90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

The New York Times Best-Seller List: Another Reason Americans Don't Trust the Media

About half the American people do not believe the mainstream media tell the truth. They believe the media are more interested in promoting their left-wing views than reporting the truth.

I am, I note with sadness, a member of that half.

Here is but one more example: The New York Times best-seller list.

As a writer (who, for the record, had a previous book on that list), I have long known it isn’t a best-seller list, and I don’t pay attention to it. But I paid attention last week to see if my recently published book, which opened up on Amazon as the second best-selling book in America, was on the list. It wasn’t.

The book, “The Rational Bible: Exodus,” the first volume of a five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible (the Torah), was No. 2 in nonfiction on The Wall Street Journal best-seller list; No. 2 on the Publishers Weekly nonfiction best-seller list; No. 1 on Ingram, the largest book wholesaler in the country; and, according to Nielsen BookScan, the organization that tracks 75 to 85 percent of book sales, No. 2 in hardcover nonfiction.

In fact, according to BookScan, it outsold 14 of the 15 books on The New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. But again, it is not even listed on The New York Times best-seller list.

I was told years ago that the Times best-seller list almost never includes overtly religious books. I believe it but cannot prove it. I was told the Times doesn’t even monitor Christian bookstore sales (though many Christians have bought my commentary, few of its sales thus far have been through Christian bookstores).

At least as suggestive of bias is that the No. 1 hardcover nonfiction book on The Wall Street Journal and Publishers Weekly lists, “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan B. Peterson, is also not listed on The New York Times best-seller list.

Is it a coincidence that Peterson is a conservative, and that I am a conservative and my book is a Bible commentary?

In order to think it is mere coincidence, you have to believe The New York Times more than reality itself, which about half the country seems to. While the Times occasionally lists conservative books and, very rarely, religious books, after comparing the list and the BookScan list, the Observer concluded in 2016:

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

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3 Student Journalists Sue University for Covering Up Teacher’s Role in Anti-Trump Campus Rally

Three student journalists have filed a lawsuit against their Illinois university and an instructor, alleging that the teacher grabbed and broke a smartphone as they tried to report on an anti-Trump rally.

The three students’ federal suit against the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and instructor Tariq Khan says that the university got a restraining order preventing them from reporting on Khan’s involvement in the November protest against President Donald Trump.

Khan, 39, was charged with destruction of property after taking and smashing a student’s smartphone on the pavement, an action caught on video.

The suit contends that the instructor and university officials violated the students’ constitutional rights to free press, free speech, and due process, according to the law firm representing the students, Mauck & Baker, LLC.

“The First Amendment should not be a partisan issue or something only conservatives are willing to defend,” the law firm said in a formal statement.

The suit claims that the school punished freshmen Joel Valdez and Blair Nelson and senior Andrew Minik for reporting on the anti-Trump rally, the organizers of which included the Black Rose Anarchist Federation.

“During the rally, Black Rose spokesman and university instructor, Tariq Khan, assaulted Joel Valdez and also went after...

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Congressmen Repeatedly Failed To Supervise IT Aides With ‘Keys To The Kingdom,’ Officials Say

Only one IT aide currently working directly for members of Congress has ever completed a background check, members’ data have been improperly mixed with other members’ data, and members provided almost no supervision, officials revealed Thursday in a House hearing spurred by “egregious” violations by former IT aide Imran Awan.

Members of Congress threw “$10 million” in additional funding to the [chief administrative officer (CAO)] in order to enhance their cybersecurity program” in June 2017. The move followed repeated cybersecurity threats against members of Congress, including the detection of what an IG report called “unauthorized access” by Awan. They also had the CAO and others propose how best to clamp down on vulnerabilities. But the CAO revealed Thursday that members blocked the resulting proposal, which called for eliminating Awan’s job category, that of a floating IT aide accountable only to members.

System administrators like Awan “hold the ‘keys to the kingdom,’ meaning they can create accounts, grant access, view, download, update, or delete almost any electronic information within an office,” Inspector General Michael Ptasienski said at the House hearing.

“A rogue system administrator could inflict considerable damage to an office and potentially disclose sensitive information, perform unauthorized updates, or simply export or delete files,” he continued. “A rogue system administrator could take steps to cover up his/her actions and limit the possibility that their behavior being detected or otherwise traced back to them.”

House Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko testified that experts found “two dozen” problems with the way the House managed cybersecurity. “Enforcement gaps range from improper vetting of the employees themselves, to unfettered access to House accounts and use of non-approved software and/or cloud services, to the use of unauthorized equipment … far too many have privileged access to the House network with...

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OF COURSE: Judge Who Ruled Against Trump/Hannity/Cohen Officiated The 2013 George Soros Wedding

Judge Kimba Wood first came to the court as a Ronald Reagan appointee way back when. Then she became very cozy with the Clintons and was at one point a top Clinton choice to be Attorney General. Her ties to the far-left have continued so it was no surprise when she was hand-picked by globalist billionaire George Soros, then 83 years of age, to officiate his 2013 marriage.

Via The New York Post from 2013:

Soros and Bolton, a health care consultant, will exchange vows in a small ceremony on Saturday morning at the Bedford, New York estate, which Soros bought in 2003 from “Jurassic Park” author Michael Crichton.

Kimba Wood, a federal judge, will perform the non-denominational ceremony, which will be attended by members of the couple’s families, including...

It’s official: Andrew McCabe lied.

The new report from the Justice Department inspector general concludes that McCabe, the former FBI deputy director, lied to then-FBI Director James Comey, to other FBI agents, and to officials of the Office of the Inspector General. Some of those lies came when McCabe was under oath.

What did he lie about? Unauthorized disclosures about the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The information was leaked to a reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

The inspector general has completed his work. The question now is, will the Justice Department prosecute McCabe? Or, put another way: Will the FBI and the Justice Department follow the same rules they apply to members of the public who lie to a federal agent?

Remember, the only charge brought against Gen. Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, was lying to the FBI, a felony. And Flynn wasn’t even under oath when he supposedly lied to the FBI.

Given that recent history, failure to prosecute McCabe would tell the American people that officers of the Justice Department and the FBI think they are above the law.

According to the inspector general’s report, “law enforcement sensitive information” appeared in an Oct. 30, 2016, Wall Street Journal article titled “FBI in Internal Feud Over Hillary Clinton Probe.” Until that time, the FBI had publicly refused to confirm that an investigation into the Clinton Foundation was underway.

Despite that official stance, the inspector general determined, McCabe told his special counsel and an assistant director in the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs that they could give information about the probe to Wall Street Journal reporter Devlin Barrett.

In particular, McCabe told them to disclose a phone call he had received in August from the Justice Department’s principal associate deputy attorney general. The report does not identify the person by name, but the principal associate deputy attorney general at the time was apparently Matthew Axelrod.

McCabe claims that the official called him and “expressed concerns about the FBI agents taking overt steps in the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation during the presidential campaign.” According to McCabe, he pushed back, asking, “Are you telling me to shut down a validly predicated investigation?”

McCabe told the inspector general the conversation was “very dramatic” and that he had never had a similar confrontation with a high-level Justice Department official “in his entire FBI career.”

The way The Wall Street Journal reported this was that a “senior Justice Department official” called McCabe “to voice his displeasure” that the FBI was “still openly pursuing the Clinton Foundation probe during the...

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

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The Invisible Victims of Gun Control

She’d always “felt safe in her neighborhood,” said an unnamed young woman in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. That is, until around midnight of October 25, 2008, when she heard a crash in her basement.

A 47-year-old registered sex offender named Ronnie W. Preyer had broken into her home. She “made a beeline to the back door, but Preyer was waiting for her,” writes Bridget DiCosmo of the Southeast Missourian. She fought back, but was punched, “twice, she thinks.” Before leaving, her rapist told her, “Don’t tell anybody, I know where you live.”

“I wasn’t going to tell, but the more I thought about it, the worse I felt,” she recalls.

The landlord fixed her window and installed security devices to the doors, and, “in a gesture that may have saved her life, purchased a shotgun for her” before teaching her how to load it.

At 2 AM on October 31st, the lights went out. “She knew she’d paid the electric bill,” according to DiCosmo. And she knew “something wasn’t right.”

DiCosmo continues, “She got her gun. Growing nervous, she opened the blinds, sat down in a chair, and waited.” When Preyer came crashing through the door, she fired, striking her assailant in the chest and killing him.

Police had been making rounds to her home after the first encounter with her rapist. But they weren’t there in that fateful moment when she had to defend herself with a gun that had been purchased for her by her landlord. The gun was the difference between her being raped again and/or killed and surviving unmolested. The gun preserved her life and liberty in spite of another person who looked to rob her of one or both of those things. Not the cops, and not the good intentions of lawmakers who wish violent sexual predators like Preyer did not exist.

What if she did not have a SecondAmendment right to have such a weapon for self-defense, as former Justice John Paul Stevens recently argued in the New York Times should be repealed?

Well, okay, some gun control advocates may argue. A shotgun is alright.

Take sensible Joe Biden’s advice to other women like her. “If you live in an area that’s wooded or somewhat secluded,” Joe says, just “walk out on the balcony” and fire two shots with a double-barreled shotgun to scare attackers away.

The only problem is that the woman in the aforementioned story from Missouri didn’t live in a “wooded” or “secluded” area with a “balcony” as Biden’s wife Jill apparently does. She was “several feet away in her tiny kitchen” as she frightenedly awaited her assailant, as the report makes clear. Several aspects of the story suggest that she a) likely lives alone, b) is not...

Amid Push for Knife Control, UK Shows Gun Control Doesn’t Increase Safety

It was widely reported earlier this month that London experienced a higher number of murders over the first three months of 2018 than did New York City—the first time in modern history that has occurred.

The United Kingdom has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the world, so the increased murder rate in the British capital is largely a result of a sharp rise in knife-related crime.

The surge in violence prompted London Mayor Sadiq Khan to announce a massive “knife control” campaign eerily reminiscent of those sometimes proffered in the United States in response to firearms-related violence.

The knife control measures will include the deployment of 300 additional London police officers to conduct “stop and frisk” searches of individuals suspected of knife-carrying, a policing tactic once roundly condemned by Khan.

Emergency legislation also appears set to prohibit knives purchased online from being sent to residential addresses. The U.K. already criminalizes the purchase or possession of various types of knives, and the carrying of any knife with a blade longer than 3 inches in public is illegal unless it is carried “with good reason.” Self-defense is not considered a good reason.

This crackdown on knives, and the surrounding rhetoric demonizing those who would carry them in public, should serve as a warning to Americans disconcerted by the vocal anti-Second Amendment activists in our own country. They will not be satisfied by merely taking away your...

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Trump Overhauls Medicaid, Food Stamps and Public Housing in Landmark Executive Order

This is change conservatives can really believe in.

While much of the mainstream media was occupied with analyzing Monday’s FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, the president himself was making a different kind of history earlier this week by overhauling the country’s welfare programs to make able-bodied recipients work or risk losing their benefits.

In an executive order signed Tuesday, Trump imposed a 90-day deadline for all federal agencies that administer aid programs to review their work requirements and come up with ways to make them stronger.

As Investor’s Business Daily noted, the federal government has plenty of examples of states that have cut their welfare rolls and put recipients back to work by imposing work requirements.

Alabama, Arkansas and Kentucky are among the states that have decided that making work a requirement for public aid is good for the public coffers as well as the recipient.

Trump’s executive order is titled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility” and that pretty sell sums up the rationale. It states in part (emphasis added):

“The federal government should do everything within its authority to empower individuals by providing opportunities for work, including by investing in federal programs that are effective at moving people into the workforce and out of poverty. It must examine federal policies and programs to ensure that they are consistent with principles that are central to the American spirit — work, free enterprise, and safeguarding human and economic resources. For those policies or programs that are not succeeding in those respects, it is our duty to...

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Attkisson: Trump Was Right To Fire Comey; Here Are 12 Reasons Why

A lot of new information has come out in the year since President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.

No matter whether you admire Trump, Comey, both or neither - it’s now difficult to argue that Trump made the wrong move in removing Comey.

Even many of Trump’s detractors would agree that no president should keep in place the head of a crucial division who - along with some of his top staff — apparently worked to undermine or control the president, and exercised poor judgment in important matters.

Here are 12 ways Comey has proven Trump was right to fire him.

1. Comey testified that it gave him a “queasy feeling” when then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch directed him to publicly refer to the Hillary Clintonclassified email investigation as a “matter.” Yet, he did so anyway and did not raise objections.

2. Comey’s FBI, including allegedly his general counsel, was responsible for multiple leaks to the press with the apparent goal of politically helping Clinton or harming Trump. On the other hand, the FBI kept a closely-held secret any information that was favorable to Trump — such as the fact that Comey repeatedly told Trump he wasn’t under investigation.

3. Top FBI officials working under Comey conspired to develop an “insurance plan” in the event Trump were to be elected. (One possible implication is that they could not afford to have Trump officials poking around into what they or other U.S. intel agencies had been doing over the years.)

4. We now know that Comey apparently delayed notifying Congress that the FBI had discovered Hillary Clinton emails on the personal computer of soon-to-be convicted sexter Anthony Weiner (then husband of Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin), prior to the election.

5. Comey demonstrated bias or questionable judgment in selecting the man he trusted as his number two in February 2016: Andrew McCabe. Comey allowed McCabe to be involved in the FBI investigations into the Clinton Foundation and Clinton classified emails even though McCabe’s wife had received large sums of donor money from Clinton interests, including those of then-Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, who also was under FBI investigation at the time. (The FBI granted top Clinton staff immunity from prosecution, didn’t record her interview, drafted an exoneration letter in advance, and ultimately excused Clinton’s mishandling of classified information as not being willful.)

6. Comey allowed McCabe’s involvement in the Clinton-related investigations to continue until the week before the...

The Department of Justice Inspector General released a report Friday claiming “lack of candor” by former FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe
The report also details Justice Department’s influence to close a multi-state investigation into the Clinton Foundation
The IG claims McCabe leaked DOJ’s pressure to end the Clinton investigation to battle claims he was partial to the Clintons

The Department of Justice Inspector General report on the “lack of candor” by FBI deputy Director Andrew McCabe also documents for the first time the Obama administration’s effort to shut down the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation, according to a review of the report by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

The inspector general (IG) confirmed in its long-awaited report released Friday that in 2016 the FBI had ongoing field investigations of the Clinton Foundation in New York, Los Angeles, Little Rock, Arkansas and Washington, D.C. The multi-city investigation was launched when agents found “suspicious activity” between a foreign donor and Clinton Foundation activity in the Los Angeles area, as TheDCNF reported in August 2016.

The report, authored by Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, an Obama appointee, chronicles the Justice Department’s effort to to shut down the FBI’s investigation on Aug. 12, 2016. The pressure allegedly came in the form of a phone call to McCabe from a Justice Department principal associate deputy attorney general (PADAG) who pressed McCabe on the continuing investigation.The IG did not identify which PADAG made the call.

It was important the pressure for ending the investigation was issued in a phone call and not in a written document, former FBI assistant Director Ronald Hosko told TheDCNF.

“They did it in a....