Based on the data out there, it certainly appears that cell phones and driving are much more dangerous to teenagers than guns, so, where are the people who say one death is too many for a teens possessing cellphones? Where are the teen activists advocating that cell phones be taken away?

The numbers illustrating the dangers of cell phone use while driving are downright startling. In fact, at any given time throughout the day, approximately 660,000 drivers are attempting to use their phones while behind the wheel of an automobile.

·  The National Safety Council reports that cell phone use while driving leads to 1.6 million crashes each year.

·  Nearly 330,000 injuries occur each year from accidents caused by texting while driving.

·  1 out of every 4 car accidents in the United States is caused by texting and driving.

·  Texting while driving is 6x more likely to cause an accident than driving drunk.

·  11 teens die every day as a result of texting while driving.

·  According to a AAA poll, 94% of teen drivers acknowledge the dangers of texting and driving, but 35% admitted to doing it anyway.

·  21% of teen drivers involved in fatal accidents were distracted by their cell phones.

·  Teen drivers are 4x more likely than adults to get into car crashes or near-crashes when talking or texting on a cell phone.

At the same time, there are also many ways that Facebook and other social media outlets can be psychologically damaging.

Since more than 300 teens (way more than die from school shootings) die each month from distracted driving caused by cell phones, and social media are psychologically damaging, I will believe David Hogg, George Clooney and others are serious about teen deaths and mental health when I see signs and protests demanding that cell phones be made illegal or at least kept out of the hands of everyone until he orshe turns 21.

I also would like to see protests against the Promise program that allows troubled and dangerous youths like school shooter Nikolas Cruz to impose a danger on other students and the community by hiding the problem. The non-reporting allowed Cruz to get the guns, not the NRA

The school, the police and the FBI all allowed Cruz to go unpunished but instead of teen activists protesting them, their protest is against the NRA and guns.            

Here is a story that most of the media somehow didn’t have much time to cover. Al Sharpton’s half brother was charged with capital murder because a car he was driving had a passenger who shot and killed a woman. This occurred one day after he participated in a rally advocating gun control.

Al Sharpton’s half brother was arrested and charged with capital murder after a 23-year-old woman was shot dead in Alabama in a dispute over a car, authorities said Monday.

Jennings’ death came just a day after Glasgow’s homeless and community ministry,  Ordinary People Society participated in the nationwide March For Our Lives, which advocated for gun control and protested gun violence.

It makes you think he isn’t as much against guns as he said he was.

Most of the media also gives scant coverage to illegal aliens who kill U.S. citizens. That’s because it obviously doesn’t fit the agenda.

There were studies after the ten-year assault gun ban that showed little or no reduction in violent crime. So why doesn’t the media report that? Why do politicians and others always want to try things that haven’t worked before?  Don’t they learn from history or don’t they care?

Chicago has very strict gun laws and they don’t reduce violent crime, if at all.

Why aren’t there protests demanding that the cops get violent gangs off the streets? Instead of those protests, we get protests complaining cops are too tough.

Instead of wanting police to get tough on criminals in Chicago to make the streets safer, students are protesting $95 million for a police academy.

Since police and the government don’t enforce existing gun laws very well, since previous bans on assault weapons didn’t work very well if at all and since states, cities, Democrats and Hollywood refuse to enforce laws that keep dangerous illegal immigrants off the street why would more laws work? It appears they just want government control and results don’t matter.

I look forward to student protestors demanding that politicians enforce immigration laws that Congress passed.

I will believe that students, professors, Hollywood, the media and other Democrats actually know history when we see the following signs in bold letters:

“Hitler took away the guns and millions died”

This only occurred around 80 years ago. You would think people could understand that it could happen again if a tyrannical powerful politician took control.

“The people of the United States would not be free if only the British had guns”

Maybe students should learn about the Revolutionary War and the actual reason for the second amendment instead of the garbage they are being taught today.

It is a true shame that the media don’t report wall to wall on the large prolife rallies in the way they report on the anti-second amendment rallies. Almost all reporting today is based on an agenda (almost always the Democrat agenda)instead of reporting the actual  news. That is truly dangerous to our freedom.

“The real God is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed.”

This declaration from the one-eyed cleric Mullah Omar on March 2, 2001 created a chill throughout the free world, succeeding another declaration issued by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime stating that all pre-Islamic statues in the country were to be destroyed.  That edict, and the resulting demolition, has been condemned worldwide as “cultural terrorism.”

Much more destruction on a broader range is taking place in Iran under the direction of Iran’s theocrats.  The heinous destruction of the two Buddha statues by Afghanistan’s Taliban pales in comparison to the present barbaric designs of the Islamic Republic.

According to the World Book Encyclopedia, “cultural genocide” is a term used to describe the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage of a people or nation for political or military reasons.

The intolerant monolithic Islamists have been on the march, lashing out with fury at non-Islamic people and cultures. This ideology of violence and death spares neither the living nor the non-living heritage of humanity: wherever and whenever it can, it commits cultural terrorism – wiping out other people’s precious cultural treasures.

Over its life span, the Islamic Republic zealots have tried innumerable times to cleanse pre-Islamic Persian heritage in the name of Islam. First, they declared war against the Persian New Year or “Nowruz,” and then, they went after other Persian traditions and customs. In 1979, Khomeini’s right-hand man, the Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, tried to bulldoze Iran’s greatest epical poet Ferdowsi’s tomb and Persepolis palace.  Fortunately, the total bulldozing of the relics of the palace was averted by local Iranian patriots who were determined to preserve their heritage; who literally stood in front of the bulldozers and did not allow the destruction of this heritage of humanity. 

The Islamic Republic of Iran, which holds in great contempt any non-Islamic belief or heritage, has embarked on destroying many pre-Islamic archeological sites in Iran such as Pasargadae and Persepolis, some of humanity’s most prized cultural heritage, on the pretext of building a dam.

Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria continue their war on the region’s cultural heritage, attacking archaeological sites with bulldozers and explosives.  The so-called Islamic State (ISIS) released a video that shocked the world by showing the fiery destruction of the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the best preserved ruins at the Syrian site of Palmyra. 

The Islamic State continued destroying invaluable architecture and antiquities in northern Iraq.  Libraries that housed priceless manuscripts, detailing the heritage of Mosul and other towns, were burned to the ground.  Even books of Islamic studies were not spared, as they contained a version of Islam that ISIS rejects.

Faced with the growing terrorist threat in the world, the Parliamentary Assembly stressed the need for an overall approach to combating terrorism, combining cultural with political, economic, legal, and social methods.  It is not a matter here of confusing blind terrorism and its innocent victims with what are sometimes acts of resistance to oppression and violation of human rights.

Culture in all its aspects – the arts, heritage, religion, the media, science, education, youth, and sport – can play an important role in preventing the development of a terrorist mentality, in dissuading would-be terrorists, and in cutting them off from wider support.  Its importance in this respect is, however, often underestimated.

The basis for any cultural action against terrorism lies in understanding the complex and delicate relationship between terrorism and its cultural context.

The assembly stands resolutely against attempts to qualify any specific world, national, regional, or local culture as terrorist.  At the same time, under certain conditions, any society is capable of producing terrorism.  Extremist interpretation of elements of a particular culture or religion, such as heroic martyrdom, sacrifice, and holy war, as well as secular ideologies (nationalist and revolutionary), can also be invoked to justify terrorist acts.

Culture is, however, also becoming increasingly an object of terrorism.  Beyond the physical damage and destruction of monuments, temples, and symbols of a given culture and way of life, such terrorist acts target the cultural identity of a people.  They also harm a cultural heritage that is common to all peoples of the world.

Generations of humanity will bemoan the loss of this living testimony to the nobility of mankind.  The destructive hand of any kind of zealot must be stayed.  Stand up, raise your voice, and do what is in your power to preserve what is rightfully yours.

Header image: Juan Llanos via Flickr.

While it is reassuring to note that A.G. Jeff Sessions has climbed down from the back side of the milk carton, where his missing visage had been hiding, long enough to appoint Utah U.S. attorney Peter Huber to independently investigate claims of FBI abuses in surveilling the Trump campaign and other matters, one question remains.  Can he investigate the commission of his boss, Rod Rosenstein’s, of a fraud upon the FISA court by signing a FISA warrant application that relied on a fake British-Russian dossier financed by Team Hillary and the DNC?

It is about time we had someone who can convene a jury and subpoena witnesses, but can he and will he present the case mounting against his boss to that grand jury and present his boss with a subpoena?

Some who have long been investing the Deep State coup don’t think so.  House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) exploded on The Ingraham Angle on Fox Thursday night on both the justification for a special counsel and the Mueller-like conflict of interest inherent in Huber’s appointment:

“When the attorney general writes Congress and says, only under ‘extraordinary circumstances’ do we appoint a second special counsel, well, how about these facts, Laura?” Jordan asked.

“James Comey’s been fired; Deputy Director Andrew Mccabe has been fired; Jim Baker, former chief counsel of the FBI, has been demoted and reassigned; Peter Strzok, former deputy head of counterintelligence, has been demoted and reassigned; and Lisa Page, former FBI counsel, has been demoted and reassigned.  If those aren’t extraordinary circumstances warranting a second special counsel, I don’t know what the heck is.

“So I don’t know why the attorney general keeps postponing this,” Jordan continued.  “Everyone in town knows we need a second special counsel to get to the bottom of this. How can Mr. Huber – he’s probably a great lawyer, I don’t know much about Mr. Huber from Utah – but how can he investigate his boss, Rod Rosenstein?  That’s who he reports to.

House Freedom Caucus chairman Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) echoed Jordan’s sentiment, reciting his mistrust of anything the DOJ, which has been dragging its feet in cooperating with House investigations, says or does:

“I disagree with the attorney general, and I can tell you tonight, I went through and reviewed some redacted things that were given to our committee, and on seven pages, there were 12 material facts – material facts, not just names – material facts that were omitted by the Department of Justice,” Meadows said.

“It’s time that they come clean and give Congress what we need,” he continued.  “When we look at the multiple reactions that have taken place, this Department of Justice is not complying with the subpoena and with the oversight responsibility we have in Congress.  For the attorney general to suggest that there is not enough there is just extremely disappointing.”

Former House Oversight chairman Jason Chaffetz noted in a tweet:

Rosenstein is asking Huber to do something that’s unfair and inappropriate.  You’re asking Huber to investigate his boss.

It can be said that Huber’s appointment has all the advantages of a special counsel and none of the disadvantages.  Sessions can fire Huber if he strays off the reservation or just doesn’t do his job properly.  But would he?  Sessions is the man who recused himself from the Russian collusion investigation when he didn’t have to.  This is the A.G. who had to be dragged kicking to this point despite evidence a first-year law student couldn’t ignore.  This is the A.G. who fought to prevent testimony from the FBI informant in an earlier FBI investigation into Russian attempts to gain access to U.S. nuclear resources such as uranium, an investigation in which both Mueller and Rosenstein were up to their eyeballs. 

Rod Rosenstein misled the FISA court and signed off on the FISA application to spy on Trump’s campaign adviser, Carter Page, actions documented in the four-page House Intelligence Committee memo:

A secret, highly contentious Republican memo reveals that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein approved an application to extend surveillance of a former Trump campaign associate shortly after taking office last spring, according to three people familiar with it.

The renewal shows that the Justice Department under President Trump saw reason to believe that the associate, Carter Page, was acting as a Russian agent[.] …

The memo’s primary contention is that F.B.I. and Justice Department officials failed to adequately explain to an intelligence court judge in initially seeking a warrant for surveillance of Mr. Page that they were relying in part on research by an investigator, Christopher Steele, that had been financed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign[.]

Rod Rosenstein committed a self-evident fraud upon the FISA Court.  And now his subordinate is going to investigate him?  Can the swamp drain itself?  Carter Page has vehemently denied the allegations in the dossier and has sought the release of the memo to show its falseness and to show that the DOJ of Rod Rosenstein and the FBI of Andrew McCabe colluded with the Democrats to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House:

The former Trump campaign adviser who was spied on by the U.S. government prior to the 2016 election is “very much” in favor of the release of a controversial congressional memo alleging abuses of the surveillance warrant application process[.] …

Page pressed for the release the FISA application in a May 14 letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

“If FISA warrants indeed exist as has been extensively reported, wide-ranging false evidence will be inevitably revealed in light of the fact that I have never done anything remotely unlawful in Russia or with any Russian person at any point in my life,” he wrote.

What remains unanswered about the application for the warrant on Page is how heavily it relied on the dossier and whether the FBI and DOJ vetted the allegations made about him by Steele[.] …

Page has vehemently denied the allegations made against him in the dossier, which was put together by former British spy Christopher Steele, commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS, and financed by the Clinton campaign and DNC.

In the 35-page dossier, Steele alleges that Page was the Trump campaign’s main backchannel to the Kremlin for the purposes of campaign collusion.  Steele claims that Page was working with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and that during a trip to Moscow in July 2016, he met secretly with two Kremlin cronies, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin.

The dossier also alleges that it was Page who “conceived and promoted” the idea of having hacked DNC emails released through WikiLeaks in order to swing Bernie Sanders supporters away from Hillary Clinton and into the Trump camp.

Page denies all of the claims.  He says he does not know Manafort and has never spoken with Sechin and Diveykin.

Needless to say, Rosenstein did not grant Page’s request to see the FISA application to determine how much it was based on Steele’s fake dossier.  Nor has he expressed any dissatisfaction with the Mueller witch hunt he was responsible for launching,

In an interview with a local D.C. TV station, Rosenstein admired the monster he created, who now runs an alleged investigation into supposed Russia-Trump collusion that quickly morphed into what amounts to a silent coup against a sitting president of the United States:

The U.S. Department of Justice official who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election said he is satisfied with the special counsel’s work[.] …

“The Office of Special Counsel, as you know, has a degree of autonomy from the Department of Justice.  But there is appropriate oversight by the department.  That includes budget.  But it also includes certain other details of the office.  It is part of the Department of Justice.  And we’re accountable for it.”

Yes, Mr. Rosenstein, you certainly are accountable for the Mueller witch hunt.  Mueller has picked staff and prosecutors as if he were stocking Hillary Clinton’s Department of Justice.  He has picked a bevy of Clinton donors, an attorney who worked for the Clinton Foundation, a former Watergate assistant prosecutor, and even a senior adviser to Eric Holder.  Objective professionals all.

Oh, what tangled webs Rosenstein and the FBI have woven.  Republican lawmakers, needless to say, are not amused at all this, casting the obvious doubts on Rosenstein’s praise of Special Counsel Mueller:

Several conservative lawmakers held a news conference Wednesday demanding more details of how the FBI proceeded last year in its probes of Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email and Russian election interference. This week, the conservative group Judicial Watch released an internal Justice Department email that, the group said, showed political bias against Trump by one of Mueller’s senior prosecutors[.] …

“The question really is, if Mueller was doing such a great job on investigating the Russian collusion, why could he have not found the conflict of interest within their own agency?”  Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) asked at the news conference.  Meadows, leader of the Freedom Caucus, cited a litany of other issues that he said show bias on the part of the FBI and Mueller, including past political donations by lawyers on Mueller’s team.

A good question Rosenstein won’t answer.  Rosenstein is satisfied with Mueller, and why shouldn’t he be?  The two go back a long way and cooperated in the cover-up of an FBI investigation into Russia’s use of bribes, kickbacks, and money-laundering to grab U.S. uranium supplies and real collusion with Hillary Clinton, only to resurface years later to chase phantom collusion between Team Trump and Russia.

Mueller and Rosenstein were both involved in the FBI investigation dating back to 2009, with current Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, as noted, up to their eyeballs in covering up evidence of Hillary’s collusion, bordering on treason, with Vladimir Putin’s Russia:

Prior to the Obama administration approving the very controversial deal in 2010 giving Russia 20% of America’s Uranium, the FBI had evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were involved in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering in order to benefit Vladimir Putin, says a report by The Hill[.] …

John Solomon and Alison Spann of The Hill: Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show[.] …

From today’s report we find out that the investigation was supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who is now President Trump’s Deputy Attorney General, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who is now the deputy FBI director under Trump.

Robert Mueller was head of the FBI from Sept 2001-Sept 2013 until James Comey took over as FBI Director in 2013. They were BOTH involved in this Russian scam being that this case started in 2009 and ended in 2015.

If evidence of bribery, kickbacks, extortion, and money-laundering in the Uranium One affair were not grounds for a special prosecutor assigned to investigate Hillary Clinton, what is?  Rosenstein’s goal apparently has long been to shield Hillary Clinton from prosecution for her crimes and to use any means to bring down the Trump administration he supposedly was appointed to serve.  Now he has stooped so low as to employ a fake Russian dossier in a witch hunt the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy could only envy

Rosenstein, Mueller, McCabe, et al. have used the office of special counsel and a politicized FBI and DOJ to conduct a silent coup against a duly elected president and are unindicted coconspirators in Hillary’s crimes and should be the targets of their very own special counsel.

Rod Rosenstein should be the target of an investigation, not the overseer of one.  Maybe the question before us is not whether a second special counsel is needed, but whether one is needed to investigate just Rod Rosenstein and his Deep State activities.  One wishes Mr. Huber luck.  He will need it.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.