How it is 99
First, a few dogmatic assertions:
The Democratic Party is nothing but a menace and a nuisance.
Adam Schiff is the most loathsome and despicable politician in America.
Donald Trump is one of the greatest presidents in US history.
All of which is so obvious, we see no need for a crumb of supporting evidence.
But now, to encourage an admirable spirit of brazen triumphalism in the nation, we quote a survey of just one week (Sunday October 27 to Friday November 1, 2019) of President Trump’s achievements.
Kimberly Guilfoyle writes at Townhall:
Last week was one for the record books, not just for President Donald J. Trump, but for the entire country, which witnessed major economic, domestic policy, and national security accomplishments packed into a single calendar week. Now, with 365 days until election day 2020, these are the kind of weeks that will be remembered by voters as they consider their choices — and that’s bad news for Democrats up and down the ballot.
The week started in the morning of Sunday, October 27th, as President Trump took to the podium in the White House’s Diplomatic Reception Room to announce that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed in an American-led military operation in northwest Syria. Al-Baghdadi was not just any bad guy — he was rivaled only by Osama bin Laden. He was a mass murdering serial rapist who enslaved millions of innocent people in ISIS-controlled territories that once included parts of 20 countries on two different continents.
The president’s decision to deliver justice through swift and deadly force has made the world a better, safer place.
Oddly though, some in the media seemed disoriented by the news, grasping for a way to spin the death in a way that doesn’t look like a foreign policy success for President Trump. The failing Washington Post went so far as to title their obituary, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.” As Donald Trump Jr. recently put it, that’s like an obituary of cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer reading, “Dahmer, connoisseur of exotic and locally-sourced meats, dies at 34.
However, even more disappointing then the media twisting themselves in knots to avoid saying anything that might be interpreted as praise for President Trump was the deafening silence from Democrats. They were seemingly unable to acknowledge that the Commander-in-Chief — even in this just one specific instance — made the world safer.
However, undeterred by his constant and incessant detractors, the president went immediately from celebrating a major national security victory on Sunday to visiting Chicago on Monday to honor law enforcement at the annual International Association of Chiefs of Police.
Through the coordinated efforts of local, state, and federal law enforcement, America has reversed the tide of violent crime that spiked from 2014 to 2016 under former President Obama. The violent crime rate has fallen in each of the last two years, resulting in 50,000 fewer robberies and 286,000 fewer burglaries.
And while the president was in Chicago Monday, the stock market was hitting record highs. Although Democrats — and the typical cast of media talking heads — continue to predict impending economic turmoil, the market is once again outperforming expectations at historic levels. The S&P 500 hit a new record high four times this week, while the Nasdaq reached a new record high for the first time since July.
On Tuesday, the president’s Interagency Task Force to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons delivered a new report detailing the success the administration has had in combating the scourge of human and sex trafficking. Convictions of human traffickers have doubled, and the number of defendants charged has increased by 75 percent. This is one of the most underreported issues plaguing America today, but President Trump has committed substantial resources to addressing it, which is having a meaningful and immediate impact in communities around America.
On Wednesday, President Trump’s administration took an important step to help Americans suffering from substance abuse by launching FindTreatment.gov, a website that will enable visitors to access a database tailored to addressing their specific needs and treatments. Addiction can affect anyone, so it’s important to have a platform that supports everyone.
And while the week ended on another high note Friday, with a major jobs report showing the unemployment rate hovering near the lowest level since 1969, a new record-low for black unemployment, and 128,000 new jobs, the Democrats used Thursday to advance their singular political objective: impeachment.
Although two Democrats joined with Republicans to oppose Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s next step in the impeachment sham — an encouraging bi-partisan move — the Democrat majority …
Led by loathsome despicable Adam Schiff …
… was still able to pass the resolution establishing Pelosi’s rigged rules. While the vote has little actual effect on anything — other than being another embarrassing spectacle out of a power-hungry party — it highlighted the stark contrast between the agendas of each party.
In an almost tiring week of winning for America, the Democrats had to sully our enjoyment of America’s greatness with a meaningless, partisan charade on the floor of the House of Representatives.
The talking heads in the media may fixate on polls, fundraising numbers, and the empty promises of politicians, but voters are looking for results. And while it may not be every week that President Trump orders an operation that successfully eliminates one of the most dangerous terrorist masterminds in world history, the rest of his accomplishments in this last week were exactly what we’ve come to expect from President Donald J. Trump.
Yesterday ( November 4, 2019), Donald Trump, addressing a typically vast and passionately enthusiastic crowd at a rally in Lexington, Kentucky, repeated exultantly what Fox News political commentator Lou Dobbs said of him – …
… that I was the greatest president since Ronald Reagan. Then he said, “No, no. Trump is an even better president than Ronald Reagan. And now he’s got me down as the greatest president in the history of our country, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”
Lou Dobbs was exulting in his own foresight when he said it. He had made this prediction in 2016:
I will not pretend objectivity in this at all, I think that Donald Trump is going to be one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had.
And that is how it is.
Physicians or philanthropists? 111
There cannot be a “right” for one person that puts an obligation on another person.
There cannot be a “right” for everyone that puts an obligation on some people.
A “right” to health care imposes an obligation on medical practitioners.
Yet the Democratic candidates for the November 2020 presidential election believe that medical treatment is a “human right”.
That old Communist from way back, Bernie Sanders – elected to the Senate as an Independent but running for the presidency as a Democrat – explicitly insists that it is.
Dr. Kevin Pham writes at the Daily Signal:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was recently on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show to discuss … his vision for health care in America.
He calls his plan “Medicare for All”.
In one interesting statement, Sanders described the rollout of his plan: “I want to expand Medicare to include dental care, hearing aids, and eyeglasses, and then what I want to do is lower the eligibility age the first year from 65 down to 55, then to 45, then to 35, then we cover everybody.”
Cover? Covered by insurance? No. “Free” health care for all would not be paid for through a system of insurance. It would be paid for through taxes. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, all health care workers would be employees of the government.
The plan, Dr. Pham points out, is more accurately called “Medicaid for All”.
[It] would cost over $30 trillion in the next 10 years in ideal conditions …
So probably very much more …
… but still require physicians and providers to take a pay cut of up to 40% and continue working with the same productivity.
And of course a great many more of them would be needed.
Physicians are already heavily burdened with their workload. In the 2018 Physicians Foundation survey, up to 80% of physicians reported working at their maximum capacity or beyond.
In the same survey, about 15% of physicians reported limiting the number of Medicaid patients they see and an additional 16% did not see Medicaid patients at all.
Of these physicians who do not see Medicaid patients, or limit the number they see, over a third are in primary care, exactly the kind of physicians we need in greater numbers.
[But] … a combination of administrative burdens, delays in processing claims, and low reimbursement rates make it difficult to justify seeing many Medicaid patients.
As Medicaid and Medicare both drastically underpay relative to private health insurance, hospitals and providers have to charge private insurance more to make up the difference.
Under Bernie Sanders’s scheme (and Elizabeth Warren’s vague and colossally expensive plan), there would no private insurance and “the whole system would crumble”.
Providers who participate in Medicaid must accept the government-mandated prices for services and deal with oftentimes long delays in receiving reimbursement that is below the cost of practice.
Study hard for years at great expense only to earn a pittance? (Oh, I nearly forgot – higher education will also be “free” in that it will be paid for by taxation. Your pathetic little income will be taxed at so high a rate that you’ll be left with nothing but a little pocket-money.)
You would have to be a fanatical philanthropist, or even a masochist, to enter the medical profession under such conditions.
And we haven’t even touched on all the miseries a tax-payer funded national health service inevitably brings to patients – the long waits, the rationing, the overcrowding, the death panels …
Power speaks truth to power 7
Nigel Farage, leader of the Brexit Party, interviews his friend President Donald Trump.
What Islam teaches its scholars 1
… is to torture and murder and enslave.
Nothing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi did, or caused to be done by his followers, was against Islamic doctrine. Its torturing and mass murdering and enslaving are not just permitted but positively commanded by Islam. The Washington Post meant to annoy President Trump and the half of the nation that supports him with its obituary headline calling al-Baghadi “an austere Islamic scholar”. But in fact it was telling the truth. Al-Baghdadi was “an austere Islamic scholar”. Unintentionally, it was condemning the man with an exact, though incomplete, description. The Left constantly claims that ISIS and other Muslim terrorists have “nothing to do with Islam”. The Washington Post contradicted that. It would have been telling the whole truth if it had said that al-Baghdadi was an Islamic scholar and therefore a terrorist, a jihadi, a torturer, a mass murderer, and an enslaver.
Muhammad the founder of Islam said:
I have been made victorious through terror.

Aerial photograph of a victory over Islam
The Daily Mail reports:
Once al-Baghdadi was confirmed dead, U.S. forces grabbed every computer, every phone, every bit of paper they could find before retreating. The last action was to call in an airstrike by US drones, reducing Baghdadi’s hideout to rubble, wiping it from the face of the Earth and covering their tracks.
ISIS has other leaders. But how safe will they feel now?
Death of a Caliph 2
President Trump announced in an address to the nation today (October 27, 2019) that US Special Operations Forces have killed – or, more accurately, have forced the death of – Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS.
ISIS had declared him “the Caliph of all Muslims and the Prince of the Believers”.
We quote our favorite part of what the President said about his death, slightly shortened from Breitbart’s report:
He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering, and crying, and screaming all the way. The compound had been cleared by this time, with people either surrendering, or being shot and killed. Eleven young children were moved out of the house, and are uninjured. The only ones remaining were Baghdadi in the tunnel, and he had dragged three of his young children with him. They were led to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel, as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast. The thug who tried hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him. Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died as a coward, running and crying. A brutal killer has violently been eliminated. He will never again harm another man, woman, or child.
ISIS, which until recently occupied territory it called the Islamic State and the Caliphate, is intensely, relentlessly, unremittingly cruel. These devout Sunni Muslims have killed thousands of people, many by the most torturous methods they could devise; burning them, boiling them in oil, burying them alive, sawing their heads off …
Nothing they do is against the doctrine of Islam. Their actions and their aims are profoundly religious.
And the organization is a Hydra: no sooner is one head cut off than another will spring up to replace it.
But at least this one is dead and gone.
Thank you, President Trump!
Enlightenment values 95
Christian values (as described in the post immediately below) are alien to human nature. Human beings do not, cannot, love all other human beings. (Many find it hard to love a few. Some find it impossible to love any.) A thirst for vengeance is common among us. Normal people do not prefer poverty to riches.
Christian values do not underlie our civilization. What values do?
Freedom, justice, reason.
None of which are of any interest to the Christian religion – though millions of individuals who are Christian benefit from them and, to their credit and reward, consciously defend them.
The rewards of reason are, most importantly, scientific knowledge, technological progress, innovation. “Measurement began our might,” wrote W. B. Yeats, referring to ancient civilizations.
To live in freedom, to make justice attainable, to reap the rewards of reason, we need government by Law.
In its beginning, Christianity rejected Law. The author of the Christian religion, St.Paul, contended that the sacrifice of Christ marked a new era and the Law was no longer needed. Christianity was instead of the Law. Later the Church found it necessary to retrieve the moral law of Judaism, and to compile its own canon law. The period of Christian antinomianism was short-lived, but Catholic rule failed spectacularly through the centuries of the Church’s power to provide justice to the peoples of Christendom. It punished heresy, blasphemy, innovation, mere disagreement. It opposed scientific discovery. The Church of Rome was a totalitarian tyranny. So were the Protestant regimes of the Reformation.
The greatness of our civilization began with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the recovery of ancient thought, the launch of the Age of Reason. Europe measured again. Our age of science dawned.
And on the principles of reason, freedom, rule of law, the United States of America was founded.
Yes, some of the Founders were Christians. (And some were deists. And some, though pre-Darwin, were probably quietly atheist.) Yes, the Declaration of Independence mentions a Creator. It designates this Creator as “Nature’s God” – a bold statement of an Enlightenment perception. (Spinoza’s god was nature, the laws of physics.) This god, the Framers said, “endowed” human beings with certain rights. In other words, they saw them as natural rights. There is barely a trace of Christian doctrine in the founding documents, but just enough for those to discern it who want it to be there.
Jillian Becker October 22, 2019
A good man with a bad idea 88
The US Attorney General, William Barr, gave a formal talk at (Roman Catholic) Notre Dame Law School last week (Friday, October 11, 2019) which has come to our notice.
We respect Attorney General Barr for declaring, to questioners at a congressional hearing, that the admitted surveillance of President Trump by US intelligent agents was indeed spying. A statement that shocked the Democrats. Not because it wasn’t true, but because they didn’t want the truth to be spoken, and hated it to be spoken so bluntly.
We expect the Attorney General to shock them much more deeply and permanently by bringing all their criminal machinations to overthrow the duly elected president into open scrutiny, and charging all the guilty with their crimes. Our expectation and hope extend to seeing them jailed.
So we are reluctant to criticize Mr. Barr.
But his speech at the Law School raises an issue of importance to us.
Terry Jeffrey, editor in chief of CNSnews.com, reports the speech and comments on it at Townhall:
Barr simply explained what President John Adams meant by a statement he made in 1798 letter. He then showed the significance of that statement to American life today.
“We have no Government armed with Power which is capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by … morality and religion,” Barr quoted from Adams’s letter. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.”
Within this context, Barr accurately described the cultural war raging in America today.
“The challenge we face is precisely what the founding fathers foresaw would be the supreme test of a free society,” Barr told the Notre Dame law students.
“They never thought that the main danger to the republic would come from an external foe,” he said. “The question was whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.”
“And this is really what they meant by self-government,” said Barr. “It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislature. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.”
A notion with which we have no quarrel.
Mr. Barr went on to say:
But what was the source of this internal controlling power? In a free republic, those restraints could not be handed down from above by philosopher kings. Instead, social order must flow up from the people themselves freely obeying the dictates of inwardly possessed and commonly shared moral values.
Certainly they must.
But then he said:
And to control willful human beings with an infinite capacity to rationalize, those moral values must rest on an authority independent of men’s wills. They must flow from the transcendent Supreme Being. In short, in the framers’ view, free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people, a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and to manmade laws and had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
Why must they, how could they, “flow” from a “transcendent Supreme Being”? How is such a “transcendent moral order” made known to human beings? By the “Supreme Being” implanting the knowledge as instinct? Or through ancient assertions by ignorant men?
We state apodictically that no superhuman being ever spoke to a human being. Though both St. Paul and Muhammad say they were spoken to by “Jesus” and “the Archangel Gabriel” respectively.
We laugh off all such claims. Can we then accept that it is by instinct the religious have knowledge of a “transcendent moral order”? Moral knowledge planted deep in their souls?
But which “transcendent moral order”? Not only did Jesus and Gabriel give quite different moral commandments according to the human conduits of their messages, but instinct too has conveyed a variety of convictions as to what is morally right and wrong. They often contradict one another. While (for instance) some religions teach that a woman who commits adultery must be stoned to death by a crowd of righteously outraged citizens, another maintains that only one who is without sin may cast the first stone, and insists that all mortals are tainted with the sin of their first ancestors, so no one may start stoning.
We atheists want – as we thought the Founding Fathers all wanted – a state that has nothing to do with religion; steers clear of making any laws “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”. But William Barr, and Terry Jeffrey insist – and remind us John Adams insisted – that “our constitution was made only for a moral and religious People”. And they tell us the Constitution, and America itself as the free country founded on the Constitution, are chiefly under threat not – as we observe – from Congressional socialists, revolutionaries in the schools and universities, violent anarchists in the streets, but from “secularists”.
Barr argued that “secularists” are now attacking the moral order that is the foundation of our liberty and threatening religious freedom in pursuit of their cause.
First is the force, fervor and comprehensiveness of the assault on organized religion we are experiencing today. This is not decay. This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular culture, the entertainment industry and academia, in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.
The threat is not that the government will establish a state religion; the threat is that the state will attack people for conscientiously practicing their own.
“The problem is not that religion is being forced on others,” Barr said. “The problem is that irreligion is being forced; secular values are being forced on people of faith.
What secular values? What secularists are fervently and comprehensively assaulting organized religion?
It may be that secularists and atheists on the Left are doing so. But are they doing it to force secularist values, or Leftist values which are secular?
We atheist conservatives are doing nothing like that. And we don’t know any secularists or atheists on the political Right who are actively trying to stop people worshiping this or that god or sets of gods. Most of us just think it is absurd to do so. (And we certainly don’t want a theocracy. If we saw any danger of that coming up we would attempt, fervently and comprehensively, to stop it.)
Mr. Barr cites an example which is typical of the intolerance of the Left. Not of atheists and secularists generally – though it affected a religious organization – but essentially of the Left:
One example he cites is the crusade the Obama administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court to force Americans – including the Little Sisters of the Poor – to act against their conscience by mandating that they buy insurance coverage for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs and devices.
But Barr recognizes that the ultimate battle is for the hearts and minds of America’s children.
“Ground zero for these attacks on religion are the schools,” he said.
He cited as one example an opinion issued by the Orange County Board of Education in California that said, “Parents who disagree with the instructional materials related to gender, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation may not excuse their children from this instruction.”
In other words, if you cannot afford to liberate your child from the government school, you must allow that government agency to teach your child that a boy can become a girl.
We share his indignation. That is not an atheist or a secularist reaction. It is common sense to repudiate such nonsense.
But the excellent Mr. Barr thinks that only Christian teaching – not science – can make the conclusive argument against the proposition that there are or can be more than two sexes.
Education is not vocational training. It is leading our children to the recognition that there is truth and helping them develop the facilities to discern and love the truth and the discipline to live by it.
Sounds good, but by “truth” he means the Christian religion.
We cannot have a moral renaissance unless we succeed in passing to the next generation our faith and values in full vigor.
“Our values” certainly.
“Our faith”? No. The less religion is taught to new generations, decidedly the better!
Wherever wars are being fought or threatened now, this month, this year, anywhere in our world, the cause in almost every case arises, burning hot and lethal, out of one or another religion’s “truth”.
The US and the Kurds: no debt owed 140
To serve another’s needs at the cost of disservice to one’s own, may be a virtue when a person does it (though we don’t think it is, any more than Ayn Rand did); but when a state serves the interests of another state at the cost of its own, it is incontrovertibly wrong. It is a betrayal of the people by their government.
President Trump, whose responsibility it is to serve American interests before all else and does so unfalteringly, recently announced that he was withdrawing US soldiers from a region of Syria where there are many Kurds, and letting Turkish troops enter the zone – as the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, intends they shall. The reaction of many conservatives, including Trump supporters, as well as liberals and Leftists, has been an outbreak of passionate concern for the Syrian Kurds.
“Turkey is the enemy of the Kurds and will surely slaughter them,” the cry goes up. “The Kurds have been our faithful allies. They helped us, and now we are abandoning them. Betraying them. Letting them down. Who will ever trust us again?”
Sober conservative voices have argued differently. Among them is Andrew C. McCarthy, from whose article in the National Review, disagreeing with that periodical’s editorial position, we quote:
The Kurds have been our allies against ISIS, but it is not for us that they have fought. They fight ISIS for themselves, with our help.
The US has helped the Kurds more than the Kurds have helped the US.
They are seeking an autonomous zone and, ultimately, statehood. The editorial fails to note that the Kurds we have backed, led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), are the Syrian branch of the PKK (the Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in Turkey. The PKK is a militant separatist organization with Marxist-Leninist roots.
During the Cold War, the PKK was one of a multitude of murderous terrorist organizations attacking Western interests all over the world, supported in one way or another by the Soviet Union. Russia has continued to support the PKK, and in retaliation Turkey has given material and diplomatic help to Chechnya in its terrorist war against Russia.
Like it or not (and we do not) –
Turkey remains our NATO ally, even though the Erdogan government is one of the more duplicitous and anti-Western actors in a region that teems with them.
McCarthy says he “would be open to considering the removal of both the PKK from the terrorist list and Turkey from NATO”. But he adds:
For now, though, the blunt facts are that the PKK is a terrorist organization and Turkey is our ally.”
(We aren’t entirely in agreement with him there. We too want to see Turkey removed from NATO, but we do not think the PKK should be removed from the terrorist list.)
Why did the US send its military into Syria?
Our intervention in Syria has never been authorized by Congress. Those of us who opposed intervention maintained that congressional authorization was necessary because there was no imminent threat to our nation. Contrary to the [NR’s] editorial’s suggestion, having US forces “deter further genocidal bloodshed in northern Syria” is not a mission for which Americans support committing our men and women in uniform. Such bloodlettings are the Muslim Middle East’s default condition, so the missions would never end.
ISIS is an atrocious organization, its savage cruelty so extreme as to render all words of horror and outrage inadequate for description of it. It cannot but be a good thing that it has been deprived of the territory it ruled with terror. But was anything it did forbidden by the religion in whose name it acted? It is Islam that threatens us all, the whole non-Muslim world.
Barbaric jihadist groups such as ISIS (an offshoot of al-Qaeda) come into existence because of Islamic fundamentalism. But saying so remains de trop in Washington. Instead, we tell ourselves that terrorism emerges due to “vacuums” created in the absence of US forces. On this logic, there should always and forever be US forces and involvement in places where hostility to America vastly outweighs American interests.
In ISIS’s “Caliphate” that appalling ideology could be, and has been, punished by defeat. And by defeating it, the US was serving its own interests. For the duration of the battle, US interests coincided with the interests of groups oppressed by ISIS, including the Kurds. But that battle is over. No debt is owed to those who fought with us.
The easily foreseeable conflict between Turkey and the Kurds is at hand. We are supposed to see the problem as Trump’s abandoning of US commitments. But why did we make commitments to the Kurds that undermined preexisting commitments to Turkey? The debate is strictly framed as “How can we leave the Kurds to the tender mercies of the Turks?” No one is supposed to ask “What did we expect would happen when we backed a militant organization that is tightly linked to US-designated terrorists and that is the bitter enemy of a NATO ally we knew would not abide its presence on the ally’s border?” No one is supposed to ask “What is the end game here? Are we endorsing the partition of Syria? Did we see a Kurdish autonomous zone as the next Kosovo?” (We might remember that recognition of Kosovo’s split from Serbia, over Russian objections, was exploited by the Kremlin as a rationale for promoting separatism and annexations in Georgia and Ukraine.)
It is true, as the editors observe, that “there are no easy answers in Syria”. That is no excuse for offering an answer that makes no sense: “The United States should have an exit strategy, but one that neither squanders our tactical gains against ISIS nor exposes our allies to unacceptable retribution.” Put aside that our arming of the Kurds has already exposed our allies in Turkey to unacceptable risk. What the editorial poses is not an “exit strategy” but its opposite. In effect, it would keep US forces in Syria interminably, permanently interposed between the Kurds and the Turks. The untidy questions of how that would be justifiable legally or politically go unaddressed.
President Trump, by contrast, has an exit strategy, which is to exit. He promises to cripple Turkey economically if the Kurds are harmed. If early reports of Turkey’s military assault are accurate, the president will soon be put to the test. … For a change, he should have strong support from Congress, which is threatening heavy sanctions if Turkey routs the Kurds.
Americans, however, are not of a mind to do more than that. We are grateful for what the Kurds did in our mutual interest against ISIS.
As they are to us?
We should try to help them, but no one wants to risk war with Turkey over them. The American people’s representatives never endorsed combat operations in Syria, and the president is right that the public wants out. Of course we must prioritize the denial of safe havens from which jihadists can attack American interests. We have to stop pretending, though, that if our intentions toward this neighborhood are pure, its brutal history, enduring hostilities, and significant downside risks can be ignored.
Scandalous Ukrainian connections 595
Clouds of scandal thicken round US politicians – Democrats and Republicans – who have had shady dealings with Ukraine.
It is alleged that Hunter Biden, son of Joe Biden, Obama’s vice-president and candidate for the presidency, and Chris Heinz, the stepson of John Kerry, Obama’s secretary of state, and James Bulger, nephew of mobster James “Whitey” Bulger who was killed in prison, have laundered millions of dollars from Ukraine and China through Latvia.
A witness for the prosecution in a $220 BILLION money laundering case concerned with transfers through Latvia, Aivar Rehe, has recently been found dead in his own yard. He was a former CEO of Danske Bank in Estonia, which has a reputation for money laundering.
Conservative blogger Peggy Traeger Tierney reveals details about US politicians’ connections, direct and indirect, to corrupt Ukraine business practices, at her website Real News Network:
Mitt Romney’s top adviser, Joseph Cofer Black, joined the board of the [corrupt] Ukraine energy firm, Burisma, while Hunter Biden was also serving on the board. Hunter Biden was taking a salary of $50,000 per month from Burisma …[Black] trained for covert operations and eventually became the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. …
VP Biden bragged on camera that he was able to force the former Ukraine President to fire a prosecutor who was investigating his son, Hunter, by threatening to withhold $1 BILLION in US loans from Ukraine – all with approval from Obama!
While Communist China ran $1.5 BILLION through the Biden/Heinz private equity firm to purchase US companies with military ties, John Kerry, as Secretary of State, approved questionable acquisitions that threatened national security, but enriched his family and friends.
(For more information about these unsavory dealings by John Kerry and his stepson go here.)
Kurt Volker, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO under Obama, and was just fired [by President Trump] as special envoy to Ukraine, is the executive director of the John McCain Institute.
Nancy Pelosi’s son, Paul Pelosi Jr., is involved in oil importing from Ukraine and his company, Viscoil, is under investigation for securities fraud.
(For more information about Paul Pelosi Jr. and Viscoil corruption go here.)
In 2015, Pelosi used the Air Force to fly her entire family to Ukraine at a cost of over $185,000. Nancy Pelosi’s legislative aide, Ivanna Voronovych, is from Ukraine and is connected to the Ukrainian Embassy, the Ukrainian military, the Ukrainian government and Ukrainian party life.
Pelosi and [Adam] Schiff are both connected to a Ukrainian arms dealer.
The arms dealer is Igor Pasternak. (For more information about the Schiff-Pasternak connection go here.)
The connection between Schiff and Pasternak is certain. The Pelosi-Pasternak connection less certain. She attended the fund-raiser Pasternak gave for Schiff.
We also know that Ukraine was involved in helping the Clinton campaign fabricate evidence against Paul Manafort to smear the Trump campaign. And the firm the DNC used to “inspect” Hillary’s email server, Crowdstrike, is funded by anti-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs and run by a man who used to work for Mueller at the FBI! …
Doesn’t it seem that the Congressional Democrats are taking a very big risk with their threat to impeach President Trump because he asked the new president of Ukraine to look into the Biden scandal? It must mean that the Biden scandal itself – largely ignored until now by the left-biased media – will be a focus of attention.
And one Ukrainian investigation will lead to another, such as the Schiff and Pelosi involvements. Many a dirty deal could be exposed – none of them involving President Trump, who is likely to be the only one to emerge from investigation far cleaner than a billion dollars laundered by a Baltic bank.
Whistling for another world 363
The first “whistleblower” mobilized by the tireless plotters again the President of the United States in their latest conspiracy, was faulted for not having first-hand knowledge of what he was snitching, and reproached for huddling with the lynch-mob Democrats in Congress round the cauldron in which his evil lies were brewed. So another one has been produced, nice and fresh, who, they say, has first-hand knowledge of the same alleged wrongdoing by the President, and has not been in the huddle. And if he is faulted for anything, another one will be found, and if necessary there will be another, and another.
The attorney “representing” – ie. recruiting – these snooping liars, set up an organization named Whistleblower Aid. It advertised for whistleblowers who could and would snitch on the Trump administration.
Jim Hayek writes about it at American Truth. We select parts of his article:
Mark Zaid, the activist attorney representing the so-called whistleblower at the center of the impeachment movement targeting President Donald Trump, says he is representing a second so-called whistleblower who spoke to the Intelligence Community’s inspector general about Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. Missing from the avalanche of news media coverage about Zaid’s two anonymous clients rocking the nation’s capital is that at the beginning of Trump’s presidency Zaid co-founded Whistleblower Aid, a small nonprofit that blasted advertisements around D.C. actively seeking whistleblowers during the Trump administration.
Whistleblower Aid is heavily tied to far-left activist organizations and Democratic politics.
ABC News broke the story on Sunday about the existence of the second so-called whistleblower speaking about Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The network reported :
Zaid tells ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos that the second person — also described as an intelligence official — has first-hand knowledge of some of the allegations outlined in the original complaint and has been interviewed by the head of the intelligence community’s internal watchdog office, Michael Atkinson.
Zaid says both officials have full protection of the law intended to protect whistleblowers from being fired in retaliation. While this second official has spoken with the IG — the internal watchdog office created to handle complaints — this person has not communicated yet with the congressional committees conducting the investigation.
In a tweet on Sunday, Zaid confirmed his firm is representing another so-called whistleblower. This one “has firsthand knowledge”, he tweeted without elaborating.
In his twitter profile, Zaid describes himself as a “non-partisan” attorney “handling cases involving national security, security clearances, govt investigations, media, Freedom of Information Act, & whistleblowing”. Missing from his twitter profile and from much of the the news media coverage about Zaid’s role representing the so-called whistleblowers in the impeachment scandal is that he co-founded Whistleblower Aid. That detail is also not mentioned in Zaid’s bio on his attorney website.
The Whistleblower Aid activists against President Trump “did not sit around waiting for whistleblowers”. From its inception “it actively sought to attract the attention of Trump administration government employees”. That’s what it was for. It was not secretive about its function and aims. Its ads for snitchers appeared on Metro trains, on”mobile billboards that circled government offices for 10 hours a day“. It’s workforce “handed out whistles on street corners as a gimmick to gain attention”.
Zaid doubles as Executive Director and founder of the James Madison Project, which says it seeks to promote government accountability. The Project features on its four-person advisory board John Podesta, who led Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, served as Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton and founded the Soros-funded Center for American Progress …
Zaid’s co-founder of Whistleblower Aid is John Tye. “He himself is a whistleblower. He is a former State Department official who went public in 2014 about U.S. government electronic surveillance practices”.
Tye’s bio on Whistleblower Aid’s proudly proclaim that he has worked for far-left groups.
The bio reads:
Mr. Tye has worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Avaaz, and also Southeast Louisiana Legal Services … He was on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is known for its anti-conservative stance and controversially publishes a “hate map” listing groups that warn about radical Islam such as Jihad Watch, the Clarion Project, the Center for Security Policy …
Tye’s other former employer, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), is financed heavily by billionaire activist and Democratic Party mega-donor George Soros and is known for its hyper-partisan liberal activism.
Avaaz, a radical group where Tye served as campaign and legal director, describes itself as a “global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere.” The group has repeatedly engaged in anti-Israel activism.
Channeling the mantra of radical community organizer Saul Alinsky, Avaaz says it aims to “organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.”
Amazingly, absurdly, these insurgent plotters and liars really believe that “people everywhere” want to live under Communism!
Avaaz was founded in 1997 by the Soros-funded, partisan MoveOn.org organization and by the Soros-funded Res Publica activist group. Tax forms from Soros’s Open Society document donations to Res Publica specifically earmarked for support to Avaaz. Res Publica oversees Avaaz activism.
Avaaz’s former general counsel and campaign director, Ian Bassin, in 2017 formed United to Protect Democracy. The latter is a grouping of former top lawyers for the Obama administration working to utilize legal advocacy methods to oppose Trump’s policies. [It] works in partnership with the Brennan Center for Justice, located at NYU School of Law. The Brennan Center is heavily financed by Soros’s Open Society Foundations and is the recipient of numerous Open Society grants.
(The Brennan Center for Justice is named after Supreme Curt Justice William Brennan – not John Brennan the Communist-voting probable Muslim, erstwhile head of the CIA, appointed by Obama.)
Also in the web of conspiring organizations is “CrowdStrike, the outside firm utilized to conclude that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee’s servers since the DNC would not allow the U.S. government to inspect the servers”.
CrowdStrike founder Dmitri Alperovitch is a nonresident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
The Atlantic Council is funded by and works in partnership with Burisma, the [UKRAINIAN] natural gas company at the center of allegations regarding Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
Breitbart News reported that a staffer for Rep. Adam Schiff’s House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence took a trip to Ukraine last month sponsored and organized by the Atlantic Council think tank. Schiff’s office denied any impropriety.
The Schiff staff member, Thomas Eager, is also currently a fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Congressional Fellowship. Burisma in January 2017 signed a “cooperative agreement” with the Council to sponsor the organization’s Eurasia Center.
Besides Burisma funding, the Council is also financed by Google as well as Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. and the U.S. State Department.
Google Capital also led a $100 million funding drive that financed Crowdstrike directly.
Google, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund and an agency of the State Department each also finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower’s complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country” in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the so-called whistleblower’s document and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower’s own claims …
One key section of the so-called whistleblower’s document claims that “multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani [Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s lawyer] had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov”.
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in order to discuss the “cases” mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower’s narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.
Joe Biden, when he was vice-president, corruptly threatened to withhold billions in aid to Ukraine unless the Ukrainian government stopped an investigation into the corrupt company Burisma, which was paying enormous sums of money to his son Hunter Biden in order to get Joe Biden to do just that.
But the Bidens are allowed to be corrupt by the Democratic Party. All Democrats, and their media lackeys, are allowed to be corrupt.
Corruption is only bad when President Trump is accused of it. Accusations against President Trump do not have to be true. Any number of whistleblowers recruited by Whistleblower Aid will bring stories to the Democrats to make it seem that the President is corrupt. And the ghost of Saul Alinsky will applaud them.

