excerpt:

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA) ordered congressional investigators to physically remove all outstanding documents from the Justice Department on Thursday. 

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

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/12/boom-devin-nunes-orders-investigators-physically-remove-outstanding-documents-doj/

Image Source, Regina Cates — http://romancingyoursoul.com/power-tends-to-corrupt-and-absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely/

On the morning of April 27, 2011, Barack Hussein Obama gave a press conference in which he acknowledged the release of his more detailed, or “long-form” birth certificate as opposed to the “Certification of Live Birth” released in 2008 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bnYJI4QTpXs

IS IT ALL BEGINNING TO MAKE SENSE?

The Post & Email

by Sharon Rondeau
12/12/2017

Excerpt:

(Dec. 12, 2017) — Infowars’ Dr. Jerome Corsi reported in an explosive story on Tuesday that Obama birth certificate lead investigator Mike Zullo presented evidence gleaned from a confidential informant that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) participated in the creation of the “long-form” birth certificate image posted at whitehouse.gov on April 27, 2011.

In his article, Corsi explained that the revelation is the “universe-shattering” information Zullo claimed to have in late 2013 after former NSA and CIA contractor Dennis Montgomery approached the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) with information concerning alleged breaches of Arizonans’ bank accounts, specifically in Maricopa County.

On April 27, 2011, an image said to be a scan of a certified copy of Barack Hussein Obama’s long-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health (HDOH) was uploaded to the White House website, after which Obama held a brief press conference and stated that the public was now in possession of “additional information about the site of my birth.”

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

https://www.thepostemail.com/2017/12/12/infowars-cia-involved-creating-fake-obama-birth-certificate/

The Daily Caller

by Chuck Ross
12/8/2017

Excerpt:

CNN misreported key details of an offer made to Donald Trump Jr. last year of a batch of stolen Wikileaks documents.

The story, which CNN published on Friday and covered extensively on TV, was touted as the first evidence that the Trump campaign was given a heads-up about documents stolen from Democrats.

But the story appears to have been riddled with errors, while also lacking key context.

Perhaps the most jarring error in the CNN report is the date on which Trump Jr. was sent the email. The network reported that a person named Mike Erickson emailed Trump Jr. and others on the Trump campaign on Sept. 4, 2016, with a link to Wikileaks documents as well as a decryption key to access them.

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View the complete article including videos, images and links at:

http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/08/cnn-botches-major-bombshell-alleging-contacts-between-don-jr-and-wikileaks/

Zero Hedge

by Tyler Durden
12/6/2017

Excerpt:

In a historic moment, ignored by much of Western media, Russian military officials have announced the complete and utter defeat of ISIS in Syria. The Russian General Staff issued a statement Wednesday declaring that all territories previously under terrorist control were liberated in a final push by the Syrian Army this week, and with the support of Russian forces. 

“All terrorist units of ISIS on Syrian soil have been destroyed, and the territory is liberated,” Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov said in comments translated and published by RT.  “Therefore, as of today, there’s no territory controlled by ISIS in Syria,” he added. The announcement came during an annual briefing for foreign military attaches, and incidentally on the same day President Trump gave an extremely controversial televised address wherein he gave official US recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, thus it could mean that the demise of one problem could give rise to another in an increasingly volatile and explosive Middle East environment. 

The rapid collapse of ISIS – which once controlled an area the size of Britain stretching from the edges of Aleppo to Mosul in Iraq, and down to Ramadi and Fallujah – began in earnest in early September when the Syrian Army breached ISIS lines around Deir Ezzor city, after which the city was fully liberated by early November. As ISIS retreated in the Deir Ezzor countryside, it lost its previous Syrian capital of Raqqa in mid-October to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which also struck a deal to allow the quick exit of ISIS terrorists to other parts of Syria and region, according to a report by the BBC.

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

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-06/russia-announces-complete-destruction-isis-syria

New details about the controversy surrounding Rep. Trent Franks come as sexual harassment allegations have engulfed Capitol Hill. He became the third lawmaker this week alone to announce that he will step down after being accused of sexual misconduct. | John Shinkle/POLITICO

The congressman was seeking a pregnancy surrogate, and aides said he approached them for the assignment.

Politico

by Rachael Bade and Jake Sherman
12/8/2017

Excerpt:

Arizona Rep. Trent Franks allegedly made unwanted advances toward female staffers in his office and retaliated against one who rebuffed him, according to House GOP sources with knowledge of a complaint against him.

The allegations, which reached Speaker Paul Ryan and top GOP leaders in recent days, led to Franks’ sudden resignation this week. Franks originally announced that he would resign on Jan. 31, 2018. But just hours after POLITICO inquired about the allegations, he sped up his resignation and left office Friday.

The sources said Franks approached two female staffers about acting as a potential surrogate for him and his wife, who has struggled with fertility issues for years. But the aides were concerned that Franks was asking to have sexual relations with them. It was not clear to the women whether he was asking about impregnating the women through sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization. Franks opposes abortion rights as well as procedures that discard embryos.

A former staffer also alleged that Franks tried to persuade a female aide that they were in love by having her read an article that described how a person knows they’re in love with someone, the sources said. One woman believed she was the subject of retribution after rebuffing Franks. While she enjoyed access to the congressman before the incident, that access was revoked afterward, she told Republican leaders.

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

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/08/trent-franks-sex-surrogacy-impregnate-287808

Gateway Pundit

by Jim Hoft
12/8/2017

Guest post by Joe Hoft

Excerpt:

While the mainstream media (MSM) focuses on the fake news Trump-Russia collusion farce, the US is engulfed in the most corrupt event in its history and all roads lead back to former President Obama.

As a matter of fact, the fake Trump investigation is a major piece in the attempted coup d’état currently in place and the MSM’s fake news reporting is part of the Coup.

Just this past week former UN Ambassador John Bolten stated that this is the “First Attempted Coup D’état in US History” –

Bolton is right.  This is the biggest challenge to the survival of the country since the Civil War. 

Democrats in the 1860’s would rather break up the Union than accept the election of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln. 

Today’s Democrats would rather remove another Republican President, Donald Trump, from office than accept the results of the 2016 election. 

Democrats in the 1860’s broke up the Union because they didn’t want to give up their power over the executive branch of government and they didn’t want to end slavery, Democrats today are partaking in their Coup D’état because they don’t want to give up their power over the federal government and don’t want to be put in jail for their crimes committed in the years before the election.

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View the complete article including images, videos, links and comments at:

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2017/12/us-is-engulfed-in-the-most-corrupt-event-in-its-history-and-all-roads-lead-back-to-former-president-obama/