90 Miles From Tyranny

Friday, February 8, 2019

The Absolute STATE of Virginia (A Rant)

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Border agents just apprehended convicted child molesters and an MS-13 member at the Texas border where there's no barrier

U.S. Border Patrol agents said Thursday that they apprehended several illegal immigrants at the southern border in Texas, in places where there are no physical barrier walls to deter illegal crossings.

Among those caught crossing into the U.S. were a Mexican man with a previous conviction in Georgia for child molestation, a Honduran man with a record in North Carolina showing a conviction for "Indecent Liberties with Child," and another Honduran male with a Florida record that identified him as a member of the violent MS-13 gang.

The apprehensions occurred in the Rio Grande Valley sector of the southern border on Monday and Tuesday, according to a release by the Border Patrol.

I toured a portion of that sector in January, and agents said that areas that feature a 25-foot barrier of concrete and steel have proven critical in blocking illegal border crossers, forcing them to attempt their crossings in specific areas where they can be apprehended. They've asked for more of the same kind of border wall to fill in the long gaps that currently exist.

When President Trump said during his State of the Union address Tuesday that his proposal is for new barrier that "will be deployed in the ...

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Has Trump Found the Formula for 2020?

If the pollsters at CNN and CBS are correct, Donald Trump may have found the formula for winning a second term in 2020.

His State of the Union address, say the two networks, met with the approval of 76 percent of all viewers — 97 percent of Republicans, 82 percent of independents and 30 percent of Democrats. Seventy-two percent agreed with the president’s plans for securing the border with Mexico.

Trump was not only unapologetic in defense of his wall. He seemed to relish savaging the rising radicalism of Democrats on two critical issues many Democrats have, since their 2018 triumph, seized upon: abortion on demand, right up to the day of birth, and soak-the-rich socialism.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” Trump thundered. “America was founded on liberty and independence — not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free.”

“America will never be a socialist country,” Trump roared, as the camera focused in on the scowling face of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The GOP ovation was thunderous, the Democratic silence revealing. Understandable. For, as in the 1972 Nixon landslide, Democrats appear to be coming down with “McGovernism.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rookie sensation in Nancy Pelosi’s House, has called for a U.S. income tax rate of 70 percent. As California and New York City have state and local tax rates of 12 percent that are no longer deductible on federal taxes, their most successful residents could be forced to fork over four-fifths of all income every year in taxes.

Some Democrats have called for an 80 percent federal tax rate. New Yorkers who earn $1 million a year would be allowed to keep less than a dime of every added dollar they earn.

Sanders would impose a 45 percent tax on all estates over $3.5 million, rising to 77 percent on estates worth $1 billion.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax to scoop off 2 percent of all the wealth of folks whose net worth reaches $50 million, and 3 percent of all the wealth of every billionaire, every year.

To ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a potential rival in the presidential race, whose New York is witnessing an exodus of its wealthy to Sun Belt states, Warren’s ideas represent a gospel-of-greed stupidity.

Says Bloomberg: “If you want to look at a system that is not capitalistic, just take a look at what was perhaps the wealthiest country in the world and today people are starving to death. It’s called Venezuela.”

Democrats have also embraced the cause of...

OUTRAGE! Obama caught doing… WHAT!?

Former President Barack Obama and the Democrats’ attempt to frame Donald Trump for “Russian collusion” was dirtier, and started earlier, than anyone ever knew — and the number two man in the current investigation was in it up to his eyeballs.

Jaw-dropping testimony before Congress make experts wonder if President Trump can get a fair shake in the never-ending investigation.

It’s so sleazy, it could only happen in Washington under Obama.

Details that have leaked out from behind closed doors prove that the Democrats managed to smuggle their talking points into the top levels of power through personal — even sexual — relationships.

How did a handful of opposition research, paid for by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, lead to a two-and-a-half year investigation that smears the sitting president?

The revelations are so explosive that, even though they happened months ago, they’ve just come to light this week.

The first shocking part is just when all this happened.

Justice Department official Bruce Ohr said he took the phony dossier to Obama administration officials almost the second that Donald Trump locked up the Republican Party presidential nomination.

Ohr had breakfast with Christopher Steele, the British spy who cobbled together the fake allegations, on July 30, 2016.

Trump had just clinched the nomination on July 19 — after beating back a plot by GOP elites to rig the convention and nominate Ohio governor John Kasich… someone they knew Hillary could beat like a drum.

Lo and behold, just 11 days later Bruce Ohr took the dossier to top Obama officials and the FBI was suddenly on the case.

The Obama administration used the allegations to spy on the Trump presidential campaign.

The second shocking part is the way it caught Democrats red-handed trying to cover their tracks by shamelessly lying to the American people.

When the GOP first learned just a shred of this information, they put out a memo with the facts warning the American people that the Russian investigation was a charade.

Then Democrats released their own report—but unlike the GOP, they lied through their collective teeth.

The Democrats claimed the Republican memo “mischaracterizes Bruce Ohr’s role, overstates the significance of his interactions with Steele, and misleads about the timeframe of Ohr’s communications with the FBI.”

The Democrats swore that Ohr didn’t go to the FBI until November 2016, right around election time. He hardly had any influence over the investigation at all, they said.

But Bruce Ohr shot a hole through their lies, under oath, last August.

Now Americans that Democrats will lie about Russia, Obama and his officials, even whether crimes took place—just as long as it hurts Donald Trump.

And that leads into the most shocking part of this whole testimony—and has nothing to do with ancient history.

The present—and future—of the United States hang on one of the facts that came out…and that’s just who Ohr talked to.

Everyone knew that Bruce Ohr took his story to Andrew McCabe and Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok.

Everyone knew that those three were determined to stop Trump from being elected, and that Page and Strzok sent secret text messages discussing ways to frame Trump for...

Huge: Mueller Called Before FISA Courts after FBI Cheated on Surveillance Applications in ’02

Special Counsel Robert Mueller was summoned before the FISA courts when he was FBI director to address a “large number of instances in which the FBI cheated on sensitive surveillance warrants,” in 2002 and 2003, according to John Solomon of the Hill.

The news was revealed by former FBI principal deputy general counsel, Trisha Anderson, who testified to Congressional investigators that Mueller was asked to appear before the FISA judges over “extensive” cheating on FISA warrants.

“It preceded my time with the FBI but as I understood it, there was a pattern of some incidents of omission that were of concern to the FISA court that resulted in former Director Mueller actually appearing before the FISA court,” Anderson told Congress.

Solomon writes:

Other sources who worked for Mueller at the time told me the court’s concerns arose in 2002 and 2003 — shortly after America was stunned by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — when the FISC learned the FBI had omitted material facts from FISA warrant applications in more than 75 terrorism cases that dated back to the late 1990s.

Most of the omissions occurred in FBI work that pre-dated Mueller’s arrival, the sources said. But the court wanted assurances the new...

Here’s the most important fact about the Green New Deal: It wouldn’t work.

Ultimately, fully implementing the Green New Deal would have no meaningful impact on global temperatures.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., released their much-anticipated blueprint for a Green New Deal Thursday.

And make no mistake: If implemented, the Green New Deal would bring huge changes to our country. According to an FAQput out by Ocasio-Cortez’s office, this new deal is “a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.”

The plan additionally asks Americans to “upgrade or replace every building in U.S. for state-of-the-art energy efficiency” and to “build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

That’s not even all. Far from being just an energy and climate resolution, the Green New Deal resolution is a wish list for big government spending, expansive government control, and massive amounts of wealth distribution. As Ocasio-Cortez told NPR, “the heart of the Green New Deal is about social justice.”

Ultimately, this deal would fundamentally change how people produce and consume energy, harvest crops, raise livestock, build homes, drive cars, travel long distances, and manufacture goods. And it wouldn’t even work.

Green New Deal Wouldn’t Change Climate Significantly

But here’s the key thing: Even if Americans were on board with this radical change in behavior and lifestyle, it wouldn’t change our climate.

In fact, the U.S. could cut its carbon dioxide emissions 100 percent and it would not make a difference in abating global warming.

Using the same climate sensitivity (the warming effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide emissions) as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes in its modeling, the world would be only 0.137 degree Celsius cooler by 2100. Even if we assumed every other industrialized country would be equally on board, this would merely avert warming by 0.278 degree Celsius by the turn of the century.

One of the biggest sources of carbon dioxide emissions is developing countries.

But while one of the priorities of the Green New Deal is to make the U.S. a lead exporter in green technologies, assuming developing countries will forgo cheap, abundant carbon dioxide-emitting energy for more expensive intermittent sources is pure fantasy.

Yes, developing countries will likely expand their use of renewable power sources over time, but not to the extent it will have any meaningful impact on global temperatures. While some countries are shuttering their coal-fired plants, others in both developed and developing countries are building new plants and expanding the life of existing generators.

After all, affordable, reliable, and widely available energy is essential to lifting people out of poverty and improving the life, health, and comfort of people trying to reach a better standard of living.

Americans Could Face Hundreds of Dollars in New Energy Costs Monthly

But not only would the Green New Deal be ineffective, it would also almost certainly impose steep costs on Americans, via increased energy bills.

The resolution calls for deriving 100 percent of America’s electricity from “clean, renewable, and zero-emission” energy sources—a steep increase from the 63 percent of electricity that came from carbon dioxide-emitting conventional fuels in 2017. Nuclear power was responsible for another 20 percent. But, according to the FAQ sheet, “The Green New Deal makes new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear plants unnecessary. This is a massive mobilization of all our resources into...