The Russia hoax is over...

The Russia hoax is over...
Tucker Carlson | Fox News 

The Russia hoax is over and it's time to hold people accountable for years of lies.

The Russia hoax ended on Wednesday -- we can say that. It ended not with a bang, but with the muddled half-memories of a fading old man slipping in and out of focus.

America sat transfixed by Robert Mueller's halting testimony before Congress. No honest person could have come away at the end believing that the president of the United States colluded with the Russian government to steal an election. That was the allegation, you'll remember.

And then, after the most extensive investigation in modern American history, we found the truth. And so, we can say conclusively, once again, what we told you the day this all started, the whole thing is a crock. It never happened. They were lying to you. That's clear now. The debate is over.

But that doesn't mean the Russia story has quite ended. There are loose ends. For two and a half years, some of the most powerful people in America -- supposedly serious, well-educated people, very smart people -- these people made wild and untrue and totally reckless allegations about issues critical to the life of this country, all on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. It's hard to believe they did that. But they did do it.

What should happen to these people now? Congressman Adam Schiff, for example. Schiff claimed he possessed actual evidence of Russian collusion. And he didn't just say that one time, he said it repeatedly.

In the end, you know what happened -- or didn't. Schiff did not produce the evidence. He didn't have it because it doesn't exist. Schiff was bluffing, which is to say he was lying. He still is, actually. As of Wednesday, Schiff was continuing to claim that the Trump campaign "embraced foreign help, made use of it and covered it up." In other words, collusion. Schiff still believes the collusion hoax.

Or does he? On Thursday, Adam Schiff went on CNN to carry water for his boss, Nancy Pelosi. "Impeachment might not be a great idea," he told CNN's viewers.

But wait, that doesn't seem to make sense. If Donald Trump is working for a hostile foreign power, as Adam Schiff has told us countless times that he is, how can we not impeach him? No one on CNN asked Adam Schiff to explain that contradiction, unfortunately. Not that it matters. Think about it for a second, and you'll see exactly what's going on.

Adam Schiff never believed a word he was saying about Russian collusion. I suppose the good news is Schiff is not delusional. The bad news, though, is that Adam Schiff is a soulless liar. He is a man willing to say literally anything for political advantage, and that's really the worst of all. Being a lunatic would be much more appealing than that.

Naturally, Washington is the place that it is, Adam Schiff has been richly rewarded for his shameless deceit. He is still the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. That's one of the most powerful jobs in all of government. Schiff is all but certain to be there for years.

But what about his enablers? And there are a lot of them --the journalists, the pundits, the fellow lawmakers who helped Adam Schiff tell his lies. These are the people you'll remember who blithely accused the sitting president of the United States of treason.

One of them was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has said, among other things, the following: "Trump's eagerness to sell out America proves the Russians must have something personally politically or financially on President Trump."

It proves that Trump is committing treason. Think about that. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House, third in line for the presidency. She is the country's most powerful lawmaker, supposedly a wise and sober person. And yet, there she was telling you it's been proved that the president of the United States is working for a hostile foreign power.

Has any Speaker in American history ever said something that irresponsible? Maybe nothing comes to mind. But if you think that's shocking, consider this: Pelosi is still saying that. "Tucker Carlson Tonight's" investigative producer, Alex Pfeiffer, ran into Pelosi Thursday afternoon on Capitol Hill and asked her. Listen to what she told our show.

Alex Pfeiffer, Fox News investigative producer: Speaker Pelosi, Alex Pfeiffer of "Tucker Carlson Tonight." In January, you wondered what Putin had on Trump. After yesterday, are you any closer to figuring that out? 

Pelosi: We have it up on the courts right now. 

Pfeiffer: Are you any closer to figuring out what Putin has on Trump? 

Pelosi: That's why we need to have him to answer our subpoena. 

Pfeiffer: You still think Putin might have some sort of blackmail on the president? 

Pelosi: I wonder what Putin has politically, financially or personally.

Pfeiffer: So our president could be subject to blackmail, you think? 

The exchange isn't long, but it really tells you everything you need to know. Pelosi told our show President Trump is a traitor who is committing treason. And yet, she doesn't want to impeach him. How does that make sense?

Well, it only makes sense when you understand that Pelosi doesn't mean a single word that she says. Everything is political, meaning it's only about power.

That's not just annoying. It's also ominous. And here's why.

Fifteen years ago this spring, we invaded Iraq to stop a WMD program that didn't exist. Thousands of American troops died in the process, trillions of dollars were wasted. It was the single greatest mistake in this country in generations. And yet -- and here's the key -- nobody in Washington was ever punished for it.

The people who planned it went on to even better jobs. One of them is now our national security adviser, John Bolton. Five years after the Iraq War, our economy collapsed. Remember that? The subprime meltdown? The specific causes were complex, but the themes were instantly recognizable -- greed and stupidity. And yet, once again, no one was ever punished.

Now, fast forward another 11 years to today, right now. America stands on the brink of yet more foolish foreign entanglements, and on the brink of and potentially another financial meltdown. Why is that? Because nobody in Washington has learned anything. And why would they learn anything? When they screw up there are never any consequences. They skate by on the usual mixture of aggression and BS. "Nothing to see here, keep moving."

Imagine for a second, what would happen if you let your kids act like that? Well, they'd been in prison by now. So, maybe it's time to stop the cycle in Washington.

How about this? If you get caught lying about the big things, whether it's about weapons of mass destruction, or subprime mortgages or Russian collusion, you have to admit it and serve penance, -- not necessarily prison time, though we're open. But the punishment of some kind.

You can't stay in Washington, making six times the average American salary. You can't do that. No, sorry.

You've got to leave. You've got to relocate to Camden, New Jersey, maybe or Gary, Indiana, and do something useful. Like clean motel rooms for minimum wage put the little "sanitized for your protection" strips on toilets. Not forever, just for a decade or two, until you've learned your lesson. Call us when you've done that, but not before.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on July 25, 2019.
Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.

Goose egg

The history books won't be kind to Schiff and Nadler and their

almost three-year efforts at government obstruction and ignoring

the people's work...

The Economy, Father of Us All

The Economy, Father of Us All
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Good times immunize a president and make his over-the-top domestic enemies look irrelevant.

Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news “unexpectedly” and “surprisingly” improves or stays steady — in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent), and a record-high stock market.

In June, retail sales increased for the fourth straight month. The rate of Hispanic homeownership continues to increase. A quarter-million new jobs were created in June, with strong growth in construction and manufacturing. Record oil and gas production seems only to keep increasing. Strong wage growth of 3.4 percent continues.

The point is not so much “It’s the economy, stupid,” but rather that the economy is the font of all contemporary politics, and it adjudicates the parameters of presidential prerogatives.

In the standoff between the “Squad” and Donald Trump, near-record peacetime unemployment in general and in particular historic-low minority unemployment argue against the idea that Trump is racist.

Polls suggest that Donald Trump may well win a greater share of the minority vote than moderates John McCain and Mitt Romney — largely because of a rise in middle-class wages in a tight labor market, and new leverage of entry-level workers over labor-hungry employers. Do working-class blacks and Hispanics suffer then from false consciousness, and do they need tutorials from progressive grandees so they won’t be so incorrect as to appreciate having more jobs at better pay?  Racists do not craft economic policies that empower African Americans far more so than those promoted by the first African-American president.

Ditto the entire failure of the destroy-Trump agenda, whether exemplified by the Mueller exoneration and the absurd appeals to the Logan Act, the emoluments clause, and 25th Amendment. What saved Bill Clinton from a conviction after impeachment in 1998 was the lockstep voting of Democratic senators in the minority, which prevented a two-third conviction vote in the Senate and the consequent removal from office of the overseer of a booming economy. The reason Benjamin Netanyahu is the longest-serving Israeli prime minister and has survived every sort of personal and ideological attack is that he reengineered the Israeli economy and offered unprecedented prosperity to his constituents. Such shared bounty short-circuited his critics.

The subtext of the failure of all the Trump impeachment hysterias was not merely that they were based on emotional narratives rather than evidence and facts — empiricism has never been the forte of congressional frenzies — but that the public believed either that the removal of a successful president would stall the economic expansion or that it might show ingratitude for a domestic job well done. Democrats seem to have forgotten that voters are most interested in the economy — along with illegal immigration — and least concerned with their obsessions with climate change and the Green New Deal.

Booming times provide Trump the latitude to tweet incessantly and to editorialize on contemporary dramas, from Colin Kaepernick’s take-a-knee movement to the so-called Squad of incoming hard-left congressional representatives. Had we suffered zero growth and high unemployment, Trump’s enemies would have had some traction in their demands that he quiet down and focus on the economy. Successful economies are like successful wars: Everyone wants ownership, much as defeats and recessions are orphans.


If the U.S. was in a 1–2 percent GDP growth cycle, as in the prior decade, then calling out China for technological appropriation, patent and copyright infringement, dumping, mercantilism, and currency manipulation, well aside from human-rights abuses, might be little more than the usual, shrill hectoring, coupled with corporate indifference to the vast Chinese trade surplus. Only strong economic growth, energy security, and low employment allow the U.S. to square off against Chinese reckless behavior — a fact well known to Beijing, which enjoyed exemption from presidential criticism given that the decade-long anemic U.S. economy never reached 3 percent annualized growth.

If the U.S. was not the world’s largest producer of gas and oil, and soon to be its largest exporter, then we might never have dared to vacate the Iran deal, or might have panicked in fear of world oil prices skyrocketing after each cycle of Iran’s scripted braggadocio.

The same calculus holds true of squabbles with NATO friends in arrears, and with enemies such as an unhinged North Korea. The U.S. can jawbone for symmetry because it currently enjoys the most well-rounded economy in the world and therefore assumes that it is finally in a strong position to redress long-standing paradoxes. These include our closest allies’ reluctance to pay for their collective defense against enemies far nearer to their borders than to ours, and the absurdity that a premodern society found the capital and expertise to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear payloads.

The point is again not to reduce all politics to the status of the economy. Rather, the chance to have a good job, good wages, economic growth, low inflation, low interest, a strong stock market, plentiful and reasonably priced gas, and the opportunity to save money are the stuff of life and are what voters most care about. In comparison, what AOC or Ilhan Omar says is mostly irrelevant, as is the most recent bombast abroad from an Iranian theocrat, a Russian functionary, or a Maoist in China. George W. Bush was recovering somewhat after the successful surge in Iraq until the September 2008 financial meltdown destroyed his presidency and ensured a Democratic successor. The beloved Obama was wiped out in two midterm elections and nearly defeated in 2012 largely because the natural recovery from the 2008 collapse turned out to be not much of a recovery at all.

About the only events that overshadow a good economy and threaten to destroy a reelection bid or a second term in boom times are unpopular wars such as Vietnam or the second Iraq War, or a major scandal (well beyond Iran-Contra or Benghazi) that leads to real convictions, as in Watergate.

In Trump’s case, there is little likelihood he is going to start an optional war such as Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, or face a second round of the collusion/obstruction Mueller onslaught. Indeed, the more likely narrative for 2020 is that Trump will stay reactive, not become preemptive if tensions with Iran or North Korea lead to violence.

Likewise, any federal indictments are far more apt to focus on the probable illegal behavior of James Comey, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and John Brennan — as well as functionaries that Hillary Clinton/the DNC/the Perkins-Coie law firm, and Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS hired to subvert the 2016 Trump campaign effort.

Just as good times immunize a president, so too bad recessions infect him. One reason AOC’s Green New Deal is rightly acknowledged as unhinged is that Trump’s conventional economy is robust. If it were not, then her anti-Trump oppositional nonsense might fool millions into thinking she made sense — as in the first year of the Obama administration, when silly Solyndra “green” agendas were pushed through in the aftermath of the 2008 disaster and billed as a new way out of the doldrums.

Finally, few question whether it’s right or wrong to credit a president for booms and blame him for busts. Instead, by acclamation, he just is held culpable for everything on his watch. The Iron Rule of American politics is that the president, from his first day to his last in office, takes the credit or blame — even for larger economic trends, blunders, and unforeseen disasters rooted in events outside the reach of his own tenure. Poor Herbert Hoover was sworn into office on March 4, 1929, and yet was blamed for Black Friday, October 24, 1929 — the proverbial beginning of a ten-year depression ended only by rearmament for a looming world war — as if Hoover had time in just seven months to do much of anything.

In sum, if Trump continues the good times, his tweets are irrelevant. If he does not, these electronic riffs suddenly will be said to be windows into his supposedly dark soul.

Contrarily, the more the economy hums along, the more ridiculous the obsessive “Get Trump” fixations become. But if recession looms before 2020, then suddenly the weirder the progressive obsessions with destroying Trump, the more likely they will resonate.

For now, Democratic charges that Trump is supposedly like no other president in his callousness are ignored because Trump’s booming economy is factually like no other recent president’s in its vigor.


NRO contributor VICTOR DAVIS HANSON is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson

Blue State Model Continues To Drag Down California

Blue State Model Continues To Drag Down California
Kerry Jackson, Pacific Research Institute 

About the same time two of California’s largest cities were named among the seven worst-run municipalities in the country, we learn that the state’s — and the country’s — largest county had the worst population outflow in the U.S. in 2018.

The livin’ in California ain’t easy, in the summertime or at any other.

According to WalletHub, which compiles Internet lists like Ihop stacks pancakes, Oakland and San Francisco are the 144th and 148th — out of 150 — worst-run cities in the nation. To be fair, one California city managed to do well in the rankings: Huntington Beach is 14th. But the next California city doesn’t appear until Santa Ana makes an appearance at no. 62. San Diego (69th) and Fremont (74th) are the only other cities in the state in the top half.

Thirty-seven metrics were used to compile the list, including the violent crime rate, unemployment, median household income, and percent of population living in poverty. California cities performed well in infant-mortality rates — all of the top five are from this state, with San Francisco no. 1 with the lowest infant-mortality rate in the country. But the high rankings were offset by bottom-of-list rankings in road quality and air pollution.

San Francisco also scored high in providing quality services. It’s 19th. But that’s offset by the city’s “total budget per capita,” which pushed its overall rating to 148th. Oakland was 81st in services, but dragged down by its budget, as well.

Both cities, we should add, have become overrun with homelessness, and sharp surges in automobile break-ins. These are quality-of-life matters that city and county leaders should be held accountable for.

Not too much higher in the rankings is Los Angeles, at 135th. Both the city and the county in this sprawling megalopolis are struggling with living conditions. It’s enough to drive people away. Last year, 98,608 more people left Los Angeles County than moved in. Media reports say it is “the largest net outmigration among the nation’s big counties.”

Those paid to promote the city and ignore its warts will say the loss of fewer than 100,000 in a county of 10.1 million is nothing to be concerned about. While a good sense of proportion is always helpful for understanding, two things stand out from the Census data.

One, outflow was equal to 0.98% of all residents, 20th worst among the 176 largest counties in the country.

Two, “historically speaking,” writes Jonathan Lasner for the Southern California News Group, “last year’s outmigration was up compared with an average 57,136 outflow from 2010 to 2017.”

No doubt the objective among many, if not nearly all, of those who left Los Angeles County last year was to escape. It’s a mindset also common in San Francisco. As the Wall Street Journal has reported, “more people moved out of the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward metropolitan area — an urban core of 4.7 million people in a broader region known as the Bay Area — than moved into it from other parts of California or the U.S., according to U.S. census data.”

How long will the political leaders of California continue to follow the Blue State model that drives out the middle and working classes, and can’t competently manage matters at the municipal level?

Clearly, it’s not working for a large part of the population — which is exactly what the Democratic presidential candidates were saying about the U.S. economy during the recent debates. What they’re describing, though, is not the result of recent federal agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, which have benefited Americans at all income levels, but progressive policies, which have crushed California’s middle class but left the wealthy largely untouched.

Yet more of California is what the Democrats are proposing. It’s obviously not working here, though, and it’s not going to work for the rest of the country, either.

Kerry Jackson is a fellow with the Center for California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute.

Reparations as Poison

Reparations as Poison

Col. Mike Walker, USMC, retired

Reparation for wrongs committed in the past where every living participant is long dead is not unjust and unwarranted but frightening.

For us Americans, the rationale is slavery and the associated wrong of discrimination. Slavery and discrimination are evils yet universal ones. No one is exempt from the taint.

I doubt there is a country in the United Nations that did not enslave their fellow humans in its past. Even Pacific Islanders embraced slavery.

We so obsess about our history that we think Americans are exceptionally bad but that just is lying to ourselves – yes we were shamefully bad and so was everyone else -- shame on us all. 

It seems all humans -- regardless of race, allegiance, creed, ethnicity or what have you -- seem to have an impulse to enslave and judgmentally discriminate when they have the power. 

My life took me across the world and I never met a people I did not like, respect and admire. It is equally and painfully true that I never lived in a land that did not have a history of slavery or still practiced prejudice and discrimination – not one – not ever – not anywhere.

I have seen the violent carnage of societies that visit the sins of the parents upon the children in the name of racial or religious or ethnic justice. Punishing innocents that were not even alive when events took place creates an endless cycle of violence and hatred. It is a terrible evil to behold.

Keeping animosities alive from generation to generation ends in bloody wickedness.

But that is what some politicians endorse: Never forgive, never stop dividing people and never stop punishing. That is the inevitable product of retribution. It is a great sin.

How can the majority of Americans be held to pay reparations for wrongs that they had no part of -- that occurred before their ancestors came to America?

How can they, who are innocent, be judged guilty? Are we to adopt a cruel system of collective punishment?

And what of those whose forebears were here during slavery?

Are we to conduct a mass genealogical study to punish innocents 150 years after the fact? Should we make them wear scarlet letters or stars to mark their “sins” and punish innocents yet to be born? 

Are we to create a permanent caste to beat down and demean for selfish pleasure? Where does this end?

And after so many generations of offspring, what will we do with millions of Americans who are descendants of both slaves and slave owners?

Order self-flagellation? Subject them to an Americanized version of the Nazi ancestral Mischling blood test to identify the guilty? Where does this end? 

I became the third generation of my family to have put on a uniform, pick up a rifle, and go to Europe to stop the madness.

I was stationed for a time near Srebrenica where thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) systematically had been massacred by Serbs.

Why? To avenge a Turkish massacre from centuries earlier – the people there nurtured and embraced ancient hatreds from generation to generation. They never let go of the past.

It was a societal sickness that cherished divisions and worshipped the worst memories to ensure the destruction of their future.

That is what happens when you legitimize the moral prevision that you can punish offspring for their ancestor's sins -- and do so for all eternity.

Of course, under this detestable philosophy, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre now gives Bosniaks justification to kill Serbs not yet born in some future act of reparation and retribution. That is the sickness.

As for the institution of slavery, here is the uncomfortable historical truth: In 1776, slavery was legal all across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

The United States ended slavery in 1862.

Some countries were more progressive. Japan ended the evil in 1690. Mexico ended slavery in 1829, England (to include Canada) in 1834, Denmark in 1848 and the Netherlands in 1861.  

It is equally true that other countries lagged behind the United States.

Portugal did not end slavery until 1878; Spanish Cuba did not act to end slavery until 1886 and Brazil held out until 1888 – the country that enslaved more Africans than any other.
  
The Ottoman Empire officially ended slavery in 1890 but small-scale illegal slavery continued.

China and Korea only ended slavery in 1910 and it stopped in Tanganyika in 1919. 

Some places never abolished slavery – it just went underground – and slavery is still practiced to this day in parts of the world.

Human beings of every race creed and color were enslavers. Slavery existed in Africa for centuries before the Europeans arrived and the same is true of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. 

And what government ended slavery in the United States?

It was the United States of America -- not the Confederate States of America.

As for my history, no one in our family tree ever owned a slave.

During the Civil War, my father’s ancestor was a surgeon in the Ohio Volunteer Cavalry and my mother’s was an Irish immigrant who served in the Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

My father's ancestor was wounded and later died from those wounds leaving his family destitute save a not very generous $8 per month survivor’s benefit from the government.

He was a successful doctor in a farming community in northeastern Ohio. He could have stayed home and made a very good living for his family.

 He did not sit on the sidelines. He gave up everything to end slavery. 

Our family paid a dear and terrible price. Enough is enough. We owe no one reparations. If our family were to adopt the logic of reparations, then we too are owed a debt yet unpaid. I say no!

Where does this end? Stop the madness!

The Stock Market and Me

The Stock Market and Me

Col. Mike Walker,  USMC, retired

All,

The radical left rails against the stock market and tells me that it only helps the rich.

It is a real hoot when leftist politicians lie to me and expect me to believe their lies. It is hard not to laugh out loud. 

Here is the truth.

I get a good part of my retirement income from the California State Teachers and Public Employees Retirement Systems (Cal STRS and Cal PERS).

According to socialist democrats, because I own no stock (sold my modest holding when I retired) I get nothing from the stock market.

They shout "inequality" and scream that only the rich benefit. Baloney!

Cal STRS and Cal PERS together own the biggest stock portfolio in the world -- far richer than the richest of the richest billionaires. 

And the money Cal STRS and Cal PERS make in the stock market help me!

Even though I do not personally own stock, I get thousands of dollars a year from the stock market because Cal STRS and Cal PERS does and they send me the checks.

That is true for millions and millions and millions of average Americans who do not own a single share of stock.

And then add in the millions and millions of average Americans who have savings plans that have stocks in them.

When democratic socialists want to destroy big businesses and the stock market and banks...

...they are trying to destroy the futures of the vast majority of Americans.

Here is my message to the radical leftist democrats:

I AM JUST AN AVERAGE AMERICAN SO STOP LYING AND STOP TRYING TO DESTROY MY FAMILY'S FUTURE!