On Saturday, billionaire financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for the alleged sex trafficking of dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005. In a criminal indictment unsealed Monday, federal prosecutors claimed that Epstein lured underage girls, some as young as 14, to his luxurious homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach under the guise of paying them cash for massages. He then molested them and encouraged them to recruit other young girls to return with them. The victims who returned with new victims were paid a finder’s fee.
“In this way, Epstein created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit, often on a daily basis,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.
Snip.
According to the Daily Beast and Miami Herald, the Southern District of New York’s public-corruption unit, with an assist from the office’s sex-trafficking unit, has been investigating Epstein for months and conducting interviews with his victims. Arrested Saturday, Epstein now faces one count of sex trafficking and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. The case is focused on victims he lured to his homes in both New York and Florida.
Epstein infamously avoided federal charges — and the potential lifetime sentence that could have come with them — a decade ago after he was accused of molesting dozens of underage girls at his mansion in Palm Beach, Florida. He was instead allowed to plead guilty to two counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor. Epstein was forced to register as a sex offender and sentenced to 18 months in prison, but he only served 13 months in all — and got to spend 12 hours a day at an office, six days a week, as part of his work-release privileges. In return, Epstein’s secret plea deal shielded him and four alleged accomplices from federal prosecution.
The new charges against Epstein carry a 45-year maximum sentence. Prosecutors are also seeking the forfeiture of his 21,000-square-foot townhouse on East 71st Street, where some of his alleged crimes took place. Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a press conference Monday that investigators also found “nude photographs of what appeared to be underage girls” at the Upper East Side home. The indictment implicates several of Epstein’s employees, who are accused of helping the billionaire arrange the encounters and ensuring “that minor victims were available for encounters upon his arrival in Florida,” according to the indictment.
The fact he (allegedly) had child pornography in his home after pleading guilty to a felony sex charge suggests that Epstein does not learn from experience.
Police originally identified more than three dozen possible victims when they investigated in 2005 and 2006. The Herald has since identified nearly 80 girls molested by Epstein, most of whom were listed only as “Jane Doe” in court documents to protect their identities as minors. Most were girls between the ages of 13 and 16 when they were targeted by Epstein as far back as 2001. Many also came from low-income households and thus may have been more susceptible to the cash-for-massage ploy Epstein allegedly used to lure girls to his homes. Witnesses have also testified in subsequent civil-court proceedings that hundreds of additional victims were brought to Epstein from around the world.
Now let’s look at some of the issues surrounding the latest charges:
The hedge fund magnate’s true role in creating the foundation could not be confirmed. Whether Epstein was an actual founder of the foundation or exaggerated his role in a phony effort to appear altruistic is not clear.
Epstein is not cited in official paperwork filed by the Clinton Global Initiative as a founder or director. Neither The Clinton Foundation nor Dershowitz responded to FoxNews.com’s inquiry as to the extent of Epstein’s involvement. FoxNews.com first reported that flight logs show the former president flew on Epstein’s private plane dozens of times. But Clinton has publicly credited longtime assistant Doug Band, now counselor and director of the foundation, as conceiving of the idea.
Bill Clinton says he’s shocked, shocked by the accusations against Epstein, and claims that nobody should believe those lying flight logs about his many trips aboard the Lolita Express to Orgy Island, or him ditching his Secret Service detail to do so.
Investigative reporter Conchita Sarnoff says that Bill Clinton is a damn liar, that he flew on the Lolita Express 27 times, sometimes with Secret Service, sometimes without, and many of the flights included underage girls.
She also says the soft plea bargain Epstein received was partially to avoid embarrassing Hillary Clinton during her 2008 Presidential run.
If you want to read the actual flight logs, you can do so here. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Donald Trump, of course, knew Epstein, and infamously said he was a “terrific guy” who was “a lot of fun to be with.” He added: “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” That sounds somewhat damning, except for the fact that’s precisely what you wouldn’t say if you were having sex with underage girls procured by Epstein. The piece goes on to note:
Trump isn’t known to have gone on any trips with Epstein, which would have been out of character. “I don’t think Trump would go to someone else’s property or someone else’s island or villa,” Nunberg said. “He doesn’t even play golf at anyone else’s clubs.” But Trump did host Epstein as a guest at Mar-a-Lago, where he appears in photos in 1997 and 2000. Epstein’s personal little black book, which was leaked by an employee in 2009, contained 14 phone numbers for Trump, his wife, Melania, and several people who worked for him.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, President Trump dismissed his past appearances with Epstein, describing him as a “fixture in Palm Beach” in those years. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago,” he added, though he declined to elaborate. “I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years.”
Indeed, Trump reportedly barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago “because Epstein sexually assaulted an underage girl at the club,” according to court documents filed by Edwards.
There are a whole lot of conspiracy theories floating around, each more unlikely than the last, including the possibility that Epstein’s entire fortune came from blackmailing important figures for the underage sex, which I view as extremely unlikely. Also, Epstein’s black book reportedly contained some 1,000 names, and we should keep in mind that probably the vast majority are merely business associates or acquaintances and never took a ride on the Lolita Express…
Man, it’s been a week. The clown car and NRA pieces have been blowing up my stats, and I’ve got a bunch of other things happening. I tried to watch the Group of Death debate last night, but the stream kept cutting out, so I’ll probably save the reactions for Monday’s Clown Car Update. This LinkSwarm features Dan Crenshaw, Google, and Dan Crenshaw grilling Google.
Pelosi caves, gets the House to pass the Republican Senate bill to address the crisis on the Southern border 305-102. The Senate bill isn’t perfect, but it’s a vast improvement on the House’s laughable effort. But the fact that 90% of the 2020 Democratic presidential contenders are demonstrably to the left of Nancy Pelosi on the issue might give a more reflective party pause…
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw says Democrats live in another world when it comes to the crisis on the border.
“In Emergency Bill, House Dems Vote To Send More Fake Tears To Address Border Crisis.”
Professor Posner is correct in pointing to the rivalrous nature of political power and market power. What is less well understood is that markets won that fight in a knockout a decade or more ago. The new reality is that markets — not corporations, but markets — are more powerful than states, and much of the angry, angsty, mob-inciting politics of the Left and the Right in the past decade is simply the emotional noise and churn generated as societies and governments readjust their affairs to accommodate themselves to that new reality. Bill Clinton spent much of his presidency bitching about the bond market, which was his shorthand for the ways in which global markets (especially financial markets) limited politicians’ effective scope of action. He was, uncharacteristically for a man of such modest imagination, ahead of his time.
The power of capital flows is a reality that has made itself known bit by bit to states both liberal and autocratic, from the members of the European Union to the caudillos in Beijing. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no regard for life or property, brutal and vicious — and constantly getting slapped around by volatility in the energy market. Mohammed bin Salman can command almost anything — except the commodity markets that rule his world.
Much of the hysteria on display in the Democratic presidential primary is American progressivism’s shrieking protest of the new facts of life. Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren are intelligent enough to understand what’s happened: That just at the moment they were primed to take power, power was taken away from them.
Speaking of Big Tech censorship of conservatives, Reddit has “quarantined” The_Donald subreddit for Trump fans, one of the largest and most heavily trafficked groups on Reddit. You can still reach The_Donald by following that link, but you get a warning and you can’t search for the content anymore.
“Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne Used To Hate Donald Trump. Now, He’s Kind of a Fan.” Also worries (if you listen to the podcast) about China’s rise as a techno-authoritarian hegemon.
Stop laughing. This isn’t funny. Louis CK is now an unperson. You can no longer applaud him or enjoy his comedy hate speech. If you insist on supporting an enemy of the people, there will be consequences. You will be punished. Your life will be upended. If you care about your future, you will keep your excitement and happiness to yourself when presented with the verboten.
“Well, if you don’t like Louis CK, don’t listen to him. You can’t tell other people what they should and shouldn’t laugh at.” We hear that a lot from fascists, don’t we? They think hate speech is free speech, and they don’t think they need to do what they’re told. But they’ll learn. They will be corrected.
Today you’re cheering for an unapproved comedian. Tomorrow you’re marching with tiki torches and tweeting dank memes. The day after that, you’re annexing the Sudetenland. These people must be controlled before the fascism spreads.
President Donald Trump officially launched his 2020 reelection campaign at a packed rally in Orlando yesterday. It was a long rally, with some YouTube videos of the event running 3-5 hours long. As I strongly suspect that no one is going to watch something that long all the way through, here’s the reelection announcement portion itself.
The Trump campaign raised just under $25 million yesterday. That’s more than Sanders and Harris together raised in all of Q1 (Biden didn’t officially jump in until April), and it will be interesting to see how Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg and Harris do in Q2 fundraising. I fully expect Trump to come in on the higher range of $50-$100 million for Q2.
Predicting President Trump to make short work of his Republican primary opponents (which is, who, only Bill Weld at this point?) is like predicting that Alabama will have a better football team than UTEP this year: it’s not really a prediction if no one will take the other side of the bet…
Here’s the entirety of President Donald Trump’s remarks on the 75th anniversary of D-Day:
To the men who sit behind me, and to the boys who rest in the field before me, your example will never, ever grow old. Your legend will never tire. Your spirit—brave, unyielding, and true—will never die. The blood that they spilled, the tears that they shed, the lives that they gave, the sacrifice that they made, did not just win a battle. It did not just win a war. Those who fought here won a future for our nation. They won the survival of our civilization. And they showed us the way to love, cherish, and defend our way of life for many centuries to come. Today, as we stand together upon this sacred Earth, we pledge that our nations will forever be strong and united.
….stem the tide of Migration through Mexico, and to our Southern Border. This is being done to greatly reduce, or eliminate, Illegal Immigration coming from Mexico and into the United States. Details of the agreement will be released shortly by the State Department. Thank you!
Mexico will deploy National Guard throughout the country with priority on its southern border under the joint declaration with the U.S. https://t.co/N7vSTcA9iD
The threat of tariffs got #Mexico to agree to take unprecedented steps to control illegal migration.
Will be very interesting to see how media covers this now. It is going to be very hard for some of them to give @POTUS credit for this. https://t.co/XmKMrSH5gU via @NYTimes
President Trump’s Mexico tariff threat worked! Mexico signed a immigration deal with the U.S. to stop the flow of migrants thru Mexico. Trump is the FIRST President in modern history to understand the most powerful weapon we have is our economy… well done, @realDonaldTrump.
Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump and his team for reaching an agreement with Mexico that will substantially reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming through Mexico.https://t.co/mY3rVuXjYh
The Mexican government has pledged to do more than Congressional Ds to address this crisis: Trump announces deal to avoid tariffs on Mexico – Los Angeles Times https://t.co/WTPrHmuP0U
— Rep. Dan Crenshaw (@RepDanCrenshaw) June 8, 2019
President Trump’s newly-signed agreement with Mexico is great news for both our economy and our country’s border security. Once again, @realDonaldTrump has proven those who doubted him wrong by getting Mexico to step up their efforts to help us secure our southern border.
Important traffic notice for Austin residents: Half of I-35 is going to be closed between 290 and Rundberg starting at 9 PM tonight and lasting through 5 AM Monday, June 3, while they take down the St. John’s bridge and route southbound traffic down two northbound lanes, squeezing traffic in both directions. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s going to screw up traffic everywhere between Georgetown and Slaughter Lane. Avoid if at all possible…
Alan Dershowitz thinks that Mueller acted shamefully in going beyond his prosecutor’s mandate:
Virtually everybody agrees that, in the normal case, a prosecutor should never go beyond publicly disclosing that there is insufficient evidence to indict. No responsible prosecutor should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict. Supporters of Mueller will argue that this is not an ordinary case, that he is not an ordinary prosecutor and that President Trump is not an ordinary subject of an investigation. They are wrong. The rules should not be any different.
Remember that federal investigations by prosecutors, including special counsels, are by their very nature one-sided. They hear only evidence of guilt and not exculpatory evidence. Their witnesses are not subject to the adversarial process. There is no cross examination. The evidence is taken in secret behind the closed doors of a grand jury. For that very reason, prosecutors can only conclude whether there is sufficient evidence to commence a prosecution. They are not in a position to decide whether the subject of the investigation is guilty or is innocent of any crimes.
That determination of guilt or innocence requires a full adversarial trial with a zealous defense attorney, vigorous cross examination, exclusionary rules of evidence and other due process safeguards. Such safeguards were not present in this investigation, and so the suggestion by Mueller that Trump might well be guilty deserves no credence. His statement, so inconsistent with his long history, will be used to partisan advantage by Democrats, especially all those radicals who are seeking impeachment.
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw on the issue:
My take on this Mueller press conference:
Nothing changed. Still no Russian collusion and no conclusion on obstruction.
But the President’s adversaries will continue to move the goalposts and push impeachment, ignoring what the American people really want: good governance.
President Donald Trump has given Attorney General William Barr authority to declassify to declassify Scandularity documents (like FISA warrents aimed at the Trump campaign), and Democrats are freaking out.
Related: “It’s Not Your Imagination: The Journalists Writing About Antifa Are Often Their Cheerleaders.”
Of all 15 verified national-level journalists in our subset, we couldn’t find a single article, by any of them, that was markedly critical of Antifa in any way. In all cases, their work in this area consisted primarily of downplaying Antifa violence while advancing Antifa talking points, and in some cases quoting Antifa extremists as if they were impartial experts.
“Why Are Top Obama Officials Working Cushy Jobs for Chinese Company We Now Consider a Threat?” (I think we all know the an$wer to that que$tion.) “Samir Jain — a former senior director for cybersecurity policy under Obama’s National Security Council and now a partner with the international law firm Jones Day — was recently hired by the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei as a lobbyist. Jain works alongside James Cole, who was Obama’s deputy attorney general from 2011 to 2015. Huawei hired Cole for legal representation in 2017, the Examiner reported.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
This is interesting: Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz and New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are talking about teaming up to impose a lifetime ban on former members of congress becoming paid lobbyists. It’s a good idea that I expect to go nowhere, as it takes potential graft money out of too many congressional pockets. But this is not the only idea the hard left and the hard right could propose to fight the swampy center.
When my grandparents arrived in Israel, together with 850,000 other Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa, they understood three things.
First, they understood that they were being forced to leave their Arab homelands. My Iraqi grandparents, for example, had very clear memories of the Farhud, the 1941 pogrom that left more than 180 Jews dead at the hands of their neighbors. They finally fled their native country in 1951, pushed out by an Iraqi government determined to rid itself of all of its Jews.
When they arrived in Israel, my grandparents did not see themselves as Palestinian Jews—they had never before lived in Mandatory Palestine. They saw themselves as Jews of Iraqi descent returning to the ancient homeland they and their ancestors had dreamed of and prayed of for thousands of years, the land from which they were once expelled and to which they were overjoyed to return. And they also understood themselves to be distinct from their Ashkenazi brothers and sisters: They were all Jews, but my grandparents were proud of their Mizrahi heritage just as the 200,000 Israelis of Ethiopian descent are proud of theirs.
They’re hordes of freaks and geeks, socially promoted like the retards in Common Core to grease the retirement skids of a pack of careerist Courtney Massengales not fit nor capable to pour piss out of their own boots even with the instructions stamped on the heel.
Else we wouldn’t have Rangerettes who can’t climb a short wall, Navy officers who can’t conn a ship without hitting everything afloat, as they dredge up parts from museum pieces to keep their current aircraft flying, Air Force generals pimping for a white elephant plane that cannot fly, missile officers cheating on their proficiency tests, Marine recruits in combat arms who can’t throw a grenade without killing themselves, or “combat leaders” who couldn’t pass a ruck march, West Point “leaders” who condone open communism from faculty and students, and promote a pack of Affirmative Action cadets who couldn’t pass a PRT or meet basic weight and appearance standards, while flashing Black Power signs in uniform. We wouldn’t be doing gender reassignment surgeries instead of physical therapy for combat wounded, we wouldn’t be spending more money on gender sensitivity counseling than on marksmanship training, and we wouldn’t be wavering the insane and drug-addicted into the military in record numbers, just to appease a pack of blue- and pink-haired SJWs.
The US military is broken.
Hugely so. Nearly hopelessly so.
Nostalgia for a time long past when it was otherwise won’t paper over the reality that right now we’re as weak as kittens, with a military that’s going to have its own ass handed to it on a platter, and body bags filled by the gross, because it’s so hamstrung with PC that it cannot accomplish the most fundamental missions assigned to it, eight days out of seven.
Overstated? Probably. Almost certainly. And don’t underestimate “freaks and geeks.” Or both viewpoints are true: Our armed forces aren’t what they’re shaped up to be, but are still miles beyond other country’s armed forces. Or it could be a case of inter-service differences: The army, honed by two decades at the point of the knife in the global war on terror, is the best in the world but the Navy and Air Force have problems. Or anywhere in-between those extremes. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Former Mississippi Republican Senator Thad Cochran has died at the age of 81. Cochran was Mississippi’s first Republican senator since Reconstruction, was a stalwart advocate of the Reagan revolution, and then slowly drifted into a more moderate direction as he stayed in the senate 45 years.
I think it's legitimate to prefer one culture to another
For example, I prefer cultures that do not tolerate female genital mutilation.
Will this will be considered racist by all those who hover, eagerly hoping that someone will offend them – on someone else's behalf, naturally https://t.co/4WbZDFjs3o
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas we’re enjoying intermittant torrential rains, which means that walking your dog after one is like breathing warm soup.
Former President Barack Obama was unhappy with Hillary Clinton and her failed “soulless campaign” in 2016, saying he saw her loss as a “personal insult.”
The new details come from a recently released update to New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker’s book Obama: The Call of History.
The new edition, which includes Obama’s reaction to the 2016 election, said Obama compared himself to Michael Corleone, the titular character of “The Godfather.” Obama thought he “almost got out” of office untouched, like a mob boss avoiding a hit job.
Obama found himself shocked by the election results, thinking before Nov. 8 there was “no way Americans would turn on him” and “[h]is legacy, he felt, was in safe hands.”
The president’s standing in the Midwest now is arguably stronger than when he nearly swept the region in 2016. Polling shows Trump’s job approval rating in the Midwest is in the mid-forties, and his overall favorability rating is highest in the Midwest. Trump’s approval rating in the region is roughly the same as Obama’s was during the same point in his presidency, according to Gallup tracking polls.
The working class, the nearly 70 percent of Americans without a college degree who have been ignored and even ridiculed by both political parties, is flourishing. Five of the top ten cities enjoying the greatest job opportunities for lower-wage workers are in the Midwest. “A majority of the metro areas with the highest shares of opportunity employment are located in the Midwest . . . after adjusting for cost-of-living differences, median annual earnings tend to be relatively high in that region,” according to an April 2019 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Finding enough workers “is a problem playing out in many parts of the Midwest, a region with lower unemployment and higher job-opening rates than the rest of the country,” according to an April 2018 Wall Street Journal report, citing hiring challenges by employers in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Southwestern Ohio, solid Trump country, is in the midst of a warehousing boom. The construction industry is thriving nationwide, but the Midwest is leading the pack.
The administration’s attempts to secure the southern border are gaining popularity in the Midwest. According to a recent Washington Postpoll, 40 percent of Midwesterners say Trump’s approach to illegal immigration will make them more likely to support him in 2020, compared to 36 percent who say they are less likely. Further, 83 percent of Midwesterners called the situation at the Mexican border a crisis or a serious problem. It will take some smooth convincing by the Democratic presidential candidate to not only disabuse Midwesterners of their views, but to assure them that open borders are best for families in Racine and Grand Rapids.
Comey will claim that everything he did in the FBI was by the book. But after the investigations by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and U.S. Attorney John Huber, along with Barr’s promised examination, are completed, Comey’s mishandling of the FBI and legal processes likely will be fully exposed.
Ideally, Barr’s examination will aggregate information that addresses three primary streams.
The first will be whether the investigations into both presidential nominees and the Trump campaign were adequately, in Barr’s words, “predicated.” This means he will examine whether there was sufficient justification under existing guidelines for the FBI to have started an investigation in the first place.
The Mueller report’s conclusions make this a fair question for the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign. Comey’s own pronouncement, that the Clinton email case was unprosecutable, makes it a fair question for that investigation.
The second will be whether Comey’s team obeyed long-established investigative guidelines while conducting the investigations and, specifically, if there was sufficient, truthful justification to lawfully conduct electronic surveillance of an American citizen.
The third will be an examination of whether Comey was unduly influenced by political agendas emanating from the previous White House and its director of national intelligence, CIA director and attorney general. This, above all, is what’s causing the 360-degree head spins.
Oh, should we use the word “bombshell” or the phrase “the walls are closing on?”
The company Flint, Michigan, hired to replace lead water pipes had no experience with the work, according to a councilwoman and a contractor, despite that the city has received more than $600 million in state and federal aid for its water crisis.
And the city ignored a model showing where lead pipes are and paid to dig up every yard, the vast majority of which had copper pipes, according to meeting minutes.
The city also prohibited contractors from using an efficient method of digging holes known as hydrovac excavation, Flint Councilwoman Eva Worthing told The Daily Caller News Foundation. That leveled the playing field for a contractor, WT Stevens, with no experience or the appropriate equipment — and let it bill far more to taxpayers, she says. All of these factors, she adds, needlessly led to more waiting for anyone who actually has lead pipes.
Huge amounts of aid dollars — including $100 million from the Environmental Protection Agency — have flowed to the small city of 90,000 residents to address lead in its water supply, even though it doesn’t have a chief financial officer and, until recently, its finance chair was a gun felon.
The federal money “should be a good thing for the city,” Worthing told TheDCNF, “but given the mismanagement of the pipe replacement program, I am concerned that it’s not going to get used properly.”
The city “chose to dig up yards that they knew were copper, and they decided to hand dig instead of hydrovac,” Worthing told TheDCNF. “That was because WT Stevens didn’t have the ability, and you get more money [digging by hand]. It costs $250 [to hydrovac] versus thousands” to dig a large hole without the equipment.
Hey, remember when journalists reported on all the scandals among Virginia’s state leaders, until they noticed the (D)s after their names? “Northam, who largely won on anti-Trump anger, is now less popular than the president in the state.”
Alabama Democratic state representative John Rogers last week: “Some kids are unwanted, so you kill them now or you kill them later. You bring them in the world unwanted, unloved, you send them to the electric chair. So, you kill them now or you kill them later.” Rodgers this week: “I am now a candidate for United States Senate.” He’s primarying incumbent Democratic Senator Doug Jones, who only got in because of the Roy Moore fiasco.
Recent data show that the U.K.’s gun control experiments are actually causing more harm than good. Like its Australian counterpart, which also implemented draconian gun control in the 1990s, negative criminal trends have started to surface since new gun control laws were enacted.
Sexual assaults have seen an alarming rise from 1995 to 2006, specifically increasing by 76.5 percent according to Howard Nemerov’s book 400 Years of Gun Control. All the gun control in the world has not been able to save the U.K. from steadily increasing rates of violent crime.
“The century-long relationship between American Jews and the nation’s elite universities has rotted away. Now is the time for all of the good people involved—students, parents, donors—to get out, and fast.”
Believe women…unless they’re raped by a homeless person. “Seattle’s activist class seems, then, to have more compassion for transient criminals than for the victims of their crimes.”
I'm in Nebraska for a trip. The national media has done a horrific job covering the catastrophic flooding that has for months made homes inaccessible. It is all you see from the air, and a big deal. pic.twitter.com/XU9DmTb5Ju
Leaked Trump Peace Plan? I’d sort of like President Trump to stay away from all peace plans, as they all seem to be asking for trouble. This one is interesting. It calls for a two state solution, some Egyptian facilities for Gaza, incorporating settlements into Israel, a lot of non-U.S. countries picking up the bill, and penalties for rejecting the deal. It make so much sense that Palestinians will surely reject it out of hand…
More on China’s play for technological dominance: “Huawei Technologies, the spearhead of China’s trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), isn’t a Chinese company, but an imperial juggernaut that crushes its competition and employs their intellectual resources. By 2013 it employed 40,000 foreigners–mostly in R&D– out of a workforce of 150,000.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The New York Times had a story in which they breathlessly told us that Trump lost a billion dollars in the late 1980s and early 1990s. You know, just like Trump himself told us in his book The Art of the Comeback. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
“Facebook co-founder says Zuckerberg ‘not accountable,’ calls for government break up.” Better idea: Make all social media companies publish clear, defined reasons for suspending or banning users, and make the processes by which those decisions are made transparent. Nah, they’d never go for that, as that would keep them from arbitrarily banning conservatives… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Jim Goad says Facebook should leave Louis Farrakhan alone…because he’s hilarious. “This cat is one of the most accomplished mind-fuckers in American history, and I’m glad to call him a fellow citizen.”
Moving The Extending Arms of Christ: This probably won’t mean anything to you unless you grew up in Houston, but there was a large, striking mosaic above the emergency room entrance on Houston Methodist Hospital that had to be moved to an interior atrium under construction due to the hospital’s expansion.
Back in 2016, one of the knocks on then-candidate Donald Trump was that he was soft on Second Amendment rights, having backed the Clinton “assault weapons” ban in the 1990s. However, Trump’s views clearly evolved, as 18 years ago he stated he was against a handgun ban (“Democrats want to confiscate all guns, which is a dumb idea because only the law-abiding citizens would turn in their guns and the bad guys would be the only ones left armed.”), and Hillary Clinton was so bad on the Second Amendment that it was easy for the NRA to endorse him.
It was a speech full of red meat, and ranged considerably beyond the Second Amendment to border control, crime, sanctuary cities, and the deep state.
A few excerpts:
Every day of my administration, we are taking power out of Washington, D.C. and returning it to the American people, where it belongs. (Applause.) And you see it now better than ever, with all of the resignations of all of the bad apples. They’re bad apples. They tried for a coup; didn’t work out so well. (Applause.) And I didn’t need a gun for that one, did I? (Laughter.)
All was taking place at the highest levels in Washington, D.C. You’ve been watching, you’ve been seeing. You’ve been looking at things that you wouldn’t have believed possible in our country. Corruption at the highest level — a disgrace. Spying, surveillance, trying for an overthrow. And we caught them. We caught them. (Applause.) Who would have thought in our country?
Far-left radicals in Congress want to take away your voice, your jobs, your rights, and they especially want to take away your guns. You know that. They want to take away your guns. You better get out there and vote. You better get out there and vote. It seems like it’s a long ways away. It’s not.
Democrats want to disarm law-abiding Americans while allowing criminal aliens to operate with impunity. But that will never happen as long as I’m your President. Not even close. (Applause.) I promise to defend the Second Amendment rights of every American, and I always will. I’ll never let you down. (Applause.) Never let you down. I haven’t so far, and I won’t. Because as the famous saying goes, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Very simple. (Applause.)
As we protect gun rights for law-abiding citizens, we are also getting guns out of the hands of violent criminals.
When I took office two years ago, one of my highest priorities was to reduce violent crime. In the two years before my inauguration, the murder rate had increased by more than 20 percent, and the United States had experienced the largest increase in violent crime in over 25 years.
For this reason, my administration resurrected Project Safe Neighborhoods, bringing together prosecutors, police, sheriffs, and citizens groups to put the most dangerous offenders behind bars.
We funded 200 new violent crime prosecutors. We charged a record number of criminal offenders. And last year, we prosecuted the most violent criminals ever in our history.
And now, violent crime is way down. Murders in America’s largest cities dropped by 6 percent between 2017 and 2018. But I do have to ask you: What the hell is going on in Chicago? What is going on? (Applause.) We could solve that problem. We would’ve been down even a lot more. And it’s not a tough problem to solve. You got to let law enforcement do what they have to do. They’ll solve the problem very quickly. Very quickly. (Applause.)
We don’t think enough about the victims. They’re too worried about the people that cause the crime. It’s got to stop. That thought process is no good.
The number of police officers shot and killed in the line of duty last year, I’m so happy to report, is down 21 percent compared to the year before. (Applause.) And that was the year before I took office.
President Trump also announced he was withdrawing America from the UN Arms Trade Treaty:
in the last administration, President Obama signed the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. And in his waning days in office, he sent the treaty to the Senate to begin the ratification process.
This treaty threatened your subjugate — and you know exactly what’s going on here — your rights and your constitutional and international rules and restrictions and regulations.
Under my administration, we will never surrender American sovereignty to anyone. (Applause.) We will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your Second Amendment freedom. And that is why my administration will never ratify the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. I hope you’re happy. (Applause.)
I’m impressed; I didn’t think too many of you would really know what it is. You what it is? A big, big factor. But I see a couple of very happy faces from the NRA over there.
And I am officially announcing today that the United States will be revoking the effect of America’s signature from this badly misguided agreement. We’re taking our signature back. (Applause.) The United Nations will soon receive a formal notice that America is rejecting this treaty. (Applause.)
President Trump also brought up several people who used guns to defend their lives against bad guys, including Sutherland Springs hero Stephen Willeford.
NRA members had doubts about Donald Trump’s commitment to the Second Amendment when he announced he was running for President. I don’t see any having those doubts anymore.
In the Before Time, the Long Long Ago (which, in this case, is October of 2016), Alan Dershowitz was almost universally hailed as a leading legal mind. A Harvard professor and staunch advocate of due process and constitutional rights, Dershowitz was a frequent guest on CNN. That is, until they replaced him with creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti as their go-to legal guy.
“CNN, which used to have me on all the time, on Anderson Cooper, on Cuomo, on Lemon, as an analyst, as a centrist analyst, they decided no, no, it is okay to have extreme Trump supporters, because people just use them as a stick figure exhibits,” Dershowitz said. “What they didn’t want was a centrist liberal that went against their narrative.”
It’s obvious that CNN didn’t want actual sober legal analysis of constitutional rights and designated presidential powers harshing their Trump Derangement Syndrome buzz. Which is why they chose a guy now under multiple felony indictments over a respected legal scholar who was telling them the truth rather than what they wanted to hear.
No wonder Dershowitz gives the media a failing grade for their Mueller Report coverage. “I think we’re seeing an elimination of the distinction between the editorial page and the news page in some of the leading media in the country. It’s a shame. Walter Cronkite could not get a job in the media today.”
