RealRobert🇺🇸
@Real_RobN
And this is,

the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Ratcliffe,

the FBI was ordered by Barack Obama not to arrest Hillary Clinton for espionage in violation of — 18 U.S. Code § 793. Gathering, transmitting or los defense information. In fact, James Comey effectively served as Hillary Clinton’s personal attorney.

James Comey: “What I can assure the American people is that this investigation was done honestly, competently and independently. No outside influence of any kind was brought to bear.”

CIA John Ratcliffe: “Lisa Page confirmed to me under oath that the FBI was ordered by the Obama DOJ not to consider charging Hillary Clinton for gross negligence in the handling of classified information,"

Transcript excerpt of his interview with Page:
John Ratcliffe: Okay. So let me if I can, I know I'm testing your memory, but when you say advice you got from the Department, you're making it sound like it was the Department that told you: You're not going to charge gross negligence because we're the prosecutors and we're telling you we're not going to –
Ms. Page: That is Correct.

"The bipartisan FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 directs the Administration to hire the maximum number of air traffic controllers. That’s what the law says, so the Administration must rescind this ridiculous executive order,” Ranking Member Larsen said. “Hiring air traffic controllers is the number one safety issue according to the entire aviation industry. Instead of working to improve aviation safety and lower costs for hardworking American families, the Administration is choosing to spread bogus DEI claims to justify this decision. I'm not surprised by the President’s dangerous and divisive actions, but the Administration must reverse course. Let’s get back to aviation safety and allow the FAA to do its job protecting the flying public.”

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, was illegal but stopped short of allowing a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Texas to go into effect. The three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit ruling on the case restricted the scope of the injunction to Texas to allow further appeals.

DACA is, in my opinion, the toughest part of the illegal immigration catastrophe facing the United States to solve. DACA enrollees arrived in the United States as very young children when their parents or guardians illegally immigrated. They are culturally American and frequently can't speak the language of their home country and have no family or social ties to it. There are an estimated 580,000 DACA enrollees. //

DACA started out as a 2012 memorandum signed by Obama DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. It was never an executive order. It never went through the rule-making process required by the Administrative Procedure Act. It has never been enacted into law by Congress. Ordinarily, any memo by a cabinet secretary ceases to have validity when they leave office, not so with DACA. When President Trump’s DHS secretary rescinded the DACA memo based on the advice of the Attorney General of the United States, the Supreme Court held, in a 5-4 vote (guess how the Chief Justice voted), that the Trump administration was required to follow the Administrative Procedure Act to withdraw a memo that was never subjected to that act, ... //

The case is headed back to the Supreme Court, minus the rather stupid issue of whether a single memo by a cabinet secretary can masquerade as the law of the land.

Iran thundered in apocalyptic prose: Israel will be destroyed! Death to America! Destroy the infidels! Kill the Jews! The future is ours!

General Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, smugly told the media, “Iran’s response to the Zionist aggression is definite. We are capable of destroying all that the Zionists possess with one operation.”

At least, Fadavi felt that way on October 31, when he issued that statement. Since then, America had a pretty big presidential election. (You might’ve heard about it.) But if you haven’t, here’s the highlight: The crazy, scary Orange Man is back in the saddle.

And suddenly, Iran’s singing a dramatically different tune.

It was released on Thanksgiving Day, so most people probably didn’t see it, but The New York Times released a fascinating story yesterday: “With Trump Returning and Hezbollah Weakened, Iran Strikes a Conciliatory Tone.”

The sub-header: “As Iran faces domestic and foreign challenges, its bellicose rhetoric on the United States and Israel has given way to signs that it wants less confrontation.”

The contrast is striking: Just weeks earlier, Iran was vowing to utterly eviscerate its enemies. No compromises, no exceptions! And remarkably, the world was largely falling into line: Biden even pressured America’s allies to “respond in proportion” to Iranian missile attacks on civilian targets.

But after Election Day? Even The New York Times noted the Iranian sea change:

In mid-November, Iran dispatched a top official to Beirut to urge Hezbollah to accept a cease-fire with Israel. Around the same time, Iran’s U.N. ambassador met with Elon Musk, as overture to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s inner circle. And on Friday, it will hold talks in Geneva with European countries on a range of issues, including its nuclear program.

Get ready for the money quote:

Five Iranian officials, one of them a Revolutionary Guards member, and two former officials said the decision to recalibrate was prompted by Mr. Trump winning the Nov. 5 election, with concerns about an unpredictable leader who, in his first term, pursued a policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran. [emphasis added]

During the Nixon years, we called it the madman theory: When foreign adversaries cannot predict the actions of a “mad” U.S. president, they’re suddenly risk-adverse. It’s a very old idea: Niccolo Machiavelli wrote in 1517 that sometimes, it’s “a very wise thing to simulate madness.”

But there’s nothing “mad” about it.

All nations make risk-reward calculations. //

Flawed worldviews lead to flawed results.

Iran isn’t motivated by insecurity; Iran is motivated by self-interest. When you’re not a superpower, your actions aren’t driven by utopian ideals, but risk-reward calculations: How much can we get away with before the cost is too great?

During the Obama-Biden-Harris years, they read the numbers one way. With Trump, it’s an entirely different calculation.

It’s not just morning again in America: It’s morning again in the Middle East, too.

In their 2020 report, Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., exposed how the GSA “secretly handed over the first Trump team’s privileged and confidential information to the FBI” (Federal Bureau of Investigation), even as the FBI played political games with the infamous and unfounded counterintelligence probe into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Grassley at the time served as chairman of the Senate’s Finance Committee. Johnson led the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The report, titled “Don’t Brief the Trump Team: How the GSA and the FBI Secretly Shared Trump Transition Team Records,” details how the FBI and then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office trampled all over the transition team’s private property rights. https://links-1.govdelivery.com/CL0/https:%2F%2Fwww.finance.senate.gov%2Fdownload%2Fcommittee-report_-gsa-and-trump-transition/1/010001936e6d3951-b8b527a2-58d3-479c-9d46-f64e7a7c706d-000000/Kn3v3ppYuup1odtt5SAvm4pzrLUXOBKz0X45tmGIvNw=381. //

On Dec. 19, 2017, the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee received a letter from Trump for America general counsel Kory Langhofer. In the letter, Langhofer stated that “the GSA provided Trump for America’s records to the special counsel without giving prior notice, obtaining its consent, or providing it an opportunity to review the records for privilege or relevance.” The committee reviewed and confirmed the information. //

GSA’s creepy conduct led to the Presidential Transition Enhancement Act, a bill introduced by Sen. Johnson that requires advance notice if either party intends to deviate from the memorandum of understanding. Trump signed the bill into law in March 2020.

In other words, the Trump-Vance Transition Team confirms it has the requisite ethics plan and will post it on the GSA website as required under the Act, but oh, by the way, it won't be availing itself of taxpayer funding or government buildings or technology via the GSA. Chalk that up to Trump learning the hard way the pitfalls of trusting too readily in an outgoing administration.

Hans Mahncke
@HansMahncke
·
Follow
Trump says that his transition team will not use government resources because they want to save money. However, this is merely a smokescreen. What's really happening is that Trump has learned from past experiences, particularly what they did to @genflynn during the previous… Show more
4:17 PM · Nov 26, 2024

Black Magic
an hour ago
What is thoroughly disgusting about these actions are some of the core issues that need to be addressed and put to bed for good.

I'm 71 years old, and I grew up in an America that experienced social upheaval on the scale of george floyd riots except it was the Martin Luther King assassination, wars that people poured into the streets to protest against and what, at one time, was considered the ultimate threat to our country, the assassination of our President.

Through all of this and much much more, all the way up till the end of the last century, we had one constant we could all count on, we were all Americans and had each other's backs. We would fight like cats and dogs over various things but just like family (at least the way I was raised) you never abandoned each other and you ALWAYS stuck together to fight an existential threat to your family.

Then we were confronted with Barack Obama, the man that was going to pull us all together and end the divisions in America. Instead we got the great divider that stirred up racial passions and destroyed nearly all of the advances we had made in race relations. It turns out, that was intentional and most likely entirely playbooked by Saul Alinsky, an avowed marxist and communist admirer. We were literally being pyshoped by a sitting President and his communist/marxist advisers - and likely other communist countries that saw an opportunity they NEVER thought they would have.

Trump was born of this self inflicted division and chaos from the woke left and attacked non stop his entire Presidency and afterwards, as they truly feared he had what it took to turn the tide back to American greatness and patriotism.

Then the questionable (not in my opinion) loss to pos biden and the same enemies of America raised their heads again and doubled down on their divisiveness and attacks on anything and anyone that loved and yearned for the America of old to return. All of the conspiracy theories we have been told were nonsense are being exposed to sunlight and we are finding they were not theories at all but actual conspiracies.

I hope they BURN those associated with this FEMA scandal/conspiracy and make an example so harsh no one will consider this type of action again. The most recent election has shown Americans want to go back to the days of working together to improve and strengthen America and the minority votes President Trump received show it is popular across the entire racial spectrum.

We want to be the America that shows the world how it is done and with the mandate Trump has been given and the desire of the electorate to throw away all of the division and ginned up racial animosity we can go back to the days of Tip O'Neal and Ronald Reagan when opponents respected each other and would fight for their ideas but could have a beer at the end of the day and congratulate our opponents on their victories and tell each other,"I'll get you next time" in good natured sportsmanship, something sadly lacking recently but I believe on the horizon and making a comeback.

I am very much looking forward to the progress America is going to make going forward and can easily imagine the reinvigorated greatness to come.

Thank you God for this opportunity.

Turnout is roughly the same as it was four years ago, but it’s casting some suspicious vibes among many about the 81 million votes cast for Joe Biden. The pandemic election was arguably fraught with shenanigans, including midnight vote dumps with unverified mail-in ballots. That's why the Republican National Committee and the party's activist wing did an excellent job of having a legal brigade ready to file lawsuits and challenges on voting processes this time. Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a prime example, where voters were illegally turned away, leading to a challenge and a judge extending the early voting period. On the county's last day of early voting, the lines were long, and the locations were still understaffed, but everyone who waited cast their ballot. Trump eventually won the county, another first for a Republican since 1988.

Once again, Trump won virtually all the bellwether counties, like in 2020, but Biden won then.

Disgraced Propagandist
@DisgracedProp
·
Follow
2004 Kerry - 59M
2008 Obama - 69.5M
2012 Obama - 65.9M
2016 Clinton - 65.9M
2020 Biden - 81.3M
2024 Harris - 66.4M

Somebody needs to go to jail for this.
10:29 AM · Nov 6, 2024

Nathan Hughes
@rallynate
·
Follow
Obama got 69M votes.
Kamala got 68M votes.

But they want us to believe Joe Biden somehow got 81M votes and won, despite losing nearly every bellweather county?

They raided our homes and sent us to jail for asking where those extra 13M votes came from.
4:19 AM · Nov 7, 2024 //

And it’s not insane, tin foil hat stuff—a Chinese student in Michigan illegally voted, but the vote will count because there’s no mechanism to flag these fraudulent ballots. And we all know he wasn’t the only one, but the pandemic is over, and voter integrity measures were passed and enforced this time, for the most part. //

Sean Davis
@seanmdav
·
Follow
That thing that never happens just happened again.
Election Wizard
@ElectionWiz
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Two women, one of them a USPS carrier, were arrested last week for attempting to illegally cast over a dozen ballots in Mesa County, Colorado, after stealing the ballots from the mail.
10:22 PM · Nov 11, 2024

Sam Grant
an hour ago
They spiel hate, hubris and hypocrisy until they lose. After that it's fake humility. //

Anna DM
an hour ago
I'm interpreting this as a call to their street thugs to step back and not explode in a destructive rage. They know their Left-wing storm troops are ready to start Floyd-like violence and they are trying to put the kibosh on that. //

Tech in RL
5 hours ago
Why are these people congratulating Hitler for wrecking the country? It’s as if they didn’t believe their rhetoric. //

reddotbluestate
4 hours ago
You bastards called us every name in the book for 8 years+. You smeared us at every opportunity.

Never once did you extend an olive branch and acknowledge that we love our country and are promoting the ideas that we sincerely believe are best for us all.

No, you threw accusation after accusation. Racists, sexists, homophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, misogynist. You divided every person in the country into categories and accused us of hating every last one of those categories.

Your behavior has been pure evil - and now you want grace and reconciliation?

Based on recent IAEA reports, one nuclear watchdog group concludes that Iran has completed all the steps needed for full nuclear weapons breakout and — whenever it makes the decision to go nuclear — could produce up to nine nuclear warheads in a month, and 15 in five months. Moreover, it was discovered last year that Iran has built a new nuclear facility under a mountain near Natanz that is so deep underground that it might be beyond the reach of conventional weapons. With this facility, it will be able to make nuclear warheads even faster.

Whatever the scope of Iran’s secret nuclear activities, it almost certainly has not been producing nuclear weapons. Rather, what Iran has been trying to do in secret is get ready to produce nuclear weapons. In order to engage in serial production of nuclear weapons, Iran will need the far-flung facilities that it has developed under the guise of a civilian program. All it has to do is to stop cooperating with the IAEA and withdraw from the NPT (whether formally or de facto) so that it can pull a veil of secrecy over the entire program.

From that point forward, we will have to assume that Iran is a nuclear weapon state. North Korea didn’t conduct its first test of a nuclear device until 2006, but by then the U.S. had long since been forced to accept the high probability that it was a nuclear weapons state.

Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT will result in a cascade of disastrous consequences. Saudi Arabia has said that if Iran gets the bomb, it will get one, too. Turkey and Egypt are then likely to join the club. And consider how desperate Israel’s position will become. It will have to assume not just that any ballistic or cruise missile launched from Iran could be nuclear-tipped, justifying the use of its own nuclear deterrent, but that Iran could smuggle a nuclear device into Tel Aviv with plausible deniability that it had done so. //

As practiced by Iran and its proxies, on the other hand, missile terrorism is an entirely different kind of threat, as the July War itself had shown. The 100+ rockets that Hezbollah fired at northern Israel every day for a month caused few casualties. But they scared a third of Israel’s population into bomb shelters for weeks. Many Israelis started leaving for the United States, in many cases indefinitely.

Hence, missile terrorism poses a threat to the existence of Israel that is far beyond the potential casualty figures: A state that cannot make its people feel safe going about their daily lives, that can’t even keep its airports open because of terrorism, is in danger of failing. Whereas Palestinian terrorism targets Jews for the sheer satisfaction of murdering them, Iranian terrorism targets Israelis’ faith in the state of Israel. Iran has realized what too many Israeli leaders have not: that missile terrorism is an existential threat. Missile defenses such as Iron Dome have lulled too many Israelis into thinking that the threat is manageable. It isn’t.

So here is the question. After holding back from helping Hamas in its confrontations with Israel for nearly 20 years, why did Iran decide to join the fight this time? Perhaps Iran sensed a unique opportunity to combine the missile terrorism of all its proxies and the mayhem that antisemites and wannabe terrorists could cause in Western cities and universities to deliver a fatal blow to the morale of Israel.

Maybe. But alas, Iran’s decision to fight Israel now was likely part of a much more dangerous plan. //

The NPT allows states to withdraw with 90 days’ notice. When North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 1993, it waited to see what America’s reaction would be. When it seemed that Clinton might be prepared to use force, North Korea went down to the wire and “suspended” its withdrawal from the NPT a few days before the 90 days were up. North Korea then bluffed its way to nuclear weapons by threatening to unleash war on the Korean peninsula, a real bluff considering North Korea’s dictatorship could not have survived three days of such a war.

We should expect similar gamesmanship from Iran. We are at “the River” in Texas Hold’em. All the community cards have been revealed. Iran has a weaker hand than its enemies but is willing to risk far more. Israel is keeping its cards close to the vest, American surveillance and leaks notwithstanding, but its one ace — nuclear weapons — is worthless now. America has by far the strongest hand in the round, but it has become risk-averse to the point of torpor: its increasingly besotted national security establishment equates deterrence with provocation, which is the strategic equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Iran likes its chances.

Obama Undermined the Diplomatic Option to Stop Iran’s Nuclear Program.

When Iran’s nuclear program was first discovered in 2003, the U.S. could have nipped it in the bud with a single airstrike. The argument against that move at the time (and against military action since) was that Iran would quickly reconstitute the program.

If that was the right answer, it was the wrong question. The military option on Iran’s nuclear program has to be assessed in terms of what Thomas Schelling would call a “tacit negotiation” between the U.S. and Iran: Properly conceived, the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program would be an important but incidental benefit of military force; the right goal — as with sanctions — would be to convince Iran to abandon the program.

And for that strategic objective, the target list is much broader and includes everything the regime needs to survive in the short term. That means oil refineries, power plants, ports, and military command-and-control, up to and including Iran’s Ministry of Defense and the offices of the Atomic Organization of Iran. Targeting any of those early on could have fatally undermined the internal influence of Iran’s nuclear hawks.

Solving problems before they become crises is always a good idea. In international relations, the time to stop a dangerous deterioration in the status quo is at the start, before it has run its course. That is the single most important lesson of the chain of events that led to World War II, and it is particularly true in the case of a rogue nuclear program. It would have been much easier to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions when it had just one pilot facility that it half-expected somebody to bomb at any moment.

Now the nuclear weapons program is the crown jewel of the Islamic Revolution, to which the mullahs have subordinated all other priorities. As Henry Kissinger wrote, in order to avoid the use of force, it is sometimes necessary to threaten its use. Because we have not done that, we are now playing defense at the one-yard line and may have no other option.

Though its chances of success were never very high, there was a diplomatic option for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program — until President Barack Obama cashiered it in his Joint Comprehensive Plan Action (JCPOA), one of the most consequential examples of aiding and abetting terrorism in world history.

During the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. was able to orchestrate a powerful Iran sanctions regime, backed by the U.N. Security Council with the support of Russia and China. That was a remarkable feat considering that Iran is an important client of Russia and China is more dependent on Iranian oil than any other major economy. Obama, to his credit, built on those sanctions, which soon brought Iran’s economy to the brink of collapse. In 2014, Iran’s currency lost more than half its value.

But just in the nick of time, Obama came to the mullahs’ rescue with the JCPOA, which dismantled the sanctions regime and provided Iran with a massive infusion of cash, just to secure Iran’s forbearance to go nuclear for a few more years. Needless to say, Iran took the money and ran.

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. moved quickly to abandon the JCPOA. But alas, its benefits for Iran had already largely accrued. Obama’s cash infusion (which his dunce Secretary of State John Kerry had promised would not be used for terrorism) allowed Iran to lavishly fund the IRGC and Hezbollah. Even worse, the international sanctions regime could not be resurrected. The U.S. imposed “maximum pressure” through sanctions of its own, but while those exacted a heavy price, the reality was that Obama had fatally undermined the diplomatic option for stopping Iran’s nuclear program.

In the supposed interest of peace and stability, the U.S. has waited until its most virulent enemy is in a position to turn the world upside down. The moment that the mullahs have been waiting so patiently for, suffering through decades of sanctions and privations, is finally here. They have a nuclear weapon within their grasp. They need but seize it, knowing that the odds of America’s folding are in their favor, and overwhelmingly so, as long as Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is in power.

All Iran needs to do now is withdraw from the NPT, and it will be a brave new world.

CurtTX53
2 hours ago
Seems to me many people liked Obama, because of his charisma, his supposed, coolness. I’ll give him this, he was good at reading speeches, but would fumble and stumble about when answering questions, would draw out his answer to the point of everyone wanting to go home after he answered just one question, in the last hour and ten minutes. He sure could filibuster with the best of them in response. He stood at the podium for an hour and forty five minutes answering all three questions asked, in the allotted time.

In my experience he is and was the most divisive leader this Country has ever seen ! Set the racial divide back seventy years at least. Definitely did nothing to unite the people. A sad chapter for the US of America. //

anon-jzji
2 hours ago edited
Obama has wildly succeeded in turning this country into bitter factions- it is he who started the woke movement. He continues to work behind the scenes to Cloward & Piven the country. He's done untold illegal things in the shadows, emboldened by the media's compliance. In terms of effectiveness, I'd say he was a success. //

It's worth noting that Politico's headline reads "Harris to join Michelle and Barack Obama on the Campaign Trail." Last I checked, it's the vice president who is running and being joined on the campaign trail, yet the press, in all their slavish devotion, still gives deference to the Obamas. //

If the Obamas had the ability to sway elections, Hillary Clinton would be finishing up her second term right now.

I think it is inarguable that the military created by Joe Biden and Kamala is only fractionally as effective as the military under Trump. And even in Trump's first term, the rot of DEI and "gender equality" had already taken root. The failure of Biden and Harris is made clear every day as the only way the services make their manpower goals is by cutting end strength. //

The official and institutional embrace of sexual fetishes as a normal part of the military has been shocking. The clips Trump shows are nowhere near as bad as the situation really is. //

Kamala HQ @KamalaHQ
·
Trump says he will “fire” America’s military generals and replace them with MAGA loyalists, echoing Project 2025

12:24 PM · Jun 2, 2024 //

FOX NEWS: Are you going to fire those generals? The woke generals at the top?

TRUMP: Yes, I would get rid of them. Yeah. But see, now I know them. I didn’t know them before. But, you know, I came in, what do I know? I was a New York real estate person. But no, I’d fire. I would fire them. You can’t have woke military. //

If Trump intends to politicize the military, filling the ranks with loyalists, it sets the stage for a dramatic and fundamental change in how the United States is supposed to operate.

I'd encourage this guy to review how Thomas Jefferson dealt with known Federalist Army officers or ponder the fact that the military is not the civil service. The military is not an independent power center that has "equities." The president is the commander-in-chief. Every commissioned officer is appointed at each step of his career by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. I have a copy of the Congressional Record when the Senate voted to make me a second lieutenant. No one is advocating a partisan military, but Trump and many of us would like to return to the days when active-duty general officers, or even retired general officers, stayed out of partisan politics and basic standards of civilized behavior adhered to; see General Mark Milley Reportedly Stocking Up on Brown Trousers in Case Trump Is Reelected – RedState. The president has the right, and I would argue the duty, to ensure that senior officers faithfully execute his will and not sandbag him behind his back.

The former president has lashed out at generals before, but this was new. Trump apparently envisions a system in which U.S. military leaders will be subjected to some kind of ideological review, in which members of a task force — whose members will presumably be appointed by Trump — will go about assessing the generals’ and admirals’ personal attitudes.

Those deemed “woke” will apparently see their military careers curtailed.

What could possibly go wrong?

There is nothing wrong with Trump doing just that, and the worst results of that process would not be as bad as what we've seen with the military being suborned on a wholesale level by the left. //

ColderWeather
2 days ago
Step 1: Politicize the military
Step 2: Complain about the politicization of the military when someone tries to depoliticize it //

polyjunkie
2 days ago
The (false) assumption by this leftist tool is that the CURRENT military leadership is somehow apolitical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Obama retired hundreds of officers who didn’t support his view of the military, enabling the remainder to be politicized to implement the leftist agenda. Trump needs to purge (yes, the correct term) any officer at any level who supports the “woke” agenda and has implemented DEI policies from the last administration. If the leftist don’t like it, tough doo doo.

Oh, and call Miley back to active duty so he can be reduced in rank and court martialed. //

anon-kvbw
a day ago edited
Obama was the one who purged the military of officers who believed in the rule of law and constitutional governance. All Trump proposes is righting the ship. //

DoctorB92 anon-kvbw
a day ago
I was Army during the Obama reign of terror and I don't recall the number but he purged hundreds of Army officers at the general down to the colonel level because of their lack of social conscienceness or something like that. He forced warriors out and put in politicos and now we are continuing to reap the fruits of that disaster.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the occasion of an interview at the Aspen Security Forum to announce that Iran “is now probably one or two weeks” away from having enough fissile material to construct a nuclear weapon. The real news is that Iran may already have a bomb. //

What is much more likely is that the Iranians have a nuclear weapon on hand. In February 2023, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl told the House Armed Services Committee that Iran could make enough fissile for one nuclear bomb in "about 12 days." If they could make enough material for a bomb in "about 12 days" a year and a half ago, there is no reason to assume they didn't. There is nothing in the behavior of the Biden White House that could have possibly deterred them. Just last month, the official White House estimate was 18 months (see How Close Is Iran to Getting Nuclear Weapons? New Info Alarms Intelligence Officials). //

Blinken, of course, tried to blame it all on the Trump administration for leaving the Obama-conceived Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that guaranteed Iran a path to owning a bomb without troublesome sanctions by calling Iran out for cheating (Trump Says Iran Is Violating Nuclear Deal and the Left Goes Bonkers (VIDEO) and BREAKING. President Trump's Remarks on Leaving the Iran Nuclear Deal – RedState).

The real fault lies in a strategy based on nothing more than the hope that a terrorist state dedicated to the destruction of the United States could be convinced to forgo developing a nuclear weapon by bribing them.

According to Politico, many well-known legal and political commentators have been getting together on previously unreported, weekly off-the-record Zoom calls to talk about the lawfare against former President Donald Trump. //

The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment. //

Laocoön of Troy
11 hours ago
Same thing they did with JournoList back in the day. Some of the same people too. Krystol, Rubin, and others among the upscale NYC/National Review crowd.

the 1906 Antiquities Act. The century-plus-old law allows the commander-in-chief to unilaterally place additional public lands under enhanced federal protections by executive order.

While a national park is a large swath of land protected by an act of Congress, land with a “national monument” designation protects a “specific natural, cultural or historic feature.” The 1906 law, however, requires that the area preserved must be “the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

President Obama had a habit of violating the law’s mandates to establish quasi-national parks without congressional approval. President Biden is carrying on the tradition. //

Designating public lands under monument status strips the multiple-use mandate that allows residents to capitalize and more freely recreate on public property.

By turning most of health care into what amounts to regulated utilities, Obamacare forced mergers and acquisitions within the sector.

A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighting a new antitrust investigation against the nation’s largest health insurer represents a variation on a long-standing theme. In this instance, as in prior occurrences, the Justice Department and federal officials are trying to undo the harmful effects of a law — Obamacare — that has led industry giants throughout the health sector to consolidate.

Recall that, four election cycles ago, then-candidate Obama promised in 2008 that his health care plan would lower premiums by an average of $2,500 per family. That premiums continue to rise unabated shows the failure of Obamacare by Obama’s own standards — and the anti-competitive behavior the law has engendered explains why. //

But Warren gave away the plot by citing the title of a blog post in her letter: “How Obamacare Created Big Medicine.” It’s the perfect summation of why, as Donald Trump said in social media posts around the time of Warren’s letter, “Obamacare sucks.” And the Justice Department’s investigation into UnitedHealth provides an implicit admission that even President Biden and his administration agree.

Given what we know now, a coronavirus pandemic that emerged out of Wuhan more than three years ago seems less like a coincidence. Yet Daszak of EcoHealth has been the most vocal lab-leak theory denier. Among his efforts to shut down any public discussion of the lab-leak theory, the most infamous one was that he organized a group of scientists to co-sign a letter published by Lancet, denouncing the lab-leak theory without disclosing his conflict of interest (his intimate collaboration with the WIV). //

The leaked Project DEFUSE documents are a reminder, according to Chan, who commented on X, “This is a pattern of dishonesty. Clearly, we cannot take the word of conflicted parties. It is urgently important that the public and investigators gain full access to all EcoHealth documents relating to WIV research.” //

Democrats and corporate media’s collective silence and the lack of curiosity about the virus’s origin are likely driven by two reasons. First, they cannot blame the origin of Covid on Trump because the NIH funding occurred under former President Obama. Any investigation of Covid’s origin will inevitably lead to the questionable conduct of Anthony Fauci, former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, and his allies at the NIH, from underwriting the WIV’s gain-of-function research to suppressing the lab-leak theory since the beginning of the pandemic.

Second, the Democrats and corporate media’ conduct during the pandemic has shown that they were only interested in taking advantage of a crisis to grab more power and expand their control over the country and the American people. Public health prevention is their last concern. Therefore, it is up to concerned citizens and independent media to keep searching for truth and demanding accountability.

While nearly everyone agrees that it was a colossal intelligence failure on the part of Israel and its allies that led to the slaughter on October 7, the ensuing war in Gaza, and other instability in the region, the little-known truth is that it was US military aid to Lebanon provided by Joe Biden's national security brain trust that effectively prevented Israeli intelligence from sniffing out the plan and preventing the attack.

To understand this, one has to look at our history with Lebanon since the Bush (43) administration. If you find yourself asking how the United States ended up funding the internal security apparatus that rolled up Israel's intelligence networks and blinded them to the coming storm, the answer is a lot like the character Mike Campbell in his novel "The Sun Also Rises" explaining how he became bankrupt: "Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” //

In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah fought a nasty little war. Even though Lebanon was a virtual Iranian satrapy under the de facto control of Hezbollah, the Diplomatic SmartSet® reasoned that we needed to try to retain some influence. As a result, we began a program of providing training and equipment to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and their Internal Security Forces (ISF). It wouldn't take a genius to figure out what would happen. Still, the logical and foreseeable consequences of training the ISF when Iran politically dominated the country were beyond the grasp of a Harvard Kennedy School grad.

The training and equipment paid immediate dividends to Hezbollah as the ISF began trading Israeli agents and sources to Hezbollah in return for survival. This is from an account of a 2009 Lebanese operation.

The chief of Lebanon’s domestic security forces had a warning for the Hezbollah commander: “You’ve been infiltrated.”

With that, Achraf Rifi, head of the U.S.-backed Internal Security Forces, handed over evidence showing that two trusted, mid-ranking Hezbollah commanders were working as informants for Israeli military intelligence, said a high-ranking Lebanese security official with knowledge of the April 2009 meeting. //

With the rise of ISIS and the effective dissolution of Syria, more money was directed to the LAF and ISF because they were viewed in Foggy Bottom as the glue that was holding Lebanon together. Money to supply the LAF and ISF with equipment and training continued under Obama and grew under Trump. By 2020, the US was spending $242 million annually in Lebanon, up from $213 million in Obama's last year in office.

The training and equipment were excellent because the ISF rolled up 15 Israeli espionage networks in their next round of arrests that took place in December 2021. //

The above report places the beginning of planning and training for the October 7 massacre of Israeli civilians in the late summer of 2022. This was carried out while a US-trained, equipped, and funded Lebanese counterintelligence service provided operational security for the Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran planning and training period. As if to underscore the abject failure of the "retain influence" and "glue that holds Lebanon together" crowd, no one in the ISF, which we had trained and equipped for over a decade and whose salaries we were paying, dropped a dime to US intelligence or diplomatic personnel.

None of this is to say that the Biden national security goat rope knew the attack was coming, but it is hard to see how the outcome differed from being an active participant. Had we not been overawed by our cleverness and let Lebanon descend into its natural state, which is chaos and violence, Hamas would not have had a secure area in which to plan and to train, and the coming attack would probably have been discovered and prevented. //

Author's Note: My primary resource for this story is "Eyeless in Gaza" https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/america-leaves-israel-eyeless-in-gaza

We don't have a ‘problem’ on the border. We have a Biden immigration policy, which is working perfectly, if you're a hard-left person, which is destroying American identity, it's crippling the rule of law.

It is flooding the country with people who haven't been trained into the culture, don't necessarily understand how to function in our society and create all sorts of problems. //

And I think we don't realize yet this is a deliberate policy by people who want to undermine America, change it profoundly, and eliminate all of those crazy ideas like the Constitution, the rule of law, the work ethic, meritocracy, actually being able to know and do something. //

If you'd told me not so long ago that a U.S. president would deliberately undermine our security and actively flout our laws, I would have thought you were nutters and that it was a crazy conspiracy theory. And, yet, that's exactly what we've been seeing with first Obama and now his surrogate Biden.

Gingrich's explanation as to why is as good as any you'll see.