Author: Papa Giorgio

Obama’s School Policies Dire Consequences (Required Reading)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(JUMP to UPDATE)

I just wish to note that this is another prime example of the Left (Democrats) creating a problem through this Obama administration policy, and then when it fails (to the tune of kids killed), guns and the NRA are blamed. The Broward County police had 45-contacts with Cruz (calls or face-to-face — not to mention the FBI dropping the ball multiple times), and yet Dick’s Sporting Goods refuse to carry a sporting rifle and Delta Airlines nixed its discount to NRA members over 13-customers complaining. Here is a novel idea, refuse discounts to anyone involved in this insane Obama Admin policy, or, don’t sell a gun to school administrators who implemented this policy — which is the root of the problem. Or “a symptom” of the larger issue, culture thinking it can guide society without a healthy respect for God:

  • “…we have no government, armed with power, capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

John Adams, first (1789–1797) Vice President of the United States, and the second (1797–1801) President of the United States. Letter to the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, 11 October 1798, in Revolutionary Services and Civil Life of General William Hull (New York, 1848), pp 265-6.

Here is the article JOHN & KEN were reading from via REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS:

Despite committing a string of arrestable offenses on campus before the Florida school shooting, Nikolas Cruz was able to escape the attention of law enforcement, pass a background check and purchase the weapon he used to slaughter three staff members and 14 fellow students because of Obama administration efforts to make school discipline more lenient. 

Documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations and interviews show that his school district in Florida’s Broward County was in the vanguard of a strategy, adopted by more than 50 other major school districts nationwide, allowing thousands of troubled, often violent, students to commit crimes without legal consequence. The aim was to slow the “school-to-prison pipeline.” 

“He had a clean record, so alarm bells didn’t go off when they looked him up in the system,” veteran FBI agent Michael Biasello told RCI. “HE PROBABLY WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN ABLE TO BUY THE MURDER WEAPON IF THE SCHOOL HAD REFERRED HIM TO LAW ENFORCEMENT.”

Disclosures about the strategy add a central new element to the Parkland shooting story: It’s not just one of official failings at many levels and of America’s deep divide over guns, but also one of deliberate federal policy gone awry.

In 2013, the year before Cruz entered high school, the Broward County school system rewrote its discipline policy to make it much more difficult for administrators to suspend or expel problem students, or for campus police to arrest them for misdemeanors– including some of the crimes Cruz allegedly committed in the years and months leading up to the deadly Feb. 14 shooting at his Fort Lauderdale-area school.

The new policy resulted from an Obama administration effort begun in 2011 to keep students in school and improve racial outcomes (timeline here), and came against a backdrop of other efforts to rein in perceived excesses in “zero tolerance” discipline policies, including in Florida. 

Broward school Superintendent Robert W. Runcie – a Chicagoan and Harvard graduate with close ties to President Obama and his Education Department – signed an agreement with the county sheriff and other local jurisdictions to trade cops for counseling. Students charged with various misdemeanors, including assault, would now be disciplined through participation in “healing circles,” obstacle courses and other “self-esteem building” exercises.

Asserting that minority students, in particular, were treated unfairly by traditional approaches to school discipline, Runcie’s goal was to slash arrests and ensure that students, no matter how delinquent, graduated without criminal records.

The achievement gap “becomes intensified in the school-to-prison pipeline, where black males are disproportionately represented,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to continue to arrest our kids,” he added. “Once you have an arrest record, it becomes difficult to get scholarships, get a job, or go into the military.”

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel backed Runcie’s plan to diminish the authority of police in responding to campus crime. A November 2013 video shows him signing the district’s 16-page “collaborative agreement on school discipline,” which lists more than a dozen misdemeanors that can no longer be reported to police, along with five steps police must “exhaust” before even considering placing a student under arrest.

In just a few years, ethnically diverse Broward went from leading the state of Florida in student arrests to boasting one of its lowest school-related incarceration rates. Out-of-school suspensions and expulsions also plummeted. 

[….]

In January 2014, his department issued new discipline guidelines strongly recommending that the nation’s schools use law enforcement measures and out-of-school suspensions as a last resort. Announced jointly by Duncan and then-Attorney General Eric Holder, the new procedures came as more than friendly guidance from Uncle Sam – they also came with threats of federal investigations and defunding for districts that refused to fully comply.

In 2015, the White House spotlighted Runcie’s leading role in the effort during a summit called “Rethink School Discipline.” Broward, the nation’s sixth largest school district, is one of 53 major districts across the country to adopt the federal guidelines, WHICH REMAIN IN EFFECT TODAY DUE TO ADMINISTRATIVE RULES DELAYING A PLAN BY THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO WITHDRAW THEM.

[….]

“Broward County adopted a lenient disciplinary policy similar to those adopted by many other districts under pressure from the Obama administration to reduce racial ‘disparities’ in suspensions and expulsions,” said Peter Kirsanow, a black conservative on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington. “In many of these districts, the drive to ‘get our numbers right’ has produced disastrous results, with startling increases in both the number and severity of disciplinary offenses, including assaults and beatings of teachers and students.”

For example, in St. Paul, Minn., a high school science teacher was “beaten and choked out” by a 16-year-old student, who allegedly came up behind him, called him a “f–king white cracker,” and put him in a stranglehold, before bashing his head into a concrete wall and pavement. The student, Fon’Tae O’Bannon, got 90 days of electronic home monitoring and anger management counseling for the December 2015 attack.

The instructor, John Ekblad, who has experienced short-term memory loss and hearing problems, blames the Obama-era discipline policies for emboldening criminal behavior, adding that school violence “is still rising out of control.”

In Oklahoma City, which softened student punishments in response to a federal race-bias complaint, “students are yelling, cursing, hitting and screaming at teachers, and nothing is being done,” an Oklahoma City public school teacher said. “These students know there is nothing a teacher can do.”

In Buffalo, New York, a teacher who got kicked in the head by a student said: “We have fights here almost every day. The kids walk around and say, ‘We can’t get suspended – we don’t care what you say.’ ”

Kirsanow said that in just the first year after the Obama administration issued its anti-discipline edict, public schools failed to expel more than 30,000 students who physically attacked teachers or staff across the country. Previously, “if you hit a teach, you’re gone,” he said, but that is no longer the case.

No district has taken this new approach further than Broward County. The core of the approach is a program called PROMISE (Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education), which substitutes counseling for criminal detention for students who break the law. According to the district website, the program is “designed to address the unique needs of students who have committed a behavioral infraction that would normally lead to a juvenile delinquency arrest and, therefore, entry into the juvenile justice system.”

The expressed goal of PROMISE is to bring about “reductions in external suspension, expulsions and arrests.” Delinquents who are diverted to the program are essentially absolved of responsibility for their actions.  “This approach focuses on the situation as being the problem rather than the individual being the problem,” the website states.

Additional literature reveals that students referred to PROMISE for in-school misdemeanors – including assault, theft, vandalism, underage drinking and drug use – receive a controversial alternative punishment known as restorative justice.

“Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done,” the district explains. Indeed, it isn’t really punishment at all. It’s more like therapy. Delinquents gather in “healing circles” with counselors, and sometimes even the victims of their crime, and talk about their feelings and “root causes” of their anger. 

Students who participate in the sessions and respond appropriately to difficult situations are rewarded by counselors with prizes called “choice rewards,” which they select in advance. Parents are asked to chip in money to help pay for the rewards.

Listed among the district’s “restorative justice partners” is the Broward Sheriff’s Office. Deputies and local police officers, as well as court officials, routinely attend meetings with PROMISE leaders, where they receive training in such emotional support programs.

The program also includes a separate juvenile “system of care,” rather than the regular court system, where delinquents and parents are counseled about the consequences of getting caught up in the criminal system.

Broward’s launch of the new initiative synced up with a discipline policy shift advocated by the Justice Department. “A routine school disciplinary infraction should land a student in the principal’s office, not in a police precinct,” asserted Holder in January 2014.

At a press conference in 2015, Duncan described his “good friend” Runcie as courageous for implementing a “new system” to “keep kids in classrooms and out of courtrooms.” “It’s difficult work,” the then-education secretary said, “challenging centuries of institutionalized racism and class inequality.”

Duncan noted that Runcie had partnered with a psychology professor, Phillip Atiba Goff, who has been working with both Broward educators and police officers to become more aware of their “implicit biases” toward minority children.

“Implicit bias exists in all of us,” Runcie said in late 2016, “and we have to be courageous enough to confront it if we are going to meet our goals.” District records reveal Runcie has been putting school leaders and school support personnel through intensive training in “implicit bias, black male success strategies [and] Courageous Conservations about Race.”

[….]

A little more than a month before the Feb. 14 shooting, the FBI hotline received a tip about Cruz being a potential school gunman, but it failed to take action. If he had been previously arrested and booked for the on-campus misdemeanors, the FBI intake specialist handling the call would have seen his violent history in the federal National Crime Information Center database, which includes all state arrests, convictions, warrants and alerts.

“Once the agent, or any officer, entered his name in the NCIC system, his history would have been viewed,” Biasello said.

Though he said the call was “specific and urgent” enough to pass the information on to the bureau’s Miami field office, “the message might have been taken more seriously and escalated up the chain of command if the search turned up a police record.”

Another tip from last September, warning the FBI that a “Nikolas Cruz” had boasted on YouTube he was “going to be a professional school shooter,” also fell through the cracks due to a paucity of information in the system. A spokesman for the Miami division explained that “the FBI conducted database reviews [and] checks but was unable to further identify the person who actually made the comment.”

THE BROWARD COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE RECEIVED AT LEAST 45 CALLS RELATED TO CRUZ AND HIS BROTHER DATING BACK TO 2008 – including a February 2016 call from a neighbor warning he made a threat on Instagram to “shoot up” the high school, and another last November advising he was collecting guns and knives and appeared to be “a school shooter in the making.” Though deputies visited Cruz at his home, they did not try to recover his weapons, despite requests from relatives who feared he planned to use them on his classmates.

Their inaction reflects the Broward department’s embrace of the school district’s approach to student crime. Even in response to a major crime scene, Sheriff Israel agreed to defer to school officials when “feasible” and employ “the least punitive means of discipline” against the perpetrators.

The Broward school board also revised agreements between the district and the school resource officers assigned by the sheriff to ensure that they no longer intervene in misdemeanor incidents to cut down on the number of “arrests for school-based behavior.” (The board also signed an agreement with Fort Lauderdale police to reduce officer involvement in such campus offenses.)

At the 2013 signing ceremony on school discipline, Sheriff Israel lauded the new goals. He vowed to “demolish” the pipeline allegedly funneling students to jail by changing the “culture” of school-related law enforcement.

“WE’VE GOT TO DEMOLISH THIS CYCLE FROM THE SCHOOLHOUSE TO THE JAILHOUSE,” HE SAID, ECHOING RUNCIE, WHO STOOD BEHIND HIM. “OUR KIDS NEED TO BE IN SCHOOLS, NOT JAILS.”

ADDED ISRAEL: “AT THE BROWARD SHERIFF’S OFFICE, WE’RE CHANGING. WE’RE CHANGING THE CULTURE, AND WHAT WE’RE DOING IS WE ARE GONNA MAKE OBSOLETE THE TERM ‘ZERO TOLERANCE.’”………………………..

(READ IT ALL!)

UPDATE

Here is an UPDATE relayed to us by BREITBART:

A new investigation reveals that while the Broward County schools superintendent and school board are touting fewer arrests of minority students, the most recent state data actually shows the district has the highest rate of weapons-related incidents in South Florida.

Research conducted by Paul Sperry for RealClearInvestigations (RCI) shows while Broward County Public Schools, under the direction of superintendent Robert Runcie, has embraced Obama-era, social justice school discipline policies aimed at ending the “school-to-prison pipeline” for minority students, data indicate the school district has grown increasingly unsafe over recent years.

The school district has drawn intense scrutiny since accused shooter Nikolas Cruz killed 17 individuals two months ago at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Despite an extensive history of violence and threats, Cruz was never expelled from the district or referred to law enforcement for arrest, factors that prevented a background check from flagging authorities who might have blocked his ability to obtain a firearm for his rampage.

RCI reports Cruz was not the only violent young person who failed to be reformed through “restorative justice” counseling offered through the Obama-era school discipline framework:

Records show such policies have failed to curtail other campus violence and its effects now on the rise in district schools — including fighting, weapons use, bullying and related suicides.

Meanwhile, murders, armed robberies and other violent felonies committed by children outside of schools have hit record levels, and some see a connection with what’s happening on school grounds. Since the relaxing of discipline, Broward youths have not only brazenly punched out their teachers, but terrorized Broward neighborhoods with drive-by shootings, gang rapes, home invasions and carjackings.

“Broward County now has the highest percentage of ‘the most serious, violent [and] chronic’ juvenile offenders in Florida, according to the county’s chief juvenile probation officer,” Sperry writes. “Since 2015, at least three other pupils have brought loaded firearms into schools and threatened to go on shooting sprees.”

Like Runcie, the district’s Chief Public Information Officer Tracy Clark, denies the district has grown unsafe as a result of the social justice disciplinary policies.

“In fact, our district’s overall disciplinary incidents have dropped since we adopted the new policy and wraparound supports to students with behavior issues,” Clark said, according to RCI.

[…..]

The district’s PROMISE program was likely one used as a model program for the Obama administration’s national school discipline initiative mapped out in a 2014 Dear Colleague letter. The directive coerced schools into reducing reports of arrests, expulsions, and suspensions of minority students in order to avoid federal investigations and the withdrawal of federal funding.

Runcie came to Broward County from Chicago where he worked for Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan when Duncan headed up Chicago Public Schools. The first year after Runcie put PROMISE in place in Broward, the school district’s arrest rate dropped 66 percent – since schools were instructed not to refer assaults and other crimes committed by minority students to law enforcement.

However, RCI reports:

Prosecutors and probation officers complain that while overall juvenile arrests are down, serious violent crimes involving school-aged Broward youths – including armed robbery, kidnapping and even murder – have spiked, even as such violent crimes across the state have dropped.

Juvenile arrests for murder and manslaughter increased 150 percent between 2013 and 2016. They increased by another 50 percent in 2017. County juveniles were responsible for a total of 16 murders or manslaughters in the past two years alone, according to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.

RCI adds that thousands of Broward students who were arrested “had their records deleted in the system as part of a program to end ‘disproportionate minority contact’ with law enforcement, blindfolding both street cops and school resource officers to the criminal history of potential juvenile threats.”

“[T]he actual police reports are being destroyed,” Broward juvenile prosecutor Maria Schneider stated at a recent Juvenile Justice Circuit Advisory Board meeting.

Two weeks after Cruz’s rampage, retired Broward School Resource Officer (SRO) Robert Martinez, agreed the school district wanted to keep arrest numbers down and encouraged SROs not to make arrests, reported WSVN.

“He [Martinez] said removing a dangerous teen like Cruz from a school can take up to two years due to all the red tape that was added to the process by Runcie’s new discipline policies and programs,” the news report continued.

“We know that when Cruz committed felonies he wasn’t arrested,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow and education policy expert Max Eden tells Breitbart News. “We hear, from a retired School Resource Officer, that the school board and police department verbally instructed SROs to not arrest for certain felonies in addition to PROMISE misdemeanors. It appears Cruz was shielded from felony arrests by a program designed for re-integrating students post felony-conviction.”

Indeed, while Runcie has asserted his PROMISE program is not connected to the shooting because Cruz did not participate in that program, RCI reveals Cruz was enrolled in the Behavior Intervention Program, an initiative that Eden describes as “PROMISE on steroids for felons.”

As RCI previously reported Broward’s Behavior Intervention Program is intended for “students who exhibit severe, unmanageable behavior that cannot be adequately controlled in a traditional school setting.”

Students referred to the Behavior Intervention Program are those “returning from residential Juvenile Justice Programs,” including students “convicted of a serious crime such as: rape, murder, attempted murder, sexual battery or firearm related,” and those whose behavior off campus would qualify them for expulsion….

Censorship On Largest Scale In Human History

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Don’t forget the IRS scandal or lying to FISA Court judges, or the JournoLIST scandal or the ClimateGate issue [and the MANY others] in order to weaponize the government against conservatives or to push Leftist ideology by way of obfuscation of the truth.)

Bozell says, “This is the emerging of the greatest censorship of free speech worldwide in the history of man. Now, let me explain this, the left is on a jihad against conservative thought. It’s happening in academia, entertainment, business, religion, everywhere.” More from NEWSBUSTERS:

….The Media Research Center has undertaken an extensive study of the problem at major tech companies — Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube — and the results are far more troubling than most conservatives realize. Here are some of the key findings:

  • Twitter Leads in Censorship: Project Veritas recently had caught Twitter staffers admitting on hidden camera that they had been censoring conservatives through a technique known as shadow banning, where users think their content is getting seen widely, but it’s not. The staffers had justified it by claiming the accounts had been automated if they had words such as “America” and “God.” In 2016, Twitter had attempted to manipulate election-related tweets using the hashtags “#PodestaEmails” and “#DNCLeak.” The site also restricts pro-life ads from Live Action and even Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), but allows Planned Parenthood advertisements.
  • Facebook’s Trending Feed Has Been Hiding Conservative Topics: A 2016 Gizmodo story had warned of Facebook’s bias. It had detailed claims by former employees that Facebook’s news curators had been instructed to hide conservative content from the “trending” section, which supposedly only features news users find compelling. Topics that had been blacklisted included Mitt Romney, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and Rand Paul. On the other hand, the term “Black Lives Matter” had also been placed into the trending section even though it was not actually trending. Facebook had also banned at least one far right European organization but had not released information on any specific statements made by the group that warranted the ban.
  • Google Search Aids Democrats: Google and YouTube’s corporate chairman Eric Schmidt had assisted Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The company’s search engine had deployed a similar bias in favor of Democrats. One study had found 2016 campaign searches were biased in favor of Hillary Clinton. Even the liberal website Slate had revealed the search engine’s results had favored both Clinton and Democratic candidates. Google also had fired engineer James Damore for criticizing the company’s “Ideological Echo Chamber.” The company had claimed he had been fired for “advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Damore is suing Google, saying it mistreats whites, males and conservatives.
  • YouTube Is Shutting Down Conservative Videos: Google’s YouTube site had created its own problems with conservative content. YouTube moderators must take their cues from the rest of Google – from shutting down entire conservative channels “by mistake” to removing videos that promote right-wing political views. YouTube’s special Creators for Change section is devoted to people using their “voices for social change” and even highlights the work of a 9/11 truther. The site’s very own YouTube page and Twitter account celebrate progressive attitudes, including uploading videos about “inspiring” gay and trans people and sharing the platform’s support for DACA.
  • Tech Firms Are Relying on Groups That Hate Conservatives: Top tech firms like Google, YouTube and Twitter partner with leftist groups attempting to censor conservatives. These include the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Both groups claim to combat “hate,” but treat standard conservative beliefs in faith and family as examples of that hatred. George Soros-funded ProPublica is using information from both radical leftist organizations to attack conservative groups such as Jihad Watch and ACT for America, bullying PayPal and other services to shut down their funding sources. The SPLC’s “anti-LGBT” list had also been used to prevent organizations from partnering with AmazonSmile to raise funds.
  • Liberal Twitter Advisors Outnumber Conservatives 12-to-1: Twelve of the 25 U.S. members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – which helps guide its policies – are liberal, and only one is conservative. Anti-conservative groups like GLAAD and the ADL are part of the board. There is no well-known conservative group represented.
  • Tech Companies Rely on Anti-Conservative Fact-Checkers: Facebook and Google both had partnered with fact-checking organizations in order to combat “fake news.” Facebook’s short-lived disputed flagger program had allowed Snopes, PolitiFact and ABC News to discern what is and is not real news. Google’s fact-checkers had accused conservative sources of making claims that did not appear in their articles and disproportionately “fact-checked” conservative sources. On Facebook, a satire site, the Babylon Bee, had been flagged by Snopes for its article clearly mocking CNN for its bias. YouTube also had announced a partnership with Wikipedia in order to debunk videos deemed to be conspiracy theories, even though Wikipedia has been criticized for its liberal bias.

(Full Special Report can be found here.)

Cops Are the Good Guys

Published by Papa Giorgio

Are cops perfect? Of course not. And no one should expect them to be. But every single day, under the most difficult conditions, the police protect us from the bad guys. In other words, they do their job and they do it well. Former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke makes it very clear: cops are not the problem.

FBI Special Agent James Gagliano Calls Comey a “Feckless Leader”

Published by Papa Giorgio

  • “But what’s worse, Trump world’s behavior or someone writing about trying to sound the alarm about it,” Stelter whined. “This is nothing to do with that,” [FBI Special Agent James] Gagliano exclaimed. “He held the moral ground, Brian, until he leaking to The New York Times. And then folks like me that defended him last May, you lost our respect.” (link below)

And amid his lionization of Comey during Sunday night’s CNN Newsroom, CNN law enforcement analyst and former FBI Special Agent James Gagliano embarrassed Stelter by calling out Comey for being a “feckless leader.”

[….]

“The issue I take with him, and many former agents and those on board, current on boards take this issue, James Comey is still an FBI employee,” Gagliano said, explaining why what Comey was doing was against DOJ policy. “He’s discussing matters that are relevant and salient to an open or ongoing investigation or case. I.e., the Russia probe. I.e. the Inspector General’s probe. I.e., a number of different congressional probes still going on right now.”

Gagliano noted that what Comey was doing (and what the media had been praising) in term of chiding and sliming the President both in the book and social media was exactly what they hated about Trump (NEWSBUSTERS)

“Beneath the Dignity of the Office He Held” -Gowdy On Comey-

Published by Papa Giorgio

On ‘Fox & Friends,’ Republican congressman from South Carolina slams the former FBI director’s new tell-all as a ‘tabloid book.’ Ainsley Earhardt, Steve Doocy, Brian Kilmeade.

The New York Times Best Seller List IS #FakeNews

Published by Papa Giorgio

The New York Times best seller list really isn’t that. What it is is merely an editorial “what you should read, not what actually sells the best.”

The NYT’s even had the audacity (or the lack of self awareness in their egalitarianism aims) to publish a graph of the male and female authors by decade. It showed a clear male dominance over the women. However, as the decades progressed, the sexes got closer to being even, until, the final decade in the graph, they were very similar in books on the New York Times best seller listing.

But this graph, then, is merely an illusion. Since they control the list and who makes it on the list — they can control whichever factors they wish to. Like gender for instance. So they can even out the sexes on the list to give the appearance that male and female authors are writing and selling great books, equally. It does not reflect reality. Nor does this “evening-out process” have anything to say about how well something is written. It merely projects what the few editors think is important to the New York Times.

The majority of authors are — I presume — white. So soon a similar graph will surely show an evening out of minority vs. Caucasian authors.

Facebook “Convo”

I posted a link to this article discussing Trump’s foreign policy advancements as compared to Obama’s in regard to “Nobel Peace Prizes.” Here is part of the article:

North and South Korea are discussing plans to make a stunning announcement at their leaders summit next week: a permanent end to the 68-year state of war between the two, according to reports.

North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in may release a joint statement saying they will seek to end military conflict, an unidentified Seoul official told the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper, Bloomberg reported.

The two men are scheduled to meet April 27 in the border village of Panmunjon — the third-ever summit of leaders from the two Koreas.

Pyongyang and Seoul have technically been at war since the 1950-1953 Korean conflict ended with a truce. Despite occasional flare-ups between the two nations in the years since the armistice, the two Koreas have managed to avoid an all-out war.

A successful summit could pave the way for a historic meeting between Kim and President Trump — the first between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader….

Later we find out that Pompeo met with the North over Easter weekend. A person simply said “Wow…..” MIND YOU, I am reading a lot into his “Wow,” but here is my response to the larger issue:

You do realize people like myself do not really want Trump to get the Nobel Prize in Peace, but what is being intimated by the article (OP) is that Obama got his just eight and a half months in the White House.

The prize was nothing more, then, than Leftist panels awarding a Leftist person they idealized with a hopeful fiction.

(In fact, all of Leftism is an idealization of a Utopian dream. A “Super Man” in the “Nietzsch’ian sense”… genderless, able to offend no one, always concerned for the welfare of others in the market place, etc. REALLY THEN, a pipe-dream but one enforced by legislative acts. Dangerous in other words.)

It is similar, then, to the NYTs posting this graphic as if it means something (https://tinyurl.com/y9jck4x3). Since the NYT Best Seller list are really editorial choices and not based on the reality of “which books actually sell the best,” their being proud of an evening-out of male-to-female authors is meaningless. (Unless you live in a bubble: SNL – https://youtu.be/vKOb-kmOgpI)

It is a form of self-gratification, or as David French calls them, the “New Holy Rollers.” That is, “social justice warriors.” The NYT sees themselves as such in creating a fictitious reality in order to fool people with what is really an illusion that says nothing of literary excellence.

You see, when you believe you are morally superior, when you have dehumanized those you disagree with, you can justify almost anything.

Like giving a Nobel Peace Prize to a person who will hold to an illusory ideal created whole cloth from nothing.

So, if that is the standard…

…then…

…the Trump administration has already surpassed it. As we found out with the meeting over the Easter weekend. Ultimately nothing may come of it, but it is more “hope and change” to the real world than what Obama had “accomplished.”

THAT is the point.

Democrat Senator Corey Booker Exemplifies Totalitarianism

Published by Papa Giorgio

In the grilling of Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, Corey Booker displays classic “thought control.” Dennis Prager rightly warns his listeners not just of Corey (although he does this), but of the tendency of all Leftism to degenerate into this form of fascism.

Facebook Was FOR Data Mining BEFORE They Were Against It

Published by Papa Giorgio

Just so we are clear on the numbers (GP):

  • Facebook announced in early April that the data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with a political consulting firm connected to President Trump during the 2016 election.
  • But in 2012 the Obama campaign harvested data from 190 million Facebook users.

The media cheered in 2012 the sheer brilliance of the Obama campaign. Data used for similar GOP “mining”? Not so much.

TIME (11/20/2012):

…But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. For supporters, the app appeared to be just another way to digitally connect to the campaign. But to the Windy City number crunchers, it was a game changer. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. “People don’t trust campaigns. They don’t even trust media organizations,” says Goff. “Who do they trust? Their friends.”…

Another interesting article that links to Obama’s campaign managers Twitter is this one at THE DAILY MAIL:

‘They were on our side’: Obama campaign director reveals Facebook ALLOWED them to mine American users’ profiles in 2012 because they were supportive of the Democrats

  • Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America, claimed Obama campaign mined millions of people’s information from Facebook
  • She said that Facebook was surprised at the ease with which they were able to ‘suck out the whole social graph’
  • But the firm never tried to stop them when they realized what was doing, and even told them they’d made a special exception for them
  • They ‘were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,’ she tweeted
  • Davidsen said that she felt the project was ‘creepy’ – ‘even though we played by the rules, and didn’t do anything I felt was ugly, with the data’
  • Davidsen posted this in the wake of the uproar over Cambridge Analytica, and their mining of information for the Trump campaign

[….]

Carol Davidsen, who worked as the media director at Obama for America and has spoken about this in the past, explained on Twitter that she and her team were able to ingest massive amounts of information from the social network after getting permission from Facebook users to access their list of friends.

‘Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,’ wrote Davidsen.

She wrote that, not only did Facebook not try to stop them, but the company said they’d made a special exception for them. 

‘They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side,’ she tweeted.

Davidsen was then careful to note: ‘I am also 100% positive that Facebook activity recruits and staffs people that are on the other side.’ ….

Also, remember this?

BEFORE IT’S NEWS has the transcript:

“The President has put in place an organization with the kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life,” Representative Maxine Waters told Roland Martin on Monday.

“That’s going to be very, very powerful,” Waters said. “That database will have information about everything on every individual on ways that it’s never been done before and whoever runs for President on the Democratic ticket has to deal with that. They’re going to go down with that database and the concerns of those people because they can’t get around it. And he’s [President Obama] been very smart. It’s very powerful what he’s leaving in place.”

The Yellow Cake Uranium Mantra (YUGE UPDATE!)

Published by Papa Giorgio

a YUGE update

HOT AIR catalogs Judith Miller’s comments:

Former NY Times reporter Judith Miller’s testimony played a significant role in the case of Scooter Libby both when she originally made it and later when she recanted it. Now that Libby has officially been pardoned, Miller talked to Fox News to explain why she believes this was the right decision.

“I think it’s long overdue,” Miller said. She continued, “Ever since I got out of jail and began trying to look into the details of the Scooter Libby case…I became persuaded that my testimony had been in error and that he, in fact, had done nothing wrong.

“I decided to go back and correct the record in my own book, which I did, and when Scooter Libby was given his law license back a year and a half ago, the judge specifically cited my testimony, the recantation of my testimony, as one of the factors in his decision.”

All of this stems from a note Miller wrote about a conversation with Scooter Libby. She wrote “(wife works in bureau?)” in reference to Joe Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame. That was taken as proof that Libby must of have raised Plame’s work at the CIA. But as Peter Berkowitz explained in a piece for the Wall Street Journal back in 2015, Miller later decided her note probably hadn’t been a reference to Plame’s work at the CIA at all, but was more likely a question about her cover working at the State Department:

Ms. Miller’s new memoir recounts that after her conditions had been met and Mr. Fitzgerald asked the court to release her from jail in September 2005, she was summoned to testify before the grand jury. While Mr. Fitzgerald prepared her, she recalls, his pointed queries led her to believe that a four-word question regarding Joseph Wilson surrounded by parentheses in her notebook—“(wife works in Bureau?)”—proved that Mr. Libby had told her about Ms. Plame’s CIA employment in a June 23, 2003, conversation (well before Mr. Libby’s phone conversation with Russert). She so testified at trial in 2007.

Three years later, Ms. Miller writes, she was reading Ms. Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” and was astonished to learn that while on overseas assignment for the CIA Ms. Plame “had worked at the State Department as cover.” This threw “a new light” on the June 2003 notebook jotting, Ms. Miller says, since the State Department has “bureaus,” while the CIA is organized into “divisions.”…

Mr. Fitzgerald, who had the classified file of Ms. Plame’s service, withheld her State Department cover from Ms. Miller—and from Mr. Libby’s lawyers, who had requested Ms. Plame’s employment history. Despite his constitutional and ethical obligation to provide exculpatory evidence, Mr. Fitzgerald encouraged Ms. Miller to misinterpret her ambiguous notes as showing that Mr. Libby brought up Ms. Plame…

If Ms. Miller had testified accurately, she would have dealt a severe blow to Mr. Fitzgerald’s central contention that Mr. Libby was lying when he said he was surprised to hear Russert mention Ms. Plame.

Fitzgerald knew all along that someone else, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, had leaked Plame’s name. Armitage was never charged with anything and an investigation found the leak did no harm to national security. Libby’s conviction hinged largely on Miller’s testimony which should have made her recantation significant….

MORE AT LEGAL INSURRECTION!

And… BTW – Governor Huckabee agrees with me the “Dubya” had no balls!

OLDER POST BELOW

Did Cheney Lie? Did Libby Lie? No, Wilson Did!

This post is an import of an older post of mine dated July of 2007 (posted here April of 2015). It will be connected with my WMD page. I may update it a bit, as I go along.

Some seem to forget, conveniently, that the only person that lied in the Wilson case was, well, Wilson. Libby “lied” about when he found out Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA. She wasn’t “covert,” nor did he leak the name to the press. Libby simply forgot when he first found out about her CIA job and testimony showed that he talked about that fact before he said he talked about that fact. That’s the facts.

Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame’s name. In fact, he learned early on that Mr. Novak’s primary source was former deputy secretary of state Richard L. Armitage, an unlikely tool of the White House. The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame’s identity — and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert….

Washington Post, Wednesday, March 7, 2007; Page A16

A great summation of the above article is found at Yahoo Answers:

A bipartisan investigation by the Senate intelligence committee subsequently established that all of these claims were false — and that Mr. Wilson was recommended for the Niger trip by Ms. Plame, his wife. When this fact, along with Ms. Plame’s name, was disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak, Mr. Wilson advanced yet another sensational charge: that his wife was a covert CIA operative and that senior White House officials had orchestrated the leak of her name to destroy her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson.

The partisan furor over this allegation led to the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Yet after two years of investigation, Mr. Fitzgerald charged no one with a crime for leaking Ms. Plame’s name.

Update: “The trial has provided convincing evidence that there was no conspiracy to punish Mr. Wilson by leaking Ms. Plame’s identity — and no evidence that she was, in fact, covert.” -Washington Post
Update 2: I cited an editorial from a liberal newspaper. Read the entire bipartisan senate intelligence report (if you can handle reading many pages detailing how the Wilson’s lied).
Update 3: I cited an editorial from a liberal newspaper. Read the entire bipartisan senate intelligence report (if you can handle reading many pages detailing how the Wilson’s lied).

I could defend Libby further here, but I have already done that. This is not the purview of this post. This post is to clearly show that Joe Wilson lied. I do need to — however — settle one other area here before we go any further, that is the “Yellowcake” ruse the Left often use.

You may want to watch an NPR liberal, a NYT’s lefty, one neo-con, and one Reaganite go at it on this very topic (video to the right).

FactCheck.org says this:

  • Both the Butler report and the Senate Intelligence Committee report make clear that Bush’s 16 words weren’t based on the fake documents. The British didn’t even see them until after issuing the reports — based on other sources — that Bush quoted in his 16 words.

Bush’s “sixteen word” statement in his State of the Union speech has been shown to be correct. People keep speaking about forged documents, however no one in the Bush administration or in print uses these forged documents as their source to say Iraq was looking to purchase yellowcake uranium. Sheeeesh! The British have consistently stood by that conclusion. In September 2003, an independent British parliamentary committee looked into the matter and determined that the claim made by British intelligence was “reasonable” (the media forgot to cover that one too). Indeed, Britain’s spies stand by their claim to this day. Interestingly, French intelligence also reported an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium from Niger.

Yes, there were fake documents relating to Niger-Iraq sales. But no, those forgeries were not the evidence that convinced British intelligence that Saddam may have been shopping for “yellowcake” uranium. But that’s not all. The Butler report, yet another British government inquiry, also concluded that British intelligence was correct to say that Saddam sought uranium from Niger. The Financial Times has reported that illicit sales of uranium from Niger were indeed being negotiated with Iraq, as well as with four other states.

According to the FT: “European intelligence officers have now revealed that three years before the fake documents became public, human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries picked up repeated discussion of an illicit trade in uranium from Niger. One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq.”

There’s still more: As Susan Schmidt reported in the Washington Post: “Contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence.” She goes on to report that the bi-partisan Senate Intelligence “panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.”

Score ONE for radioactive material, ZERO for the Liberal bloggers out there who cannot see past there MoveOn.org/Keith Olbermann/Nancy Pelosi brown stained noses.

Okay, on we trudge.

…After a whirl of TV and radio appearances during which he received high-fives and hearty hugs from producers and hosts (I was in some green rooms with him so this is eyewitness reporting), and a wet-kiss profile in Vanity Fair, he gave birth to a quickie book sporting his dapper self on the cover, and verbosely entitled The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity: A Diplomat’s Memoir.

The book jacket talks of his “fearless insight” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) and “disarming candor” (which does not extend to telling readers for whom he has been working since retiring early from the Foreign Service).

The biographical blurb describes him as a “political centrist” who received a prize for “Truth-Telling,” though a careful reader might notice that the award came in part from a group associated with The Nation magazine — which only Michael Moore would consider a centrist publication….

(National Review, preserved at Foundation for Defense of Democracies)

Unfortunately for Wilson, the bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report concluded that it is he who was telling lies. (See the Wall Street Journal)

Wilson claimed quite clearly in the press and in his book that his wife, CIA employee Valerie Plame, was not the one who came up with the brilliant idea that the agency send him to Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had been attempting to acquire uranium.

“Valerie had nothing to do with the matter,” Wilson says in his book. “She definitely had not proposed that I make the trip.” In fact, the Senate panel found, she was the one who got him that assignment. The panel even found a memo by her.

Here is part of the Washington Post’s article:

…Wilson’s assertions — both about what he found in Niger and what the Bush administration did with the information — were undermined yesterday in a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report.

The panel found that Wilson’s report, rather than debunking intelligence about purported uranium sales to Iraq, as he has said, bolstered the case for most intelligence analysts. And contrary to Wilson’s assertions and even the government’s previous statements, the CIA did not tell the White House it had qualms about the reliability of the Africa intelligence that made its way into 16 fateful words in President Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union address…

[….]

…The report also said Wilson provided misleading information to The Washington Post last June. He said then that he concluded the Niger intelligence was based on documents that had clearly been forged because “the dates were wrong and the names were wrong.”

“Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the ‘dates were wrong and the names were wrong’ when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the reports,” the Senate panel said. Wilson told the panel he may have been confused and may have “misspoken” to reporters. The documents — purported sales agreements between Niger and Iraq — were not in U.S. hands until eight months after Wilson made his trip to Niger.

Wilson said that a former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, was unaware of any sales contract with Iraq, but said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss “expanding commercial relations” between Niger and Iraq — which Mayaki interpreted to mean they wanted to discuss yellowcake sales. A report CIA officials drafted after debriefing Wilson said that “although the meeting took place, Mayaki let the matter drop due to UN sanctions on Iraq.”

According to the former Niger mining minister, Wilson told his CIA contacts, Iraq tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998.

Still, it was the CIA that bore the brunt of the criticism of the Niger intelligence. The panel found that the CIA has not fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium in Niger to this day, citing reports from a foreign service and the U.S. Navy about uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin.

The agency did not examine forged documents that have been widely cited as a reason to dismiss the purported effort by Iraq until months after it obtained them. The panel said it still has “not published an assessment to clarify or correct its position on whether or not Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa.”

So does Wilson lose his “truth telling” awards? No.

Again…

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.

FactCheck.org had this to say about Wilson’s report:

The Intelligence Committee report said that “for most analysts” Wilson’s trip to Niger “lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal.”

What you have – in fact – is a Looney Left who affords murderers and terrorists the benefit of the doubt over a President they cannot stand. They choose Saddam over Bush, they support Afghanistan over America (yes, Democrats are starting to say “get us out of Afghanistan” as well). It was the same during the Reagan years as well. Reagan and the U.S. were the bad guys for putting ICBM’s along the borders of Western/Eastern Europe. The horrible things that were said about Reagan and the United States by Democrats and the left leaning media are well documented. The same would be true but for the increased platitudes.

Alan Dershowitz and Joe DiGenova Discuss Mueller Investigation

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Via the LAST REFUGE) Alan Dershowitz and Joe diGenova appeared tonight on Sean Hannity to discuss the ramifications to the political FBI raid on Michael Cohen’s office and residence along with the ongoing Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation. Additionally, they discussed fired FBI Director James Comey and current Asst. Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

LEGAL INSURRECTION uses the NYT commentary to note what is being given up:

There isn’t much of a pretense anymore that the Mueller investigation is about alleged Russian campaign collusion.

Maybe it started out about collusion, but it veered off course within a couple of months, when Mueller decided that Paul Manafort needed to be investigated for conduct many years ago having nothing to do with the campaign, or even Russia. Rod Rosenstein created the paperwork in early August 2017 to retroactively expand Mueller’s investigation and justify Mueller conduct that already had taken place.

The raid on Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen’s law office by the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, was at the referral of Mueller, and signed off by Rosenstein. That raid was a frontal assault on Trump’s business and personal history.

If reporting is accurate, the records seized concerned not just payments to Stormy Daniels, but also the Access Hollywood tape revealed during the campaign. It’s fair to assume that a wide range of records going beyond those salacious topics were grabbed by the FBI, including Trump’s other personal and business dealings over a long period of time.

The seizure of Cohen’s records surely goes more directly to taking down Trump for conduct unrelated to the campaign much less Russian collusion.

The NY Times Editorial Board is honest about the goal, The Law Is Coming, Mr. Trump:

Mr. Trump has spent his career in the company of developers and celebrities, and also of grifters, cons, sharks, goons and crooks. He cuts corners, he lies, he cheats, he brags about it, and for the most part, he’s gotten away with it, protected by threats of litigation, hush money and his own bravado. Those methods may be proving to have their limits when they are applied from the Oval Office. Though Republican leaders in Congress still keep a cowardly silence, Mr. Trump now has real reason to be afraid. A raid on a lawyer’s office doesn’t happen every day; it means that multiple government officials, and a federal judge, had reason to believe they’d find evidence of a crime there and that they didn’t trust the lawyer not to destroy that evidence….

Mr. Trump also railed against the authorities who, he said, “broke into” Mr. Cohen’s office. “Attorney-client privilege is dead!” the president tweeted early Tuesday morning, during what was presumably his executive time. He was wrong. The privilege is one of the most sacrosanct in the American legal system, but it does not protect communications in furtherance of a crime. Anyway, one might ask, if this is all a big witch hunt and Mr. Trump has nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why does he care about the privilege in the first place?

That last highlighted sentence is very instructive. Would the NY Times Editorial Board be willing to give up its attorney-client privilege in litigation against the NY Times? If the NY Times has  nothing illegal or untoward to hide, why would it care about the privilege in the first place?……..

Steven Crowder Interviews Thomas Sowell

Published by Papa Giorgio

(Should start at the interview if “play” is pressed.) Talking all things media malpractice on the YouTube headquarters shooter, Detroit zoo poo, Japanese pregnancy forgiveness, and more. Dr Thomas Sowell stops in to talk economics and Owen Benjamin swings by to discuss his new YouTube strike and Twitter ban!