90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

OBNOXIOUS FAKE NEWS CNN PEST JIM ACOSTA WINS PRESS FREEDOM AWARD

The fake news industry has made a fine choice for one of its major awards…

Press credibility just took another major hit when CNN’s yappy nuisance Jim Acosta scored the coveted 2019 “Truth To Power” award in a display of how low that the media has sunk in this sad era of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

The trophy will be presented to the clownish “reporter” at the upcoming New York Press Club Journalism Awards soiree in another one of those self-serving ceremonies similar to those that are conducted by the entitled narcissists in the entertainment industry.

As CNN has come to be the nation’s nexus of anti-Trump propaganda, it has been Acosta who best exemplifies the pathetic remnants of what was at one time an internationally renowned news organization.

The announcement came down on Friday.

Via The Wrap, “CNN’s Jim Acosta To Receive ‘Truth to Power’ Award From NY Press Club”:

CNN’s Jim Acosta will be honored with the New York Press Club’s “Truth to Power” award, the organization said in a press release Friday. The award honors “an individual whose body of work challenges the power establishment and/or defends journalists.”

“We are proud to honor a man such as Jim Acosta, who has proven himself throughout his storied, decades-long career to be a journalist of the utmost integrity, ” Jane Tillman Irving, president of the Press Club, said in the release. “For his unwavering commitment to fact and journalism, we are pleased to add to Jim’s many accolades with the Gabe Pressman ‘Truth to Power’ award.”

Acosta, the channel’s chief White House correspondent, spent years in relative obscurity on CNN until Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. Trump has...

The Free Market Will Find The Best Solution. The Climate Hoax Has Nothing To Do With The Free Market...

Probe launched into John Kerry's Iran talks

Former Obama official suspected of interfering with president's policy

When President Trump took office, he announced the U.S. would withdraw from the John Kerry-negotiated and Barack Obama-approved deal with Iran, contending it would not accomplish the objective of halting the mullah-led regime’s nuclear-weapons program.

Kerry wasn’t pleased with the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in which the U.S. sent pallets of cash to Iran. But Judicial Watch argued that didn’t give him the authority to work with foreign leaders behind the back of the president to salvage the deal.

Judicial Watch announced Monday it is suing the State Department to obtain copies of documents relevant to Kerry’s “shadow diplomacy.”

Trump announced on May 8, 2018, that the U.S. was withdrawing from the deal.

“In the months preceding the U.S. withdrawal, Kerry reportedly had been on a ‘stealthy yet aggressive mission’ of shadow diplomacy in an attempt to preserve the Iran nuclear deal. Kerry reportedly held meetings and spoke with major players, foreign and domestic, involved in the Iran nuclear agreement who opposed the U.S. withdrawal,” Judicial Watch explained.

“During his personal campaign to salvage the Iran nuclear deal, Kerry is said to have met with Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif at the United Nations in New York in late April 2018, their second meeting in two months, to discuss ways of preventing the deal limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program from falling apart. Current Secretary of State Mike Pompeo termed Kerry’s meeting with ‘the world’s largest state-sponsor of terror’ ‘unseemly and unprecedented’ and ‘beyond inappropriate,'” Judicial Watch said.

Kerry also met in 2018 with...

Potential Consequences of Spying on the Trump Campaign

Actions by Justice Department officials in spying on a Donald Trump campaign adviser in 2016 could be a crime or merely an administrative offense, legal experts say.

Crimes could include perjury or misleading a court, they say, while disciplinary action for an administrative offense could mean being fired or losing a law license.

Testifying last week before two separate congressional panels, Attorney General William Barr said the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General report about the surveillance of Trump campaign aide Carter Page will be released in May or June.

Barr also indicated that he planned a further review of government “spying” on the Trump campaign.

What’s known is that the Obama administration’s Justice Department obtained a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to conduct electronic surveillance on Page in October 2016.

The inspector general’s review is looking at whether Justice Department or FBI officials did anything improper in obtaining the warrant approved by a federal judge.

“Before looking at the legality, the department should examine the process behind getting a FISA warrant against a presidential campaign. That’s something that should be approved by the attorney general first,” John Yoo, a former assistant U.S. attorney general under President George W. Bush, told The Daily Signal.

Domestic spying on political opponents was a big part of what prompted the FISA law in the 1970s after President Richard Nixon’s administration, the goal being to put a check in place.

“The whole point of FISA was because Nixon was spying on political opponents,” said Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “This seems to have violated the purpose of FISA, which is to make sure surveillance is always...

Ilhan Omar’s Los Angeles CAIR speech — the one that has attracted the current attention — gives the received CAIR origin fable that is recited as fact by the mainstream media outlets. I mean the one that serves up CAIR as a civil rights organization. Mosaic reminds us this morning:

Controversy broke out last week concerning remarks Congresswoman Ilhan Omar made at a gathering of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Last week also marked the fifth anniversary since CAIR—widely regarded by American journalists and politicians as a legitimate representative of U.S. Muslims—successfully pressured Brandeis University into canceling its plans to grant an honorary degree to the apostate Muslim and women’s-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. At the time, Andrew McCarthy responded with an updated version of a chapter from his 2010 book, in which he explained how Hamas operatives created CAIR.

Mosaic quotes this passage:

When 25 [Hamas] members and supporters gathered at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia on October 27, 1993, they were unaware that the FBI was monitoring their deliberations. The confab was a brainstorming exercise: how best to back Hamas and derail the Oslo Accords while concealing these activities from the American government? . . . In the U.S., Hamas was [by this time] perceived as the principal enemy of the popular “peace process.” . . .

That was where [a] new organization would come in. . . . The new entity’s Islamism and Hamas promotion would have to be less “conspicuous.” It would need to couch its rhetoric in sweet nothings like “social justice,” “due process,” and “resistance.” If it did those things, though, it might be more attractive . . . and effective. A Muslim organization posing as a civil-rights activist while soft-pedaling its jihadist sympathies might be able to snow the American political class, the courts, the media, and the academy. It might make real inroads with the . . . progressives who dominated the Clinton administration. . . .

Despite its Hamas roots and terror ties, the most disturbing aspect of CAIR is its accomplishment of the Muslim Brotherhood’s precise aspiration for it. Thanks to its media savvy and the credulousness of government officials and press outlets, which have treated it as the “civil-rights” group it purports to be rather than the Islamist spearhead that it is, CAIR has been a constant thorn in the side of American national defense.

NR published an adapted excerpt from McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad in 2014 as “The roots of CAIR’s intimidation campaign.” Everyone should know this story. Those who...