53percenter's Blog

WASHINGTON, DC – More than 100 national conservative leaders demanded Tuesday that Congress tackle illegal aliens on the U.S.-Mexican border in the year-end funding measure, demanding $5 billion for a border wall and other national security safeguards.

Leaders of many of the most powerful conservative organizations in the United States signed this Conservative Action Project Memo to the Movement, entitled “America’s National Sovereignty Threatened: Congress Must Fund a Wall that Secures our Southern Border.”

“As the southern border continues to be overwhelmed by migrants seeking illegal entry into the United States, we urge Congress to finally address this issue,” begins the Memo to the Movement.

The Memo makes three specific demands on Congress to achieve this national security goal:

Provide a minimum of $5 billion for President Trump’s border wall. Unlike the $1.6 billion that Congress passed in March, these funds must allow the president to actually engage in new construction and planning. To be clear, funds that merely allow for repairs, planning or pedestrian fencing—and do not allow for new construction of President Trump’s wall prototypes—do not constitute funding a border wall.

Provide more funds for the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. The U.S. border patrol is facing continued and growing illegal crossings, with more than 50,000 apprehensions this fiscal year alone. As current events have demonstrated, adequate funding for both manpower and resources are critical to the safety and security at the border, but also to our national sovereignty. Our legal immigration system, the rule of law, and the nature of U.S. citizenship are at risk if we do not control the flow of illegal immigration by securing the border.

Provide funds for more judges at the border. Under President Obama, the legal threshold for claiming asylum was lowered to one of “credible fear.” As a result, asylum cases have shot upward, many times taking years to process. In the meantime, illegal entrants claiming asylum are released into the interior of the country, where they await legal proceedings for which they may or may not show up. More judges at the border will allow for faster processing times, allowing genuine asylum claims to be identified and prioritized and inadequate asylum claims to be efficiently handled.

These leaders praise President Donald Trump, saying the commander-in-chief is “using all of his authorities to address this crisis at the border.”

The signatories include:

• Ed Meese, former U.S. Attorney General of the United States
• Don Hodel, former U.S. Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Interior
• Matt Schlapp, Chairman, American Conservative Union
• Al Regnery, Chairman, Conservative Action Project
• Ken Blackwell, Chairman, Constitutional Congress
• Jenny Beth Martin, Chairman, Tea Party Patriots
• Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council
• David Bozell, President, ForAmerica
• David Bossie, President, Citizens United
• Gary Bauer, President, American Principles Project
• Tom Fitton, President, Judicial Watch
• Bill Walton, Chairman, CNP Action
• Colin Hanna, President, Let Freedom Ring
• Charles Cooper, former Assistant Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice
• Gen. Jerry Boykin (ret.), former Commander, U.S. Army Special Warfare Center
• Jim DeMint, former U.S. Senator
• Bob McEwen, former U.S. Congressman
• Ken Cribb, Former White House Domestic Policy Adviser to President Reagan

Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski.

SEVERANCE, Colo. (AP) — A 9-year-old boy has convinced the leaders of a small northern Colorado town to overturn a nearly century-old ban on snowball fights, and he already knows who his first target will be — his little brother.

Dane Best, who lives in the often snow-swept town of Severance, presented his arguments at a town board meeting Monday night, and members voted unanimously to lift the ban.

“I think it’s an outdated law,” Dane said in the lead-up to the meeting. “I want to be able to throw a snowball without getting in trouble.”

Dane’s mother, Brooke Best, told The Greeley Tribune her son had been talking about snowballs since he found out about a month and a half ago that it was illegal to throw them within town limits. The last time it snowed, Dane said he and his friends looked around for police and joked about breaking the law.

Kyle Rietkerk, assistant to the Severance town administrator, said the rule was part of a larger ordinance that made it illegal to throw or shoot stones or missiles at people, animals, buildings, trees, any other public or private property or vehicles. Snowballs fell under the town’s definition of “missiles.”

“All of the kids always get blown away that it’s illegal to have snowball fights in Severance,” Rietkerk said before the meeting. “So, what ends up happening is (town leaders) always encourage the kids with, ‘You have the power you can change the law.’ No one has.”

Then Dane took up the cause, writing letters with his classmates in support of overturning the ban.

And after Monday night’s success, his 4-year-old brother Dax had better watch out. When board members asked Dane during a meeting in November who he wants to hit, he pointed directly at his little brother.

Dane and his family have researched other Severance ordinances, including one that defines pets only as cats and dogs.

Dane has a guinea pig, which is illegal in Severance, too.

TEL AVIV – Israel has mobilized artillery and unrolled a partial mobilization of reservists from the Air Force and Military Intelligence to thwart potential attacks from Lebanese terror group Hezbollah following the launch of an IDF operation to destroy cross-border attack tunnels dug by the Iranian-backed group.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also serves as defense minister, held a meeting with security chiefs and senior defense officials Tuesday afternoon at IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv to discuss the operation, which has been dubbed Northern Shield.

IDF Spokesperson Brigadier General Ronen Manlis said the military was gearing itself up for an “extended operation.”

“We are prepared for all options, and the operation is only in its first day. The neutralizing of the tunnels will not necessarily take place within our territory,” he said.

The IDF said earlier that it had uncovered the “first of sure to be many” subterranean attack tunnels.

BREAKING: We have just launched Operation Northern Shield to expose and neutralize cross-border attack tunnels dug by Hezbollah from #Lebanon to #Israel. #NorthernShield pic.twitter.com/HKgnbhn23I

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) December 4, 2018

The 200-meter tunnel, which originated in a private home in Qafr Kila in southern Lebanon and penetrated some 40 meters into Israel’s north near the town of Metulla, did not present an immediate threat, the army said.

The UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, UNIFIL, was deployed today on both sides of the border to monitor developments and prevent escalation.

The IDF dismissed claims by both Israelis and Hezbollah that Netanyahu chose to launch Operation Northern Shield now because of calls by police to indict him.

“There’s no cynicism here,” Manelis said.

Speaking to Lebanon’s An-Nahar newspaper, an unnamed Hezbollah official compared Netanyahu to the fictional Don Quixote, who attacked imaginary enemies.

“He is in crisis mode. He is tilting at windmills in Lebanon in an attempt to evade it,” the Hezbollah official said.

However, IDF spokesperson Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus said the operation was planned over a year ago and the launch date was decided upon weeks before the police recommendations were published.

The attack tunnel took Hezbollah more than two years to excavate and contained electrical and communication lines as well as ventilation, the army said, adding that it was “intended to hurt civilians.”

“Hezbollah has been using industrial equipment in order to dig these tunnels. We are beginning to assess and analyze the findings,” Conricus said.

On Monday, Netanyahu told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a last-minute meeting in Brussels that Israel would take military action if Beirut did not reign in Hezbollah.

The prime minister told Pompeo that the tunnels were “a flagrant violation of Israeli sovereignty and UN Security Council Resolution 1701,” according to a statement provided by his office.

Netanyahu added that the operation on the northern border was “complex,” but that it had so far been successful.

“We are taking determined and responsible action in all sectors simultaneously. We will continue with additional actions — open and covert — in order to ensure the security of Israel,” the prime minister said.

A study from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows that the United States ranks 64th in the per capita frequency on the list of countries that witnessed mass shootings from 1998 to 2015.

The study also found that while the U.S. constitutes 4.6 percent of the world’s population, “it makes up less than 1.15 percent of the mass public shooters” and less than 1.5 percent of their murders.

CPRC used the study’s summary to explain: “Over the 18 years from 1998 to 2015, our list contains 2,354 attacks and at least 4,880 shooters outside the United States and 53 attacks and 57 shooters within our country. … Attacks in the US are not only less frequent than other countries, they are also much less deadly on average.”

It added, “Out of the 97 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranks 64th in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 65th in the murder rate.”

CPRC also notes that attacks in the U.S. are on the decline, that “there has been a much bigger increase over time in the number and severity of mass shootings in the rest of the world compared to the US.”

The CPRC’s findings on the number of mass shootings in America run completely counter to the mantra of the establishment media, Hollywood elites, and various gun control activists, but they are in line with academic research that seeks to present an unpoliticized view of the world.

For example, in June, the New York Times claimed “at least 700 mass shootings” over a two-year time frame, and in 2015, actress Rose McGowan claimed 355 in 2015 alone. But a University of Alabama researcher found a much lower figure–a total of 90 mass shootings in America from 1966-2012.

With emotionalism out and academic rigor in, CPRC shows 53 mass attacks in the U.S. during the last 18 years and declining U.S. share in the number of attacks worldwide.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

The campaign of the American left to silence conservatives on campus sustained a massive defeat yesterday, as the University of California, Berkeley reached a legal settlement (text here) to a lawsuit brought against it following cancelation of a speech by Ann Coulter.  The co-sponsor of that speech (along with Berkeley College Republicans), Young America’s Foundation (YAF) jubilantly announced, in an article by Spencer Brown:

Following more than a year of hard-fought litigation in the hostile Ninth Circuit, Young America’s Foundation secured victory for free speech against the University of California, Berkeley.  Through YAF’s lawsuit and subsequent settlement agreement executed over the weekend, UC Berkeley agreed to the following terms set by Young America’s Foundation:

1) Pay Young America’s Foundation $70,000.

2) Rescind the unconstitutional “high-profile speaker policy.”

3) Rescind the viewpoint-discriminatory security fee policy.

4) Abolish its heckler’s veto – protestors will no longer be able to shut down conservative expression. 

This landmark victory for free expression means UC Berkeley can no longer wantonly treat conservative students as second-class members of its community while ignoring the guaranteed protections of the First Amendment. 

No longer can UC Berkeley place a 3:00 p.m. curfew on conservative speech.  No longer can UC Berkeley ban advertisements for Young America’s Foundation-sponsored campus lectures.  And no longer can UC Berkeley relegate conservative speakers to remote or inconvenient lecture halls on campus while giving leftist speakers access to preferred locations. 

Further, the policy that allowed Berkeley administrators to charge conservative students $20,000 for security to host Ben Shapiro – an amount three times greater than the fee charged to leftist students to host liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor – is gone.  YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally.  Unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event, the security fee will be zero.

Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley (photo credit: Picryl).  Sproul Paza, beyond the gate, has been the scene of many riots since 1964, including the one that shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s speech.

The lawsuit was handled by the Dhillon Law Group, founded by superstar civil rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who also represents James Damore, the Google engineer fired for posting a memo questioning progressive orthodoxy on sex.  She issued a press release stating:

This landmark settlement means that all students at UC Berkeley now have the exciting opportunity to hear a variety of viewpoints on campus without the artificial tax of security fees selectively imposed on disfavored speech[.]

As is customary in such settlements, U.C. Berkeley and the other named defendants deny the allegations while agreeing to change policies and pay up $70,000, which presumably will be applied to the plaintiffs’ legal fees.

The Daily Californian student newspaper features the statement of the University:

“Given that this outcome is all but indistinguishable from what a courtroom victory would have looked like, we see this as the least expensive path to successful resolution of this lawsuit,” Mogulof said in the statement.  ”While we regret the time, effort and resources that have been expended successfully defending the constitutionality of UC Berkeley’s event policy, this settlement means the campus will not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable defense costs to prove that UC Berkeley has never discriminated on the basis of viewpoint.”

There is huge irony in this case in that in 1954, the University of California, Berkeley was convulsed with student demonstrations in the so-called Free Speech Movement that kicked off years of student unrest.  At that time, the left demanded free speech, only to reverse itself half a century later following its hegemony on campuses and demand the silencing of dissident voices questioning its shibboleths.  With elite academia captured by the left, universities have largely betrayed their mission of open inquiry and sided with the silencers.

This settlement represents a reversal of course – at least at the campus that has played the leading role in the left’s assault on civil rights.

The campaign of the American left to silence conservatives on campus sustained a massive defeat yesterday, as the University of California, Berkeley reached a legal settlement (text here) to a lawsuit brought against it following cancelation of a speech by Ann Coulter.  The co-sponsor of that speech (along with Berkeley College Republicans), Young America’s Foundation (YAF) jubilantly announced, in an article by Spencer Brown:

Following more than a year of hard-fought litigation in the hostile Ninth Circuit, Young America’s Foundation secured victory for free speech against the University of California, Berkeley.  Through YAF’s lawsuit and subsequent settlement agreement executed over the weekend, UC Berkeley agreed to the following terms set by Young America’s Foundation:

1) Pay Young America’s Foundation $70,000.

2) Rescind the unconstitutional “high-profile speaker policy.”

3) Rescind the viewpoint-discriminatory security fee policy.

4) Abolish its heckler’s veto – protestors will no longer be able to shut down conservative expression. 

This landmark victory for free expression means UC Berkeley can no longer wantonly treat conservative students as second-class members of its community while ignoring the guaranteed protections of the First Amendment. 

No longer can UC Berkeley place a 3:00 p.m. curfew on conservative speech.  No longer can UC Berkeley ban advertisements for Young America’s Foundation-sponsored campus lectures.  And no longer can UC Berkeley relegate conservative speakers to remote or inconvenient lecture halls on campus while giving leftist speakers access to preferred locations. 

Further, the policy that allowed Berkeley administrators to charge conservative students $20,000 for security to host Ben Shapiro – an amount three times greater than the fee charged to leftist students to host liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor – is gone.  YAF and UC Berkeley agreed to a fee schedule that treats all students equally.  Unless students are handling money or serving alcohol at an event, the security fee will be zero.

Sather Gate, University of California, Berkeley (photo credit: Picryl).  Sproul Paza, beyond the gate, has been the scene of many riots since 1964, including the one that shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s speech.

The lawsuit was handled by the Dhillon Law Group, founded by superstar civil rights lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, who also represents James Damore, the Google engineer fired for posting a memo questioning progressive orthodoxy on sex.  She issued a press release stating:

This landmark settlement means that all students at UC Berkeley now have the exciting opportunity to hear a variety of viewpoints on campus without the artificial tax of security fees selectively imposed on disfavored speech[.]

As is customary in such settlements, U.C. Berkeley and the other named defendants deny the allegations while agreeing to change policies and pay up $70,000, which presumably will be applied to the plaintiffs’ legal fees.

The Daily Californian student newspaper features the statement of the University:

“Given that this outcome is all but indistinguishable from what a courtroom victory would have looked like, we see this as the least expensive path to successful resolution of this lawsuit,” Mogulof said in the statement.  ”While we regret the time, effort and resources that have been expended successfully defending the constitutionality of UC Berkeley’s event policy, this settlement means the campus will not need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrecoverable defense costs to prove that UC Berkeley has never discriminated on the basis of viewpoint.”

There is huge irony in this case in that in 1954, the University of California, Berkeley was convulsed with student demonstrations in the so-called Free Speech Movement that kicked off years of student unrest.  At that time, the left demanded free speech, only to reverse itself half a century later following its hegemony on campuses and demand the silencing of dissident voices questioning its shibboleths.  With elite academia captured by the left, universities have largely betrayed their mission of open inquiry and sided with the silencers.

This settlement represents a reversal of course – at least at the campus that has played the leading role in the left’s assault on civil rights.

Anyone who thinks illegal aliens and “asylum” applicants are coming here to work is living on another planet.

New data from the Census show that 63% of non-citizens are helping themselves to the welfare.  They get it legally, and sometimes illegally, through food programs, general assistance programs, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit for low-income workers, just for starters.  They get even more when benefits derived from their U.S.-born children are thrown in, though bringing in a kid born elsewhere is also an asset.

Here’s the report from the Washington Examiner:

A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it.

So no, it’s not a temporary little safety net for those who just arrive here until they get their sea legs on the vast ship of America – the percentage of non-citizens on welfare expands as such people stay a while, meaning welfare is preferable to work.  Why work when Uncle Sam is giving it away for free?  That’s a great deal for someone otherwise condemned to living in a tin shack out in Tegucigalpa but not a benefit to our country.  In fact, it’s a drain, and Democrats, based on their policy positions, seem desperate to import more of it.

It’s almost a given that the illegal alien population would be part of this trend.  The migrant caravan of Honduras consists almost exclusively of low-skilled, zero-English people who at best have a tenth-grade education.  As a result, they are likely to earn only low wages here and are least likely to assimilate, given their high concentrations.  The generous welfare state is making it easy for them, and drawing more to come.

Amazingly, even legal immigrants are higher consumers of welfare services, too.  That likely speaks to the power of leftist judges who take any asylum claim no matter how unlikely an applicant is to succeed here, as well as the power of family reunifications that expand the size of non-citizen welfare families as well as their consumption of welfare.  It’s very rare that an uneducated legal immigrant here is going to have a lot of educated relatives to bring in through chain migration.

Every detail of the report is problematic.  Most people probably wouldn’t mind if illegal aliens and other non-citizens really did come here to work and nothing else.  But even work is corrupted with the fact that illegals and other non-citizens qualify for the earned income tax credit, meaning that if they earn low wages, they get big fat tax refunds back despite not paying any taxes into the system.  That explains why nearly all non-citizen households have one member who works.  The tax credit, after all, is large.

This presumably doesn’t even get into other kinds of services illegals use that aren’t considered welfare, such as free public school education, public defenders, highway use, and untaxed remittances on illegally earned wages.

And the use of public assistance seems to be going up.  If you look at this interview done by Paul Sperry earlier this year from an immigration-skeptical think-tank, the official says 62% of non-citizens use welfare.  Now the Census data shows that it is 63%.  That signals word getting around south of our border.

Two things stand out.  One, Republicans have done nothing to cut off at least some of the benefits, such as the earned income tax credit, which is so obviously a magnet for non-contributory migrants who come here to take, without putting a penny into the system.  Where were these Republicans when they had some power to end this injustice?

Two, the Democrats are pushing for more of this kind of welfare migration, extending the goody table ever farther for them.  California, for instance, wants to put every low-waged illegal on Medi-Cal, offering up a free ride to all takers from abroad while the rest of us make rent-sized payments for our health insurance, and Democrats want to extend the vast banquet table of benefits ($12 billion’s worth) to DREAMers.  That speaks to a party desperate to import more poverty to secure votes.  That was how Hugo Chávez secured his votes – and his permanent power in Venezuela. 

Voters haven’t a clue as to how dangerous this all is.

Anyone who thinks illegal aliens and “asylum” applicants are coming here to work is living on another planet.

New data from the Census show that 63% of non-citizens are helping themselves to the welfare.  They get it legally, and sometimes illegally, through food programs, general assistance programs, Medicaid, and the earned income tax credit for low-income workers, just for starters.  They get even more when benefits derived from their U.S.-born children are thrown in, though bringing in a kid born elsewhere is also an asset.

Here’s the report from the Washington Examiner:

A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it.

So no, it’s not a temporary little safety net for those who just arrive here until they get their sea legs on the vast ship of America – the percentage of non-citizens on welfare expands as such people stay a while, meaning welfare is preferable to work.  Why work when Uncle Sam is giving it away for free?  That’s a great deal for someone otherwise condemned to living in a tin shack out in Tegucigalpa but not a benefit to our country.  In fact, it’s a drain, and Democrats, based on their policy positions, seem desperate to import more of it.

It’s almost a given that the illegal alien population would be part of this trend.  The migrant caravan of Honduras consists almost exclusively of low-skilled, zero-English people who at best have a tenth-grade education.  As a result, they are likely to earn only low wages here and are least likely to assimilate, given their high concentrations.  The generous welfare state is making it easy for them, and drawing more to come.

Amazingly, even legal immigrants are higher consumers of welfare services, too.  That likely speaks to the power of leftist judges who take any asylum claim no matter how unlikely an applicant is to succeed here, as well as the power of family reunifications that expand the size of non-citizen welfare families as well as their consumption of welfare.  It’s very rare that an uneducated legal immigrant here is going to have a lot of educated relatives to bring in through chain migration.

Every detail of the report is problematic.  Most people probably wouldn’t mind if illegal aliens and other non-citizens really did come here to work and nothing else.  But even work is corrupted with the fact that illegals and other non-citizens qualify for the earned income tax credit, meaning that if they earn low wages, they get big fat tax refunds back despite not paying any taxes into the system.  That explains why nearly all non-citizen households have one member who works.  The tax credit, after all, is large.

This presumably doesn’t even get into other kinds of services illegals use that aren’t considered welfare, such as free public school education, public defenders, highway use, and untaxed remittances on illegally earned wages.

And the use of public assistance seems to be going up.  If you look at this interview done by Paul Sperry earlier this year from an immigration-skeptical think-tank, the official says 62% of non-citizens use welfare.  Now the Census data shows that it is 63%.  That signals word getting around south of our border.

Two things stand out.  One, Republicans have done nothing to cut off at least some of the benefits, such as the earned income tax credit, which is so obviously a magnet for non-contributory migrants who come here to take, without putting a penny into the system.  Where were these Republicans when they had some power to end this injustice?

Two, the Democrats are pushing for more of this kind of welfare migration, extending the goody table ever farther for them.  California, for instance, wants to put every low-waged illegal on Medi-Cal, offering up a free ride to all takers from abroad while the rest of us make rent-sized payments for our health insurance, and Democrats want to extend the vast banquet table of benefits ($12 billion’s worth) to DREAMers.  That speaks to a party desperate to import more poverty to secure votes.  That was how Hugo Chávez secured his votes – and his permanent power in Venezuela. 

Voters haven’t a clue as to how dangerous this all is.

The decision by President Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen to plead guilty to making false statements to the Senate Intelligence Committee has been described as nothing short of a “bombshell” capable of taking down the Trump administration.

This impression has only been bolstered by Trump tweeting about it, essentially calling Cohen a Judas and saying he “lied for this outcome and should, in my opinion, serve a full and complete sentence.”

The political discernment behind those tweets will be debated for some time to come, or at least until the next news cycle starts in about three hours. Regardless, they did make the president sound like a man who had something to be afraid of.

And therein lies the great problem with the tweets: At least from what we know so far from court documents, fear is probably not the correct reaction.

Author and commentator Paul Sperry, best known of late for his work with the New York Post, analyzed what we know so far about the indictments in an article published Monday by RealClearInvestigations.

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Contrary to the en vogue media theory that Cohen’s guilty plea is — at long last — the falling domino that will topple the entire Trump administration, Sperry wrote that what we know thus far from the Cohen filings is actually exculpatory for the president even as Cohen is admitting he lied about how long he was involved in proposed Trump real estate project in Moscow.

“The nine-page charging document filed with the plea deal suggests that the special counsel is using the Moscow tower talks to connect Trump to Russia,” Sperry wrote.

“But congressional investigators with House and Senate committees leading inquiries on the Russia question told RealClearInvestigations that it looks like Mueller withheld from the court details that would exonerate the president. They made this assessment in light of the charging document, known as a statement of ‘criminal information’ (filed in lieu of an indictment when a defendant agrees to plead guilty); a fuller accounting of Cohen’s emails and text messages that Capitol Hill sources have seen; and the still-secret transcripts of closed-door testimony provided by a business associate of Cohen.”

And this includes the putative link to Russian leader Vladimir Putin in the indictment everyone seemed to be mesmerized over.

“On page 7 of the statement of criminal information filed against Cohen, which is separate from but related to the plea agreement, Mueller mentions that Cohen tried to email Russian President Vladimir Putin’s office on Jan. 14, 2016, and again on Jan. 16, 2016,” Sperry wrote.

“But Mueller, who personally signed the document, omitted the fact that Cohen did not have any direct points of contact at the Kremlin, and had resorted to sending the emails to a general press mailbox. Sources who have seen these additional emails point out that this omitted information undercuts the idea of a ‘back channel’ and thus the special counsel’s collusion case.”

“Page 2 of the same criminal information document holds additional exculpatory evidence for Trump, sources say. It quotes an August 2017 letter from Cohen to the Senate intelligence committee in which he states that Trump ‘was never in contact with anyone about this (Moscow Project) proposal other than me,’” he continues.

“This section of Cohen’s written testimony, unlike other parts, is not disputed as false by Mueller, which sources say means prosecutors have tested its veracity through corroborating sources and found it to be accurate.”

Mueller also doesn’t take issue with Cohen’s statement that he “ultimately determined that the proposal was not feasible and never agreed to make a trip to Russia.”

RELATED: Corsi To Hit Mueller with Criminal Complaint, Reveals Mueller Asked Him To Commit Witness Tampering

Other sources seemed to indicate that there was less than there might appear in the Cohen plea.

“Though Cohen may have lied to Congress about the dates,” a Capitol Hill investigator told Sperry, “it’s clear from personal messages he sent in 2015 and 2016 that the Trump Organization did not have formal lines of communication set up with Putin’s office or the Kremlin during the campaign. There was no secret ‘back channel.’”

“So as far as collusion goes,” he continued, “the project is actually more exculpatory than incriminating for Trump and his campaign.”

Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The Mueller investigation can be a very tight ship when it wants to be and we don’t know everything the special counsel has. We likely won’t know everything until we see Mueller’s final report.

However, what Sperry seems to have collected is a whole lot of evidence that, to quote the inimitable Peter Strzok, “there is no big there there.”

While Cohen was involved with a go-between named Felix Sater who claimed he had some connections with the Russian leader, “the project never went anywhere because Sater didn’t have the pull with Putin he claimed to have. Emails and texts indicate that Sater could only offer Cohen access to one of his acquaintances, who was an acquaintance of someone else who was partners in a real estate development with a friend of Putin’s.”

The Kremlin was never involved with the project in any manner, according to Sperry’s sources, and no one traveled to Russia to try and make the deal happen. In other words, Sater was less connected than that dodgy lawyer who took part in the infamous Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. Both seem to have gone nowhere.

But tell that to the media.

“The actual texts of the plea deal and related materials filed last week in federal court do not jibe with reports and commentary given on several cable news outlets and comments of Democrat leaders,” Sperry wrote.

“CNN said the charging documents, which reference the president as ‘Individual 1,’ suggest Trump had a working relationship with Russia’s president and that ‘Putin had leverage over Trump’ because of the project.

“’Well into the 2016 campaign, one of the president’s closest associates was in touch with the Kremlin on this project, as we now know, and Michael Cohen says he was lying about it to protect the president,’ said CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.

“’Cohen was communicating directly with the Kremlin,’ Blitzer added.”

Really, now.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

Shoots down the myth of wanting jobs.

Via Washington Examiner:

A majority of “non-citizens,” including those with legal green card rights, are tapping into welfare programs set up to help poor and ailing Americans, a Census Bureau finding that bolsters President Trump’s concern about immigrants costing the nation.

In a new analysis of the latest numbers, from 2014, 63 percent of non-citizens are using a welfare program, and it grows to 70 percent for those here 10 years or more, confirming another concern that once immigrants tap into welfare, they don’t get off it.

The Center for Immigration Studies said in its report that the numbers give support for Trump’s plan to cut non-citizens off welfare from the “public charge” if they want a green card that allows them to legally work in the United States.

“The Trump administration has proposed new ‘public charge’ rules making it harder for prospective immigrants to qualify for lawful permanent residence — green cards — if they use or are likely to use U.S. welfare programs,” said CIS.

“Concern over immigrant welfare use is justified, as households headed by non-citizens use means-tested welfare at high rates. Non-citizens in the data include illegal immigrants, long-term temporary visitors like guest workers, and permanent residents who have not naturalized. While barriers to welfare use exist for these groups, it has not prevented them from making extensive use of the welfare system, often receiving benefits on behalf of U.S.-born children,” added the Washington-based immigration think tank.

The numbers are huge. The report said that there are 4,684,784 million non-citizen households receiving welfare.

And nearly all, 4,370,385, have at least one worker in the house.

Keep reading…

HT: Huck Funn

Wait a cotton-picking minute…

Via Daily Mail:

The growing popularity of veganism could lead to a cull of meat and dairy sayings, an academic has claimed.

Phrases such as ‘bring home the bacon’ and ‘killing two birds with one stone’ will go out of fashion to avoid offending animal lovers, according to Shareena Hamzah of Swansea University.

She cited guidance from Peta, the animal rights charity, which wants people to replace expressions such as ‘take the bull by the horns’ with ‘take the flower by the thorns’.

Dr Hamzah said the influence of veganism will raise awareness of animal cruelty and push people towards using less meaty metaphors.

‘If veganism forces us to confront the realities of food’s origins, then this increased awareness will undoubtedly be reflected in our language and literature,’ she said.

‘The increased awareness of vegan issues will filter through our consciousness to produce new modes of expression.’

But Dr Hamzah said it was unlikely such phrases would be cut out of the linguistic diet altogether, and their more sparing use could in fact heighten their impact.

Keep reading…