How can a legitimate news agency explain the fact that CNN was reporting, before President Donald John Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, that Trump was not going to bring up Russian interference in the presidential election?
Anybody who has been paying even casual attention to Trump since he announced he was running for president knows that Trump says and does whatever he wants.
It turned out that Trump did want to talk about the reports of Russian interference and a lot more. The meeting was supposed to last 30 minutes and lasted over two hours.
Trump and Putin are not the kind of men to sit and chitchat for two hours. In the future we’ll probably find out more about what they discussed.
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The European leaders are not supposed to be too happy with Trump. One thing that really has them miffed is that he was honest about the Paris climate accord, which was not a good deal for the US. Also, nobody likes the kid who points out that the emperor has no clothes, which is what Trump did.
Trump, unlike former President Barack Obama, really does put America first, and they don’t like that either. Part of that is forcing them to pay their fair share for NATO and for the United Nations. There is no reason for the US to keep picking up the check like some rich uncle taking his nephews and nieces out to dinner. Some of those nephews and nieces are all grown up now and doing very well themselves. Trump is right; it’s long past time they started paying their own way.
They also don’t like Trump because he is dealing with the illegal immigration problem in the US. The European Union is refusing to deal with its own immigration problem and Trump is making them look bad.
They aren’t accustomed to dealing with a man who says what he thinks and doesn’t try to agree with everyone. In the end, Trump has the cards and will win this one, but for right now he’s having to deal with some petulant European leaders.
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As I’ve written before, the so-called fact checking sites are brilliant – giving the liberal mainstream media another bite at the apple. The sites are no more than propaganda machines disguised as fact checkers.
Take the now retracted claim that 17 intelligence agencies signed off on the report concerning Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee.
Hillary Clinton said it, therefore the fact checkers rated it as 100 percent correct and Trump as incorrect for saying he doubted it was true. (Trump, by the way, cannot be incorrect if he says he doubts something, unless someone can find evidence that he doesn’t doubt it. A person can doubt anything they want.)
But even a cursory check of the 17 intelligence agencies would have shown that many have absolutely nothing to do with Russian hacking, so why would they sign off on a report on Russian hacking. The military intelligence agencies are by law not allowed to operate in the US, so by law they shouldn’t have an opinion on problems at the DNC.
It is possible that the liberal media, which overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, didn’t bother to check her statement but assumed it was true because she is “the smartest woman in the world” and she said it. It’s also possible that they did check it and knew it was false, but to say so would have hurt her campaign and their goal was to help her win.
Regardless of why they missed such an obvious error, it proves once again that the purpose of the fact checkers is to promote the liberal agenda and has little to do with checking facts.
What is somewhat amazing is that it took The New York Times, at one time a great newspaper, so long to correct an obvious mistake – a mistake that was pointed out in congressional testimony. But pointing out that Hillary Clinton was wrong is nothing The Times is wont to do. And as Hillary Clinton famously said about another far more costly mistake she made, “What difference does it make?”
Indeed, she lost despite the support from the mainstream media, so what difference does it make to point out that once again Hillary Clinton lied?
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Here is one question about climate change that needs to be answered.
We are constantly told by climate change disciples that this is settled science and that 97 percent of scientists agree on climate change. It’s a completely bogus number, but just for fun we’ll accept it as true.
So these are scientists who agree that man’s activities are causing Earth to warm faster than it would be warming absent man. The question is, what percent of the current warming trend is caused by man and what percent is the warming that has been going on for the past 10,000 years or so? If it’s science and not a belief or feeling, then the scientists should be able to determine a percentage and show their work.
So maybe it’s two questions: One is, what is the percentage of warming caused by man and the other is, how did you come up with that answer.
If there is an answer, then do 97 percent of the scientists agree with that percent?
Sen. Al Franken quoted one scientist as saying that 100 percent of climate change was caused by man. This is a remark that is wrong on its face. The climate is always changing; if it were not the US would be covered with glaciers. The great deserts of Northern Africa and the Middle East would be dense jungles. The climate was changing long before man existed and will continue to change after we are all gone.
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I have no idea how much of a threat North Korea is. I don’t know whether the latest missile launch is simply Kim Jung Un showing off or if he seriously intends to attack the US with a nuclear weapon as soon as he has the capability. I would hope the US intelligence agencies know what his intentions are.
But what I do know is that if the US decides to launch any kind of military attack on North Korea, it should not be limited, except that we shouldn’t use nuclear weapons. These surgical strikes don’t appear to have ever accomplished much except give the president – whoever he is – something to boast about.
If the brain trust in Washington believes that Kim Jung Un does intend to launch a nuclear missile at the US and the only thing holding him back is technology, then we should make a deal with the Chinese and Russians and take Kim Jong Un and his government out. We should destroy all of their nuclear and missile facilities, sink every one of their submarines, take out as many surface ships as possible, destroy their air force, in short, the US should not get involved in some tit for tat with North Korea but go ahead and take decisive action.
I also don’t know, considering the damage that Obama did to our own military, if the US has that capability while we have troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. So it’s possible that we are in a race with North Korea – racing to build our military back to the point that we can take out the North Korean military and still maintain our forces in other trouble spots.
What we don’t need is to drop a couple of bunker buster bombs where we think their nuclear and missile facilities are, only to find out later, when they do launch a nuclear missile, that we were wrong.
It won’t be popular to expend the lives and money that it will take. But reports are that the successful missile launch was from a mobile launch pad. If North Korea can launch a missile from a truck, why not a ship; and a ship could get close enough to hit the continental US even with the limited range they have now.
But who knows if Kim Jung Un ever has any intention of attacking anybody. He might simply want the prestige of having nuclear missiles but have no intention of every using them except in a defensive response to an attack.
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I was talking to just a regular working guy the other day. The kind of guy that the present economy has, if not left behind, left in limbo. This guy keeps up with the news and always knows all about the hot political topics of the day.
He told me he thought Trump was the best president of his lifetime and that Trump was going to be tremendously successful in Washington.
He said that most people don’t appear to understand what Trump is doing, and unlike what you read or hear on the news or pseudo-news, he loves it when Trump tweets. He said the president is communicating with the American people directly. There is no middleman, no big speech to a gathering of notables, it is simply the president sitting down with his phone and communicating directly to the American people.
When President Franklin Roosevelt started doing his fireside chats, using what was at the time new technology, the radio, it was considered radical and by some not presidential. But the people loved it because the president was speaking to them, not to Congress or some highfalutin audience somewhere. I don’t see where tweeting is that different.
Trump is communicating with his base and leaving the mainstream media behind, which drives the mainstream media berserk.
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Republican Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania almost put his finger on the problem with Republicans repealing and replacing Obamacare. He said that they weren’t ready because none of the leaders in Congress thought that Trump would win.
This is the reason Trump needs to get to work on draining the swamp, and Toomey and his buddies are swamp creatures.
That statement means that Toomey and the leaders in the Senate, or perhaps so-called Senate leadership, still believe the mainstream media. But if there were real leadership in the Senate, they would have been prepared to repeal Obamacare because in an election anything can happen.
It’s time for the Republicans in Washington to get with the program. What Toomey is actually saying is that the Republican Senate leadership assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to win, which meant they wouldn’t have to do any work. All they would have to do is what they have become frighteningly good at – complaining all the time about not being able to do anything.
The problem that they have that is going to come back to bite them is that, before they complained because the Democrats wouldn’t allow them to do anything. Now they have to admit they can’t get anything done because they don’t have the will to do anything.
It proves that all those votes to repeal Obamacare were exactly what the Democrats said they were – all hat and no cattle. The Republicans clearly didn’t have any plan to appeal Obamacare; they simply wanted to pretend to be doing something. They could have just as easily voted for the sun not to set or for the tide not rise, but they probably didn’t think about that.
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Back when Bill Clinton was president, he allowed his wife, Hillary Clinton, who had no official standing in the government, to create a task force that wrote a new health insurance bill.
This was hailed by the mainstream media as a wonderful thing. Bill Clinton was showing what a true feminist he was, bringing the country into the future.
When he had been running, one of the slogans of the campaign was that the people would get two for the price of one – meaning Bill and Hillary Clinton as some kind of co-presidents.
Of course it didn’t work out like that, perhaps something that really shocked Hillary Clinton, who may be an attorney but doesn’t seem to understand the laws of the nation very well. But since she couldn’t be co-president, Bill let her be the healthcare czarina.
President Trump enlists the support of his grown daughter, and somehow this is awful nepotism, corruption, and every other bad word you can think of.
Do you think as far as the mainstream media is concerned, the problem might be not what is done, but who does it?
Doesn’t it seem like they would at least attempt to mask their feelings? They don’t. Everything Trump does is awful by definition and done for the very worst motivations.
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It’s hard to believe, but the mainstream media used to love Trump. Back when he was a billionaire businessman and reality show host, they loved him because he was opinionated and didn’t mind sharing those opinions.
Then, when he ran for president, they loved him because it was such a great story, even though everyone knew it was going to be a race between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, who had already raised $100 million and had endorsements coming out the wazoo.
A Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush campaign would have been so incredibly boring that the debates would have only been watched by reporters and inmates who couldn’t change the channel. By the time of the election, people would have had so little interest in who won that half the networks would have gone to regular programming and most Americans would have been satisfied to wake up the next morning to find out who won. Then they would have had to ask, is that the one that was married to a president or the one whose father was president?
But Trump could excite a crowd. Trump could give the media headlines day after day. Trump would also do interviews and call in to talk shows, and he didn’t mind being on the air. The media loved Trump.
But then Trump did a bad, bad thing. Trump embarrassed Bush and beat the true media darling, the woman most people in the media love more than their own mothers, Hillary Clinton, and they cannot forgive him for that. When Trump beat Hillary, the media at first couldn’t believe it and they still can’t accept it. The candidate who they loved, because they knew Hillary Clinton would beat him so badly, had the audacity to win.
The mainstream media cannot figure out what to do except attack Trump at every opportunity. It’s been eight months since the election; it’s time for the media to get out of their funk and start treating Trump like the president because he is the president.
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If the Republicans in Congress want to be successful, they need to get rid of the tired old political hack they have running the show in the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Sometimes tired old political hacks can be effective. If they know they aren’t running for reelection, and want to work on their legacy, they may decide to twist arms, lean on people, call in old favors and get things done.
McConnell seems to have taken an entirely different tack. Evidently he wants his legacy to be as an ineffective, do-nothing majority leader whose claim to fame is that almost nothing was passed during his terms.
His problem now is that – with the Republicans having a majority in the Senate, a large majority in the House and a Republican in the White House – it is getting extremely difficult to do nothing.
McConnell is probably frantic with fear that a major piece of legislation will get passed on his watch. If he doesn’t work this thing just right, he could end up passing an Obamacare repeal bill despite working overtime to kill every rendition of a new health insurance law.
Proving that he is working hard not to get anything done, McConnell announced on Tuesday that the Senate would stay in session for the first two weeks of August rather than recessing at the end of July. What this does it takes all the pressure off getting Obamacare repealed and replaced for another two weeks.
It makes sense to extend the legislative session, but this is not the time to extend it. He should have convinced everyone that it wouldn’t be extended, forcing them to work toward a compromise they could pass.
If, at the end of July, they were still deadlocked, then he should have said they would stay in session until the issue was resolved, period. Saying that he is extending the session for two weeks gives the senators two more weeks to posture and get face time on the national news and not make any progress.
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Donald Trump Jr. was duped into meeting with a Russian lawyer. He received emails from a record promoter he knew that a woman connected to the Russian government had information about Hillary Clinton that would be useful to his father.
It turned out the Russian lawyer didn’t have any information about Hillary Clinton, wasn’t connected to the Russian government and wanted to meet with Trump Jr. to ask that something be done about Russian orphans.
Trump Jr. doesn’t have much experience in politics and should be embarrassed for falling for such an obvious ploy. But it’s clear from all the evidence revealed so far that Trump Jr. didn’t commit any crimes. The idea that he violated some statute about accepting donations from foreign nationals is a real stretch. He didn’t accept anything from her. All she did was waste his time.
In Trump Jr.’s defense, this happened in June 2016. Trump was not even the Republican nominee. The talk then was of a brokered convention. People who claimed to know such things said that the delegates supporting Sen. Ted Cruz were going to take over the convention and nominate Cruz. This was before Vice President Mike Pence had been named as Trump’s running mate. But most importantly it was before the emails from the DNC had been made public and the fable that the Russians were colluding with Trump to steal the election had not been promoted by the mainstream media.
So it was a different time.
The emails to convince Trump Jr. that this woman has great information are over the top. But here is an interesting note. The evidence that has been revealed so far are that this record promoter, Rob Goldstone, was blowing smoke. The lawyer was none of the things he claimed she was. There is, for instance, no such thing as a “crown prosecutor” in Russia, but the email states that the crown prosecutor of Russia met with somebody else who was working through the record promoter to get information to Trump through this lawyer.
Trump Jr. must have really wanted to believe it because, if you stop for a moment and consider how convoluted the whole thing is, it doesn’t make much sense. But it doesn’t make sense because this Goldstone was evidently making it up as he went along.
The part that the mainstream media and Trump haters have grasped with both hands is that Goldstone wrote that the meeting was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Trump.”
So, according to the mainstream media, that proves that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. But we know that much of the other information in the email is simply made up, so why should we believe this one phrase is true or that Goldstone would even know if it were true or not?
However, it is no secret that Putin hates the Clintons and wanted Hillary Clinton to lose and Trump to win. This will shock some people, but there is nothing illegal about Putin wanting Hillary Clinton to lose.
What this whole Trump Jr. mess seems to be is a case of Trump Jr. thinking that he was going to come up with some valuable information from his own contacts. He was evidently so taken by the whole idea of being the one to unearth dirt on Hillary Clinton that he invited his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort to the meeting.
The meeting turned out to be a bust and no doubt Trump Jr. was not pleased to see it in the media, not because it is evidence he did anything illegal but because it is evidence that he was genuinely fooled.
If all this had been real, why in the world would the two communicate by email so there is a written record of what they were doing? Trump Jr. hadn’t been involved in politics long, but considering all the trouble Hillary Clinton’s emails had caused her, you would think that he would have taken the hint.
What seems incredible is that the Republicans in Congress want to investigate this. It seems incredible until you realize that the Republicans in Congress don’t like Trump much more than the Democrats because Trump has a habit of pointing out the many things they aren’t doing.
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I know this idea is too simple to work, but then again nothing else is working on the health insurance front.
Since just about every Republican in the Senate ran against Obamacare, why not repeal Obamacare and then figure out how to fix the failed health insurance system.
Obamacare was sold to the American people based on a bunch of lies. If Obama had been honest and said that Obamacare would mean you couldn’t keep your doctor, you couldn’t keep your healthcare plan and that premiums would skyrocket, it’s doubtful he could have come up with the votes, even in a Congress controlled by the Democrats.
The biggest reason that when Obama took office he had 60 votes in the Senate and when he left office he had 48 was Obamacare. The Republicans used Obamacare to beat Obama Democrats all across the country. Now that Republicans have the power to repeal Obamacare, they should go ahead and do it.
Obamacare only worked in theory because people who were relatively healthy were supposed to pay for a lot more insurance than they needed, so that people who were unhealthy could pay less for the health insurance they needed.
It didn’t work for a lot of reasons, one is that a lot of people chose to pay the fine for not purchasing insurance because it was cheaper than paying for health insurance they didn’t need and didn’t think they would use.
Certainly if push came to shove even the Republicans in Congress could come up with a better plan.
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Former President Obama said that the biggest threat to the country was climate change, which I believe to be a tragically misinformed statement, but also a statement that radically underestimates the strength and ingenuity of the American people. The worst projections are that global temperatures are going to rise by 2 degrees to 9.7 degrees by 2100. So what?
Will it ruin the US if the peach orchards of Georgia are replaced with orange groves? Will the country founder because cucumbers in eastern North Carolina are planted in March instead of April.
For most Americans it will mean using the air conditioner more and the furnace less. Is that a threat to our country?
So what if the polar ice caps diminish and the sea level rises. A good bit of the Netherlands is below sea level and it survives. If New York had to build dikes to keep water out of the streets, it would cost a lot of money but it is not exactly cutting edge technology to build a dike.
How is it a threat? Some plants and animals would die and others would flourish in areas where they couldn’t survive before, but humans live from the poles to the equator; it’s not like Earth warming a couple of degrees is going to make it uninhabitable.
But what is a real threat to this country is that we are losing our free press.
Recently The New York Times had to retract a months-old, frequently repeated story that all 17 federal intelligence agencies signed off on a report that the Russians were behind the leaks of the DNC emails.
The reason the obviously false report was printed, reprinted, broadcast and even quoted by Hillary Clinton was that The New York Times and the rest of the mainstream media wanted to believe it.
Humans are incredibly good at deceiving themselves. Every day people lose the money they have saved for retirement because they want to believe that they can invest $10,000 and make $50,000 in a year. Flimflam men depend on this and hardly a year goes by where some major ponzi scheme involving millions of dollars isn’t uncovered.
Otherwise smart people invested millions with Bernie Madoff, even though they knew that his returns on investments defied economic reality.
The mainstream media hate Trump with such ferocity that they are willing to believe obvious lies about Trump and then print those lies as news.
How many news stories have been written about the collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians to affect the outcome of the election? But so far all the various investigations have not produced one scintilla of evidence that this is true. The news story is only a story because the mainstream media want it to be and the mainstream media conveniently ignore the facts and print what they want to be true.
More and more Americans are coming to the realization that they are not receiving news from the mainstream media but propaganda. But where does that leave us? Americans without accurate news are lost when it comes to governing ourselves.
It is incredible and also sad that Trump was able to win the presidential election facing the overwhelming opposition of the mainstream media. But what that proves is that about half of the American voting population no longer believes the news as reported by the mainstream media. If they had believed what was being reported, they never would have voted for Trump.
So the question is, where do people get their news, and it appears more and more Americans are trusting social media sites rather than news organizations. This makes sense, but it can also be disastrous because no one is supervising those sites. News organizations have editors and fact checkers, not the ones with columns but real fact checkers who are supposed to validate their stories. Anybody can put anything they want on social media, whether it is true, mostly true or completely false. It’s more like gossip than news.
The result of the mistrust of the mainstream media is that Americans believe completely different sets of facts about people and events. Some who believe the mainstream media think Trump is a failed businessman who ran for president to try and save his business empire. How a failed businessman has a business empire to save is hard to explain, but it’s one of the scenarios being promoted.
Trump supporters don’t believe that. They don’t believe that a man worth billions of dollars with his own Boeing 757, helicopters, hotels, golf courses, resorts and some of the most prestigious buildings in the country is a failed businessman.
Some who oppose Trump believe he is a dangerous nut who they can’t trust. Those who support him see him as a rare elected official who speaks his mind.
