Obama claims that the eight years of his presidency were free of scandal. In fact, the scandals were many and appalling.

Obama claims to have stopped Iran becoming a nuclear power. In fact, he entered into a deal that permitted Iran to become a nuclear power.

Obama claims to have improved race relations. In fact, he worsened them. 

Obama claims to have launched an economic boom. In fact, he never achieved even 3% GDP growth.

In sum, he was a weak and destructive president. The harm he did would not be easy to repair, and America is lucky to have found the man to succeed him who could not only mend what he had broken, and is doing so, but is going much further, turning the failure round and achieving success. Even some unprecedented successes. And all in record time.

Obama sees the repair as an undoing of the changes he wrought. As he puts it, “The status quo pushes back.”

The complaint comes from a speech he made at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Ill., on Sept. 7, 2018, when the university honored him with the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.

The speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the prize included these claims:

Each time we painstakingly pull ourselves closer to our founding ideals, that all of us are created equal, endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights; the ideals that say every child should have opportunity and every man and woman in this country who’s willing to work hard should be able to find a job and support a family and pursue their small piece of the American Dream; our ideals that say we have a collective responsibility to care for the sick and the infirm, and we have a responsibility to conserve the amazing bounty, the natural resources of this country and of this planet for future generations, each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. …

To which political party does that last sentence most aptly apply? We say the Democratic Party? But then, the Left has a habit of accusing its opponents of the faults, failings, bad emotions, plots, conspiracies, evil intentions, underhand actions, and failures of which itself is guilty.

Most of you don’t remember a time before 9/11, when you didn’t have to take off your shoes at an airport.

Did he mention who was responsible for 9/11 and for us having to take off our shoes at an airport? No. Because he never did and never will blame Islam for its acts of terrorism.

Most of you don’t remember a time when America wasn’t at war, or when money and images and information could travel instantly around the globe, or when the climate wasn’t changing faster than our efforts to address it.

A strange combination of references. No one living remembers a time when America wasn’t at war, if the Cold War is counted. About the money and images he probably meant “remember a time when they could not …”  And then he throws in as a certainty that there was a time when climate was not changing fast, but it is now.

And this was all before a change. What change? Have the wars stopped?

The only change he almost got right was a change to faster communications than ever before.

He claims that all three factors together brought about this consequence:

This change has happened fast, faster than any time in human history. And it created a new economy that has unleashed incredible prosperity.

Only, of the three phenomena he mentioned, could the faster communications be said to have promoted prosperity.

Actually, he just gabbled nonsense. And all to get in a claim to an “unleashed incredible prosperity” – the prosperity he claims as his own achievement.

He goes on to say how he rescued the economy from wicked men.

[T]he reckless behavior of financial elites triggered a massive financial crisis, ten years ago this week, a crisis that resulted in the worst recession in any of our lifetimes and caused years of hardship for the American people, for many of your parents, for many of your families. Most of you weren’t old enough to fully focus on what was going on at the time, but when I came into office in 2009, we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. 800,000. Millions of people were losing their homes. Many were worried we were entering into a second Great Depression. So we worked hard to end that crisis, but also to break some of these longer term trends. And the actions we took during that crisis returned the economy to healthy growth and initiated the longest streak of job creation on record. And we covered another 20 million Americans with health insurance and we cut our deficits by more than half, partly by making sure that people like me, who have been given such amazing opportunities by this country, pay our fair share of taxes to help folks coming up behind me.

While it is true that employment rose before he left office, his claim that higher taxes (on “people like me”) were a formula for prosperity is false. President Trump’s tax cuts (for all tax payers) prove it. Furthermore, Obama heavily regulated business, and President Trump’s lifting of many Obama regulations has been a factor in creating the very real present economic boom.

And by the time I left office, household income was near its all-time high and the uninsured rate had hit an all-time low and wages were rising and poverty rates were falling. I mention all this just so when you hear how great the economy’s doing right now, let’s just remember when this recovery started. …

He came on then to his foreign policy.

Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder. …

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history …

Nonsense! No generation is more “diverse” than any other.

… with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. …

[O]ver the past few decades, the politics of division, of resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.

Remember when a Republican Attorney General refused to prosecute a bunch of white people although they were breaking the law, on the grounds that he would not act against “his  people”? No. Neither do we. But we do recall Eric Holder- Obama’s black AG – saying something like that in a case of the Black Panthers …

This Congress has … embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi, or my birth certificate.

The trick: he throws out, in passing, that the (factually accurate) report of his failure to send help to a US ambassador and three servicemen who were killed by Muslim terrorists in Benghazi was a “wild conspiracy theory’, and associates it with an unproved, unlikely, and petty story that he was not born in the United States. But the horrible events in Benghazi were proved and profoundly important.

He comes to his own party’s wild conspiracy theory:

[The Repulicans in power are] undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia. What happened to the Republican Party? Its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against Communism, and now they’re cozying up to the former head of the KGB, actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from Russian attack.

And he calls the partial repeal of his unworkable health legislation “sabotage”:

Their sabotage of the Affordable Care Act has already cost more than three million Americans their health insurance. And if they’re still in power next fall, you’d better believe they’re coming at it again. …

He defends the media who gave him uncritical support in all he did, and never stp attacking President Trump. What is indefnsible in his eyes, is Trump hitting back at his media enemies. To do this, he lies again:

I complained plenty about Fox News – but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people.

We did hear that his administration “spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’ after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources”. (See our quotations from Matt Margolis below.)

Next, he endorses the lie that President Trump sympathizes with Nazis:

We’re supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we’re sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to Nazi sympathizers.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad.

How hard can it be to say that Islamic terrorism is bad? That Communism is bad? Too hard for him, it appeared.

Then comes the most blatantly impudent accusation of them all:

And we won’t win people over by calling them names, or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist, or sexist, or homophobic.

Who, every minute of every day, calls whom “racist, or sexist, or homophobic”? Or all three?

Matt Margolis comments at PJ Media:

Today we saw just how far academia is going to perpetuate the myth of Obama’s “scandal-free” administration when he was awarded the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government by the University of Illinois. Not since the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has Obama been so undeserving of an award. But, I submit that this award is even worse than the Nobel Peace Prize he didn’t deserve. In 2009, the Nobel committee was at least ignorant of what Obama’s record would turn out to be. There is simply no excuse in 2018 for Obama to be receiving an Ethics in Government award. … The Paul H. Douglas Award is now forever tainted.

What, exactly, did the committee at the University of Illinois think Obama did to earn an Ethics in Government award? The Obama years were plagued by scandal and defined by a hyper-partisan government.

Last month I cited six Obama scandals where a special counsel should have been appointed to investigate but was not. Unlike Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Obama’s attorneys general, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, were partisan lackeys who did everything they could to protect Obama from being held accountable. Obama, Holder, and Lynch knew that if they left the investigating to Republicans in Congress they could write them off as partisan witch hunts and use any and all tactics possible to obstruct and stonewall those investigations, or in some cases, run their own sham investigation that cleared them of any wrongdoing.

I document thirty different scandals in my book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama. Each scandal on its own makes the idea of Obama receiving an ethics award laughable. All of them together make this award blasphemous. From the moment Obama took office he was under a dark cloud of scandal, having been involved in illegal negotiations with [the condemned criminal] Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to give him a cabinet position in exchange for Blagojevich nominating an Obama-preferred candidate to his vacated Senate seat … yet Obama just received an Ethics in Government award? What a joke!…

There are plenty of well-known scandals that the committee that decided to award Obama had to have been aware of but chose to ignore. There was the Fast and Furious scandal, which involved sending guns to Mexico in the hopes of tracking them to drug cartel leaders. Not only did they lose track of a large number of guns, but one gun was found to have been used in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Obama administration tried to cover it up, and they stonewalled a congressional investigation, resulting in Attorney General Eric Holder being held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents. Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois?

The Obama administration also abused the Espionage Act to target reporters and their sources. They even spied on members of the media, illegally seizing the phone records of Associated Press journalists. Fox News reporter James Rosen called Obama “the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation” after being threatened with possible jail time for refusing to reveal one of his sources.  Is this what constitutes “ethics in government” to the University of Illinois? …

There were also –

The Solyndra scandal [see here], the Benghazi cover-up, Uranium One, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the covering up of thousands of deaths of veterans waiting for care at VA hospitals, manipulating intelligence, paying ransom money to Iran, Project Cassandra [see here], spying on Donald Trump, the Hillary email scandal, which I should add, also implicated Obama, who communicated with Hillary via her private email address and used a pseudonym himself.

It’s bad enough when Obama claims he was scandal-free. But, when he receives an ethics in government award, it diminishes the meaning of ethics. It’s time to stop pretending Obama was scandal-free or ethical. … I’ve only scratched the surface of Obama’s scandalous and unethical presidency. 

The only reason why Barack Obama was elected president was that he was black. He had nothing else to offer. A sufficient number of white Americans voted for him to get him into the White House for no better reason than that they needed to feel good, to prove to themselves, and the country and the world, that they were not “racist“.

Barack Obama, for all his expensive education, was ill-informed and strangely ignorant – and he embraced ideologies inimical to America. He seemed not to know how many states there were in the country he governed. He thought Austrians spoke a language called Austrian. He did not know how to pronounce “corpsman”. And he was a follower of the Communist “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, and a lackey of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He lied and commanded others to lie. Under his leadership, his party worked an elaborate plot, which it still pursues, to destroy the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump with false and slanderous allegations of treason.

If prizes were awarded for lying, Obama would deserve them all.

Many young voters, it seems, believe they really can have free education, free health care, free housing, and a guaranteed job at a sweet wage. “If that’s what Socialism will bring us, then let’s have it,” many of them are saying.

It is the responsibility of the conservative Right to impress on them that Socialism has never worked, that it cannot work, that under no circumstances and under no guiding hands can it ever possibly work. Far from landing them on rock-candy mountain with impressive degrees, strong bodies, neat houses, and a life of security and luxury, it will dump them in a bog of poverty, stagnation, sorrow, and serfdom.

Free goodies. That’s what the now-far-left Democratic Party is offering them. It is all the Democrats have to offer: a lie. And if the electorate is conned by it into putting them in power, its the steep way down to Venezuela for all of us.

If they are defeated in the November 2018 elections – ideally overwhelmingly defeated – a terrible fate will be avoided, and, in splendid addition, the Left may wither away and the advance of Islam may be stopped.

One way or another, we are entering a different world.

We select some passages from an article by Virgil at Breitbart about the passing of a man and an era:

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the week-long media extravaganza over John McCain’s death came on September 1, when Meghan McCain, daughter of the late senator, chose to use her “eulogy” to rip into Donald Trump.

Here’s how The Washington Post set the scene:

Trump was absent and his name never invoked, but the entire service was animated by a sustained rebellion against the president’s worldview and his singular brand of politics.

“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” she said, gritting her teeth through the tears. “The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

Okay, we get it: Ms. McCain hates Trump so much that she has to grit her teeth when she talks about him.  Trump and his supporters already knew that, of course. …

She is an expert in telling the Establishment what it wants to hear — and the Establishment will hugely reward her for her “courage”. Once again, the Post, that reliable reflector of Beltway conventional wisdom, sets the scene:

When she fiercely declared that “the America of John McCain has no need to be made great again because America was always great,” the generals, senators, former presidents and other world leaders who filled the pews burst into applause.

We might linger over those last words: “burst into applause”.  It’s worth recalling that this was supposed to be a funeral service, and yet Ms. McCain turned it into a kind of political rally for the Establishment and for what it sees as the “good old days”.  Ah, for the good old days of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, and … John McCain.  The days when the Establishment, for sure, was great — or at least greatly in charge.

Yes, in the Establishment’s collective mentality, the good old days were the time when the U.S. border was open, when trade deals were easy, and foreign wars were being fought.

The Establishment, of course, never cared that, as a result, social chaos was increasing, wages were declining,  regions were de-industrializing, and young Heartlanders — not Establishmentarians, of course — were getting killed and maimed overseas.  So when Meghan McCain defined those days as “greatness”, well, that was what the Establishmentarians came to hear.   She was patting the big shots on the back, and they were glad for the pat.  And John McCain, of course, was the champion of that sort of Beltway bonhomie — and, especially, the bipartisan “fun” of foreign wars.

Except when he was running for re-election in Arizona, McCain made no apologies for any of his views, even as they ultimately drove down his approval rating, among Arizona Republicans, to just 20 percent — with a whopping 68 percent disapproving.  Indeed, according to another poll, McCain was the third-most unpopular Senator in the nation.

Yet to the Establishment, such unpopularity is a badge of honor; that is, if a political figure is willing to “stand up” to the dopey masses, well, that’s a good thing.  So it’s little wonder that John McCain received the John F. Kennedy “Profile in Courage” award, that annual liberal smug-fest.  And now, maybe Meghan McCain will win it, too.

Indeed, Ms. McCain won extra points with the Establishment by snubbing Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor had been John McCain’s running mate in 2008, and had delivered what’s commonly regarded as the greatest vice presidential acceptance speech in modern memory. So if the McCain-Palin ticket lost in ’08, it certainly wasn’t her fault.

And yet to the Establishment — including the many McCain campaign staffers who now make their living on MSNBC — Palin was hopelessly deplorable. She was too much the populist and no kind of elitist. So by not inviting Palin to the service, the McCains made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with the Deplorables, now and forever. Thus we see that class warfare is alive and well within the Republican Party — assuming, that is, that the McCains still think of themselves as Republicans at all. …

The Establishment will cheer for Meghan McCain, and its handmaidens in the MSM were happy to make the whole of last week into a McCain Mediathon.  And yet at the same time, the Establishment is deathly afraid that it can’t put the old humpty-dumpty back together. … John McCain really is gone.

The American Establishment might know, down deep, that it has screwed up in its hubris — although, of course, that can never be admitted publicly. Can’t show weakness to the proles!

Nevertheless, the Establishment is visibly growing nervous. In its jitteriness, it is clapping wildly, and inappropriately, for those who still hold to the fading faith — such as the McCain family.

… The Establishment is raging against the dying of the light. … The elites know that this is their political twilight and that dusk is giving way to nightfall.

… Establishmentarians fear, most of all, that a new and different sun is rising.

Will it go on rising? Will it be a new day?

Or will the Left win and bring down a very long night?

Evidence of collusion between a US presidential candidate and Russians has been found aplenty. 

Only, the candidate was not Donald Trump, it was Hillary Clinton. 

Victor Davis Hanson discusses this at American Greatness, and concludes:

Mueller originally was appointed due to the contrived leaks from the Steele dossier — a misnamed document that was more likely cobbled together by Glenn Simpson and his wife of Fusion GPS for purposes of destroying Donald Trump’s candidacy and then presidency. Mueller must have analyzed carefully what amounts to this font of his entire investigation. And yet his team has so far shown no interest in whether their own foundational document was used fraudulently to obtain FISA warrants.

Mueller’s lawyers show little concern for whether Christopher Steele himself colluded with Russians to find his dirt, or whether Hillary Clinton’s hiring of Fusion GPS and Steele constituted a sort of Russian collusion in and of itself — or whether Steele was mostly a fraud whose distant espionage past was seen by the creative writers at Fusion GPS as useful window dressing in efforts to peddle and seed the fictitious dossier as the work of serious spooks.

Much less does Mueller worry whether John Brennan, former CIA Director, improperly seeded the dossier to various agencies to ensure it reached the media before the election, or whether FBI Director James Comey lied about its pivotal importance in obtaining a FISA warrant, or why Bruce Ohr, the fourth highest official in the Justice Department, before and after the election, was meeting with a fired Christopher Steele — supposed severed from FBI support — to pass along his further gossip and dirt to the FBI, fueled by the suppressed fact that Ohr’s wife was working with Steele and was a Fusion GPS operative intent on seeing her “research” fertilized in the right government agencies to delegitimize Trump.

… Mueller sought with the dossier to find wrongdoing elsewhere, when it was right under his nose all along.

Robert Mueller’s legacy … will be one of willful blindness: he saw nothing ethically or legally wrong, or dangerous to the republic, in a bought and fictional dossier that fueled … his own reason to be [special counsellor investigating “Trump collusion with Russia”], and in various ways was central to an historic [Obama] government effort to surveille, to infiltrate, to undermine, and to discredit a political campaign first and later to derail an elected presidency.

If Hillary Clinton’s complicated conspiracy involving collusion with Russians is not itself a crime, there was many a crime of fraud, deception, cheating, leaking, breaking rules as the conspirators implemented their foul plot.

But will the guilty be brought to justice? Will Americans know what happened – how dishonest were the people they trusted to keep them safe?

If there are to be no indictments, will the facts at least become generally known? Or is it possible that the Clinton-supporting mass media and the indoctrinators of distorted History in the schools and academies can keep the nation in perpetual ignorance of it? They seem to think they can.

It is no secret that the Obama administration sought to downplay the threat of Islamism, and even to co-opt some Islamist movements to promote its agenda. In its foreign policy, the administration expressed support for Mohamed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt, while domestically, the White House invited Islamists to design the government’s Countering Violent Extremism program. It is difficult to argue that these efforts were the product of anything but great naïveté and political dogma. Is it possible that this combination extended to deliberately funding an al-Qaeda affiliate?

Sam Westrop, whose investigative research was used for the video, is the director of Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

He writes (in part, but the whole article is well worth reading for more detail) at National Review:

The Middle East Forum has discovered that the Obama administration approved a grant of $200,000 of taxpayer money to an al-Qaeda affiliate in Sudan — a decade after the U.S. Treasury designated it as a terrorist-financing organization. More stunningly, government officials specifically authorized the release of at least $115,000 of this grant even after learning that it was a designated terror organization.

The story began in October 2004, when the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Khartoum-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), also known as the Islamic African Relief Agency (IARA), as a terror-financing organization. It did so because of ISRA’s links to Osama bin Laden and his organization Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.

According to the U.S. Treasury, in 1997 ISRA established formal cooperation with MK. By 2000, ISRA had raised $5 million for bin Laden’s group. The Treasury Department notes that ISRA officials even sought to help “relocate [bin Laden] to secure safe harbor for him”. It further reports that ISRA raised funds in 2003 in Western Europe specifically earmarked for Hamas suicide bombings. …

Despite this well-documented history, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in July 2014 awarded $723,405 to World Vision Inc., an international evangelical charity, to “improve water, sanitation and hygiene and to increase food security in Sudan’s Blue Nile state.” Of these funds, $200,000 was to be directed to a sub-grantee: ISRA. …

Mark Smith, World Vision’s senior director of humanitarian and emergency affairs, wrote to USAID, stating that the Islamic Relief Agency “had performed excellent work” for World Vision in the past, and that “putting contractual relationships in limbo for such a long period is putting a significant strain” on World Vision’s relationship with the Sudanese regime. Smith also revealed that World Vision had submitted a notice to OFAC indicating its “intention to restart work with [ISRA] and to transact with [ISRA]” if OFAC did not respond within a week. …

Then, incredibly, on May 7, 2015 — after “close collaboration and consultations with the Department of State” — OFAC issued a license to a World Vision affiliate, World Vision International, authorizing “a one-time transfer of approximately $125,000 to ISRA,” of which “$115,000 was for services performed under the sub-award with USAID” and $10,000 was “for an unrelated funding arrangement between Irish Aid and World Vision.” …

Obama-administration officials knowingly approved the transfer of taxpayer dollars to an al-Qaeda affiliate, and not an obscure one but an enormous international network that was often in the headlines. …

Now we know that the [Obama] government deliberately chose to transfer at least $115,000 to ISRA after confirming that it was on the terror-designation list. In other words, an al-Qaeda front received taxpayers’ money with the apparent complicity of public officials. 

US Diplomacy explains: The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is an independent agency of the U.S. Government that works closely with the State Department and receives overall foreign policy guidance from the Secretary of State.

Obama’s State Department apparently shared his view that the US needed to be humbled and Islam exalted. Hence his government’s promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood followed by its even more outrageous submission to the demands of the Iranian theocracy. Both policies were enthusiastically implemented by former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. And no doubt there are “deep state” operatives still inside the Department who even now, with (Trump-loyal) Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, remain faithful to the Obama sentiment.

We seldom argue with atheists of the Left. We seldom argue with the Left. We find the attempt to be, almost always, a nugatory exercise. Leftism is a religion, and religions are not to be argued with. Faith and Reason exclude each other.

A religion need not have a god in it. Atheists on the Left can and do reason against the existence of a deity, but not against the doctrines of collectivist ideology such as: the community must be organized; the economy must be planned; the purpose of government is to control and direct the lives of the people to serve the general interest.

This time we make an exception. We raise arguments with certain statements that seem reasonable, but are not, because – we want to demonstrate – they are premised on dogma.

We quote an article from Patheos Friendly Atheist, a Humanist website. As far as we can discover, all self-named humanists and all Humanist organizations are on the Left (although there is nothing about Humanism as such that makes Leftism logically necessary to it). Patheos is no exception.

Patheos Friendly Atheist’s most frequent columnist, Hemant Mehta, writes:

Here’s a really important development in the world of organized atheist activism.

On Thursday [July 19, 2018], the American Humanist Association launched what they’re calling the Humanist Legal Society.

I’d call it the atheist equivalent of the conservative Federalist Society: A way to identify, bring together, and support those in the legal professional who are dedicated to maintaining church/state separation, science-based evidence, civil rights (especially for marginalized people), and ethics in government.

You know… all the things conservatives no longer give a damn about.

The statements we have stressed in bold provide us with an opportunity to make clear how the issues we are concerned about, the values we hold, and the judgments we make according to the information we acquire, are opposed to the issues, values, and judgment of Hermant Mehta, the Humanist Legal Society, and the Left in general.

1.”The atheist equivalent of the conservative Federalist Society”

To start with, he does not, or they do not, really mean “the atheist equivalent”. The Federalist Society is not a god-concerned institution. What is meant is a “leftist-humanist equivalent”.

So what is the Federalist Society?

This is what the members of the Federalist Society say about themselves under the heading,

Our Purpose

Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.  The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.

This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law.  It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors.  In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.

The first paragraph makes it perfectly clear that the Federalist Society opposes “a centralized and uniform society”.

The second and third paragraphs provide a summary of certain core conservative principles: “that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be”; that individual liberty is a prime value, along with “traditional values, and the rule of law”. The Federalist Society works to restore “the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors.” To this end it has “created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network” in the world of the legal profession.

Plainly, this new association is intent on reinforcing the very “orthodox liberal ideology” that the Federal Society exists to overcome.

The Humanist Legal Society’s purpose is to defend “a centralized and uniform society” that does not believe in the state’s prime duty to preserve individual freedom, traditional values and the rule of law. It would hold that the duty of the judiciary is to say what the law should be, not what it is. It would exist to preserve all that the Federalist Society finds wrong with “the current state of the legal order”. There is no equivalence between the cause of individual freedom protected by the rule of law and the cause of collectivist state-dictatorship. The Humanist Legal Society might be called the “counterpart” of the Federalist Society, but not its “equivalent”.

2. “All the things conservatives no longer give a damn about”

2.1″Church-state separation”

Conservatives want the Constitution to be preserved intact. They want no variation of the First Amendment, the separation of church and state clause. So to say that “conservatives no longer  give a damn about church-state separation” is a lie.

2.2 “Science-based evidence”

Mehta may be referring here to the belief among Christians, many of whom are also conservatives, in Bible literalism, and their rejection of evolution. But Bible literalism, or any variety of Creationism, is not a core principle of conservatism.

What is also probably being referred to here is the widespread skepticism among conservatives that climate change is caused – dangerously – in our time by human activity. We are unwilling to go over the arguments as to why we conservatives are skeptical about it, but they can be found easily. One of our own posts revealing the vicious motivation behind the Anthropological Global Warming (AGW) movement, The real enemy is humanity itself, may be found here.

The Left maintains that the science of AGW is “settled”. That in itself is an unscientific statement. It is a dogmatic statement.

All real science is ardently encouraged by most conservatives. American conservatives are delighted that NASA is returning to the exploration of space under President Trump’s leadership, after Obama had told the space agency to concentrate on outreach to Muslims!

Furthermore, as gathered by the Heritage Foundation …

Conventional wisdom holds that it’s conservatives who are anti-scientific morons, and liberals who are devotees of reason, science, and evidence. But as the The Chapman University Survey on American Fears reveals, that accusation is based on nothing but prejudice.

As The Washington Post summarizes it, “Democrats were slightly, and in some cases significantly more likely than Republicans to believe in paranormal phenomena.” From fortune telling to astrology, liberals live in a world of spirits. At least belief in Bigfoot is bipartisan. 

The Chapman study shouldn’t surprise anyone. A 2011 Pew Research Center study similarly found that liberals were more likely than conservatives to believe in the evil eye, spiritual energy, reincarnation, communication with the dead, and of course fortune tellers and ghosts.

2.3 “Civil rights”

Since President Trump was elected, the civil rights of his supporters have been violently interfered with by  militant organizations of the Left. Instance are numerous, but one of the most egregious was the violent action of masked ANTIFA thugs at Berkeley on February 1, 2017. There are no such violent militant organizations on the conservative Right interfering with anyone’s civil rights.

Towards the end of the article “letting the government dictate what a woman can do with her body”  – meaning her “right” to abort a child she has conceived – is raised, probably  to be understood as a civil rights issue. The Left consistently refuses to allow that when there is another body inside a woman, the law has to extend its protection to that other, helpless, human being.

2.4″Marginalized people”

The Left is obsessed with race and sex. What matters about you, according to Leftist ideology – propounded continually by ever-more-lefty Democrats – is your race, your descent, your ethnicity, your sex and sexual proclivity. Not your individual worth, your talents, your achievements. And they like to pretend that women, non-whites, and those classed as  “LGBT”, are “marginalized” in the United States.

American women are the most privileged class of person that has ever existed in the history of humankind.

And in fact, far from it being “LGBT” persons, it is white men and the sexually normal who are marginalized wherever the Politically Correct and the Social Justice Warriors have power – notably in the academies.

As for blacks – it is ironic and outrageous that Democrats should virtue-signal themselves as the champions of blacks. Democrats whose party defended slavery and segregation; Democrats who  launched and exclusively manned the KKK; who passed the Jim Crow laws; who consistently opposed every effort the Republicans made to give equal rights to blacks! A black woman professor, Carol Swain, explains in this video how that was really the case. And now it is the Democratic Party that insists on the humiliating policy of affirmative action, based on the notion that blacks cannot compete unless whites (and Asians) are handicapped!

2.5 “Ethics in government”

The Left makes wild unsubstantiated accusations against President Trump of every kind of moral offense from his being given two scoops of ice-cream when everyone else was only given one, to his being a “racist” and a “sexist”, and even a “traitor” for meeting with Vladimir Putin and not throwing the Russian leader’s crimes in his face. Meanwhile, in a manifestation of deliberate amnesia, the Left ignores the indisputable fact that the Obama administration was deeply morally disgraceful, guilty over and over again of scandalous turpitude. Its inaction over the appalling events in Benghazi on 9/11/12, to recall just one of the scandals, marks Obama’s terms in office as a period of ethical baseness hard to outmatch in the history of the United States. And how ethical was it to give permission to the hostile regime of Iran to build a nuclear arsenal in a few years’ time?

Mehta quotes:

“Many lawyers approach the world and the law from a humanist standpoint, but there is a need for them to have a way of organizing professionally as a group,” said the Society’s president, David Codell, a nationally recognized constitutional litigator who has served as counsel in many major cases involving LGBT rights. “The Humanist Legal Society will give humanist lawyers solidarity and resources that will make a difference.”

No. It is against the iniquitous Left, with its religious intolerance, its betrayal of science, its denial of civil rights to everyone it disagrees with, its marginalization of whites, and its lack of moral responsibility, that lawyers, judges, law students and professors need to band together. And fortunately they have done so, in the Federalist Society.

What actually was discussed by the presidents of the US and Russia at Helsinki on July 16, 2018?

Was anything achieved, anything agreed between them that will have an effect in reality?

Were the leaders of these two powers, who together have more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons under their control, able to find common cause in at least some troubled areas where their militaries are or might be engaged?

Angelo Codevilla writes at American Greatness:

The high professional quality of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s performance at their Monday press conference in Helsinki contrasts sharply with the obloquy by which the bipartisan US ruling class showcases its willful incompetence. …

Having taught diplomacy for many years, I would choose the Trump-Putin press conference as an exemplar of how these things should be done. Both spoke with the frankness and specificity of serious business. This performance rates an A+.

Both presidents started with the basic truth.

Putin: The Cold War is ancient history. Nobody in Russia (putting himself in this category) wants that kind of enmity again. It is best for Russia, for America, and for everybody else if the two find areas of agreement or forbearance.  

Trump: Relations between the globe’s major nuclear powers have never [since the Cold War? – ed] been this bad — especially since some Americans are exacerbating existing international differences for domestic partisan gain. For the sake of peace and adjustment of differences where those exist and adjustment is possible, Trump is willing to pay a political cost to improve those relations (if, indeed further enraging his enemies is a cost rather than a benefit).

In short, this was a classic statement of diplomatic positions and a drawing of spheres of influence.

As Putin listed his agenda, he showed that today’s Russia is a status quo power, whose primary objective is stability. Having come to power over a country diminished and dispirited, he sought to recover as much as possible of what Russia had lost in the Soviet break-up. He forcibly took back parts of Georgia and Ukraine. In doing so, he pushed against open doors.

Today, no other doors are open. Now being ahead, he wants to stop the game. He knows that this is possible because nobody is going to wage or even risk war against Russia to try disgorging Abkhazia and Crimea. He wants Trump to acknowledge that. Warning against extending NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, he signaled that all else is negotiable.

He also has rebuilt Russia’s military and wants to protect its edge by persuading Trump to keep US missile defense in its current dysfunctional mode. This is an inflexible demand that deserves an equally inflexible rejection. Trump had already delivered it by ordering the establishment of the US Space Force.

By securing his naval and air bases in Syria, Putin succeeded in returning Russia to warm-water sea power. That required backing the Shia side in its intra-Muslim war against the Sunni in Syria, while the United States backed the other side. Today Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey are much as Putin wants them. He wants Trump’s acknowledgment of this status. Russia continues to argue to Americans that both countries have suffered far more from Sunni terrorism — ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood — than from the Shia version.

The two made clear that their commitment to stability in the Middle East outweighs support for either side, and signaled wider cooperation, especially on military matters.

Trump, leaving no doubt that America’s commitment to Israel’s security is absolute, faced Putin with the choice of partnering with America in restraining Iran or of being drawn into an Israeli-American war against an Iran with whose forces Russia’s are interwoven. Putin, for his part, seemed to concur with Trump’s priority. That along with tripartite security consultations with Israel is likely to cool Iran and Hezbollah’s ardor for war.

Trump signaled that America’s interest in Eastern Europe lies in re-establishing peace there, and in safeguarding the independence of its states. Poland and the Baltic States are not just NATO members, but also close to the American people’s hearts. By stressing peace, he made clear that America does not intend to make its defensive commitments there the occasion for a war at or beyond the extreme reach of American power.

Though Russia has backed North Korea in the past, Putin signaled that he is not happy with its acquisition of a modern nuclear force that is effectively China’s pawn. He seemed to promise pressure on North Korea to denuclearize — something that would displease China. Though that was a minor part of both sides’ press conference, it may well signal both sides’ recognition of their mutual interest in not letting China become the Western Pacific’s overlord. Such an understanding would be no minor achievement.

The American ruling class’s attribution of the 2016 election to Trump-Putin collusion, which has characterized US-Russia relations for two years, provided the press conference’s fireworks. Both denied any such thing and insisted there was no evidence of it. In response to a question about whether Putin would make available the 12 Russian state intelligence employees indicted for interference in that election to Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Putin pointed to the existence of a treaty of cooperation on criminal matters and promised Mueller that access to the accused through the treaty.

This led to the final flourish. The Associated Press reporter demanded that Trump state whether he believes the opinions of US intelligence leaders or those of Putin. It would be healthy for America were it to digest Trump’s answer: The truth about the charge that Russia stole the contents of the Democratic National Committee’s computer server is not to be found in the opinions of any persons whatever. The truth can be discovered only by examining the server in question—assuming it has not been tampered with since the alleged event. But, said Trump emphatically, those making the accusations against Russia have refused to let the server be examined by US intelligence or by any independent experts. What is the point of accusations coupled with refusal of access to the facts of the matter?

The classic texts of diplomatic practice teach that diplomacy advances the cause of peace and order only to the extent that its practitioners avoid contentious opinions and stick to demonstrable facts.

The AP reporter, who should be ashamed, is beyond shame. Then again, so are the ruling class representatives who have redoubled their animus against Trump. Cheap partisanship is not all that harmful. It is the transfer of domestic partisan animus to international affairs, however, that has the potential to start wars. …

What that ignorant “journalist” was demanding of Trump — precisely what the credentialed experts should know better than to have demanded — was that the president of the United States scream at the president of Russia for all his evils. Competitive “virtue signaling” has become the way of political life in America. To the extent that it bleeds into America’s foreign policy, we are all in big trouble.

It did not, and will not, “bleed into America’s foreign policy” through President Trump. Though his style of negotiating is to be frank and straightforward, he knows, through long experience, how to maintain an atmosphere of amicable goodwill which makes agreement easy where it is possible.

Contrast this meeting with the silly performance that a giggling US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, put on with her failed “Reset” act when she met the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on March 6, 2009, in Geneva; a farce which simply signaled to the Russians that Obama’s America was a push-over.

From the Obama-Clinton “reset’, Russia made all the gains. The US agreed to reduce its nuclear arsenal by a third (which Vice-President Biden hailed as a victory for the US!). Obama broke a US promise to Poland and the Czech Republic to provide them with missile defense systems and radar stations because the Russians were furious at the very idea. The Russians proceeded to destabilize Ukraine, shoot down a civil aircraft in Ukrainian airspace – and annex the Crimea. Though Obama drew a “red line” against the Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad, using chemical weapons against his own people, he did nothing about it when Assad crossed the line by gassing the population of Ghouta, an area in southwest Syria, in August 2013. In the following month, the egregious John Kerry, successor to Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, claimed to have reached  an agreement with the Russians whereby they would reign Assad in, to prevent such a horror being perpetrated again. Russia, he was confident, would oversee the destruction of Assad’s arsenal of sarin and mustard gas and the facilities for their manufacture. Needless to say, Russia did no such thing.

True, we have yet to see the long-term results of any understanding reached by the two presidents at Helsinki. But of this this we can be sure: Vladimir Putin will have understood that Donald Trump is not a man to be trifled with.

And busily at work fulfilling his messianic mission.

He goes by the name George Soros.

[Soros] confessed to having harbored “potent Messianic fantasies since childhood”, telling reporters: “It is a sort of disease when you consider yourself some kind of god, the creator of everything, but I feel comfortable about it now since I began to live it out.”

Jack Montgomery reports at Breitbart:

Italy’s deputy prime minister and minister of the interior Matteo Salvini has infuriated billionaire plutocrat George Soros, claiming the financier wants to flood Europe with migrant “slaves”.

The Lega (League) leader, who has surged in popularity since coming to office as head of one half of Italy’s new populist coalition government, made the comments in an interview on the In Onda television programme.

Salvini accused the convicted insider traderof financing the so-called civil society NGOs which have been racing the Libyan Coast Guard to pick up illegal migrants from smuggler boats a few miles off the North African coast, in order to ferry them to distant European ports.

“Soros wants to fill Italy and Europe with migrants,” Salvini told La7 TV viewers, adding that he “would like Italy [to become] a giant refugee camp because he likes slaves”.

Brilliant! Salvini found a soft spot and plunged the knife in where it obviously really hurt.

The populist later shared the comments on his social media, so they could be seen by an even wider audience. Open Society Foundations, Soros’s flagship NGO into which he recently poured 18 billion dollars, has now issued a furious denial, demanding Salvini stop “repeating these and similar false statements about Mr Soros”.

Yes, Salvini is a populist. The new government of Italy is a populist government. Populist movements are arising and growing all over Europe. Patriotic nation-state supporters, passionately against their countries being colonized by Islam. And gratefully inspired by President Trump.

Salvini has challenged the financier and his foundation before, claiming the NGO and its partners have made it their business to promote uncontrolled immigration, liberalization of drug use, and social policies which undermine the family and promote alternative lifestyles and gender identities.

And those are only some of the destructive plans this – not very smart but very cunning – mastermind of subversion works at night and day.

Without over-dramatizing, it can be fairly said that George “the Messiah” Soros is the arch-enemy of Western civilization.

“So no more families with a Mum and Dad. Isn’t it way better to have an ‘open society’ with six dads, three mums, 18 great-grandparents, and six cousins, who also change gender according to the mood of the day? … And sometimes they smoke pot together!” [Salvini]  quipped sarcastically.

“This is the project they [Soros and his minions] want to leave to our children. Why? Because then you no longer have a man or a woman — you have a number, an item, with no rights, no history, no thought, no nationality, no identity… They are very well organized enemies, and they are very rich,” he warned.

“But we’ll prevail. Because history tells us that when peoples wake up and realize that they are in danger, they react.”

Soros is not active only in Italy, being a key co-ordinator and funder of the elite campaign to overturn the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, and a determined foe of the anti-mass migration Hungarian government, which has warned against his network of “reliable allies” in the European Parliament.

He is extremely popular among the global establishment, however, being greeted in the style of a visiting head of state by President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, and holding many more recorded meetings with the Brussels executive than Britain’s Theresa May since the EU referendum.

George Soros also funds many – possibly all – of the anti-America anti-West groups in the US.  (For a list of them, and much more about him, see Discover the Networks here.)

But perhaps the title of this post should be Another messiah is here. Because there have been a great many self-named or acclaimed with that appellation. None of them has done the human race any good. Some have done much harm. George Soros can be classed among the worst of them in intention – though not the most effective.

As a bringer of sorrow and spreader of grief, he started his messiahship in his childhood by collaborating with the Nazis. For which he denies feeling any guilt – though he calls Nazism”a great evil”.  Now in his late eighties, he labors on in the service of evil.

The sums he lavished out of his own enormous fortune on subverting governments in Eastern Europe and South America (Hungary, Macedonia, Albania, Romania, Colombia) were generously  supplemented by (unwitting) American tax-payers. Obama’s State Department handed him $9,000,000 to help him subvert the government of Albania.

Will George Soros be allowed to “live out” his messiahship “comfortably”?

The conscientious people at Judicial Watch are doing what they can to acquire evidence of his guilt.

If they get it, perhaps the keen and energetic US Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, will have his Department of Justice investigate Soros with a view to indicting him.

Okay, okay! We only said “perhaps”. And yes, perhaps “keen and energetic” is an exaggeration.

Something that seems to have eluded comment, though it is particularly disturbing and puzzling, is that the FBI and DOJ bosses named by the inspector general in his report as having used their positions to try keeping Donald Trump out of power, and bringing him down from it, were passionately intent on helping a crook into the White House.

They knew, better than anybody – since they worked hard to cover it all up – that Hillary Clinton was crooked, corrupt, venal, lying, hypocritical and incompetent. And yet they fervently strove to get her elected to the presidency!

What does that say about them? What does it say about the politics of the Democratic Party who nominated a scoundrel as their candidate for the highest office in the land? Isn’t it obvious that to put an incompetent crook in power is to court disaster? Did they shut that logical understanding out? If so, why? What advantage in her election did they see that eludes common sense and overrides prudence?

Reason is baffled. So let’s consider emotion. What emotional need cries out for a leader who could only take the country into steep decline? What weird immoral passion?

How do they square with their conscience the sneaky spiteful steps they took to slander Donald Trump, to stitch him up, to lie about him in order to destroy him?

We are not talking about the dwindling audiences of CNN and the gullible readers of the New York Times – uninformed and misinformed people who swallow what they’re told; who can believe that “Trump is Hitler” because they know nothing about Hitler; who burble nonsense about being “on the right side of history” in imitation of their idol Obama. We are talking about the servants of the nation, the highly educated, the highly paid, the most trusted.

Is it the same intense emotion that compels European leaders to invite Islam to occupy, conquer and subdue their countries? Self-hatred? Life-hatred?

All our questions in this post are rhetorical. But opinions are welcome as always.

Jacki Pick, host of the Jacki Daily radio show and former Counsel to the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution Subcommittee, reveals that the Obama administration required the Department of Homeland Security to “scrub terrorist databases”.

And on the subject of protecting the enemy, Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page:

On September 4, 2001, Robert Mueller took over the FBI …

[He] fought alongside [James] Comey against surveilling terrorists. Materials involving the Muslim Brotherhood were purged. Toward the dawn of the second Obama term, Mueller met with CAIR and other Islamist groups and a green curtain fell over national security.

But the surveillance wasn’t going anywhere. Instead it was being redirected to new targets.

Those targets were not, despite the wave of hysterical conspiracy theories convulsing the media, the Russians. Mueller’s boss was still quite fond of them. Barack Obama did have foreign enemies that he wanted to spy on. And there were plenty of domestic enemies who could be caught up in that trap.

By his second term, the amateur was coming to understand the incredible surveillance powers at his disposal and how they could be used to spy on Americans under the pretext of fighting foreign threats. ….

While the Mueller purge was going on, Obama was pushing talks with Iran. There was one obstacle and it wasn’t Russia. The Russians were eager to play Obama with a fake nuke deal. It was the Israelis who were the problem. And it was the Israelis who were being spied on by Obama’s surveillance regime.

But it wasn’t just the Israelis.

Iran was Obama’s big shot at a foreign policy legacy. As the year dragged on, it was becoming clear that the Arab Spring wouldn’t be anything he would want to be remembered for. By the time Benghazi went from a humanitarian rescue operation to one of the worst disasters of the term, it was clearly over.

Obama was worried that the Israelis would launch a strike against Iran’s nuclear program. And the surveillance and media leaks were meant to dissuade the Israelis from scuttling his legacy. But he was also worried about Netanyahu’s ability to persuade American Jews and members of Congress to oppose his nuclear sellout. And that was where the surveillance leapfrogged from foreign to domestic.

The NSA intercepted communications between Israelis and Americans, including members of Congress, and then passed the material along to the White House. Despite worries by some officials that “that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress”, the White House “believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign”.

The precedent was even more troubling than it seemed.

Obama Inc. had defined its position in an unresolved political debate between the White House and Congress as the national interest. And had winkingly authorized surveillance on Congress to protect this policy in a domestic political debate. That precedent would then be used to spy on members of the Trump transition team and to force out Trump’s national security adviser.

National security had become indistinguishable from the agenda of the administration. And that agenda, like the rest of Obama’s unilateral policies, was enshrined as permanent. Instead of President Trump gaining the same powers, his opposition to that agenda was treated as a national security threat.

And once Obama was out of office, Comey and other Obama appointees would protect that agenda.

We still don’t know the full scope of Spygate. But media reports have suggested that Obama officials targeted countries opposed to the Iran sellout, most prominently Israel and the UAE, and then eavesdropped on meetings between them and between figures on the Trump team.

Obama had begun his initial spying as a way of gaining inside information on Netanyahu’s campaign against the Iran deal. But the close election and its aftermath significantly escalated what had been a mere Watergate into an active effort to not only spy, but pursue criminal charges against the political opposition. The surveillance state had inevitably moved on to the next stage, the police state with its informants, dossiers, pre-dawn raids, state’s witnesses, entrapments and still more surveillance.

And the police state requires cops. Someone had to do the dirty work for Susan Rice.

Comey, Mueller and the other cops had likely been complicit in the administration’s abuses. Somewhere along the way, they had become the guys watching over the Watergate burglars. Spying on the political opposition is, short of spying for the enemy, the most serious crime that such men can commit.

Why then was it committed?

Yes, WHY?

To understand that, we have to go back to 9/11. Those days may seem distant now, but the attacks offered a crossroads. One road led to a war against our enemies. The other to minimizing the conflict.

President George W. Bush tried to fight that war, but he was undermined by men like Mueller and Comey. Their view of the war was the same as that of their future boss, not their current one, certainly not the view as the man currently sitting in the White House whom they have tried to destroy.

Every lie has some truth in it. Comey’s book, A Higher Loyalty, his frequent claims of allegiance to American ideals, are true, as he sees it, if not as he tells it. Men like Comey and Mueller believed that the real threat came not from Islamic terrorists, but from our overreaction to them. They believed that Bush was a threat. And Trump was the worst threat imaginable who had to be stopped by any means.

But WHY?

Daniel Greenfield has an answer which he explains:

What Comey and Mueller are loyal to is the established way of doing things. And they conflate that with our national ideals, as establishment thugs usually do. Neither of them are unique. Washington D.C. is filled with men and women who are registered Republicans, who believe in lowering taxes, who frown at the extremities of identity politics, but whose true faith is in the natural order of government.

Mueller and Comey represent a class. And Obama and Clinton were easily able to corrupt and seduce that class into abandoning its duties and oaths, into serving as its deep state against domestic foes.

It is a plausible answer. But we do not and cannot really know why some people – a large number of intellectuals – feel more anger about a reaction to terrorist criminality than to the crimes themselves. We do not and cannot know why highly educated Westerners – children of the Enlightenment – admire, and even desire to protect, the deeply immoral religion of Islam.

We agree with what follows:

Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? It’s the old question of who watches the watchmen that no society has found a good answer to. And the answer is inevitably that the watchers, watch themselves and everyone else. What began as national security measures against Islamic terrorism was twisted by Obama and his deep state allies into the surveillance of the very people fighting Islamic terrorism.

Spygate was the warped afterbirth of our failure to meaningfully confront Islamic terrorism. Instead, the political allies of the terrorists and the failed watchmen who allowed them to strike so many times, got together to shoot the messengers warning about the terror threat. The problem had never been the lack of power, but the lack of will and the lack of integrity in an establishment unwilling to do its job.

After 9/11, extraordinary national security powers were brought into being to fight Islamic terror. Instead those powers were used to suppress those who told the truth about Islamic terrorism.

… through an Australian living and working in the United States, Professor Philip Alston.

The UN – aka Evil HQ – despises and condemns this free republic.

Dan Calabrese writes (to the citizens of the United States) at Canada Free Press:

You should all be ashamed of yourselves. The United Nations says so.

Six months ago, the UN sent a “human rights investigator” to find out if the poor are worse off under Donald Trump, which of course he and the UN had already decided was the case before he ever got here. He spent a little time here, visited a few run-down areas, and referenced some obsolete census data. Philip Alston, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty, called on U.S. authorities to provide solid social protection and address underlying problems, rather than “punishing and imprisoning the poor”.

While welfare benefits and access to health insurance are being slashed, President Donald Trump’s tax reform has awarded “financial windfalls” to the mega-rich and large companies, further increasing inequality, he said in a report.

Which was, of course, totally untrue. Everyone except the super-rich benefit from the tax cuts.

U.S. policies since President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s have been “neglectful at best”, he said.

“But the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship,” Alston said.

Almost 41 million people live in poverty, 18.5 million of them in extreme poverty, and children account for one in three poor, he said. The United States has the highest youth poverty rate among industrialized countries, he added.

“Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate … and the highest obesity levels in the developed world,” Alston said.

Oh, happy is the country whose problem is that its people are too fat!

However, the data from the U.S. Census Bureau he cited covers only the period through 2016, and he gave no comparative figures on the extent of poverty before and after Trump came into office in January 2017.

The Australian, a veteran U.N. rights expert and New York University law professor, will present his report to the United Nations Human Rights Council later this month.

It is based on his mission in December to several U.S. states, including rural Alabama, a slum in downtown Los Angeles, California, and the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico.

Actually bothering to rebut this point-by-point would be an exercise in absurdity, but the defining fact here is that this fool wants to blame Trump for all this while citing December 2016 census data to support all his points.

As for his view of the problems and the cause/effect, let’s just say Americans have been debating for centuries the best economic and societal policies to employ, and the debate continues, but apparently that’s all over now that a “UN human rights investigator” has pronounced from on high how things are.

Remember, this is the same UN that has allowed the likes of Syria, Iran and Cuba to serve as members of its Human Rights Commission, and that blames Israel for every bit of violence that occurs in the Middle East. The UN is a complete joke. Can someone tell me again why we bother to pay for the privilege of membership in this schlock organization?

A very bad joke. A very bad institution.

The UN must be destroyed!