North Korea said it had successfully conducted another test at a satellite launch site, the latest in a string of developments aimed at “restraining and overpowering the nuclear threat of the U.S.”, state news agency KCNA reported on Saturday...
In a later statement carried by KCNA, Chief of the General Staff Pak Jong Chon said the tests were designed to bolster North Korea’s defenses by developing new weapons.
“The priceless data, experience and new technologies gained in the recent tests of defense science research will be fully applied to the development of another strategic weapon of the DPRK for definitely and reliably restraining and overpowering the nuclear threat of the U.S.,” he said, using the initials of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
It was the second test at the Sohae facility in the space of a week.
Trump may have good instincts about lowering tensions with North Korea and Russia but he is in over his head. The Deep State continues to sabotage his efforts at every turn and things become even worse.
Former Gov. Matt Bevin flexed his executive power as he left office Monday, granting conditional commutations of sentences for more than 300 Kentuckians who were in prison for possession of a controlled substance.
Those commutations made up a significant portion of the hundreds of pardons and commutations Bevin signed during his final days in office...
On Monday, the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet gave Bevin a list of 336 people it said were in jail only for possession of a controlled substance. A letter to Bevin signed by Kathleen Kenney, who was interim director of the Department of Corrections, says the inmates were screened for several risk factors, including “pending detainers, pending felony charges, recent violations of community supervision, prior escapes and a history of violent behavior.”..
The justice cabinet then attached a proposed Executive Order, which Bevin used to commute the remaining sentences of all 336 inmates. The only condition was that they not commit another felony offense...
Bevin also signed conditional commutations of sentences for at least 56 other inmates last Friday. None of the commutations specified what crimes the individuals had committed, only that the people had been recommended for commutation by the Justice and Public Safety Cabinet and had been “screened and determined to present the lowest risk to public safety.”
Awesome!
Some of this may have to do with overcrowding in the Kentucky prison system but I would like to think he was swayed a bit by his brother.
One question is: Why not free the prisoners who previously attempted to escape? After all, this is nothing but attempting a libertarian jump on the process. And what about "high-level" drug offenders? This just means that they have a better entrepreneurial bent.
Antifa are rioting in London in response to the election results giving Conservatives a huge electoral win. It’s like what I saw in Portland in November 2016. pic.twitter.com/xeRfkPCGnA
Congressman Justin Amash has stated that he will vote to impeach President Trump when the vote reaches the floor of the House.
But that did not stop him from attending, last night, the Christmas White House Congressional Ball that was hosted by Trump.
Strange.
Axios reports, a senior White House official said of Trump's critics: "It's kind of odd to be voting to say the guy is a clear and present danger to the globe but I'm going to come and hang out at the White House for a black tie affair."
Last night I went to the Golden State Warriors-New York Knicks game at the new Chase Center (Knicks won in OT!), I stood during the playing of the national anthem largely because I wanted to enjoy the game and not trigger any yahoos who might have been around me.
You will never catch me wearing a Trump-fan boy hat, but the bigger point is you have to know where you are, the environment around you, and when it makes sense to engage the opposition. After all, we are in statist controlled territory.
Chick98 emails:
Good Morning Robert!
I appreciate and generally agree with the comments and yours regarding
this incident. My question is when does this type of response become
the very "self-censoring" that the regressives want to impose on us?
I don't consider it self-censoring as much as knowing the environment around you. I know what I think of singing an anthem to the state but I don't know the people around me when I am in an arena and how they will react if I demonstrate against the state.
I really consider libertarians as living in occupied territory. Pretty much everyone around us is a statist to one degree or another and, especially when we are out in public, we don't know what will trigger who.
Further, there are many, many ways most libertarians fall in line with state dictates largely because the consequences of not doing so are severe. From paying taxes to getting a state driver's license, we fall in line. It is simply a method of survival.
You just have to pick your spots for protest and the like.
If you objected to rules of the King of England on American soil, you waited for your moment, dressed up like an Indian and late at night dumped British tea in the harbor. When the Redcoats marched down the street, you didn't walk right up to them with gun over your shoulder, you took your position behind a tree and, again, waited for your moment.
French resistance operatives during World War 2 did not publicly expose themselves. They published clandestine newspapers by using friendly print-shop facilities at night. They also put together clandestine intelligence networks and guerrilla war operations. This is all about picking your spots.
I should point out that I am not advocating here in the United States guerrilla war operations. We still have enough freedom and are not that oppressed to resort to such operations. My point is merely that open resistance of any kind can be dangerous and you really have to measure the costs against the benefits and pick your spots. We are not in an environment that is friendly to us.
I notice you identify in your email as Chick98 rather than with your given name, so you must understand this to some degree.
Of course, statists push to intimidate in an effort to create self-censorship. We just have to be creative about how we get around it. Confronting the state directly, however, and confronting directly its useful idiots, is generally not a good idea.
Boris Johnson’s Conservatives on course for huge victory in #UKelection, exit poll projects.
The projections will be a big disappointment for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and suggests Johnson will be able to pass his Brexit deal comfortably.
The exit poll is usually fairly accurate but a lot can still change as the night progresses and actual results begin to come through.
UPDATE 2
Via Msnbc:
Exit poll projects win for Boris Johnson's Conservative Party and potential to take UK out of EU next month.
UPDATE 3
From Sky News:
Sky's election analyst Michael Thrasher, who was involved in producing the exit poll, said: "It's been a remarkable day. We've been taking interviews from across the country since 7am this morning right through until just before polling stations closed.
"The Conservatives have been heading for an overall majority all day long, it's just the number has fluctuated down as more Labour voters perhaps turned out to vote later on.
"It really is a remarkable election victory for Boris Johnson. For Labour it really is an appalling election result and possibly its worst performance in any general election since the Second World War.
"Jeremy Corbyn will go down as one of the worst leaders in Labour's history."
UPDATE 4
Conservatives gain Heywood and Middleton. First time they’ve ever held it.
Note to parents: If your kid does not know how to fight, don't send him on a bus wearing a MAGA hat when he is surrounded by urban primitives.
My attorney @FoyeWalkerPA said it's okay to release the video, 😡warning graphic 😡 keep in mind this is only the first 21 seconds of the video...please RT to have these two girls and 3 boys held accountable. pic.twitter.com/8oEz79K2xN
Last night I went to the Golden State Warriors-New York Knicks game at the new Chase Center (Knicks won in OT!), I stood during the playing of the national anthem largely because I wanted to enjoy the game and not trigger any yahoos who might have been around me.
You will never catch me wearing a Trump-fan boy hat, but the bigger point is you have to know where you are, the environment around you, and when it makes sense to engage the opposition. After all, we are in statist controlled territory.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has joined fellow Deep State snake Lindsey Graham in trying to kill a long Senate trial with witnesses which would expose the shady operations of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and who really knows how many others, following a House impeachment of President Trump.
"Mutually assured destruction," McConnell says.
He warns GOP senators that calling witnesses would blow up in their faces. Rs looking at a few-week trial.
W/ @seungminkim on lead vocals.https://t.co/l8T3mcarIZ
It's an order that would allow Trump to take further steps to combat anti-Israel sentiments and divestment movements on college campuses by requiring colleges and universities to treat those movements as discriminatory in order to keep their funding.
The move would trigger a portion of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 that requires educational institutions receiving federal funding to not discriminate based on national origin, according to senior administration officials. The Department of Education can withhold federal funding from any college or educational program that discriminates based on race, color or national origin, according to the Civil Rights Act.
Religion is not covered in that portion of the law so the administration would have to interpret Judaism as a nationality in order to potentially punish universities for violations.
Shapiro believes it is an attempt to squelch protest and opposition, even from Jews, of the current establishment Israeli position.
He said it is against the Torah which he said holds that Judaism is only a religion.
As part of a long read, New York Magazine's Andrew Sullivan informs:
At Oxford,...I overlapped with him for a year (1983–84) and, like him, was president of the Oxford Union. Compared with most of the toffs, he seemed to me endearing. So many other Etonians downplayed their upper-class origins, became lefties, smoked pot, softened their accents, and wore clothes indistinguishable from anyone else.
But Boris wore his class as a clown costume — never hiding it but subtly mocking it with a performance that was as eccentric as it was self-aware. He made others feel as if they were in on a joke he had created, which somewhat defused the class resentment he might otherwise have been subject to and which, like many from the lower ranks of British society, I mostly shared.
But I gave him a pass because he was so splendidly colorful....
In his chosen profession as a journalist, he worked for the Times of London and the Daily Telegraph, often finding stories where others didn’t but also just making stuff up. In one Times story, he invented a quote to sex up the piece, then lied to his editors about it. He was fired when the person he “quoted” complained, but, using his connections, he managed to get a second job, at the Telegraph, the solid Tory non-tabloid. In a stroke of editing genius, he was assigned to cover the E.U. in Brussels, where his environmentalist father had been one of the first British officials to work for the European bureaucracy (assigned to controlling pollution), where boy Boris thereby attended elementary school for two years and where, as a journalist, he also proceeded to just make stuff up.
But this time, the stuff he embellished or concocted — about the overweening ambitions of the E.U. and the absurdities of various E.U. regulations, on, say, the size of condoms — was almost designed to tickle Tory Telegraph readers.
A small group of House Democrats fearful of their re-election prospects has revived the idea of censuring President Trump instead of impeaching him, according to a report out Tuesday.
The Democrats, all repping districts Trump won in 2016, met Monday afternoon to consider their options, no matter how slim, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had already put the kibosh on censure, Politico reported.
The lawmakers, about 10, included Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Ben McAdams of Utah and Anthony Brindisi of upstate New York.
How desperate are they? The Post continues:
Some of the Dems have contacted centrist House Republicans in recent days to see whether they might be willing to censure Trump, the website reported. It’s not known what response they got, if any.
Amid all the accusations and gut-level vitriol on display, outside the House hearing room another impeachment dynamic was beginning to take shape: the self-inflicted 2020 blowback Democrats face for basing their impeachment campaign on President Trump’s attempts to push another country’s leader to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden, their highly questionable dual roles in Ukraine and the obvious conflicts of interest they posed.
On Thursday the former vice president showed just how sensitive he is on the topic. Biden lashed out at an Iowa voter who accused the 77-year-old Democratic primary contender of being too old and helping his son Hunter attain a lucrative role serving on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company, despite having no prior experience in the energy sector...
If Biden thought that townhall question was tough, he can expect far worse from Senate Republicans as the impeachment enters the next phase and moves to the upper chamber early next year.
Eric Ueland, the White House director of legislative affairs, told reporters Wednesday afternoon that the White House plans to mount an aggressive defense during the Senate trial. The strategy includes spotlighting live witness testimony on the Senate floor – not the videotaped depositions that were submitted as evidence in the Bill Clinton impeachment trial 20 years ago...
[E]ven Democratic impeachment witnesses testified last month that Hunter Biden’s role at Burisma raised legitimate conflict-of-interest questions and that they were at a loss to explain why no one in the Obama administration put a stop to it.
Having that unsavory Burisma conflict put into sharp, televised relief during an impeachment trial early next year could be the final jolt that knocks the Biden campaign off its already shaky moorings...
The timing couldn’t be worse for Biden with the Iowa caucuses coming Feb. 3 and the New Hampshire primary eight days later. Senate Republicans have already signaled they intend to extend an impeachment trial into the primary season.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may go down as one of the weakest and dumbest House speakers in US history.
A crashing lefty Democratic Party is not a bad thing. Go Nancy, go!
For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th "debate" — regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls. I instead choose to spend that precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South Carolina.
I am not sure Tulsi would have made it to the debate anyway, she is still one qualifying poll away but it is interesting she mentions South Carolina. While it appears she has spent extensive time in New Hampshire, she has spent nowhere near as much in SC--as best as I can tell just a few events.
She must see an opening there to bring it up in this tweet.
She is polling at 5.0% in New Hampshire, if she can pull that off in South Carolina, the media won't be able to ignore her. Currently, she is polling around 1.5% in SC. But will Super Tuesday come up to fast after the SC vote? She is only polling between 1.0% and 1.5% in Super Tuesday states.
The New Hampshire primary is February 11, the South Carolina primary is February 29. Super Tuesday is March 3.
I am not a constitutionalist. (I am hardcore PPS).
But for those of you that hold the constitution dear, the below testimony by Jonathan Turley is the brilliant and powerful constitutional case against Trump impeachment.
The Jimmy Dore commentary is also excellent pointing out that mainstream media is not covering the Turley statement.
All I can do is point out that the constitution can be twisted and distorted and we are better off without such a weak reed to guide society. It is time for the PPS.
Twenty-one-year old rapper Juice Wrld died after 'swallowing Percocet painkillers to hide them from cops' after his private jet pilot phoned Chicago police to tell them the rapper was flying with 70 pounds of marijuana, hand guns and armor-piercing bullets, reports the Daily Mail.
After the call, coppers waited inside the Atlantic Aviation hangar for the rapper’s jet to arrive from Los Angeles at 1:30am on Sunday morning.
As officers began sifting through a number of the suitcases on board, the rapper - real name Jarad Higgins - began ‘convulsing [and] going into a seizure' according to The Mail.
A search of luggage aboard the jet yielded 41 ‘vacuum-sealed’ bags - or 70 pounds - of marijuana and six bottles of prescription codeine cough syrup.
A young life was taken because of bad laws and a busybody pilot---and a not too bright kid.
Today, in the House Judiciary Committee hearing on impeachment, U.S. Congressman Matt Gaetz (FL-01) skewered the impeachment process and the Democratic witnesses.
This is how he started off:
The last public opinion poll I saw showed Congress had an approval rating of 9%. By contrast, Muammar Gaddafi had an approval rating of 13% and his own people dragged him into the streets and killed him.
Watch him take down the pro-impeachment witnesses:
From a libertarian perspective, I wasn't as impressed with his closing, but this guy is good. #upandcomer
The Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia is out.
President Trump is calling what the report reveals occurred "a disgrace to the country."
The report was compiled under the supervision of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz and came in at 434-pages.
“The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” US Attorney General William Barr said in a statement.
But in a separate statement John H. Durham, a federal prosecutor whom Barr appointed to run a separate criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, seems to indicate that the Inspector General's conclusions were not tough enough. “Last month, we advised the inspector general that we do not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the F.B.I. case was opened,” Durham said.
And so the battle, Trump vs. elements of the Deep State continues.
Grab your popcorn. Trump is about to go on offense.
The report from Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz also revealed for the first time that the FBI used a confidential source to approach an unidentified high-level Trump campaign official in September 2016 who was never the subject of any investigation. The approach revealed nothing of value to the probe, the review found.
Horowitz’s review did not find any indication that the FBI planted anyone in the campaign, as President Donald Trump has claimed, but it does bolster that campaign officials were repeatedly the focus of outreach by ‘confidential human sources’ seeking to establish whether the campaign was colluding with Russia.
Story Continued Below
The report finds those tactics complied with existing FBI policy, but the review contains withering criticism of the pre-eminent law enforcement agency for “basic, fundamental and serious errors” handling of the surveillance applications for campaign adviser Carter Page.
“We are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate, hand-picked investigative teams; on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations; after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI; even though the information sought through the use of FISA authority related so closely to an ongoing presidential campaign; and even though those involved with the investigation knew that their actions were likely to be subjected to close scrutiny,” Horowitz wrote.
“We believe this circumstance reflects a failure not just but those who prepared the FISA applications, but also by the managers and supervisors in the Crossfire Hurricane chain of command, including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed,” the inspector general added.
This Sunday, Lindsey Graham appeared on Maria Bartiromo's Fox show.
During the show, he indicated that he wanted to end the Senate trial of President Trump as "fast as he can."
Translation: He doesn't want to expose Joe Biden, Hunter Biden or any Deep State operatives.
This is in direct contradiction to what President Trump has been calling for.
Bartiromo even asked him about it. His answer was that oversight committees could "dig into those things." What a dangerous Deep State creep. We have a great opportunity to blow open the Deep State and Graham is going to shut it down.
Trump should tell Graham he is going to turn him into a crumpled Graham cracker if he doesn't put on a massive, Trump spectacular show that exposes the Deep State bigly.
