Month: January 2019

(CNSNews.com) – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced legislation on Friday that would require the president and vice president and candidates for the presidency and vice presidency to release their tax returns.

The bill, however, would not require members of Congress or candidates for Congress to release their tax returns.

The provision is part of H.R. 1—the “For the People Act”—which Pelosi introduced Friday.

A summary of the bill says that it includes a section titled “Presidential Tax Transparency.” This section, says the summary: “Requires sitting presidents and vice presidents, as well as candidates for the presidency and vice presidency, to release their tax returns.”

In 2017, when members of Congress were calling on President Donald Trump to release his tax returns, Roll Call asked all 535 members of the House and Senate to release theirs. As Roll Call reported at the time, 6 members did release their tax returns as requested by the publication. Another 6 had already released theirs elsewhere. Another 45 members, Roll Call reported, had previously and partially released their tax returns. But 473 members had not released their tax returns and did not respond to Roll Call’s request that they do so.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi was one of the members, Roll Call reported, who had not released her tax returns.

At an April 2017 press briefing promoting similar legislation that would have required the president—but not members of Congress—to release their tax returns, Pelosi said that president’s do not have a “right to privacy” when it comes to their tax returns.

““It’s not a right to privacy that the President has,” Pelosi said. “He’s the president of the United States. There is a question about a Russian connection, politically, personally, financially, to the president; there’s concerns about recent actions by the Chinese government in relation to the Trump Organization.”

“There’s plenty reasons why we need this key to open the door to the information we need to connect the dots,” Pelosi said. “And if they have nothing to fear, then what are they afraid of.”

The earth is about 4.6 billion years old (with apologies to young earthers). During that time, the climate has changed numerous times, including several episodes of freezing that put the earth into virtual hibernation.

The processes that led to “Snowball Earth,” where miles of ice have entirely covered the planet have only been dimly understood. But scientists have found an important clue; there’s a lot less rock on the surface than there should be. Simple erosion cannot account for the missing miles of crust.

Los Angeles Times:

“There must have been some sort of special event in Earth’s history that led to widespread erosion,” said Steve Marshak, a geologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies what has come to be known as the Great Unconformity.

New research suggests it was something special indeed. Scientists propose that several freak episodes of global glaciation scoured away miles of continental crust, obliterating a billion years of geologic history in the process.

Scientists call it “The Great Unconformity” and it throws conventional theories about climate change for a loop.

Today, however, researchers have come to accept the outlandish notion that, a few times in its 4.6-billion-year history, the planet froze over and became a “Snowball Earth.” Now Keller and his colleagues hope to convince their peers that the glaciers that crawled across the continents between 720 million and 580 million years ago were responsible for the Great Unconformity.

Since there are so few rocks from that period, the researchers had to look for other kinds of clues to figure out what happened. They reasoned that the missing layers probably went through the full geologic spin cycle: They would have been broken down into sediment and washed out to sea, then deposited on the ocean floor and recycled into the mantle during subduction before finally melting into the magma that feeds volcanoes.

If so, a record of this activity should hide in tiny time capsules called zircons. These indestructible crystals grow in magma, and they contain the elements oxygen and hafnium. Oceanic and continental crust have distinct signatures of these elements. Therefore, a huge spike in the amount of recycled continental material should have left a clear chemical signal in zircons that formed at that time — and it did.

During these episodes of global glaciation, almost all life is snuffed out. So the question of what has been causing global climate change for the last half billion years becomes relevant to us.

What we know is that it almost certainly wasn’t carbon dioxide or any other trace gas in the atmosphere that was responsible. It appears that levels of CO2 have fluctuated modestly over that period of time and would have little or nothing to do with creating a “snowball earth” or any other radical alteration of the climate.

The question then becomes, why would greenhouse gases have much to do with climate change today? There is no doubt that there is a correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature, but no supercomputer in the world could predict any kind of radical alteration of the climate because X amount of CO2 was spewed into the atmosphere. There are many other factors at work in climate change – none of them man made – that to assign CO2 as a culprit for global warming is absurd.

A lack of CO2 in the atmosphere did not lead to “snowball earth.” Why should an overabundance of CO2 lead to catastrophic global warming?

The earth is about 4.6 billion years old (with apologies to young earthers). During that time, the climate has changed numerous times, including several episodes of freezing that put the earth into virtual hibernation.

The processes that led to “Snowball Earth,” where miles of ice have entirely covered the planet have only been dimly understood. But scientists have found an important clue; there’s a lot less rock on the surface than there should be. Simple erosion cannot account for the missing miles of crust.

Los Angeles Times:

“There must have been some sort of special event in Earth’s history that led to widespread erosion,” said Steve Marshak, a geologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who studies what has come to be known as the Great Unconformity.

New research suggests it was something special indeed. Scientists propose that several freak episodes of global glaciation scoured away miles of continental crust, obliterating a billion years of geologic history in the process.

Scientists call it “The Great Unconformity” and it throws conventional theories about climate change for a loop.

Today, however, researchers have come to accept the outlandish notion that, a few times in its 4.6-billion-year history, the planet froze over and became a “Snowball Earth.” Now Keller and his colleagues hope to convince their peers that the glaciers that crawled across the continents between 720 million and 580 million years ago were responsible for the Great Unconformity.

Since there are so few rocks from that period, the researchers had to look for other kinds of clues to figure out what happened. They reasoned that the missing layers probably went through the full geologic spin cycle: They would have been broken down into sediment and washed out to sea, then deposited on the ocean floor and recycled into the mantle during subduction before finally melting into the magma that feeds volcanoes.

If so, a record of this activity should hide in tiny time capsules called zircons. These indestructible crystals grow in magma, and they contain the elements oxygen and hafnium. Oceanic and continental crust have distinct signatures of these elements. Therefore, a huge spike in the amount of recycled continental material should have left a clear chemical signal in zircons that formed at that time — and it did.

During these episodes of global glaciation, almost all life is snuffed out. So the question of what has been causing global climate change for the last half billion years becomes relevant to us.

What we know is that it almost certainly wasn’t carbon dioxide or any other trace gas in the atmosphere that was responsible. It appears that levels of CO2 have fluctuated modestly over that period of time and would have little or nothing to do with creating a “snowball earth” or any other radical alteration of the climate.

The question then becomes, why would greenhouse gases have much to do with climate change today? There is no doubt that there is a correlation between greenhouse gases and temperature, but no supercomputer in the world could predict any kind of radical alteration of the climate because X amount of CO2 was spewed into the atmosphere. There are many other factors at work in climate change – none of them man made – that to assign CO2 as a culprit for global warming is absurd.

A lack of CO2 in the atmosphere did not lead to “snowball earth.” Why should an overabundance of CO2 lead to catastrophic global warming?

After a hard-fought battle to obtain records by the Sacramento Bee, we now learn that California’s electoral officials are admitting that they have no idea how many illegals and other non-citizens voted in the last primary, based on the state’s motor-voter registration, which has been shown to have registered thousands of non-citizen voters. The Bee reports:

California officials still can’t say whether non-citizens voted in the June 2018 primary because a confusing government questionnaire about eligibility was created in a way that prevents a direct answer on citizenship.

Apparently, tens of thousands of foreign nationals and other ineligible voters, maybe 16 year olds, got registered to vote at the DMV when they applied for their drivers licenses whether they asked for it or not.

Investigators can see that people marked themselves as ineligible to vote or declined to answer eligibility questions, but they can’t tell why. 

“We can’t assume why they declined to answer eligibility questions or why they said they were not eligible,” the Secretary of State’s Office wrote in an internal memo on Oct. 8, 2018.

That email and other documents The Sacramento Bee obtained through the Public Records Act shed light on why the Secretary of State has been unable to say clearly whether non-citizens voted last year. The Bee filed a legal complaint for the records when the Secretary of State initially withheld most of them.

The email shows that, for months, California officials have been examining whether non-citizens voted last year. On Thursday, Secretary of State Alex Padilla confirmed for the first time that his office has an active internal investigation into the matter.

“The Secretary of State’s office does not comment on the details of ongoing investigations,” the office said in a statement. “Determining whether ineligible individuals who were erroneously registered to vote by the DMV cast ballots requires a complete review. The Secretary of State’s office is doing its due diligence by conducting a thorough investigation.”

Spokesmen for the office declined to say how the department could otherwise determine citizenship of those registered.

This doesn’t even include the undoubtedly significant numbers of voters who answered that they were eligible to vote when they were not. Could that have happened when the ballot-harvestors were out patrolling illegal immigrant neighborhoods in search of votes? At a minimum, it most certainly was possible, especially, since claims to voter-eligibility on drivers license forms are never checked in California (it’s the honor system), according to voter-integrity activists. It also doesn’t help that California sneakily had residents sign to certify on their yellow mail-in ballots that they were California residents (rather than voting-eligible citizens) so as to prevent for illegals any potential perjury charges in addition to vote-fraud charges.

If California has no idea who’s a citizen, and has resisted every effort out there to get that information (it has defied cooperation with President Trump’s electoral integrity commission), well, then what we can conclude is that they don’t want to know if a non-citizen is voting and now the word is out that they don’t. Apparently, Democratic interests in ‘counting all the ballots’ as they say, means counting illegal ones, too.

They don’t know, they don’t want to know, and they aren’t about to clean this up. Keep after them, Sacramento Bee. In this case, the Bee is a newspaper that’s doing its actual job.

After a hard-fought battle to obtain records by the Sacramento Bee, we now learn that California’s electoral officials are admitting that they have no idea how many illegals and other non-citizens voted in the last primary, based on the state’s motor-voter registration, which has been shown to have registered thousands of non-citizen voters. The Bee reports:

California officials still can’t say whether non-citizens voted in the June 2018 primary because a confusing government questionnaire about eligibility was created in a way that prevents a direct answer on citizenship.

Apparently, tens of thousands of foreign nationals and other ineligible voters, maybe 16 year olds, got registered to vote at the DMV when they applied for their drivers licenses whether they asked for it or not.

Investigators can see that people marked themselves as ineligible to vote or declined to answer eligibility questions, but they can’t tell why. 

“We can’t assume why they declined to answer eligibility questions or why they said they were not eligible,” the Secretary of State’s Office wrote in an internal memo on Oct. 8, 2018.

That email and other documents The Sacramento Bee obtained through the Public Records Act shed light on why the Secretary of State has been unable to say clearly whether non-citizens voted last year. The Bee filed a legal complaint for the records when the Secretary of State initially withheld most of them.

The email shows that, for months, California officials have been examining whether non-citizens voted last year. On Thursday, Secretary of State Alex Padilla confirmed for the first time that his office has an active internal investigation into the matter.

“The Secretary of State’s office does not comment on the details of ongoing investigations,” the office said in a statement. “Determining whether ineligible individuals who were erroneously registered to vote by the DMV cast ballots requires a complete review. The Secretary of State’s office is doing its due diligence by conducting a thorough investigation.”

Spokesmen for the office declined to say how the department could otherwise determine citizenship of those registered.

This doesn’t even include the undoubtedly significant numbers of voters who answered that they were eligible to vote when they were not. Could that have happened when the ballot-harvestors were out patrolling illegal immigrant neighborhoods in search of votes? At a minimum, it most certainly was possible, especially, since claims to voter-eligibility on drivers license forms are never checked in California (it’s the honor system), according to voter-integrity activists. It also doesn’t help that California sneakily had residents sign to certify on their yellow mail-in ballots that they were California residents (rather than voting-eligible citizens) so as to prevent for illegals any potential perjury charges in addition to vote-fraud charges.

If California has no idea who’s a citizen, and has resisted every effort out there to get that information (it has defied cooperation with President Trump’s electoral integrity commission), well, then what we can conclude is that they don’t want to know if a non-citizen is voting and now the word is out that they don’t. Apparently, Democratic interests in ‘counting all the ballots’ as they say, means counting illegal ones, too.

They don’t know, they don’t want to know, and they aren’t about to clean this up. Keep after them, Sacramento Bee. In this case, the Bee is a newspaper that’s doing its actual job.

Can’t catch a break in the courts.

Via Stars and Stripes:

A federal appeals court on Friday ruled in favor of a controversial Trump administration ban of transgender personnel in the military, though the policy can’t be implemented yet because of ongoing lawsuits.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia said a lower court judge erred in blocking the policy, also known as the “Mattis Plan,” which was named for former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis who drafted its specifics. The policy originated from a proposal in 2017 by President Donald Trump.

While Friday’s ruling isn’t final, the three-judge panel concluded public interests outweigh the injunction to halt the policy.

“Although today’s decision is not a final determination on the merits, we must recognize that the Mattis Plan plausibly relies upon the ‘considered professional judgment’ of ‘appropriate military officials,’” the ruling states. “In light of the substantial constitutional arguments and the apparent showing that the policy accommodates at least some of Plaintiffs’ interests, we think that the public interest weighs in favor of dissolving the injunction.”

A White House effort to ban transgender people from military service has been mired in confusion, chaos and a web of litigation nearly two years after Trump fired off tweets that ignited the controversy, experts have said.

For now, a 2016 Pentagon policy to open the military to transgender individuals remains in place, but a Trump administration effort to reverse that plan has created a chilling effect for potential recruits and heightened fears for some servicemembers, some advocates for transgender personnel have said.

On Friday, the Defense Department lauded the appeals court ruling.

“The department is pleased with the D.C. Circuit’s decision. However, the department remains bound by three other court orders that require continued implementation of the [former Defense Secretary Ash] Carter policy,” Pentagon spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said. “The department will continue to adhere to those orders.”

Keep reading…

President Donald Trump used the words of former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for a border barrier and against illegal immigration to advocate Sunday for the same things.

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently, and lawfully to become immigrants in this country,” Barrack Obama said in 2005 while still a U.S. Senator from Illinois.

“I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in. And I do think you have to control your borders,” then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told a town hall audience in 2015 according to the Weekly Standard.

President Trump referenced Obama and Clinton Sunday in defense of the need to build a wall at the southern border, something reinstated House Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused this week to give any funding for.

“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked…” Barrack Obama, 2005. I voted, when I was a Senator, to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in…” Hillary Clinton, 2015.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

“The only reason they do not want to build a Wall is that Walls Work!” the president said Sunday. “99% of our illegal Border crossings will end, crime in our Country will go way down and we will save billions of dollars a year! A properly planned and constructed Wall will pay for itself many times a year!”

….The only reason they do not want to build a Wall is that Walls Work! 99% of our illegal Border crossings will end, crime in our Country will go way down and we will save billions of dollars a year! A properly planned and constructed Wall will pay for itself many times a year!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019

President Trump has made clear he requires $5.6 billion in border wall and security funding in the partial government funding bill. Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have this week flat refused any funding for the border wall. 

Vice President Mike Pence led Saturday meetings with staff of Congressional Democrat and Republican leadership, Senior Advisor to the president Jared Kushner, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and members of White House Staff. While Pence reaffirmed the president’s commitment to building the border wall and securing the border, Democrat representatives demanded more information from DHS.

Trump was briefed on the meeting before announcing “Not much headway made today. Second meeting set for tomorrow. After so many decades, must finally and permanently fix the problems on the Southern Border!”

The president headed to Camp David Sunday for meetings on the wall, North Korea, and China. “We have to build the wall or we have to buld the barrier. The barrier or the wall can be of steel instead of concrete if that works better,” he told reporters as he departed the White House. “This is a very important battle to win from the standpoint of safety, number one, defining our country and who we are. Also from the standpoint of dollars. This wall will pay for itself many times through the course of the year.”

He re-emphasized the importance of building a southern border barrier, “It’s about stopping human traffickers, it’s about stopping drugs. So we have to have it.”

Michelle Moons is a White House Correspondent for Breitbart News — follow on Twitter @MichelleDiana and Facebook

TEL AVIV – Israel is expected to demand $250 billion in compensation from eight Arab states as well as Iran for assets left behind by Jews who fled or were expelled from those countries after the State of Israel was founded.

“The time has come to correct the historic injustice of the pogroms (against Jews) in seven Arab countries and Iran, and to restore to hundreds of thousands of Jews who lost their property what is rightfully theirs,” Israel’s Minister for Social Equality Gila Gamliel, whose ministry is handling the issue, said Saturday.

Israel released official estimates of the total property and assets lost in the Arab world in anticipation of President Donald Trump’s imminent peace plan, Hadashot TV news reported. A peace deal with the Arab world will likely be conditional on receiving compensation from those countries, the report said.

The first two countries on the list are Tunisia and Libya, with a combined total of $50 billion worth of Jewish property.

Israel will also seek another $200 billion from Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Iran, the report said.

More than 850,000 Jews fled or were forcibly driven out of 10 Arab countries following violent Arab rioting over Israel’s establishment.

The valuations released Saturday are the result of research conducted over the course of the past year and a half by the Israeli government and an international accountancy firm.

“One cannot talk about the Middle East without taking into consideration the rights of the Jews who were forced to leave their thriving communities amid violence,” said Gamliel. “All the crimes that were carried out against those Jewish communities must be recognized.”

The Palestinian Authority has demanded more than $100 billion in compensation from Israel for property deserted by Arab residents after the founding of the state. Furthermore, the Palestinians have also maintained “the right of return” for millions of the descendants of those original “refugees” — a demand that would spell the end of the Jewish state by demographic means.

Jews who were persecuted in Arab lands arrived in Israel destitute and did not receive refugee status from the UN or other international bodies.

Any compensation received from those eight countries would be funneled to a special fund, the report said.

In 2014, Israel passed legislation to mark November 30 as a memorial day for the departure and expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran.

“It is not for nothing that this day is marked on the day after the 29th of November,” Netanyahu said on November 30, 2014, referencing the date of the UN’s partition resolution in 1947. “The Arab countries, which never accepted the UN declaration on the establishment of a Jewish state, compelled the Jews living in their territories to leave their homes while leaving their assets behind. … We have acted — and will continue to act — so that they and their claims are not forgotten.”

President Donald Trump gave a long-overdue lesson to the White House press corps about the Constitution’s limits on executive power — limits the media largely ignored under President Barack Obama, because they agreed with Obama’s policies and wished to see him succeed politically.

Trump pointed out that Democrats had lost interest in negotiating over the future of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program when a federal judge in San Francisco ruled last year that the Trump administration’s decision to cancel the policy was unlawful.

Republicans have always considered DACA unconstitutional, because Obama created it in defiance of Congress, and because he did so by extending his powers of prosecutorial discretion to an unprecedented number of cases, numbering nearly a million beneficiaries.

Barack Obama himself believed it was unconstitutional and unlawful. As former Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) documented in his 2013 memoir, Obama “had been telling the entire immigrant-rights community for nearly a year and a half that he couldn’t do it.”

Nevertheless, amnesty activists tried and failed to push Obama to act, until Republicans — Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in particular — threatened to outflank him.

After Congress rejected Democrats’ proposals for a “Dream Act” that would eventually grant citizenship to illegal aliens brought to the country as minors, Rubio proposed a more moderate bill that looked likely to pass with Republican support.

“Some of the activists say they are open to Rubio’s effort,” the Washington Post reported at the time.

Rather than face the political setback of having to sign or veto a Republican bill to help “Dreamers,” and risk Latino support, Obama decided to declare DACA, which critics called the “Dream Act by fiat.”

When Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, announced the end of DACA, he noted the Trump administration believed the policy had always been unconstitutional:
“[T]he executive branch, through DACA, deliberately sought to achieve what the legislative branch specifically refused to authorize on multiple occasions. Such an open-ended circumvention of immigration laws was an unconstitutional exercise of authority by the Executive Branch.”

But the media had never shown much interest in whether DACA was constitutional or not. Instead, they have focused on how ending DACA might harm “Dreamers” — who are often portrayed in glowing terms as patriotic, high-achieving Americans in all but name.

At the same time, they have often speculated — or even presumed — that President Trump is an authoritarian leader who would do anything to protect and increase his power.

On Friday, Trump pointed out that DACA was unconstitutional — and that if the Supreme Court disagreed, by rejecting the Trump administration’s appeal of the lower court’s decision, it would be giving him potentially unlimited power (emphasis added):

We discussed [DACA] a long time ago … You remember those discussions. But where it really ended is when the judge ruled against [the cancelation of DACA]. And it was — I said, as soon as that happened, ’cause that was a shocking decision, it was shocking to the Democrats and it was more shocking to the Republicans. It was an incorrect decision, it was a political decision made by a judge — and I know a lot of people don’t like when I say it, but try going there sometime to the Ninth Circuit and try winning a case. Not easy. Everybody files right in the Ninth Circuit. The fact is, it was a terrible decision, and incorrect decision. When that decision came down, when that judge ruled the way he ruled, I said, as soon as I heard it, I said, “You know what’s going to happen? We’re never going to hear from them again.” And that’s exactly — that’s what broke up the DACA deal. Yes, we had a pathway [to citizenship], we had many things — that was getting close to being a deal. … we were getting close. And I said as soon as that decision came down, that incorrect and horrible decision — I mean, there’s been a number of them made lately — but I said, “You’ll never hear from them again.” I called up. I said, “Hi, it’s President Trump. What is going on?” They say,”President trump?” We don’t know who that is.” It was over. The deal was over. That’s what killed the DACA deal. It was nothing else. It was the judge’s decision. And if the Supreme Court does what, really, everyone thinks from a legal standpoint it should be doing — if they don’t allow the President of the United States, which is me also, because if President Obama is allowed to do that, I’m allowed to do it also. Can you imagine? If the Supreme Court overrules that wrong executive order [by Obama], we’ll have a deal very quickly on DACA and other things. And the Democrats want that and so do we. But once he ruled that way, it was something you couldn’t really negotiate.

Trump’s description of the case pointed out the problem that the Democrats, and the media, overlooked in 2012: namely, that if Obama were allowed to expand his executive powers by ignoring all constraints, including Congress, a future Republican president could do the same.

He also set a trap for his critics: if they disagree with his description of the constitutional problem with DACA, they are forced to trust him with the same sweeping authority they applauded under Obama, and to accept that he may not be the tyrant they have portrayed after all.

Though one might object to Trump signaling to the Court which way it ought to rule on a constitutional question, he is hardly the first president to do so. Obama, for example, did it in 2012, when he urged the Court to uphold Obamacare, arguing — bizarrely — that it was a “duly constituted law.”

How ironic that Obama — lauded by the media for being a “professor” of constitutional law — would imply he did not believe in the power of judicial review, while Trump — treated as some kind of fascist — would appeal to the constitutional restraints on his own power.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.