Conservatives welcome. Libs & RINOs go away. It's all of you destroying the society and conservatives must no longer appease you!
Joey Mucha’s arcade rental business in San Francisco grew out of his love for Skee-ball. For the last five years, he has been renting Skee-ball and other machines out of a warehouse in the Mission District. Recently, Murcha decided to convert the space into an arcade/restaurant that would be open]]>
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The war on Christmas marches on. Secularists — let’s say it: atheists — are leaving no stone unturned. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch said “Merry Christmas” in an interview on Fox & Friends. Leftists pounced, complaining this was a “talking point for the GOP.” Hollywood sees that old-time religion as a relentless nightmare of oppression. Christmas makes them want to tear the roof off of a Nativity set. So they vent through entertainment television.
via NewsBusters – Exposing Liberal Media Bias
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Blexit founder Candace Owens told Breitbart News on Friday that the Democrats proposing “reparations” for black Americans is an “obvious scam” meant for pandering ahead of an election cycle. “They think black Americans are stupid,” said Owens of Democrat politicians.
“I spoke specifically about reparations because it’s just one of the most obvious scams that’s before us, in terms of saying that this is something they want to suddenly take a look at — ahead of an election cycle.” said Owens of her September testimony before a House Oversight Joint Subcommittee Hearing.
Breitbart News caught up with Owens at Turning Point USA’s fifth annual Student Action Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida on Friday.
“This is exactly the sort of pandering that I speak out against,” added Owens of the Democrats’ reparations proposal. “They think black Americans are stupid. They think that we’re emotional. They don’t think that we understand that what we need are better policies, not more handouts.”
“Handouts amount to absolutely nothing,” said Owens. “If they did, black America would be wealthy today, because the welfare industry — 22 trillion dollars has gone into it, and black Americans are poorer today than when it began. So, I speak out against all of that trickery that comes from the left, and that rhetoric ahead of any election cycle.”
Owens added that President Trump reaches black Americans because he doesn’t play race games.
Watch below:
“I don’t think [President Trump] focuses on any one group in America,” said Owens. “He just believes in America, and that’s really all it takes to uplift groups that, in the past, have not been uplifted — to not play the race games — just say, you know what, I’m going to bring jobs to America. You know what, I’m going to tackle illegal immigration.”
“Which, we know is one of the biggest issues harming black America,” added Owens of illegal immigration. “Black American men between the ages of 18 and 21 are the people that have to directly contend and fight for jobs with illegal immigrants.”
“So it’s just his policies — which are good for the economy — that ultimately uplifted black America, and people are starting to see,” said Owens. “They accuse him of being a racist. He’s obviously not racist, because he’s uplifting all sorts of groups, just through good policies.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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For at least the second significant time, an organization financed by billionaire activist George Soros released material playing a central role in directly fueling the impeachment narrative targeting President Trump.
The news media and Democrats are seizing on emails released to the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity on Friday showing the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) requested the Pentagon withhold military aid to Ukraine the same day as Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The OMB immediately pushed back explaining the aid hold was actually announced seven days prior to Trump’s July 25 phone call and that the Center for Public Integrity was harping on one line within 146 pages of documents that the organization obtained to paint an inaccurate and misleading picture of the timing of the aid hold.
The OMB strongly denied that the email, one of many, had anything to do with Trump’s phone call, explaining the communication was part of an ongoing process put into place one week early.
The email being hyped by the media shows an official with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Mike Duffey, contacted Pentagon officials 91 minutes after Trump’s call with Zelensky to discuss withholding aid.
“Based on guidance I have received and in light of the Administration’s plan to review assistance to Ukraine, including the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, please hold off on any additional DoD obligations of these funds, pending direction from that process,” Duffey wrote, according to the documents.
Rachel Semmel, a spokeswoman for OMB, told reporters it was “reckless to tie the hold of funds to the phone call.”
“As has been established and publicly reported, the hold was announced in an interagency meeting on July 18,” she said. “To pull a line out of one email and fail to address the context is misleading and inaccurate.”
A senior administration official further said the email was part of a discussion already going on for one week between OMB and the Pentagon about withholding aid.
The documents were obtained on Friday by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) as part of a Freedom of Information Act request to the OMB and the Department of Defense.
CPI bills itself as a nonprofit journalism organization seeking to “protect democracy and inspire change using investigative reporting that exposes betrayals of the public trust by powerful interests.” https://ift.tt/2Mo5eVu
CPI has been openly funded by Soros’s Open Society, which formally listed CPI as a media “partner.”
CPI is also funded by the Soros-financed Tides Foundation. CPI previously ran iWatchNews, which it described as “the Center’s online publication dedicated to investigative and accountability reporting.” That project was sponsored by Soros’s Open Society as well as the Soros-funded Sunlight Foundation.
Soros, Ukraine and so-called whistleblower
CPI is the second Soros-funded purported journalism outfit to play a key role in fueling the impeachment narrative.
Breitbart News previously reported another self-described investigative journalism organization funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations was repeatedly referenced as a source of information in the so-called whistleblower’s official complaint alleging Trump was “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country” in the 2020 presidential race.
Indeed, the complaint relied upon information first reported by the Soros-funded group.
Also Breitbart News reported that Eric Ciaramella, whom Real Clear Investigations suggests is the likely so-called whistleblower, received emails about Ukraine policy from a top director at Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
The emails informed Ciaramella and a handful of other Obama administration foreign policy officials about Soros’s whereabouts, the contents of Soros’s private meetings about Ukraine and a future meeting the billionaire activist was holding with the prime minister of Ukraine.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the so-called whistleblower’s document and released by the Google and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower’s own claims, as Breitbart News documented.
OCCRP did work with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a program of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, DC.
One key section of the so-called whistleblower’s document claims that “multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov.”
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump’s call with Zelensky in order to discuss the “cases” mentioned in that call, according to the so-called whistleblower’s narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump’s request for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – “multiple U.S. officials told me” – it contains a footnote referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower’s account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does so to:
The OCCRP report repeatedly referenced is actually a “joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine.”
BuzzFeed infamously also first published the full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia. The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed “joint investigation” resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump’s political rivals.
The so-called whistleblower’s document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.
Meanwhile, despite the known timeline that the Trump administration’s decision to withhold Ukraine aid was taken on July 18, Senator Chuck Schumer already claimed the “explosive” email released by CPI underscored the need to call new witnesses with alleged impeachment evidence.
“If there was ever an argument that we need Mr Duffey to come and testify, this is that information. This email is explosive,” Schumer said.
“A top administration official, one that we requested, is saying, stop the aid 90 minutes after Trump called Zelensky and said keep it hush, hush. What more do you need to request a witness?” Schumer asked.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio.” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
With additional reporting by Joshua Klein.
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Who is Clarence Thomas?
Every pundit has an opinion, but few actually know him.
Now, we all have an opportunity to hear his story in his own voice. In a remarkable documentary by Michael and Gina Pack, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” the famously silent justice tells his life story. And not just the small part that everyone has an opinion about, but his whole, and wholly astonishing, story.
As memories of the facts surrounding his contentious
confirmation battle—in which Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment and
Thomas vigorously defended himself—have faded with time, public opinion has
shifted against Thomas.
At the time of his confirmation, the public was twice
as likely to believe Thomas over Hill (55% to 27%), and 58% favored his
confirmation. Today, only
30% of Americans believe that he should have been confirmed, and 38% say he
should not have been.
What accounts for these changing opinions? Mostly likely
it’s the relentless effort by Thomas’s critics over the last 28 years to tell his
story in their own terms. They lost the
battle against his confirmation, but they’ve never stopped fighting the battle
over his life story. Until now, Thomas
has largely preferred to stay out of the fight with the exception of publishing
his memoir, “My
Grandfather’s Son,” in 2007.
Like his memoir, the documentary follows Thomas’s journey
from poverty in rural Georgia to the Supreme Court. Along the way, he lives through segregation, starts
upon and then leaves the path to the Catholic priesthood, joins the Black Power
movement, goes to Yale Law School, hesitantly joins the Republican Party, and
marries the woman he calls “a gift from God.”
Thomas talks about growing up speaking Geechee—a Creole language spoken by the descendants of slaves in Georgia—before Standard English. He relives his reactions to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and explains how the prejudice of his fellow seminarians drove him from the church and into radical racial politics.
He describes his slow turn away from those politics and tells
how he decided to vote for Ronald Reagan.
And, in a particularly raw moment, he reveals that the racist attacks
leveled at him ever since his confirmation continue to create fresh wounds.
Perhaps what makes Thomas’s story most interesting is that it is as much about the people in Thomas’s life as it is about him. He recounts the ways—big and small—that others shaped his life. From Sister Mary Virgilius, his eighth-grade teacher who wouldn’t let him waste his potential, to John Danforth, who as Missouri‘s attorney general gave Thomas his first job after law school when no one else would (despite his excellent grades).
Hardly a moment goes by in the film when Thomas isn’t speaking about somebody else.
Most often, that person is Thomas’s grandfather who raised him until he later threw Thomas out of his house. More than anything, the film is the story of how his grandfather shaped him, often against Thomas’s will, into the man he is today. Thomas’s grandfather was hardworking, fiercely independent, and strict. He lived his life by biblical principles and the sweat of his brow, and he taught Thomas those lessons.
His grandfather’s lessons weave through Thomas’s life as he learns, rebels against, and finally embraces them. Proverbs 22:6 seems to be the unifying theme to his story: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Perhaps, above all else, what makes Thomas’s story so
powerful is that it’s relatable. More
than a rags-to-riches story, it’s the story of a person struggling to reconcile
his passions with his family values and the world around him.
After all the noise and spin continually whipped up by
pundits about Thomas, it’s refreshing to hear the man himself tell his
story. And what a story it is.
The post Clarence Thomas Tells His Story in a New Documentary appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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After months of false starts and threats and endless posturing, Donald Trump has joined Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, becoming the third American president impeached by the House of Representatives.
Democrats started promising to do this before the president was elected. Still, it feels kind of weird, surprising, surreal even, that it actually happened. Why? Because impeachment is a terrible idea for the country.
At this point, there is no chance the Democrats can remove the president. And in trying, they will only hurt themselves. The polls are clear. Yet—and here is the fascinating part—they did it anyway.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., explained why: “The president’s continuing course of conduct constitutes a clear and present danger to democracy in America. We cannot allow this misconduct to pass. It would be a sell-out of our Constitution, our foreign policy, our national security and our democracy.”
See if you can follow his logic chain: Leaving a president in office until voters can decide to remove him from office if they want to is “a danger to democracy.”
The entire impeachment saga has become detached from reality.
Here are the facts: Democrats do not have the votes to remove Trump from office. They never will have the votes to remove the president. The point of impeachment is to remove a president. They cannot do that. This process is doomed.
By the way, they don’t have the votes because voters don’t support it. The irony is that our democracy is working just fine. Voters support it. After a full month of watching public hearings on impeachment, Democrats have not gained support. They have lost it.
In late October, when this began, about half the country backed impeachment and 44% said they were opposed. In the most recent polling, those numbers have inverted. In other words, the more people learned about impeachment, the less they wanted impeachment. That’s not one person’s opinion. That is the sum total of the polling.
Even in the face of all the data, elite Democrats still will not admit it. They are in denial. Democratic Party cheerleader and CNN commentator Jeffrey Toobin attacked his own company’s polling when it didn’t match what he believes to be true, saying:
You see a decline from our last poll in Democratic support from 90% down to 77%. Can I just say that I don’t believe that poll for one second … The 90% to 77%. You know, it’s just I don’t believe it. Like it makes no sense that that the numbers would change like that. I mean … sometimes polls are sometimes wrong.
Why doesn’t Toobin believe it? Because he doesn’t. Says the legal analyst. I look out my window and I see the horizon. That means it’s flat. You can tell me the Earth is round. But I just don’t believe it, never mind your dumb numbers and scientific theories. I just don’t believe it.
This is the definition of ideological extremism. It’s an inability to change course no matter what the evidence tells you. At that point, this is no longer politics. We left that a long time ago. What we are seeing is religion. And, of course, being the Democratic Party, it’s always the exact opposite of what they claim it is.
As Trump noted in his recent letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: “You are the ones interfering in America’s elections. You are the ones subverting American democracy. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to the republic for your own selfish personal, political, and partisan gain.”
The public, whether they like Trump or not, agrees with that. Polling shows it.
But the Democrats can’t acknowledge that they are stuck. In 2016, even before the election, they went all-in on denouncing Trump and his supporters as beyond the pale racists not worthy of being hated.
When they lost, they refused to learn. They refused to think about why they may have lost. Instead, they moved seamlessly from calling voters who wouldn’t support them “racists” into a conspiracy about Russia that was so bizarre they could never fully explain its outlines. That collapsed, too.
But what hasn’t changed is the rage storm they’ve created with years of propaganda. Democratic leaders whipped their voters into such a frenzy that the voters can’t be pulled back now. They want blood.
The Democrats have no choice but to march forward even though it will inevitably destroy them, and they know it will.
The post Understanding Democrats’ March Toward Electoral Defeat appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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The single-family detached home is one of the glories of America’s material civilization. Without noisy and nosy neighbors upstairs, downstairs, and sharing a wall next door, the single-family home becomes our castle, our refuge from enforced contact with others. Pirvacy!
Estimates vary slightly, but the overwhelming majority of us live-in single-family homes, most of us as owners, though the financial crisis of 2008 set back owner-occupied housing in favor of renting. This estimate has77% of us in such homes:
But many of the social engineers among us hate single family homes. They consume too much energy, take up too much land, and discourage use of transit with low population density. Because on average they are more expensive than similar sized and located apartments, they are held to be “racist” toward those minority groups that don’t enjoy average or higher levels of income than the majority, even though actual housing discrimination is illegal.
Unsurprisingly, the most progressive jurisdictions are already busy changing the law to favor multi-unit housing and eliminate single family housing-only districts. My hometown of Minneapolis last year ended single-family housing zoning for the entire city, dictating a radical change in the character and population density of the city over time in the name of diversity and equality.
The State of California (of course) debated a bill to do the same thing to the entire state (including Beverly Hills), S.B. 50:
If you live in a single-family home in California, it’s likely everyone else in your neighborhood does too.
That could change under a state measure that would require California cities and counties to permit duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes on much of the residential land now zoned for only single-family houses. The proposal was recently added to Senate Bill 50, legislation by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) that also would allow mid-rise apartment construction near mass transit as well as small apartment complexes and town homes in wealthy communities in large counties including Los Angeles.
The bill would not spell the end of single-family housing in the state. Developers could continue to build such homes on their land if they chose, and the legislation prohibits the demolition of single-family homes to build fourplexes without further government review. Even so, allowing as many as four homes on parcels of land where now just one is permitted would trigger significant change compared with how California has grown over much of the last century.
The horror! (Photo credit: Sam Beebe)
That bill was placed in limbo last May, despite the Democrats’ total dominance of the State Legislature and Governorship. Methinks the rich donors in Beverly Hills, Woodside, and other tony neighborhoods don’t want apartment dwellers, their noise and their traffic disturbing the tranquility they paid good money to achieve.
But in Virginia, where Democrats just swept to power, the levelers are feeling their oats and a similar statewide jihad against single-family only neighborhoods has been launched by a state rep with a troubling background. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation reports:
Democrats in Virginia may override local zoning to bring high-density housing, including public housing, to every neighborhood statewide — whether residents want it or not. (snip)
House Delegate Ibraheem Samirah, a Democrat, introduced six housing measures Dec. 19, coinciding with Democrats’ takeover of the state legislature in November.
“Single-family housing zones would become two-zoned,” Samirah told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Areas that would be impacted most would be the suburbs that have not done their part in helping out.”
“The real issues are the areas in between very dense areas which are single-family zoned. Those are the areas that the state is having significant trouble dealing with. They’re living in a bubble,” he said.
He said suburbs were “mostly white and wealthy” and that their local officials — who have historically been in charge of zoning — were ignoring the desires of poor people, who did not have time to lobby them to increase suburban density.
Sure, poorer people would like to live in nice, quiet suburban neighborhoods. They’d also like to drive the fancy cars that wealthier people enjoy, not to mention eating the steaks, seafood, and other tasty items that grace the tables of upper income families. What’s next? Requiring people to invite strangers to dine with them and borrow their cars?
I’d wager that Delegate Samirah fancies himself a fan of “diversity.” But he doesn’t favor diversity in housing options. Neighborhoods exclusively composed of single family homes are not to be allowed in his vision of the future.
He also has an antisemitism problem:
Samirah himself has a history of anti-Semitic comments, including saying sending money to Israel is worse than funding the Klu Klux Klan.
“I am so sorry that my ill-chosen words added to the pain of the Jewish community, and I seek your understanding and compassion as I prove to you our common humanity,” he said in February. (snip)
His father is Jordanian refugee Sabri Samirah, who authorities banned from the U.S. for a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in part because of his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014.
I’ve got some news for Delegate Samirah, Virginia and California Democrats, an the party’s presidential field: Americans love their single family houses and the quiet neighborhoods composed of them. They will not take kindly to shoehorning in apartments and multi-family dwellings imposed by state-level politicians. In my own ultra-liberal Berkeley neighborhood high in the hills, a plot of city-owned land was to be sold off, and “activists” demanded that public housing be constructed so that poor people could enjoy Bay views, too. You’ve never seen liberals turn on a dime faster than that. Locals came up with all sorts of objections, mostly couched in compassion –you see, without a car there is no shopping available.
In the end, the land was sold to a developer who put luxury houses on the plot.
The single-family detached home is one of the glories of America’s material civilization. Without noisy and nosy neighbors upstairs, downstairs, and sharing a wall next door, the single-family home becomes our castle, our refuge from enforced contact with others. Pirvacy!
Estimates vary slightly, but the overwhelming majority of us live-in single-family homes, most of us as owners, though the financial crisis of 2008 set back owner-occupied housing in favor of renting. This estimate has77% of us in such homes:
But many of the social engineers among us hate single family homes. They consume too much energy, take up too much land, and discourage use of transit with low population density. Because on average they are more expensive than similar sized and located apartments, they are held to be “racist” toward those minority groups that don’t enjoy average or higher levels of income than the majority, even though actual housing discrimination is illegal.
Unsurprisingly, the most progressive jurisdictions are already busy changing the law to favor multi-unit housing and eliminate single family housing-only districts. My hometown of Minneapolis last year ended single-family housing zoning for the entire city, dictating a radical change in the character and population density of the city over time in the name of diversity and equality.
The State of California (of course) debated a bill to do the same thing to the entire state (including Beverly Hills), S.B. 50:
If you live in a single-family home in California, it’s likely everyone else in your neighborhood does too.
That could change under a state measure that would require California cities and counties to permit duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes on much of the residential land now zoned for only single-family houses. The proposal was recently added to Senate Bill 50, legislation by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) that also would allow mid-rise apartment construction near mass transit as well as small apartment complexes and town homes in wealthy communities in large counties including Los Angeles.
The bill would not spell the end of single-family housing in the state. Developers could continue to build such homes on their land if they chose, and the legislation prohibits the demolition of single-family homes to build fourplexes without further government review. Even so, allowing as many as four homes on parcels of land where now just one is permitted would trigger significant change compared with how California has grown over much of the last century.
The horror! (Photo credit: Sam Beebe)
That bill was placed in limbo last May, despite the Democrats’ total dominance of the State Legislature and Governorship. Methinks the rich donors in Beverly Hills, Woodside, and other tony neighborhoods don’t want apartment dwellers, their noise and their traffic disturbing the tranquility they paid good money to achieve.
But in Virginia, where Democrats just swept to power, the levelers are feeling their oats and a similar statewide jihad against single-family only neighborhoods has been launched by a state rep with a troubling background. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation reports:
Democrats in Virginia may override local zoning to bring high-density housing, including public housing, to every neighborhood statewide — whether residents want it or not. (snip)
House Delegate Ibraheem Samirah, a Democrat, introduced six housing measures Dec. 19, coinciding with Democrats’ takeover of the state legislature in November.
“Single-family housing zones would become two-zoned,” Samirah told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Areas that would be impacted most would be the suburbs that have not done their part in helping out.”
“The real issues are the areas in between very dense areas which are single-family zoned. Those are the areas that the state is having significant trouble dealing with. They’re living in a bubble,” he said.
He said suburbs were “mostly white and wealthy” and that their local officials — who have historically been in charge of zoning — were ignoring the desires of poor people, who did not have time to lobby them to increase suburban density.
Sure, poorer people would like to live in nice, quiet suburban neighborhoods. They’d also like to drive the fancy cars that wealthier people enjoy, not to mention eating the steaks, seafood, and other tasty items that grace the tables of upper income families. What’s next? Requiring people to invite strangers to dine with them and borrow their cars?
I’d wager that Delegate Samirah fancies himself a fan of “diversity.” But he doesn’t favor diversity in housing options. Neighborhoods exclusively composed of single family homes are not to be allowed in his vision of the future.
He also has an antisemitism problem:
Samirah himself has a history of anti-Semitic comments, including saying sending money to Israel is worse than funding the Klu Klux Klan.
“I am so sorry that my ill-chosen words added to the pain of the Jewish community, and I seek your understanding and compassion as I prove to you our common humanity,” he said in February. (snip)
His father is Jordanian refugee Sabri Samirah, who authorities banned from the U.S. for a decade after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, in part because of his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014.
I’ve got some news for Delegate Samirah, Virginia and California Democrats, an the party’s presidential field: Americans love their single family houses and the quiet neighborhoods composed of them. They will not take kindly to shoehorning in apartments and multi-family dwellings imposed by state-level politicians. In my own ultra-liberal Berkeley neighborhood high in the hills, a plot of city-owned land was to be sold off, and “activists” demanded that public housing be constructed so that poor people could enjoy Bay views, too. You’ve never seen liberals turn on a dime faster than that. Locals came up with all sorts of objections, mostly couched in compassion –you see, without a car there is no shopping available.
In the end, the land was sold to a developer who put luxury houses on the plot.
via American Thinker Blog
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Hunter Biden, the youngest son of former Vice President Joe Biden, is allegedly the subject of a criminal investigation relating to money laundering with Burisma Holdings, according to documents filed in Arkansas court.
The New York Post reported on Monday that a private investigator hired by Lunden Roberts, a woman suing Biden for child support in Arkansas circuit court, has declared he is the subject of multiple criminal investigations.
“One of those purported investigations relates to Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy company with which Biden held a lucrative board post while his father, Joe, was vice president — drawing allegations of impropriety from Republicans including President Trump,” the Post noted.
The private investigator claims the younger Biden “established bank and financial accounts with Morgan Stanley” for a “money laundering scheme” involving Burisma Holdings Limited. According to documents filed in court, nearly $6.8 million was transferred from Burisma to the account between March 2014, when the younger Biden joined Burisma’s board of directors, and December 2015.
Court filings also allege that Biden and a group of business associates “utilized a counterfeiting scheme to conceal” the payments.
The revelations come as Hunter Biden’s role with Burisma continues to draw scrutiny, especially in light of the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Congressional Democrats claim that Trump’s suggestion the government of Ukraine looking into Hunter Biden’s work with the natural gas company amounted to asking a foreign power for dirt on a political opponent. Trump and his allies, on the other hand, have countered that Hunter Biden’s appointment, coming around the same time former Vice President Joe Biden was tapped to lead Obama-era policy towards Ukraine, and his relative inexperience in the energy industry warrant investigation.
As Peter Schweizer, senior contributor at Breitbart News, detailed in Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, Hunter Biden’s background in investment banking, lobbying, and hedge fund management paled in comparison to that of current and past members of Burisma’s board.
The elder Biden claims he has never talked to his son about his business in Ukraine, but the former veep has yet to answer questions about a photograph showing him, Hunter, and another Burisma board member playing golf together in 2014.
Adding to concerns is the fact that, at the time Hunter Biden joined Burisma—where he was paid as much as $83,000-per-month—the company was seen as actively courting western leaders to prevent further scrutiny of its business practices. The same month Hunter Biden and Kwasniewski were tapped to join the group’s board, the government of Great Britain froze accounts belonging to Burisma’s founder, Mykola Zlochevsky, under suspicion of money laundering.
A Ukrainian official with strong ties to Zlochevsky admitted in October the only reason that Hunter Biden secured the appointment was to “protect” the company from foreign scrutiny. The claim has credence given that at the time, Joe Biden was tasked with leading the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion of Crimea.
It is in the context of Burisma and Zlochevsky’s legal troubles that Joe Biden’s political influence has raised the most red flags. The former vice president has particularly drawn questions over his conduct in demanding the Ukrainian government fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, in 2016.
Joe Biden, who has publicly bragged about the firing, reportedly threatened to withhold more than one billion dollars in U.S. aid if the Ukrainian government did not remove Shokin. He has claimed the demand came from then-President Barack Obama, who had allegedly lost faith in the prosecutor’s ability to tackle corruption.
Unofficially, though, it was known that Shokin was investigating both Burisma and Zlochevsky for public corruption. It is uncertain if the probe extended to Hunter Biden, although Shokin has recently admitted that prior to his ouster, he was warned to back off the matter. Regardless of what occurred, Shokin’s successor, who is now himself being investigated for public corruption, dropped the investigation into Burisma and Zlochevsky.
Since the start of impeachment, the Ukrainian government has reopened its case into Zlochevsky, this time broadening the investigation to include public corruption and embezzlement.
via Breitbart News
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In an extensive report that is part of its “Privacy Project,” The New York Times revealed Thursday that it has gained access to cell phone tracking data for millions of Americans and was able to rather easily track the movements of regular Americans as well as high-profile and powerful figures, including President Trump himself — details of whose actions the Times published in a follow-up report.
In its initial report, titled “Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy,” the Times warns that if you were able to see the data which they obtained from a single private cell phone app company, “you might never use your phone the same way again.”
“The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so,” the Times explains. “The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.”
The single data file the Times obtained is “by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists,” the Times claims, containing “more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.” That data covers a period of several months in 2016 and 2017, the Times notes.
Times researchers spent “months” analyzing the data, and in that time tracked cell phone activity involving some very famous names. “One search turned up more than a dozen people visiting the Playboy Mansion, some overnight,” the Times reports. “Without much effort we spotted visitors to the estates of Johnny Depp, Tiger Woods and Arnold Schwarzenegger, connecting the devices’ owners to the residences indefinitely.” They also took some time to track the movements of participants at both pro-Trump and anti-Trump rallies.
Using the data — which the Times notes can be legally obtained by companies, who defend collecting the data because it is “anonymous” and app users give their “consent” to being tracked — the Times says they spent most of their attention “identifying people in positions of power”:
With the help of publicly available information, like home addresses, we easily identified and then tracked scores of notables. We followed military officials with security clearances as they drove home at night. We tracked law enforcement officers as they took their kids to school. We watched high-powered lawyers (and their guests) as they traveled from private jets to vacation properties. We did not name any of the people we identified without their permission.
The data set is large enough that it surely points to scandal and crime but our purpose wasn’t to dig up dirt. We wanted to document the risk of underregulated surveillance. Watching dots move across a map sometimes revealed hints of faltering marriages, evidence of drug addiction, records of visits to psychological facilities.
In a follow-up report titled “How to Track President Trump,” the Times reveals that it easily followed the movements of Trump — even providing a map of those movements — by simply identifying a cell phone owned by a person in his entourage:
The device’s owner was easy to trace, revealing the outline of the person’s work and life. The same phone pinged a dozen times at the nearby Secret Service field office and events with elected officials. From computer screens more than 1,000 miles away, we could watch the person travel from exclusive areas at Palm Beach International Airport to Mar-a-Lago.
The meticulous movements — down to a few feet — of the president’s entourage were recorded by a smartphone we believe belonged to a Secret Service agent, whose home was also clearly identifiable in the data. Connecting the home to public deeds revealed the person’s name, along with the name of the person’s spouse, exposing even more details about both families. We could also see other stops this person made, apparently more connected with his private life than his public duties. The Secret Service declined to comment on our findings or describe its policies regarding location data.
via The Daily Wire
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This article is from Hillsdale College’s Imprimis. To view the original, click here: Imprimis.
Colleges today are increasingly collections of hostile identity groups, each clamoring against the crimes of the other. Students are not invited to step outside themselves, to step outside their own time, and to look at things as they have been understood by the best over time. If they did that, they would then learn and grow not by invention but by discovery.
The article Four Pillars: Educating for America originally appeared on Imprimis.
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