…in 1866, the actual author of the post-Civil War Amendment – Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan – explained the real purpose of what become the 14th Amendment.
Unfortunately for liberals, it was only for granting citizenship to recently freed African slaves, not foreigners. In fact, it didn’t even include Native Americans.
Howard wrote “that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”
Sadly, the 14th Amendment is a wildly-abused amendment, as it was also justification in the Roe V. Wade abortion case. Clearly, not enough Americans know what the amendment actually was intended for.
Dennis Prager does a decent job in dissecting Mika Brzezinski’s call for Democrats to stop the madness not created by their own actions/thoughts, but by not giving in to what the President wishes them to do. She herself has been led down the primrose path many a time by following exactly the dictates of Donald Trump. For instance:
You see, this is playing Donald Trump’s game, you see. If you don’t admit Donald Trump is playing you, you then are being fooled by him… er… wait. At any rate, a good commentary by Prager.
Steven Crowder takes Change My Mind to the White House to have real conversations with real people on hot button issues. In this edition, Trump is not a fascist. (See my post on “What Is Fascism” and “Is Fascism Right Or Left?“)
Some older videos by CROWDER:
You’ve heard it a hundred times: “TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER!” But when you look past the click-bait rhetoric and compare actual policies, it’s obvious the Hillary has far more similarities to the Führer…
Howard is one of the most amazing people I have ever met. Among other things, he is a corporate lawyer turned entrepreneur, inventor, and corporate executive.
Howard faced down the government. The jury didn’t think much of the government’s case. It returned with a verdict of acquittal on all charges after a day of deliberations, and that includes the time spent electing a foreman.
Howard’s case is important in its own way. The crimes charged were bogus. The government procured testimony through serious prosecutorial misconduct. The prosecution represented fruit of the poisonous Yates Memo tree. Howard had the resources to fight the government’s case against him and his company, but it exacted an enormous toll. The case cries out for study and reform.
Howard has thus sought to engage prosecutors in discussion of the case in person before professional audiences of lawyers and businessmen for whom it holds immediate relevance. The prosecutors and their superiors in the department have sought to keep Howard from speaking to such audiences. When I wrote the Department of Justice to request its explanation for what it was doing, it declined to comment (a week after I asked the question).
Former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy was more forthcoming. He called out the Department of Justice’s behavior as “a disgrace.”
The Department of Justice declines to answer to Howard or me but it has at long last responded to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Utah Senator Mike Lee. Senators Grassley and Lee sent a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein seeking an update on the Justice Department’s inquiry into professional misconduct committed by prosecutors and higher-ups who brought the charges against Howard and have since sought to prevent him from being heard. I posted the Grassley/Lee letter in “Fear & loathing at the DoJ, cont’d.”
In their letter Senators Grassley and Lee noted that “reports suggest a pattern of threatened and actual retribution against defendants and witnesses borne out of the Department’s disappointment with the outcome of a particular case. This not only casts doubt on the Department’s ability to accept the results of judicial proceedings in a professional manner befitting the nation’s preeminent law enforcement agency, but it significantly undermines our confidence in its commitment to hold government attorneys accountable for questionable actions that may have occurred in the course of this case or other cases.” …..
Hannity led his radio interview of Rep. Jim Jordan with Jay Sekulow (I added the extended video of what was audio). A good interview, Jim is on it and we will within weeks have many more damning texts and understandings of the flimsy evidence of the “dossier” used to get the FISA warrants. See more here:
Nunes: Democrats, Journalists Will Be “Frightened” By Declassified Trump-Russia Documents (DAILY CALLER)
Here is Jason Chaffetz discussing his book regarding the “deep state”
This is all POWERLINE, but soo important for the “Mantra Busting” that …. here ya go:
…This is what is going on: Some “scientists”–read anti-Trump Democratic Party activists–constructed a theoretical baseline of how many deaths would be expected to occur in Puerto Rico during the months after Hurricane Maria. They then compared this baseline to the actual number of deaths, and voila! The actual number was higher than their hypothetical guess by 3,000. So all of those deaths–whether caused by cancer, car accidents, or whatever–are attributed to the hurricane. These activists have not made any attempt to count the actual number of hurricane-related deaths.
No one would use such a foolish methodology except for political reasons. This is more fake news propagated by anti-Trump activists. The fake news media, like CNN, have attacked President Trump for disputing the “scientists” who came up with the 3,000 number. Sadly, some Republicans have joined them, probably because they are ignorant about what is actually going on here.
For what it is worth, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, and Puerto Rico’s death rate declined in 2017, after years of increases:
(click to enlarge)
So, following the logic of the Left and the #NeverTrumpers, MORE hurricanes should hit Puerto Rico. Just sayin’ — I love the holes dug by these early reactors to the MSM. Some article to preserve:
…Excess mortality studies have been used to measure everything from the life expectancy of smokers to “temperature-related stress” in the Netherlands. The problem is that such studies are inherently reliant on conjecture. There can be other problems as well, namely politics, as I learned a decade ago while poking holes in an excess mortality study in Iraq published by the Lancet.
An article in the British medical journal estimated some 650,000 “excess” Iraqi deaths in the 40 months following the U.S. invasion. This figure was seven times higher than the toll based on body counts. It was based on field surveys supposedly done by a former health official in Saddam Hussein’s government and was authored by outspoken critics of the Iraq war — and of George W. Bush. It was also timed to come out just before the 2006 midterm elections.
To some neutral observers, the controversy underscored the importance of actually documenting wartime casualties. I don’t know how much Donald Trump knows about this topic. But he apparently is aware that “excess mortality” is not how U.S. authorities have previously tallied storm deaths. The National Hurricane Center, for example, estimated that 1,833 people died in Hurricane Katrina, most from drowning.
In Puerto Rico, there were myriad problems getting accurate data, the biggest being that electricity was knocked out for so long. This inhibited the reporting ability of island health officials. It also led to deprivations that killed health-impaired residents months after the hurricane season ended. In that environment, excess mortality studies made sense. Inevitably, they would be imprecise, and perhaps just wrong. The first such study, by researchers at Penn State University, estimated the number of deaths at 1,085 – when the government in San Juan was still listing the official toll as 64. Days later, the New York Times, using island death certificates, produced an estimate of 1,052.
Harvard went next. Its study, trumpeted uncritically around the world, had problems. For one thing, its range of 793 to 8,498 excess deaths was unhelpful. So the media settled on the median figure, 4,645, which was little more than a guess. The bigger problem is that the methodology was a mish-mash. Harvard’s researchers compared actual deaths in 2016 to estimates based on interviews – polling surveys – in 2017. “The big thing is the methodology is so completely different, you don’t now what you’re dealing with,” said University of Texas biostatistics professor Donald Berry. “What you end up with is garbage.”
That’s the background when the governor of Puerto Rico tapped George Washington University’s school of public health to do another excess mortality survey. Like all such studies, it’s based on assumptions and guesswork – in this case assumptions complicated by the outward migration of tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans to the mainland after the hurricane. That said, I know of no evidence that would undermine its estimate of 2,975 excess deaths…
The difference between survey results and demonstrable realities was also pointed out by the author of Hillbilly Elegy: “In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.”
Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2018), 23-25 (added references).
As Twitchy reported, the media went wild last week when a report from Harvard University estimated that nearly 5,000 people in Puerto Rico had died from Hurricane Maria.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog, though, took a look at how Harvard, whose researchers admitted they conducted “a quick study on a limited budget,” came up with that number and found that the methodology was ridiculously flawed:
In effect, the researchers took one number — 15 deaths identified from a survey of 3,299 households — and extrapolated that to come up with 4,645 deaths across the island. That number came with a very large caveat, clearly identified in the report, but few news media accounts bothered to explain the nuances….
…It turns out there is no list of names. There is no accounting of what causes of death were attributable to the aftermath of the devastating storm. In fact, having now scanned the George Washington University report at the heart of this all, I have an itching feeling they missed a big statistical point.
The bottom line is that the researchers developed a model and made a projected estimate of the number of deaths to be expected on the island during the six months following the storm, based on previous year’s death numbers. They then factored in the fact that a full 8 percent of the population, 280,000 people roughly, left the island following the storm.
With that population change factored in, the “expected” number of deaths was about 3,000 fewer than the 16,000 deaths which were recorded September through February. Those 3,000 “excess” deaths above the projection are the one’s being attributed to the effects of the storm. I’m rounding because their report admits the projection is not exact. The chart I included above notes the higher death rate per 10,000 people.
There are not 3,000 death certificates noting hurricane-related causes (loss of electricity, stress, poor transportation response) and the authors chide the local medical community for not being sufficiently exact in filling out their death certificates. So they are left with models and projections and estimates, which have translated into MSM-accepted Truth.
Here’s my question, the itch not addressed in the report, that I saw: Who left? Who departed following the storm? Would the elderly, infirm and impoverished have been the ones to decamp to the mainland? Or would they have been the one’s left behind? Doesn’t the shift in the baseline also at least in part explain this? The death rate really only jumped dramatically when you reduce the baseline population…
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on former Secretary John Kerry: “What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented.” He also says: “Secretary Kerry ought not to engage in that kind of behavior.”
POWERLINE: “What Secretary Kerry Has Done Is Unseemly And Unprecedented”
Yesterday morning I revisited former Obama administration Secretary of State John Kerry’s coaching of the powers that be in Iran on the fine art of resistance to the Trump administration. Yesterday afternoon Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was asked at a press conference (transcript here) about Kerry’s freelance diplomacy, as Michael Rubin calls it in this excellent New York Post column. Pompeo responded: “What Secretary Kerry has done is unseemly and unprecedented. This is a former Secretary of State engaged with the world’s largest state sponsor of terror…” Going further, Pompeo condemned Kerry’s conduct as “beyond inappropriate.”
Pompeo spoke firmly but diplomatically, as befits the office he holds, but how sweet the sound of Kerry being called out by a Secretary of State seeking to squeeze the Iranians into civilized norms of behavior….
John Kerry deserves jail for secret Iran diplomacy
Kerry has always been an arrogant and aloof man. During his long career on Capitol Hill, Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle described him as the least-liked senator, an opinion repeatedly affirmed by his own office staff during his long career. He is disdainful of democracy. Simply put, he sees himself as above the law, deserving of privilege and special dispensation not only when he is in government, but also as a private citizen.
Perhaps Kerry believes he is not violating the Logan Act of 1799 which states that: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”
Trump responded Thursday night. Brooke Singman reports at FOX News:
President Trump and John Kerry entered into a war of words on Twitter Friday, with the president suggesting the former secretary of state had “illegal meetings” with the Iranian regime, and Kerry suggesting the commander-in-chief should be more concerned with the Russia investigation.
“John Kerry had illegal meetings with the very hostile Iranian Regime, which can only serve to undercut our great work to the detriment of the American people. He told them to wait out the Trump Administration! Was he registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act? BAD!” Trump tweeted Thursday night.
President Donald Trump said Friday that he’s considering using military resources to finish construction of his long-promised border wall instead of relying on Congress to fund the project through the Homeland Security Department’s budget.
He also wouldn’t eliminate the possibility of a government shutdown if Democrats continue to confound his efforts to appropriate money for the project on the U.S.-Mexico border.
‘We have two options,’ he told DailyMail.com aboard Air Force One as he flew from Billings, Montana to Fargo, North Dakota. ‘We have military, we have homeland security.’
He was asked specifically about using the Army Corps of Engineers as a taxpayer-funded construction crew.
Trump said he would prefer to fund the ambitious construction ‘the old-fashioned way – get it from Congress – but I have other options if I have to.’
Here is an update due to some discussion on my Facebook for the skeptics. This first article excerpt from THE HILL dated December 2011:
The Obama administration won’t be bound by a gun-control ban in the $1 trillion spending bill for 2012, the president said Friday.
The funding provision for the federal Health agency says that “none of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.” The language aims to ban taxpayer dollars from supporting gun-safety research.
“I have advised the Congress that I will not construe these provisions as preventing me from fulfilling my constitutional responsibility to recommend to the Congress’s consideration such measures as I shall judge necessary and expedient,” Obama said in a statement as he signed the bill into law…..
….It’s not an official ‘Federal Budget’. It’s an Omnibus bill…not a Budget…He outsmarted them again…Congress basically screwed themselves by not passing a Budget…
Per the Constitution…the President must adhere to a Budget set forth by Congress and direct the expenditures as provided therein.
This is another one of those big Porkulus Bills, like they gave Obama for 8 years. This is not a Budget..
An Omnibus Spending Bill may have some ‘instructions’ as to how the money will be spent…but Obama ignored them. He spent the money, or didn’t spend it, however, he wanted to. And Congress didn’t do a thing about it! Because they couldn’t..”
As some suspected Trump had an “Ace up his sleeve”. Sunday on Social Media, the President verified that he had indeed kept his promise to stay focused on the “Building the Wall”….
Democrats View of Trump’s Game
Donald’s Real Game
The morning after Trump signed the ominous OMNIBUS bill, a friend and I were very disappointed, to say the least. Below is our conversation… and let me say, I was wrong and not in tune with what this business man was after. And he was after getting his way because he loves America. My buddy is the orange boxes, I am the light colored boxes:
And it is that “what if” at 10:53am that got me thinking that Trump just may have bitch-slapped that evil grin on Schumer’s face off! And speaking for myself as an Evangelical conservatarian, I am reinvigorated — greatly.
How I now see it… The Omnibus Bill is a temporary spending procedure to keep the government funded for a while (I don’t know how long? 6-months? a year?). It was a mess of funding every pet project the Dems wanted to continue to fund, like Planned Parenthoood, NPR, etc. The bill may have even increased spending in some of these areas. But again, this is a t-e-m-p-o-r-a-r-y fix, and can be revisited in the future. It has to be.
A REAL BUDGET passed by the Congress and signed into law has to allocate money specifically to earmarked results — so if monies were said to go to the “a”, they couldn’t then be used for “a(i)”. So the monies allocated to these projects are more “malleable,” so-to-speak. Especially if the executive “declares” something that this office has power over. Congress would have a much rougher go at it, as they would have to collectively agree on what they have authority over, and THAT ain’t happening anytime soon.
So Trump’s Monday Tweet was as follows:
The “M” me thinks (hat-tip to Rush Limbaugh BTW) is the military. What that Tweet shows are the two requirements needed to use the military funds and know-how to build a large portion of the wall. A humanitarian emergency (crime, rape, drugs, etc. — related to the border and at the border) as well as a national security threat (terrorists being able to easily enter through our Southern border).
And walla, the ARMY Core of Engineers can get to work.
And he knew this from the get-go.
So 5-hours before he signed the bill he said he was going to veto it. Naw, that was a head-bob and weave. After he signed it he said never again. That is because he got what he wanted/needed.
The graphic to the right is for me: “Oh ye [me] of little faith.”
I could imagine this happening behind closed doors:
Schumer and Pelosi and others are in a private “backroom” gloating, having martinis and a few smoking cigars. Schumer’s aid walks in unannounced and comes over to Schumer, he bends down and whispers something in his ear. Schumer looking perturbed, being the egotistical ass he is, out loud says they put an iron-clad aspect in the bill to not pour concrete with the 33-million they allocated to “Trump’s wall.” He was shooed from the room.
* laughter from the back of the room is heard* and murmurs of how they will make sure unions get the job… and then the 33-million will only get them a couple miles of fence with all the overtime.
A few minutes later Pelosi’s aid walks in unannounced and rushes over to Pelosi and whispers something in h-e-r ear. She laughs and shoos her out of the room. Schumer asks what that was about. Pelosi said that Trump is planning on using the 33-million to grade the land for the wall to prepare the building he will access from the military budget.
Laughter and small talk turns to heads tilting and serious debate. Aids are told to bring in precedence and a legal team.
What was once a happy and giddy time soon turned into wailing and gnashing of teeth.
My Tweet regarding the 33-million the Dems gave Trump:
Even if the above is not true to the “tee”… it has to be true in some respect. The Democrats got played. And I bet they are pissed! So are the spineless GOPers! (A two-fur one)
Trump strengthened the military greatly, and he can now come at North Korea and Iran with a stronger military and a bigger bargaining chip — and keep China’s ambitions with their Navy to a minimum. And, he gets his wall. AND he routed the Dems. Awesome! I am not worthy:
Michael Medved interviews economist STEPHEN MOORE about the recent agreement between Trump and the current [and incoming] President[s] of Mexico. I did not include the callers, but one guy pointed out that it still has to pass our Congress and Mexico’s. A great interview.
The first hour of Thursdays show where Mark Levin discusses the false media reports that Donald Trump violated campaign finance laws. A good dealing with the topic.
Former CIA chief Hayden warns against impeaching Trump (“One-third of America will believe it was a soft coup’)
….“If President Trump is somehow forced to leave office before the end of his first term […] one-third of America will believe it was a soft coup,” added Mr. Hayden, a career intelligence official who retired in 2009 after leading the CIA under former President Barack Obama and George W. Bush.
An outspoken critic of the president, Mr. Hayden warned against impeachment in light of prosecutors securing convictions this week against Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former personal attorney and election campaign chairman, respectively….
RED STATE does a BANG-UP job in the following list:
…A comparison of the carnage at the very highest levels of the FBI and the DOJ to the complete lack of evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump following over two years of investigations should tell Robert Mueller that it’s time to extricate himself, as gracefully as possible, from this fraud. He needs to admit defeat in his attempt to undo the results of a fair election.
Seamus Bruner of The Epoch Times has just put together a list of 25 DOJ and FBI officials who have resigned in the last year. Some of them, Rachel Brand for example, have left to take positions in the private sector. Mike Kortan has said he was planning to retire anyway. But many on this list have been fired, or forced out (largely in disgrace) or demoted, because of the Trump/Russia investigation.
Joel McElvain, assistant branch director of the civil division (resigned)
*Status Unclear
As I look at this list, I know it includes only a fraction of those who have risked their careers and their reputations because they simply couldn’t bear to see Donald Trump in the White House.
Before this is over, others will be added to the list. Perhaps even Rod Rosenstein. And there will likely be former top-level Obama officials caught in the net as well. Perjurers John Brennan and James Clapper come to mind.
In addition to the men and women who have been working against Trump in the DOJ and the FBI, there were/are employees in the State Department and the CIA, holdovers from the Obama administration, who are complicit.
The mainstream media has played a huge role in perpetuating this hoax. They have breathlessly distorted events to influence public opinion. Instead of reporting the news, they have worked overtime to shape it.
For an example of how the mainstream media has aided and abetted the left’s attempt to impeach Trump, we need to look no further than their outrage over the revocation of John Brennan’s security clearance….
Even contention in the ranks of the upper echelon of SPOOKS is starting to maske it’s way to the public as people “cover their asses”
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Sunday that he thinks former CIA Director John Brennan‘s rhetoric is becoming an issue “in and of itself.”
“John and his rhetoric have become an issue in and of itself,” Clapper said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “John is subtle like a freight train and he’s gonna say what’s on his mind.”
Clapper’s comments came in response to an op-ed penned by Brennan in The New York Times this week, in which he wrote that President Trumpcolluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
Clapper said he empathized with Brennan, but voiced concerns for Brennan’s fiery rhetoric toward Trump and his administration.
“I think that the common denominator among all of us [in the intelligence community] that have been speaking up … is genuine concern about the jeopardy and threats to our institutions,” Clapper said.
Brennan’s claims drew criticism from some in the intelligence community who said the timing was suspect.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) on Thursday took aim at Brennan for “purport[ing] to know, as fact, that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power.”
“If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the special counsel, not The New York Times,” Burr said……..
WOW — how far Podhoretz has fallen. When Mika Brezinski (on the Left) notes John Podhoretz Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)… if she see’s it it MUST be bad!
