90 Miles From Tyranny

Monday, March 12, 2018

Morning Mistress

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.

Orlando, Florida – U.S. District Court Judge Carlos E. Mendoza sentenced Oniel Christopher Russell, a/k/a “O G Russell” (40, Jamaican national), to five years in federal prison for possessing two loaded firearms while being in the United States illegally, and for committing a felony assault on a federal law enforcement officer, causing bodily injury.

According to testimony and evidence presented at trial, Russell last entered the United States on October 29, 2008, as a non-immigrant visitor for pleasure with subsequent authorization to remain within the United States only until January 3, 2009. However, Russell failed to depart the United States, and he remained without any lawful immigration status thereafter. On August 24, 2013, Orange County Sheriff’s deputies pulled Russell over for a traffic violation. They subsequently conducted a lawful search of his vehicle, where they discovered two loaded firearms, one in the glove compartment box, and another under the passenger seat. Russell confessed to possessing the firearm in the glove compartment, but denied knowledge of the other. He was charged by the State Attorney’s Office for carrying a concealed firearm.

In October of 2016, deportation officers with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement were alerted to Russell’s presence in the United States when he placed a call to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and made several threatening verbal statements. After verifying that he was in the United States illegally, on April 25, 2017, they located Russell and attempted to execute an administrative warrant for his arrest, during which he resisted and a federal officer suffered injuries to his shoulder and ankle.

At sentencing, the Court imposed an upward variance of 30 months, citing Russell’s apparent hatred for the United States, and law enforcement, his actions when arrested, and his lack of remorse or acceptance of responsibility. The Court also specifically noted that it also had taken into consideration the exhibits submitted into evidence by the United States, which included still shots and a transcription of the lyrics from Russell’s YouTube video on October 23, 2015, titled “Cop Killer.” In the still shots from the video, Russell could be seen brandishing a firearm, and mimicking...

A HIV positive Catholic priest who admitted to raping 30 girls between the ages of 5 and 10-years-old has been acquitted by The Globalist, Communist Pope Francis.

The priest, Jose Garcia Ataulfo, was cleared of any wrong-doing and will not face criminal charges, despite the fact he knew he was infected with HIV when he raped the young girls.

The mother of one of the priest’s victims wrote a letter to Pope Francis asking to meet with him in Rome to discuss the case, but was shunned by the Vatican who declared that “the matter is closed”.

Ataulfo admitted to sexually assaulting well over two dozen children, many of whom were indigenous young girls from Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico known for its large indigenous population. Due to the significant influence that the Catholic Church wields in Mexico, the priest won’t face any criminal charges for his crimes in areas populated by indigenous ethnic groups.

The report which first appeared on the Spanish-language news site Urgente24.com, says the priest was “absolved of any wrongdoing” by the Archdiocese of Mexico and the Vatican. According to Urgente24, only two out of the thirty rape victims have come forward to denounce the acquittal.

According to the Daily Mail, sexual abuse of minors by priests – and the subsequent cover-ups by bishops and other Church officials – have been widespread in many countries, including the United States. The issue was thrust into the national spotlight in 2002 when the Boston Globe revealed the extent to which the local archdiocese shielded abusive priests from being exposed to the public even though it knew they posed a danger to young parishioners.

The Globe exposé, which detailed abuse cases that numbered in the thousands over a span of several decades, inspired other victims to come forward, leading to an avalanche of lawsuits and criminal prosecutions. Not only did the floodgates open in the US, but the Catholic Church was also forced to confront cases in other countries, including Mexico.

In 2004, the Vatican re-opened a prior investigation against Marcial Maciel, who was accused of sexually abusing minors as well as fathering six children by three different women. Though the allegations spanned decades and the extent of his crimes was known to church officials....

Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are seeking information about the Steele dossier from a former Obama administration official who is married to an employee of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier.

The committee, chaired by GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California, issued questionnaires Friday to around a dozen former President Barack Obama’s administration officials.

The Daily Caller News Foundation is told that one of the letters was sent to Shailagh Murray, a former journalist who served as senior adviser to Obama and as former Vice President Joe Biden’s deputy chief of staff.

Murray’s husband is Neil King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who worked at the newspaper at the same time as Fusion GPS’s three co-founders, Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch and Tom Catan.

Murray also worked at The Journal until 2005. She joined the Obama administration in 2011.

King left The Journal in December 2016 after accepting a buyout offer. Politico reported at the time that he was joining Fusion GPS, which is based in Washington, D.C.

House Intel Republicans are exploring whether there are similarities to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and his wife, Nellie Ohr, according to Fox News, which first reported that Murray was being sent a letter.

Bruce met with Fusion’s Simpson shortly after the election to discuss the dossier. Nellie worked for Fusion at the time as a researcher on the firm’s investigation on President Donald Trump.

Fox also reports that a questionnaire was sent to Colin Kahl, who served as national security adviser to Biden.

The letters are part of a Nunes-led investigation into the previous administration’s handling of the dossier. Republicans want to know who in the previous administration knew about the salacious document and whether they shared its allegations with reporters and others in government.

The letters also inquire when the officials learned that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Nunes and other Republican lawmakers, including Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, have alleged that the FBI and Justice Department abused the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court process by using the dossier to obtain a surveillance warrant against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

The agencies failed to disclose the source of the dossier’s funding and also relied on the document even though...

On Thursday, President Trump, surrounded by steel workers in the Oval Office, signed a memo imposing tariffs on steel (25%) and aluminum (10%) that are imported to the United States.

He carved out two exceptions to the tariffs:

Canada and Mexico would be temporarily exempted from the tariffs, pending the outcome of the ongoing renegotiation of NAFTA. The U.S. will likely insist that products imported tariff-free into the U.S. use steel produced within NAFTA.
He directed USTR (U.S. trade representative) Robert C. Lighthizer to negotiate with those military allies that want to be excluded from the tariffs, but such exclusions would require trade reciprocity. The Trump administration is expert at using economic leverage to produce negotiated outcomes that benefit the United States.

This announcement marks a victory for the trade deficit hawks in President Trump's inner circle of economic advisers, including Wilbur Ross, Trump's secretary of commerce, and University of California at Irvine economics professor Peter Navarro, who was recently elevated to the ranks of the president's top-level advisers.

The economic recovery being produced by President Trump's tax cuts and deregulation is at stake. During the fourth quarter of 2017, real GDP grew at a 2.5% clip, which is good compared to growth rates during the Obama years, but it could have been much better. Here are the contributions to growth during the fourth quarter:

Contributor to GDP	Resulting Growth
Consumption	2.6%
Fixed Investment	1.3%
Change in Inventories	-0.7%
Government Purchases	0.5%
Net Exports	-1.3%
Total	2.5%

The reduction of inventories by 0.7% is not of concern. It simply means that business inventories declined by 0.7% of our GDP, probably because businesses were selling more than they had anticipated. The concerning factor is the worsening net exports (i.e., trade balance), which reduced GDP growth by 1.3% of our GDP. If not for the worsening trade balance, GDP growth would have been an outstanding 3.8% during the fourth quarter.

Critics point out that the tariffs will raise the price of products fabricated with steel or aluminum. But the existing low prices of iron and steel and aluminum are at the expense of American producers in those industries. American consumers should not be favored at the expense of American wage-earners.

The reality is that the same countries that produced the most steel in the world produced the largest trade deficits in the United States (deficits shown as negative trade balances):

Country	Steel Production millions of tonnes	U.S. Trade Balance millions of dollars
China	808.4	-316,273
Japan	104.8	-58,286
India	95.6	-19,455
United States	78.5	-----
Russia	70.8	*-10,016
South Korea	68.6	-18,977
Germany	42.1	-52,886
Turkey	33.2	*330
Brazil	31.3	6,322
Ukraine	24.2	*809
Italy	23.4	-27,061
Taiwan	21.8	-14,739
Mexico	18.8	-59,286
Iran	17.9	*75
France	14.4	-12,454
Spain	13.6	*-4,646
Canada	12.6	-13,765
Total	1629.6	-568,400
*goods only, does not include services

The biggest steel-producing country in the world in 2016 was China, which accounted for about half of the world's steel production and more than half of the U.S. trade deficit. Imposing tariffs on such products is a way to balance trade.

What of fears of a trade war? Most of the above countries are already participating in a trade war with the United States, except that the United States has not been fighting back. The governments of these countries have been manipulating the terms of trade to enhance their exports to the United States and keep out U.S. products. As a result, we get debt, and they get...