The PRAVDA Like Actions of the Unified Press (+Flashbacks)

Trust me, I wish Trump was as clear as Newt, but with Trump we get the whole package, like with our spouse, friends, children, etc (Via RIGHTSCOOP).

I start out the following audio with a reminder of what Obama ACTUALLY DID in regard to the press. Trump has done none of this. But because a bombastic personality has said the press is the enemy of the American people (words), this is wrong when the same press compares Trump to the Third Reich, Hitler, NAZIs, fascists, bigoted, racist, etc., etc., THIS… this is somehow okay. Dumb.

All this does is fortify the idea that the media is far-left in their “news” AND “editorial;” positions. So every paper that puts forward an editorial YOU KNOW is a mouthpiece for the Democrats.

THE FEDERALIST notes the “non-scandal” of Obama’s war with the free-press:

Yet many professionals who supposedly deplore the authoritarian nature of an administration that doesn’t answer CNN’s questions were generally quiet when Obama spied on reporters. The Obama DOJ spied on the Associated Press in an attempt to crack down on internal leaks. The DOJ tapped around 20 different phone lines—including cell phone and home lines—that snared at least 100 staffers who worked for the outlet. The Justice Department spied on Fox News reporter James Rosen in 2010, collecting his telephone records, looking at his personal emails and tracking his movements.

Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt similar Trump efforts would be framed as a “rare peek into a Justice Department leak probe,” as if we were pulling the curtains back on a fashion show. It would be, rightly, depicted as an assault on democracy.

Then again, spying was also never really given the scandal treatment during the Obama years. As Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan became aware of an operation of illegal spying of a legislative branch staffer over torture files and misled the media about it. Did the president know? Shrug. The story hardly made a dent. Likewise, Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, admitted he misled Congress about spying on American citizens. No scandal.

Today both these people are on TV chumming around with serious journalists who allow them to continue to make reckless, unsubstantiated political statements all the time. It isn’t Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press” who asks Clapper tough questions, it’s Meghan McCain on “The View.”

There was unprecedented politicization of the government under Obama — most of it, I imagine, excused for being part of a good cause. The NLRB. The Justice Department. The IRS. The Office of Special Counsel, which reviews whistleblower allegations, foundthat IRS employees urged callers to vote for Obama, wore pro-Obama swag, and campaigned for Democrats in conversations with taxpayers — all of it illegal.

But far more seriously, IRS leadership, specifically Lois Lerner, aggressively targeted conservative groups before elections. The IRS admitted as much in an apology letter. Lerner was held in contempt by Congress for refusing to comply with investigators’  demands. She never answered questions for this genuine attack on democracy…..


FLASHBACK


The above UPDATE is with thanks to GayPatriot and Bruce’s Twitter page. Are people exaggerating the similarities? The only difference is the responsibility level… Nixon showed he was a man. Obama? Not so much.

The above audio is Hugh reading from the following article in the New Yorker Magazine:

The Justice Department and Fox News’s Phone Records

The Obama Justice Department has seized the phone records of numbers that are associated with White House staffers and, apparently, with Fox News reporters, according to a document filed in the case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, on October 13, 2011. Kim is a former State Department contractor accused of violating the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to James Rosen, a Fox News reporter. Ronald C. Machen, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is prosecuting the case, has seized records associated with two phone numbers at the White House, at least five numbers associated with Fox News, and one that has the same area code and exchange as Rosen’s personal-cell-phone number (the last four numbers are redacted).

In all, Machen has seized records associated with over thirty different phone numbers. In the filing that included the new information, the last four digits of each telephone line targeted by the Obama Administration are redacted. Two of the numbers begin with area code 202 and the exchange 456, which, according to current and former Administration officials, are used exclusively by the White House. (The phone number for the White House switchboard is (202) 456-1414.)

At least five other numbers targeted by the government include the area code 202 and the exchange 824. The phone number for the Fox News Washington bureau, which is publicly available, is (202) 824-0001. Rosen’s work phone number at Fox News begins with the same area code and exchange.

William Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney, told The New Yorker this afternoon, “Because that information is sealed, I can’t confirm the owner or subscriber for any of those records.” Asked if the phone numbers of any reporters had been targeted in the Kim investigation, Miller said he could not comment.

Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that, as part of the investigation of the Kim leak, Obama’s Department of Justice seized e-mails from Rosen’s personal Gmail account. In the search warrant for that request, the government described Rosen as “an aider, and abettor, and / or co-conspirator” in violating the Espionage Act, noting that the crime can be punished by ten years in prison. Rosen was not indicted in the case, but the suggestion in a government document that a reporter could be guilty of espionage for engaging in routine reporting is unprecedented and has alarmed many journalists and civil libertarians….

…read more…


Washington Blog does a bang-up job in showing how many liberals are saying that Obama’s “buck stops here” makes his admin waaayy worse than Nixon’s:

In the wake of the twin scandals of the IRS targeting conservative groups and the Department of Justice spying on AP reporters, the comparisons between Obama and Nixon are everywhere.

But what do experts say?

Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale – who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration – said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms. And see this.

Former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald noted last year:

We supposedly learned important lessons from the abuses of power of the Nixon administration, and then of the Bush administration: namely, that we don’t trust government officials to exercise power in the dark, with no judicial oversight, with no obligation to prove their accusations. Yet now we hear exactly this same mentality issuing from Obama, his officials and defenders to justify a  far more extreme power than either Nixon or Bush dreamed of asserting: he’s only killing The Bad Citizens, so there’s no reason to object!

Jonathan Turley – perhaps the top constitutional law expert in the United States (and a liberal) – writes:

The painful fact is that Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be.

Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an “imperial presidency” with unilateral powers and privileges. In 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition. The success of Obama in acquiring the long-denied powers of Nixon is one of his most remarkable, if ignoble, accomplishments. Consider a few examples:

I will bullet point Jonathan Turley’s points that you can read his expanded thoughts on for yourself:

  • Warrantless surveillance
  • Unilateral military action
  • Kill lists
  • Attacking whistle-blowers

…More…

Nixon’s “Enemies List” is famous, and the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program says that Obama also has an enemies list … which has been used to take down a wide variety of people, including the head of the CIA. The Washington Post’s Ed Rogers notes:

Obama doesn’t need a traditional Nixonian enemies list. In the digital age, with the Obama machine’s much-celebrated technological capabilities, the president can sort his enemies by keywords.

You’ve heard about the AP spying scandal, and the head of the Department of Justice implies that the government has spied on many other reporters.

Reporters who criticize those in power are being smeared by the government and targeted for arrest (and see this).

Indeed, the Obama administration is treating real reporters as potential terrorists.

…read more…

Democrats Favor Socialism Over Capitalism… Sorta

Here Dennis Prager discusses a recent poll showing that Democrat are in LOVE with socialism. USA TODAY notes the following about the poll:

According to a Gallup poll published Monday, a majority of Democrats no longer hold a positive view of capitalism, while nearly 60 percent of them feel good about socialism. More than 70 percent of Republicans, on the other hand, see capitalism positively, while only 16 percent of them have a positive view of socialism.

The positive view of socialism among Democrats, and those who lean Democrat, actually dropped a point from 58 percent in 2016. But in those same two years, positive feelings about capitalism plummetted from 56 to 47 percent

At one point Prager notes that socialism hasn’t made one dime in money… which made me think of this quote from an excellent book:

  • A 2009 study by the Swedish Economic Association discovered that the Swedish economy had failed to create any new jobs on net from 1950 to 2005. Thanks to conservative reforms, however, progress was finally being made, and Sweden’s national debt went from 80 percent of GDP in 1992 to 40 percent by 2008.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism (New Jersey, NJ: Regnery, 2016), 79.

Rep. Trey Gowdy Focuses on Bruce Ohr Next (7th Fired?)

CNS NEWS has more on the above:

…Ohr’s wife Nellie worked for Fusion GPS, which hired Christopher Steele to produce the opposition research on Donald Trump. The Clinton Campaign and the Democrat National Committee paid for the Steele dossier through a law firm.

The FBI used Steele as a source for a while. And recently revealed documentsindicate that Bruce Ohr was funneling information from Christopher Steele to the FBI, even after the FBI fired Steele as a source. It appears that Ohr served as a go-between at a time when the FBI had ended its association with Steele.

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) told Fox News Monday night that he used to work at the Justice Department “doing what Bruce Ohr does now.” Both men are or were prosecutors.

“It’s unbelievable that a prosecutor would insert himself into an ongoing investigation for which he had nothing to do,” Gowdy said.

According to Gowdy, “Bruce Ohr worked for the Department of Justice. He had nothing to do with the Russia investigation other than he inserted himself by having contact with Christopher Steele.”

Ohr “even had contact with Chris Steele after the FBI terminated its relationship with Chris Steele.” Gowdy noted that one branch of the Justice Department — the FBI — decided Steele was “not even fit to be an informant,” yet a high-ranking Justice Department official, Bruce Ohr, was continuing to funnel information from Steele to the FBI.

“We’re going to interview him on August 28th,” Gowdy said. “I am going to come back to Washington — I’m going to leave my beloved South Carolina and I’m going to go back, and I’m sure others will, too…we’re going to be back, and we’re going to interview Bruce Ohr — not in a public circus setting, but in a deposition with no time limits and we’re going to get to the bottom of what he did, why he did it, who he did it in concert with, whether he had the permission of the supervisors at the Department of Justice.

“I used to work doing what Bruce Ohr does now. It’s unbelievable that a prosecutor would insert himself into an on-going investigation for which he had nothing to do.”….

Jim Jordan was on Neil Cavuto’s show discussing the recent firing of Peter Strozk:

This is the main point Jim Jordan made, among the others:

Dan Bongino fills in for Mark Levin and discusses John Solomon’s recent article entitled, “Did FBI Get Bamboozled by Multiple Versions of Trump Dossier?“. Devastating information keeps coming out, and the FBI is looking worse-and-worse by the day (well, it’s leadership is):

Economy – Trump’s vs. Obama’s Upward Trajectories

The new economic lie is with the sad growth of GDP during Obama’s tenure AS COMPARED to Trump’s “upward trajectory.” The IBD article Prager is reading from is entitled “Economic Boom: Media Rewrite History To Credit Obama Instead Of Trump“.

IBD:

In fact, The New York Times itself described Obama’s economy this way in August 2016: “For three quarters in a row, the growth rate of the economy has hovered around a mere 1%. In the last quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016, the economy expanded at feeble annual rates of 0.9% and 0.8%, respectively. The initial reading for the second quarter of this year, released on Friday, was a disappointing 1.2%.”

GDP growth decelerated in each of the last three quarters of 2016.

And on January 27, 2017, after the government reported that GDP growth for all 2016 was a mere 1.6% — the weakest in five years — the Times announced that “President Trump’s target for economic growth just got a little more distant.”

That same month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office forecast growth this year would be just 1.9%.

There were other signs of stagnation as well. Stocks had flatlined in 2016, with major indexes down slightly. Real median household income dropped that year, according to Sentier Research.

Growth had been so worrisomely slow throughout Obama’s two terms in office that journalists started warning about “secular stagnation.” They said the country was in a period of long, sustained, slow growth resulting from slow population and productivity growth.

In August 2016, the Times declared that “the underlying reality of low growth will haunt whoever wins the White House.”

Predictions of Slow Growth

The next month, CBS News reported that “with U.S. economic growth stuck in low gear for several years, it’s leading many economists to worry that the country has entered a prolonged period where any expansion will be weaker than it has been in the past.”

In short, there was no upward trajectory to the economy on anyone’s radar when Trump took office…..

Dennis Prager poses a 64,000-dollar question to Andy Puzder, which brings clarity to the differences in the two economies when compared so far. (Puzder is an American attorney, author, and businessman… former chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants, the parent company of Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr…. previously a commercial trial lawyer in private practice from 1978 to 1995 who handled many high-profile cases and was active in the pro-life movement…. Puzder is a frequent commentator on economic and political issues.)

CNN’s Staging “Ex-Trump” Supporters (#FakeNews)

(NEWSBUSTERS) On Tuesday CNN again treated supposed Trump voters as lab rats to analyze their current attitudes towards the President. As Newsbusters’ Brad Wilmouth observed, CNN hinted that “Half of Trump Voters Regret Support for ‘Monster.‘” However, since then it has been revealed that that supposed apple Trump voter calling the President a monster on the “facts first” CNN panel was actually a virulently anti-Trump socialist banana.

Michael Medved Interviews Dinesh D’Souza About His New Film

In this wonderful interview, Dinesh discusses his detractors LACK of knowledge about the content of his film and his positions taken in it. Discussion about the “Southern Strategy,” as well as other historical myths is always an added plus to those that enjoy our political and racial history and the mantras surrounding our past. I include some expanded thoughts by Michael in the opening of the following hour in regard to a caller, I also include a snippet of Larry Elder expanding a bit on Michael’s discussion of interracial marriage from PRAGER U. See my PAGE dealing with much of this HERE (it is big and may take a moment to load).

Don Lemon Proved Trump’s Point

While the entire segment[s] regarding this topic of President Trump calling Don Lemon “stupid” was excellent… Prager’s response to this caller was an excellent way to respond to such attacks. NOT TO mention it backfired on Don Lemon and those who make similar arguments, in one sense, PROVING the Presidents point. Not to mention Lemon reacted to the media bait the “Don” likes to throw in the water like chum for the ravenous sharks.

Here is an excellent dealing with the obvious backfire by the WASHINGTON EXAMINER:

Over the weekend, liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow said there was “definitely” a “racial underpinning” to Trump’s latest insults.

The Washington Post’s Max Boot tweeted Friday, “I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Trump thinks African-Americans are dumb.”

Former CBS newsman Dan Rather called Trump’s remark, which he made on Twitter, a “disgrace” and “racist.”

Trump is, however, well known for taking aim at just about anyone who criticizes him in public, and there’s no evidence he considers race or gender before he fires back. Here are seven examples of when Trump insulted the intelligence of white, conservative men:

….James Comey…. Rick Perry…. Mitt Romney…. Jeb Bush…. George Will…. Glenn Beck….

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Don Lemon’s defense? You are only racist if you call people of color stupid, not when you call white people stupid. (And another thought, would Democrats disagree with Trump’s assessment of these Republicans?)

The WaPo story can be found HERE  (I have noticed if you google this article you often times get the unlock version):