90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Happy Belated Ed Balls Day!

US experts ‘invited to see shutdown of N Korean nuclear test site’

North Korea has said it will close its nuclear test site in May. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un told his counterpart in Seoul that experts from the US and South Korea would be invited to witness the closure and dismantling of the Punggyi-ri site in the country’s northeast, a spokesman said on Sunday.
Seismologists said the country’s main testing facility may have partly collapsed during a series of aftershocks following the last test at Punggyi-ri in mid-September.

But Kim reportedly said on Friday that two other tunnels still remained in good condition.

The news comes as US President Donald Trump presses for full denuclearization ahead of his summit with Kim Jong-un, which now looks likely to be held in late May.

Trump said on Saturday the summit “would likely to held in the next three or four weeks”, although exactly where he will meet the North Korean leader has yet to be revealed.

On Friday, Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in vowed “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula in the first inter-Korean summit in more than a decade, but the declaration did not include concrete steps to reach that goal, Reuters said.

North Korea’s state media had said before the summit that Pyongyang would immediately suspend nuclear and missile tests, scrap its nuclear test site and instead pursue economic growth and peace.

Kim told Moon he would soon invite experts and journalists to show the dismantling of the facilities “to the international community”, the Blue House in Seoul, where the South Korean leader resides, said.

“The United States, though inherently hostile to North Korea, will get to know once our talk begins that I am not the kind of person who will use nuclear weapons against the South or the United States across the Pacific,” Moon’s press secretary Yoon Young-chan quoted Kim as saying.

“There is no reason for us to possess nuclear weapons while suffering difficulties if mutual trust with the United States is built through frequent meetings from now on, and an end to the war and...

It has often been said that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. Even as his political contemporaries and media pundits in the 1980’s mocked Mr. Reagan for what they dismissed as an overly-simplistic approach to world affairs, time and time again Reagan proved them wrong and in the end was the man most responsible for freeing hundreds of millions from the tyranny of an oppressive Soviet regime. The parallels between Reagan vs the Soviet government and Trump vs the North Korean government are striking.

A recent social media post by a Trump supporter described the President’s success with North Korea as “genius level diplomacy.”

The gist of that conclusion goes like this:

**Trump comes out swinging against North Korea warning the authoritarian regime he won’t put up with nonsense as previous presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama) have done.

**Trump moved forcefully against China economically via demands for new trade agreements. While on the surface China tries to appear only mildly upset, behind the scenes Chinese officials are in a panic over what that could do to their economy. This, in turn, makes them, for the first time ever, take the sanctions against North Korea seriously.

**The North Korean regime starts to feel the impacts of real sanctions on them. China quietly but forcefully urges the regime to back off its nuclear ambitions.

**The Trump government is opening back channels of communication with...

Even as the high-stakes Mexican standoff inches nearer as the “refugee” caravan gets closer to the southern border and isn’t backing down, the complicity of agents of the state of California in enabling the invasion is becoming more noticeable.

The state has waged a fierce resistance against the rest of the country after their massive vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 ran into the brick wall of the U.S. Constitution and the Electoral College and California officials are determined to block the government from enforcing federal immigration laws.

The latest example of this is an LAPD officer who was caught red-handed acting as a “coyote” by attempting to smuggle two illegal aliens into the country this week.

Via CBS Los Angeles “LAPD Officer Arrested For Trying To Smuggle Immigrants Across Border”:

A Los Angeles police officer has been arrested on federal charges alleging he tried to smuggle two illegal immigrants into the United States this week in southeastern San Diego County.

Mambasse Koulabalo Patara has been charged with violating immigration laws, according to...

There's an old Washington maxim that advises being careful because 'what goes around almost always comes back around'

There are three scary but crucially important factors underlying the rapidly growing FBI scandal that most people miss even though they are hidden in plain sight. Recognizing and understanding this trio goes a long way toward explaining what has happened in the scandal and where it is likely to go next.

First, there’s Horowitz’ Revenge. Virtually everybody in the nation’s capital is waiting either in fear or eager anticipation for the upcoming investigative report of Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Horowitz is among the most respected and effective IGs ever appointed but former President Barack Obama, who nominated him in 2011, may consider that decision among those he most regrets from his eight years in the White House.

Here’s why: The Inspectors General Act of 1978 authorizes the IGs and their investigators and auditors to obtain and examine any official document necessary to carrying out their responsibilities in fighting waste, fraud and corruption in government. Presidents appoint IGs but they report to Congress, making them an important component of congressional oversight of the executive branch.

But a few months before Horowitz was sworn-in in 2012, Eric Holder, Obama’s Attorney General and previously deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, gutted the IG act provision that mandates their access to all necessary documents. Holder acted at the behest of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller and others at the bureau.

Holder — who would subsequently be held in contempt by Congress for refusing to turn over subpoenaed documents in the Fast and Furious scandal — thus forced Horowitz to request in writing any documents he sought from the bureau.

There then ensued a three-year struggle in Congress and the media that culminated in Obama having no choice but to sign the Inspector General Empowerment Act of 2016 that removed all doubt about the IG’s access.

During the three years between Holder’s blatant subversion of the 1978 IG Act and passage of the 2016 law, James Comey succeeded Mueller as FBI chief but continued to wall off Horowitz’s access to documents essential to doing his job until the new law was passed.

Horowitz has been investigating the FBI’s conduct in its investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server and email system to conduct official business as America’s chief diplomat. He’s also probing the bureau’s investigation of allegations of collusion between President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and elements linked to the Russian government.

In the course of those two investigations, Horowitz has obtained and reviewed an estimated 1.2 million documents. There is an old saying in Washington that “things that go around have a way of coming back around.”

Second, there’s Obama’s Perogative. As more facts are uncovered about the lengths to which former FBI Director James Comey, his then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and a half dozen other pro-Hillary Clinton bureau insiders went to protect the Democratic nominee in her email scandal, the least discussed element is Obama’s role in the affair.

But former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy make persuasive cases that protecting Obama in the Clinton email scandal was key to...