PrairiePundit

Sharyl Attkisson:   @SharylAttkisson Follow Follow  @ SharylAttkisson More On p. 203 of IG report, “The OPA (Office of Public Affairs) Supervisor said that he later learned that fmr Pres. Clinton’s Secret Service detail had contacted Lynch’s FBI security detail to let them know that the former Pres. wanted to meet with Lynch.” @ChristopherSign 7:49 PM - 29 Jun 2018 1,854  Retweets 2,106  Likes 147 replies 1,854 retweets 2,106 likes Reply   147   Retweet   1.9K   Like   2.1K There is more at the link above.  It was intended to be a secret meeting and was only revealed because of a tip to a local reporter.   This report by the IG appears to discredit the attempted cover story for the meeting.   Direct message

IBD Editorial: For more than a decade, California has won high praise from environmentalists for its stringent greenhouse gas restrictions. But a new report shows that despite the enormous costs of this effort, the state is doing a worse job at cutting CO2 emissions than the rest of the country, while badly hurting its working families. Back in 2007, California became the first state to cap CO2 emissions when then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed AB32, which mandated the state cut greenhouse gas emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Schwarzenegger called it "a bold new era of environmental protection." Not to be outdone, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill last year requiring the state to cut emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. So, what happened? From 2007 to 2015, California managed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 9%. But the rest of the country cut them by more than 10%, according to a new report from the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman Univ...

Emerald Robinson: The Collapse of the Never-Trump Conservatives They have lost influence in the conservative movement.  I think it is because they would rather have liberals running the government than someone they deem to be repugnant.  I have been in the Never-Democrat camp for decades and as leery as I might have been about Trump, I was in the camp that found the Democrat candidate repugnant and unacceptable.  Trump has exceeded my expectations and since his election, the Democrats have lived down to my expectations of them. Robinson gives a rundown of the never-Trump pundits and finds many of them discredited.

NY Times: How Free Speech Is Being Used as a Weapon by Conservatives Borrowing arguments that were once the province of liberals, conservatives have used the First Amendment to justify things like campaign spending and attacks on regulating tobacco and guns. As a result, many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict. Liberals sound like they are on the cusp of tyranny in their opposition to conservative speech.  We already see it on campuses and by social media companies trying to censor conservative speech.  They seem to have lost the ability to debate ideas and just want those who disagree with them to shut up.

streiff: Right now the left is chasing its tail concocting bullsh** theories on how it can stop President Trump from nominating a conservative justice to the Supreme Court. SPOILER ALERT: they can’t. The are only two things that will prevent the nomination and confirmation of a justice like Neil Gorsuch (I’m still waiting for the Never Trump people to reprise their whining “b-b-b-but Gorsuch” nonsense as though the confirmation of Supreme Court justices actually didn’t matter). The first is that Trump will lose his nerve, imagine that he can be pals with Chuck Schumer and go for a “unity” nomination. ... The second danger, as I pointed out yesterday, is that enough GOP senators, either from love of baby-killing or just from spite, will bolt the caucus that Trump’s nominee can’t win confirmation. That latter path may have just been foreclosed. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine will not apply an ideological litmus test to the next Supreme Court nominee, her spokeswoman said Thursday. ...

Red States: This week a Santa Barbara County jury found Victor Martinez, an illegal alien who had been previously convicted of sexual assault, guilty of first degree murder in the brutal 2015 sexual assault, torture, and murder of 64-year-old Air Force Veteran Marilyn Pharis. Though Pharis was murdered just weeks after Kate Steinle was shot and killed on a pier in San Francisco, and sanctuary policies also directly led to her murder, Pharis’s case has never attracted the publicity Steinle’s case did – and that’s a shame. The only reason the country heard about Kate Steinle’s case was because the media couldn’t ignore it. Steinle was murdered in broad daylight, in a big city, on a busy pier filled with tourists. San Francisco authorities couldn’t hide or downplay her murder. And, because we still have access to public records in our country, they couldn’t hide her killer’s history. Marilyn Pharis was murdered under different, easier-to-ignore circumstances. She lived in a sleepy...

Washington Post: U.S. assessing cost of keeping troops in Germany as Trump battles with Europe European officials are scrambling to determine whether the president intends to reposition U.S. forces or is just making threats ahead of a NATO summit. Eastern European countries seem eager to have US troops deployed in their area.  Germany has not been pulling it fair share of its own defense.  It continues to lag on defense spending requirements of NATO and has a serious readiness problem.  If war broke out, it only has four fighter jets it could put into action.   Merkel does not seem to care about a strong defense and her open borders policy has created a problem for Germans.

NY Times: How ‘Abolish ICE’ Went From Social Media to Progressive Candidates’ Rallying Cry Calls to eliminate the agency charged with enforcing immigration laws, mostly rooted on the political fringe, have gained traction among progressive candidates. What the Democrats are doing is turning their party into a political fringe group.  Open borders are strongly opposed by a majority of voters in the US.  Also, the upset with ICE makes little sense in relation to the issue of separation of children from parents at the border.   ICE is an inland enforcment arm of US immigration law.  The Border Patrol is responsible for detaining illegal aliens at the border.

NY Times: ‘Shaken’ Rosenstein Felt He Was Used in Comey Firing After the F.B.I. director James B. Comey was fired, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, privately appeared conflicted about his involvement in the dismissal. It is strange that he would feel conflicted or troubled at all.  The IG report confirms basically what Rosenstein said about Comey when he was fired.  In fact, it shows that Comey engaged in other activity that would justify his firing.  If he is having second thoughts about his job, it is probably time to move on.  He has already angered Congress with his lack of cooperation in their investigation of the FBI misconduct. He is now coming across as someone with something to hide.

Gene Schwimmer: Today's lesson on morality and human rights  comes from  the probable (according to polls) next president of our  crime-infested  and  corrupt  neighbor to the south (emphases added): Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) called for mass immigration to the United States[,] ... declaring it a "human right"  for all North Americans. "[W]e will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world," Obrador said, adding that immigrants " must leave their towns and find a life in the United States ." Apparently, the U.S. must welcome an unlimited number of these unwanted,  by their own president , Mexicans, because the U.S. is morally obligated to serve as Mexico's social-dysfunction safety valve and ATM. Did you know that "chutzpah" is the same in Hebrew and Spanish?  On the other hand, everyone knows that Obrador can count on a large cohort of Democrats,...

IBD: They said it wouldn't happen, but it did: The money companies stashed overseas to protect them from high U.S. corporate tax rates is flooding back in, boosting growth, jobs and confidence in the economy. Thank the Trump tax cuts. All told, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported, some $305.6 billion returned to the U.S. from overseas accounts. That's a $1.2 trillion annual rate, and far more than the $35 billion one year before. The BEA's analysts explain why this happened: "The large magnitudes (of inward capital flows) ... reflect the repatriation of accumulated earnings by foreign affiliates of U.S. multinational enterprises and their parent companies in the United States in response to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act." In short, the Trump tax cuts did it. American companies were commonly estimated to have about $2.6 trillion parked in overseas accounts as of 2017. So in the first three months of 2018 alone, some 12% of that overseas stash ...

Washington Times: More than three out of four conservatives feel an unfriendly vibe online, saying that social media giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram intentionally censor political viewpoints they consider objectionable, according to a new survey. The Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found that 85 percent of Republicans think social media sites intentionally try to muzzle certain political opinions, with 64 percent feeling as if big technology companies typically favor liberal posters over conservatives. In all, 72 percent of Americans feel that social media platforms censor political views that they may find objectionable. “In the midst of an ongoing debate over the power of digital technology companies and the way they do business, sizable shares of Americans believe these companies privilege the views of certain groups over others,” Pew researchers said. The survey of 4,594 adults found that political partisans have strikingly differing views towards...

Thomas Lifson: The spirit of political pranksterism is alive and well in the Great State of Texas, as Republicans pulled off a couple of doozies on the hapless Democrats at their state convention in Fort Worth this week. First (via Andrea Zelinsky of the Houston Chronicle ): Republicans ran a fake obituary in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Saturday as at least 7,000 people spent time in Cow Town for the final day of Texas Democratic Party Convention. The ad highlighted the party was healthy for more than a decade before beginning to wane in the 1980s and has failed to win a statewide election since 1994. Hopes for recovery were repeatedly dashed because of the party’s “inability to connect with voters and deliver a coherent message,” the fake obit read. “The Texas Democratic Party enjoyed: whining, fighting for such causes as late-term abortions, job-destroying regulations and higher taxes for Texas families,”  according to the ad . “The Party will be remembered, although no...

Fox News: Say howdy to "probably the tweetingest judge in America, which, admittedly, is like being the tallest Munchkin in Oz." That's how Texas native Judge Don Willett describes himself on -- what else -- Twitter. His social media meditations on hamburger buns, legal precedent, and even Donald Trump, have gained him an unusually high public profile, and perhaps because of this -- or more likely in spite of -- he's become a White House favorite to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. The 52-year-old resident of Austin sits on the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, having been nominated to the post last year by President Trump after service on the state’s high court. He is one of 24 judges -- and Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, -- on a list Trump has promised to rely to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy. Willett was among seven finalists last year for the seat that ultimately went to Justice Neil Gorsuch. Sources say he was invited to Washington ...

Curtis Ellis: The 2016 election gave us the “Silent Trump Supporter” — Trump voters who would not reveal their true sympathies to pollsters. This was a great mystery at the time, but seeing now how Trump supporters are routinely denigrated, harassed and vilified, their silence was understandable if not prescient. In 2018, the Silent Trump Supporter has gone global. Around the world, government officials and heads of state ritually denounce President Trump to anyone who will listen. But at the same time they are pursuing the game-changing policies the president has championed. Take this story from the European Union, please. “China and the European Union vowed to oppose trade protectionism in an apparent rebuke to the U.S., saying unilateral actions risked pushing the world into a recession,” reports the lede sentence in a recent Bloomberg story. However, European companies are complaining about the “lack of reciprocity between the access to China’s markets that they get...

Michael Graham: In March, endangered Republican U.S. Senator Dean Heller of Nevada was caught on tape talking about his hope that a Supreme Court vacancy could help him hold on in November's election. "Kennedy is going to retire around sometime early summer," Heller predicted in a private gathering. "Which I'm hoping will get our base a little motivated because right now they're not very motivated. But I think a new Supreme Court justice will get them motivated." Is Sen. Heller right? That's certainly the conventional wisdom. Conservatives in general and Evangelicals in particular are more motivated by concerns over the courts. In 2016 exit polls, for example, 21 percent of voters said SCOTUS appointments were their most important issue, and those voters went overwhelmingly (56-41 percent) for Trump. "Hold your nose and go vote," evangelist Franklin Graham said to a North Carolina rally just days before the election. "You hav...

Washington Times: It seems the Trump administration knows the law better than the Obama administration . The Justice Department under Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed positions of the Obama administration in four cases decided by the Supreme Court this year — and won all four of them. They included constitutional technicalities, such as whether a certain set of appointments needed Senate confirmation, and politically charged cases over cutting names from voter lists and labor unions charging dues to unwilling workers. “In four cases, after careful review, we changed the department’s position in order to follow the law,” Mr. Sessions said Wednesday as the court closed out its term. “The favorable Supreme Court decisions in all four cases reflect that we took the proper course of action. The decisions speak for themselves.” Reversals of position at the department are a big deal and set tongues wagging in legal circles. That was the case last year when the Trump administratio...

Rich Lowry: The left’s increasingly unhinged portrayal of Trump as a dictator The Nazi analogy has long been recognized as the crudest and dumbest form of argument, but it’s enjoying a renaissance. ... The comparisons of Trump to despots is inept.  He is not jailing Democrats.  He is not engaged in exterminations.  He is actually enforcing teh law and not disregarding court orders.

NY Times: In Meeting With Putin, Experts Fear Trump Will Give More Than He Gets Foreign policy officials, including some in his own administration, fear a repeat of President Trump’s encounter with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader. I do not accept the premise that Kim got very much in return for agreeing to negotiate the denuclearization of his country.  Certainly, the war games can be easily reinstated if he reneges on the deal.  In fact, he did not have to pay for the hostage releases the way Obama did with Iran and he has gotten North Korea's agreement to return the remains of Americans killed during the war.  North Korea will get nothing of enduring value until it denuclearizes. I have seen no evidence that Trump feels he owes anything to Putin.  He seems to have a genuine belief that it would be good for world peace if the two countries can improve their relationship.  What does the media think Trump will give Putin?

This is a good analysis of the lection in New York where a top Democrat got ousted by a racist avowed socialist.

streiff: Trump’s Approval Rate Increases Despite Border Hysteria Based On Support From This Surprising Group There is a new Trump approval rating out from Harvard CAPS/Harris and it really isn’t what the Democrats want to see going into mid-term elections. ... The immigration polling is very interesting. While 88% oppose family separation, when you start scratching around, you find that number isn’t what some would hope: A majority of voters want immigration reform (73%) and secure borders (76%). Voters also want stricter enforcement of immigration laws (70%). Voters support prosecuting immigrants who cross the border illegally (53%) and sending these immigrants home (64%). A majority (55%) also stand against so-called “catch and release” policies. This says nearly super majorities want the wall and they want zero tolerance. When you look at the whole context, “reform” doesn’t seem to be ‘amnesty.” ... There is more. The media/Democrat hysteria did not achieve its primar...

Washington Times: It’s the military version of the Amazon headquarters sweepstakes. Five city finalists are vying to land the Pentagon’s Army Futures Command, a newly launched operational arm designed to modernize the Army while developing cutting-edge technologies. With a decision expected within the next month, the last-ditch battle among the five potential host cities — Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and Austin — once again shines a light on the economic clout the Defense Department wields, and how its decisions can mean big money or big disappointment for the contenders. The winning site will reap the benefits of a state-of-the-art military facility and an influx of high-tech spinoff jobs, and will quickly become the epicenter of a groundbreaking research partnership between the public and private sectors. Top-ranking Pentagon officials have visited each of the cities over the past several weeks. They say they are encouraging competition and urging regional eco...

Washington Examiner: We write not to praise Anthony Kennedy's jurisprudence, but to bury it. Across 31 years, Justice Kennedy issued many rulings, good and bad. But his most lasting legacy was the travesty he released 26 years ago today, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. With airy, mystical reasoning, unrooted in the Constitution, the common law, or the natural law, he talked himself into saving a precedent that was indefensible legally, scientifically, and morally. In saving Roe v. Wade in 1992, Kennedy did violence to the rule of law, and undermined the court's legitimacy and added extra poison to our politics. Casey helped transform national politics into a winner-take-all partisan death match that, over a decade, saw both parties destroy the rules of the Senate. That's before mentioning that Casey condemned tens of millions of babies to death in the womb. Politicians are already saying in so many words that replacing Kennedy is, more than anything else, about saving ...

Peter Heck: It’s fair to say that the significant number of Christians who supported President Trump in the election of 2016 did so for one reason: the judiciary. For decades the left, unable to advance their agenda through the law-making branch, has effectively overrun the courts with activist judges who impose progressivism through judicial fiat. They have struck down duly enacted laws, rewritten long-standing legislation, ignored centuries of precedent, and have codified their pet policy objectives through legal imposition. Liberal judges have redefined the role of a judge (or justice) from that of umpire to that of ruler (which is precisely why they are so utterly panicked about one retiring). It’s certainly fair to say that no ideological perspective has suffered legally during this era of activism more than social conservatism, the predominant political philosophy of practicing Christians. When Antonin Scalia’s reliably originalist voice was lost on the Supreme Court with h...

Washington Examiner: ... "It's just ridiculous what's going on," Homan told the Washington Examiner Thursday, his second-to-last day, at the agency's Washington, D.C., headquarters. Technically, Homan will be on the federal payroll until Saturday, but he will spend the day working remotely. Homan was referring to calls in recent weeks by political candidates, local lawmakers, and even one sitting U.S. congresswoman to "abolish ICE." "It's insulting that a member of Congress would say 'abolish ICE' when we're enforcing the laws that Congress enacted. They give us a set of laws that we're supposed to enforce and they give me the money to do it, then say 'abolish ICE,'" Homan said during an interview late Thursday. "We’re doing what you told us to do." The 34-year law enforcement veteran said he believes some do not understand ICE was tasked with enforcing federal laws and is not operating out of its ...

Fuel Fix: A leader of the Port of Corpus Christi says labor shortages are hampering efforts to develop energy projects, such as petrochemical plants. Speaking to Eagle Ford Consortium, a non-profit encouraging the the development of the Eagle Ford Shale oil field, Jarl Pedersen, the chief commercial officer at the Port of Corpus Christi, said the port has seen billions of investment flow into the area around Corpus Christi. RELATED: Exxon-SABIC plant moving forward But he said a lack or workers shortages has hampered the ability to build new projects, pointing to a proposed $10 billion steam cracker that would process ethane, a natural gas liquid, into ethylene, the building block of most plastics, as an example of what could be possible with a larger workforce. The plant, a joint venture of Exxon Mobil and the state-owned Saudi Arabia Basic Industries Corp., is to be located in Portland, northeast of Corpus Christi. ... Midland in the Permian Basin is reporting an unemploym...

Marc Thiessen: For those conservatives who voted for Donald Trump because of the Supreme Court, congratulations: You've been vindicated. Had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, she would have replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal jurist -- giving the Supreme Court a left-wing activist majority for a generation. Because Trump won, Neil M. Gorsuch was confirmed to replace Scalia, securing the court's 5-to-4 conservative majority. This week, the dividends of that appointment for conservatives were apparent in two landmark conservative rulings. In National Institute of Family Life Advocates v. Becerra, the high court ruled that the state of California cannot force crisis pregnancy centers to advertise access to abortion to their clients, in violation of the owners' conscience. And in Janus v. AFSCME, the court ruled that public workers cannot be forced pay union dues to support public policies with which they fundamentally disagree. These...

Washington Times: A federal judge says “even a blind person” can see that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is prosecuting Paul Manafort as a way to acquire evidence against his “true target,” President Trump. U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III made the comment in an opinion released this week that nonetheless sided with Mr. Mueller and against Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager. He rejected Mr. Manafort’s argument that the Mueller-brought tax-evasion indictment exceeded the special counsel’s authority and should be dismissed. Judge Ellis, sitting in the Eastern District of Virginia, expressed dismay at the special counsel system and at Mr. Mueller in particular. “Given the investigation’s focus on President Trump’s campaign, even a blind person can see that the true target of the Special Counsel’s investigation is President Trump, not defendant, and that defendant’s prosecution is part of that larger plan,” he wrote. “Specifically, the charges against defendant are intended to i...

Kurt Schlichter: ... Never have so many been so angry about so little bad news. With nothing real to complain about, they have to hype every silly little thing to the point where they are screeching “Nazi!” at you while you are trying to gnaw on a Quarter Pounder. Their anger is a giveaway. In poker, it’s called a “tell.” A tell is a little thing a player does that gives away the hand he’s holding. Liberals’ tell is how they constantly bemoan success, and what their tell tells us is that they are eager to trade our prosperity for their power. But what do they care about our prosperity anyway? They are actively against our prosperity! Proud, self-sufficient people don’t need or want them. The entire business model of the Democratic Party is to keep Democratic constituencies poor and then give them money looted from non-Democratic constituencies. If the Democratic constituencies stop needing handouts, uh oh. What would they need the Dems for anymore? Better a recession with them...

Wall Street Journal: Small Towns Are Booming, Thanks to Rising Oil Prices Record crude output fuels an upturn in production centers like Hobbs, N.M., and the U.S. economy as a whole Jobs and wages are on the increase across the Permian Basin of West Texas and into New Mexico.  Motels are full and restaurants are busy and looking for help in feeding the oil workers.  One of Obama's biggest mistakes was his attempt to downgrade fossil fuels.  He tried to kill jobs and switch people to less efficient alternative energy projects like wind or solar.  He claimed that the US could not drill its way to cheaper gas.  He was totally wrong.

Roger L. Simon: How many times do we have to learn that socialism doesn't work, that, as Margaret Thatcher said, at some point you run out of "other people's money," that sooner or later all the teary idealism, the stirring strains of The Internationale, devolve into gulags and death squads? Wasn't the Soviet Union enough, Communist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, etc....? Now those death squads appear to have surfaced in Venezuela , the wealthiest country in Latin America before Hugo Chavez brought his brand of socialism to the then oil-rich nation. Venezuelan security forces have carried out hundreds of arbitrary killings under the guise of fighting crime, the UN's human rights body says. In a report, it cites "shocking" accounts of young men being killed during operations , often in poor districts, over the past three years. The UN's human rights chief said no-one was being held to account, suggesting the rule of law was "vi...

Washington Post: The worst thing to be in many Democratic primaries? A white male candidate. Democratic voters have brushed aside ideology to embrace identities of class, age, gender and ethnicity, often at the expense of the white male candidates who typified the party’s offerings in past years. Being out of touch with a large segment of the population seems to be what it takes to be a Democrat these days.