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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.”

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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…

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the law professor behind popular political blog Instapundit, published an article in USA Today, Monday, explaining why he decided to delete his Twitter account which had over 100,000 followers.

In his article, titled “Why I deleted my popular Twitter account,” Reynolds claimed the social network has become a “breeding ground for thoughtlessness and contempt.”

“I was partly acting on impulse, because the social media site had just, for no obvious reason, ‘permanently banned’ someone I follow, something that seems to be happening more and more,” he explained. “But I was also acting on my growing belief that Twitter is, well, horrible.”

Reynolds added that social networks “promote bad feelings and bad behavior,” and declared, “I think that Twitter is the worst.”

“In fact, if you set out to design a platform that would poison America’s discourse and its politics, you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more destructive than Twitter,” Reynolds proclaimed. “I also think that Twitter actually makes people meaner and less thoughtful. People I’ve followed both on Facebook and Twitter are generally much meaner on Twitter, where they’re in the political arena, than on Facebook, where their friends and family are a big part of the audience.”

Reynolds then concluded his article by claiming he’s “happier” now that he isn’t using Twitter, and is instead devoting his “downtime” to “reading novels.”

In 2016, Reynold’s Instapundit account was temporarily suspended from Twitter, before it was reinstated.

Reynolds has previously criticized social media, and in a June article for USA Today, titled “Blame social media for making us more hasty and emotional. Can we fix this?” he questioned whether social networks were “bad for our brains.”

 

Last week, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics released a shocking fact: life expectancy dropped in the United States for the third straight year, down to 78.6 years as of 2017. What, exactly, drove that decline? Drug overdoses and suicides. Drug overdoses were responsible for more than 70,000 deaths in 2017, with the overdose rate climbing 9.6 percent over 2016; suicide jumped 3.7 percent.

CDC director Robert Redfield explained, “Life expectancy gives us a snapshot of the nation’s overall health and these sobering statistics are a wakeup call that we are losing too many Americans, too early and too often, to conditions that are preventable.”

The continuing decline in American life expectancy should give the lie to the bizarre notion that drug overdose and suicide are results of a stagnant economy—a common theory on both the Right and the Left. That theory suggests that the globalized economy has left behind a particular segment of Americans, and that those Americans are dealing with economic hardship through drugs and depression. But that wouldn’t explain why life expectancy is declining now, when it continued to increase throughout the 2007-2009 economic recession. As David Brooks of The New York Times points out, “[economic] gains are finally being widely shared, even by the least skilled…Thanks mostly to government transfer programs, incomes for the bottom fifth of society have increased by about 80 percent over the past four decades.”

It also wouldn’t explain the demographics of drug overdoses. As the CDC points out, “Some of the greatest increases [among heroin users] have occurred in demographic groups with historically low rates of heroin use: women, the privately insured, the people with higher incomes.” And those taking their own lives are disproportionately not middle aged people falling out of the workforce—they are older American males, predominantly white. These are not the demographics of the economically dispossessed in the United States.

No, something else is missing. That something else is also manifesting in social fragmentation, tribal polarization, and political rage.

Read the rest here.

The common phrase “bringing home the bacon” may now be offensive to some. If you thought women (because it is about providing for a household and because women seem to be offended by everything these days) you’d be wrong.

According to the Independent, phrases like “bringing home the bacon” and “putting all your eggs in one basket” aren’t merely “harmless quirks of the English language,” but actually phrases that “could be offending vegans and vegetarians.”

The poor, malnourished souls.

The Independent article is based off another article, from a researcher who wrote in the Conversation that meat is not just a “form of sustenance,” but “a source of societal power.” Throughout history, Shareena Z. Hamzah wrote, meat was something only the wealthy could afford, while peasants had to subsist on a “mostly vegetarian diet.”

After some literary references, Hamzah then lists all the bad things meat has wrought: Climate change, “environmental degradation,” studies noting some “negative effects of meat-eating on the human body,” and concerns about animal welfare. She wrote:

“The increased awareness of vegan issues will filter through our consciousness to produce new modes of expression – after all, there’s more than one way to peel a potato. At the same time, metaphors involving meat could gain an increased intensity if the killing of animals for food becomes less socially acceptable. The image of “killing two birds with one stone” is, if anything, made more powerful by the animal-friendly alternative of “feeding two birds with one scone.” If veganism forces us to confront the realities of food’s origins, then this increased awareness will undoubtedly be reflected in our language and our literature.”

Hamzah points to a survey from CompareTheMarket.com, which claims there are 3.5 million vegans in the United Kingdom, a sharp uptick from 2016, when a survey published by The Vegan Society and Vegan Life magazine found just 540,000 vegans living in Britain. It’s difficult to say there was such a sharp increase in just two years, considering the different surveys and potential sample sizes.

This increase, which Hamzah accepts without question, will lead people to stop using meat-based idioms like “bringing home the bacon.”

It’s doubtful, since idioms persist, people hate their speech being censored by the easily offended, and “bringing home the bacon” is about money, not delicious salt-cured pork belly.

Back at the Independent, Olivia Petter notes that the aggressively unpopular “animal rights” group PETA has been trying to get meat-based idioms banned from classrooms.

“While these phrases may seem harmless, they carry meaning and can send mixed signals to students about the relationship between humans and animals and can normalize abuse,” the organization wrote on its website. “Teaching students to use animal-friendly language can cultivate positive relationships between all beings and help end the epidemic of youth violence toward animals.”

These people truly think others are so dumb and evil as to hear a phrase like “killing two birds with one stone” and actually take it as a challenge.

PETA suggests saying “bringing home the bagels,” but what happens when that is deemed racist (since the food originated in Jewish communities) or sexist (please don’t make me explain why) or offensive to people on a no-carb diet?

President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who has adopted as his signature policy a violent nationwide crackdown on drug use, claimed in remarks on Monday that he uses marijuana “to stay awake.”

Duterte later told reporters he was “of course” joking, trying to keep a rambling speech about how much he disliked the experience of attending this year’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit from getting too boring.

Duterte was speaking at an event celebrating the Philippine Organizing Committee that put together the country’s delegation to ASEAN. The Philippine president typically deviates from the main themes of events he attends in his remarks, instead taking time to discuss matters of interest to him, such as his distaste for the Catholic Church. Last week, he threatened to “decapitate” a Philippine bishop for allegedly buying drugs, a claim Duterte did not back with evidence.

At the ASEAN event in Manila Monday, Duterte took the time to detail his many complaints about the conference, calling it a “killing activity,” implying that the world leaders who attend spend most of their time there slowly dying inside.

“Me, not so much,” he added, “because I take marijuana to stay awake. It doesn’t work, with others.”

Duterte used Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah as an example of one of the world leaders who fell asleep during the event.

“Just between us, but Bolkiah slept during the events,” Duterte said during the public speech at the presidential palace Monday. “He has a talent to make it appear that he was not sleeping, so it is as if he is contemplating his oil.”

Duterte also complained about the “awful” food at the event, claiming he had to bring his own canned meats and eat them in his hotel room to avoid consuming catered ASEAN food for heads of state.

“The food sucked. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s true,” Duterte protested. “I have to bring Karne Norte and dried fish.”

He went on to complain that the heads of the ASEAN “think we’re boy scouts” and overbook each world leader’s schedules. “I can’t take it,” he added.

The ASEAN conference occurred last month in Papua New Guinea. At the time, Duterte skipped several significant meetings at ASEAN and went on to skip four meetings scheduled at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Singapore, which occurred immediately after the ASEAN summit. He also skipped the ASEAN gala, which he hosted in 2017 when the Philippines organized it. Duterte’s presidential spokesman, Salvador Panelo, told reporters that Duterte skipped the meetings for “power naps” necessary due to the “punishing” schedule he faced.

Duterte’s remarks about marijuana have triggered the most outrage, as police have killed thousands of Philippine nationals in shootouts since Duterte took office in 2016, vowing to kill the nation’s drug criminals and eradicate illicit drug use entirely. Marijuana use is illegal in the Philippines. An estimated 5,000 people have died since Duterte took office in incidents related to law enforcement against drug crime. The first police convictions for wrongful killing of drug suspects occurred on Friday; Duterte has vowed to pardon officers who kill Philippine citizens suspected of using or trafficking in drugs.

Asked to clarify his remarks Monday, Duterte said, “Of course I was joking. … I want to shake a tree in the middle of a [speech].” He added that his speech “would be boring” if he did not make jokes and that this was part of his “style.”

“It’s too late to change,” he concluded, adding, “If you believe it, you are stupid.”

In an interview in 2016, Duterte issued support for legalizing medical marijuana, insisting that cannabis “is really an ingredient of modern medicine now. … There are medicines right now being developed or already in the market that contains marijuana as a component but used for medical purposes.” Yet he rejected the idea of smoking cannabis recreationally, warning that those who “fight” the law by using it in the manner will “die.”

Rappler added that Duterte has previously admitted, without claiming to be joking, to the use of fentanyl, an extremely addictive and dangerous opioid believed to have played a role in nearly half the opioid overdose deaths in the United States in 2017. Duterte claimed to use fentanyl in a patch form to relieve chronic back pain.

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

European Union regulators are reportedly asking Google competitors whether the Big Tech company is harming them.

According to Reuters, the investigation “followed a complaint by U.S. search and advertising company Yelp and rivals in the travel, restaurant and accommodation industries,” which led to European Union antitrust regulators sending “questionnaires to Google rivals last month, asking for details of the company’s practices and the impact on competing services between January 2012 to December 2017.”

“Regulators also wanted to know if rivals experienced an impact in the operation of their local services as a result of major search algorithm changes by Google, including the introduction of its Panda 4.0 algorithm,” reported Reuters. “Introduced in 2014, this algorithm determines what appears in Google search results.”

Regulators also asked if “Google used content from rival local search services such as reviews on Local Universal or One Box.”

Reuters noted that the investigation could prompt the European Union’s fourth antitrust case against the company.

In July, Google was fined $5 billion by the European Union for “denying rivals a chance to innovate” through its Android phones — a ruling it appealed in October.

In 2017, Google was also fined €2.4 billion by the European Union for taking advantage of its search engine “dominance” to push consumers to its own businesses, while last month, European Union consumer groups accused Google of tracking users’ movements and violating privacy laws.