NO ANTI-KAVANAUGH GROUNDSWELL IN MAINE OR ALASKA

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN BRETT KAVANAUGH, JUDICIAL NOMINEES, SUPREME COURT

The hope of Democrats that they can stop the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh rests largely on two moderate Republican Senators, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. So far the signsregarding these two aren’t encouraging for Democrats, though we’re still relatively early in the process.

Democrats recall that during the fight over repealing Obamacare, Collins and Murkowski bucked the GOP leadership and, along with Sen. John McCain, defeated legislation that would have effectuated a repeal. The Washington Post reports that, in the hope of a repeat performance, a “well-organized campaign” is under way to pour millions of dollars worth of anti-Kavanaugh ads into small towns throughout Maine and Alaska.

The Post also reports that, so far, constituents are unmoved. In separate interviews with the Post, Collins and Murkowski say that voters view the health-care debate and the Supreme Court very differently:

“The protests are similar, the media campaign is more aggressive this time, but the constituent involvement is less. And I think that’s because health care is so personal and affects everybody,” Collins said.

“A different level of intensity, a different level of intensity. What I was hearing at home were very personal stories,” Murkowski recalled of last summer’s interactions with constituents. “Literally people in tears. The level of just emotional outpouring that made it just — intense is the best word — is different than it is now.”

That doesn’t surprise, but this does:

Some Senate aides said the confirmation battle for Education Secretary Betsy DeVos sparked more constituent outreach than either Kavanaugh’s nomination or last year’s confirmation of Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.

Murkowski attributed the lack of an anti-Kavanaugh groundswell to the fact that Supreme Court confirmations turn on somewhat esoteric arguments about hypothetical legal questions. Democrats try to simplify their arguments, as when Ted Kennedy described“Robert Bork’s America” in gruesome terms.

However, Democrats have been crying wolf for so long that voters may be tuning them out, or at least rejecting doomsday claims. Perhaps more importantly, Republicans no longer nominate judges who seem as threatening as Bork.

Kavanaugh hasn’t met yet with either Collins or Murkowski. A lot will be riding on those meetings and on whatever the two Senators make of Kavanaugh’s judicial opinions and speeches. At least as things stand now, however, Kavanaugh won’t be fighting head winds with these two key Senators.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/no-anti-kavanaugh-groundswell-in-maine-or-alaska.php

Nunes: American People 'Will Be Shocked' by What's in Redacted Portion of FISA Application

Nunes: American People 'Will Be Shocked' by What's in Redacted Portion of FISA Application

 

BY DEBRA HEINE 

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes said Sunday that the American people will be “shocked” when they see what's in the still-redacted portions of the FBI’s applications for surveillance warrants against former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

“We are quite confident that once the American people see these 20 pages, at least for those that will get real reporting on this issue, they will be shocked by what’s in that FISA application,” Nunes said in an interview with Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo.

Nunes and other House Republicans have been urging President Trump to declassify what remains hidden in 20 pages of the FISA application.

“I think his lawyers are looking at this to see if they can declassify it sooner rather than later,” said Nunes (R-Calif.) during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “But the sooner this comes out, the better off we all are because what I’ve said is what’s left that’s redacted, the American people really need to know what’s underneath it.”

After the Department of Justice released portions of the four FISA applications, Democrats claimed that the most damaging information about Page was found in the redacted parts.

"If you look at what they were saying... 'oh, but the really juicy stuff that proves collusion and how bad Carter Page really was and how they were colluding with Russians -- that's what's redacted!'"

He said the liberal media changed their tune when they found out that Republicans on the House Intel Committee were trying to get those portions unredacted.

"You hear crickets. You hear nothing," Nunes said.

Nunes said about 70 to 75 percent of the FISA material was redacted.

“What’s left that’s redacted, the American people really do need to know what’s underneath there,” the congressman said, adding that the Democrats don't want the truth out there.

“They don’t want that unredacted. They don’t want transparency for the American people,” he said.

"If people think using the Clinton dirt to get a FISA was bad, what else that's in that application is even worse," Nunes recently told the Wall Street Journal's Kimberley Strassel.

“There’s a stall game going on at DOJ and FBI – they’re trying to stall as much as they can, hoping and betting that Republicans would lose the House in the fall,” Nunes said. “And if that happens ... it essentially shuts down everything. Rod Rosenstein will not be held in contempt, FBI will not be held accountable, all these investigations will shut down, everything will be buried…. That’s why the sooner the president declassifies this, the better.”

Nunes said that he believes that Trump’s lawyers are reviewing requests to declassify the 20 pages so they can be made public.

Fox News

✔@FoxNews

.@DevinNunes: "There's a stall game going on at DOJ and FBI - they're trying to stall as much they can hoping and betting that Republicans would lose the House in the fall." #SundayFutures @MariaBartiromo

9:46 AM - Jul 29, 2018

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 https://pjmedia.com/video/nunes-american-people-will-be-shocked-by-whats-in-redacted-portion-of-fisa-application/

Trump's Deal with the EU Is Democrat Nightmare

Trump's Deal with the EU Is Democrat Nightmare

By Roger L Simon 

 

President Donald Trump and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker speak in the Rose Garden of the White House, Wednesday, July 25, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

They must be burning whatever gallons of midnight oil they have left at MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. -- all the propaganda organs of the Democratic Party -- trying to figure out how to downplay the agreement Donald Trump just made with European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker, but it's not going to be easy. This is the beginning of a massive free trade deal between Europe and the U.S. with zero tariffs outside the auto industry.  If even half of it comes true, there will be a (okay, why not?) YUUUGE growth in trade benefitting both sides of the Atlantic.

Forget porn stars. Forget tapes. Forget evil Vlad and Rocket Man. Forget insulting our NATO partners (whatever that means). Forget that pseudo-socialist with the hyphenated name. Forget Mueller, sleazy Strzok , Adam "Leaker" Schiff, Fingers Clapper, Knuckles Brennan, Rocko Rosenstein, or any of the sordid crew.  Forget even Twitter! (well, maybe). By comparison, those are all sideshows. As everyone knows, in politics, "It's the economy, stupid!"

Or, put another way, "It's the art of the deal."  And that's what came through today and then some.  This is the most significant moment of Trump's presidency since the tax law passed -- and he's had plenty, more than any president of any of our lifetimes if you actually think about it.

Fall Forecast: An Anti-Leftist Electoral Rout

Boom went the stock market within seconds of the announcement.  And those investors know a lot more than Jim Acosta, Chris Matthews, or even Jake Tapper.  (Don't cry, guys.  We know how big your 401Ks are and a lot of that is due to Trump.  Be grateful for a change. Your grandchildren will thank you.) It already looked as if we were headed for another Trump bull market with growth approaching a jaw-dropping five percent. Good for everyone.

The Dems and their media lackeys are not going to have the tariff issue to kick around anymore.  Turns out it was what anyone with the proverbial IQ in triple digits knew it was -- a bargaining chip.

Needless to say, many of those conventional dullards who loath Trump knew this too, but wouldn't admit it.  Therefore they gave him about ten minutes to make his deal.  He made it in five (metaphorically). Panic in Media Park.

Making matters worse for the Dems, this new deal entails growing sales of liquid natural gas by our country to Europe.  Who does that most affect?  Well, duh, Comrade Putin, of course.  Thought experiment (actually you don't even have to think to answer this one): What do you suppose would trouble Putin more -- the U.S. cornering the LNG market or Trump calling him a bunch of nasty names?

It's so obvious that Trump has done more to actually "trouble" Putin by his actions (really arming the Ukrainians, etc.) than any of his recent predecessors that it would be generally acknowledged in a semi-honest media environment.  The whole hoo-haw about Helsinki was less than a bunch of nothing in the grand scheme of things. But the oppressive leftwing (to use a dated term) media environment affects even the right so they often can't see straight and apologize for things that need no apology.  This new deal should straighten some of that out.

It also should be powerful ammunition for any Republican running this fall. Do you want the Trump economy or do you want a return to the Obama economy?  It's as simple as that.  Trump continues to negotiate great agreements for America, at home and abroad. The "Art of the Deal" may be a cliché by now, but it appears to work.  And when something's working for once, why change it  -- especially to something that already failed?(Or, in the case of socialism, worse than failed -- caused mass impoverishment and mass murder.)

If Republicans can communicate that simple  message, they will win big.  Not always geniuses at marketing their ideas, this one is so obvious maybe even the GOP can do it.

Are we tired of winning yet?

Roger L Simon - co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media - is a novelist and Oscar-nominated screenwriter.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/trumps-deal-with-the-eu-is-democrat-nightmare/

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   7/31/2018

A tangled web of lies, deceit, abuse

The entire “Trump/Russia” narrative is becoming, for many Americans, a nearly irrelevant background noise much like “human-caused global warming/climate change/climate disruption/insert-current-iteration-of-world-coming-to-an-end.” You could add obfuscation and endless diversionary analysis to the tactics of those in the Democrat/News Media Complex determined to distract with, and hype, a narrative to the point of boredom and exasperation. When the news media wish to avoid unpleasant and outrage-inducing truth, they sure know how to “hide the football” and “gaslight” (look it up) the populace.

The thing is, it’s been going on since the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, certainly since the election. We know from “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, that Hillary assembled her staff within 24 hours of her concession and dreamed up the narrative that would become the “story, and she’s sticking to it” of why she lost what everybody (this local columnist and others aside) knew would be her presidency. The proximate story was and remains the “Trump/Russia collusion against her that elected Trump.” Without evidence, Obama and his people worked heartily to advance the same narrative, intentionally attempting to hobble—then remove—the new President.

We also now know that her State Department remained a conduit for introducing and channeling any dirt and unverified accusations on Trump to the FBI under James Comey. Considering that ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post—collectively working to overturn the 2016 election of Trump to this day—morphed into little more than a collaborating arm of the Democrat/Mueller legal and propaganda operation; considering that we now know that there never were any citable, indictable acts of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russians—Given all that and more, reasonable Americans have cause to put the whole political, legal and media war on Trump behind them and enjoy life.

Several related revelations over the last 20 months: In March of 2017 former Obama Intelligence chief James Clapper replied “Not to my knowledge” to a Meet the Press question of whether he had ever seen any evidence that the Trump campaign was colluding with the Russian government while the Kremlin was working to influence the election. That same Clapper has recently stated in an interview that then-President Obama was behind the whole surveillance/informant/FISA warrant operation against Trump, saying that it wouldn’t have happened without Obama.

Democrat Adam Schiff, endangering anyone between him and a camera, has denied that he’s seen evidence of Trump/Russia collusion which, considering his Intelligence Committee position, tells you there isn’t any such evidence. As with numerous other Democrat partisans, he quickly shifts the issue to one of “smoke and fire” as if there has got to be an “impeach Trump” pony in the manure.

From Mr. Peter “We won’t let that (Trump’s presidency) happen” Strzok, we have his texts to his FBI lover, Lisa Page, framing the question of joining Mr. Mueller’s Special Prosecutor team thusly: He would likely pass up a promotion to some Assistant Director position to join Mueller; however, Mueller’s prosecution would allow Strzok to be part of the grand, historic impeachment of Trump. On the other hand, he expressed reservations to Ms. Page that—with all he knew about Trump, his campaign and the results of informants and surveillance—he didn’t see any “there there.”

I was reviewing a stack of unread articles from last summer, collected for vacation reading, and was not surprised to find what were the raging questions, during spring and early summer of Trump’s first year and the start of Mueller’s investigation. They had to do with revelations about documents supporting the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court application for warrants to spy (literally, “to observe secretively or furtively; to engage in espionage,” i.e. conduct surveillance) on the Trump campaign.

Incidentally, that the spying was directed at the “campaign” has been admitted in other documents and interviews. It can be truly asserted that the FISA warrant to spy on one-time foreign policy advisor, Carter Page, was effectively a broad, carte blanche permission to collect all communication involving Page and anyone in Trump’s campaign, whether in Trump tower or not. Given that the original October 2016 FISA warrant was renewed multiple times, that means that Obama’s FBI was spying on President-elect Trump into the early months of his administration—all based on concocted lies in the infamous “Steele dossier.”

Here is where the analogies with Nixon’s Watergate scandal kick in. The actual crime of breaking into DNC offices to place listening devices (bugs) involved members of Nixon’s reelection team. Nixon reportedly tried to enlist the CIA and FBI to cover up and obstruct, but was rebuffed by principled agents. When taken together, the Obama/Lynch/Comey/Brennan/Clinton/DNC/FusionGPS/Steele cabal engaged in what on its face appeared to be legal means to surveil—spy, bug, “wiretap”—and “investigate” the Trump campaign, including Trump himself. It was all one conspiracy that involved illegal actions (fraudulent FISA applications based on lies) as well as gross misuse of law enforcement to hobble the political campaign of the candidate of the opposing party. Actually, it’s far worse than Nixon’s Watergate—it’s like a banana republic.

I felt mild amusement at praise (?) for being “consistently consistent” by fellow columnist Bill Cornelius. Was I being “damned with faint praise”? Was that a “back handed compliment”? I admit to consistency in pursuing and explicating the truth in all subjects addressed in this column; factual retractions have been extremely rare over the 13-year run of “The Way I See It” (originally “News and Views”). Time has invariably reinforced and confirmed, not disproved, my views. Let’s leave it here: Far be it from me to dispute the observations and conclusions of such a fine fellow, accomplished athlete and brilliant citizen who admits to never reading my columns. Surely, we can add estimable powers of perception (extra sensory?) and deduction to the list of Bill’s qualities.

Trump Negotiates, the Press Lies

Trump Negotiates, the Press Lies

 

BY ANDREW KLAVAN 

President Donald Trump pats the president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker on the back following a joint press conference in the White House Rose Garden in Washington, DC on July 25, 2018. (Alex Edelman/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)

As a lifelong freelancer, I have been in several high-level negotiations in my life — high-level for me, at least, with my career and my family's future on the line. Sometimes I have been protected by agents who did the talking for me, but the final decisions have always been mine. And here is what I've learned.

Negotiation is movement. The truth is not in any given moment, it's in the whole process, beginning to end. If someone says, "That's my last offer," that doesn't mean it's his last offer. If someone says, "It's over!" that doesn't mean it's over. And if someone says he loves you, that doesn't mean he loves you either. It's all part of the game. Everyone gets this.

Donald Trump is a negotiator, as he has told us from the start. Not everything he says means what it means. Not every final decision he makes is final. And just because he says he loves you, that doesn't mean he does. He's in motion toward a goal, and the truth is in the motion. By now, most of us get this.

Except the press. They just hate him too much to take him as he is — to take him as he has always said he is. They don't accept he's in a moving negotiation. If he says it's over and it's not over, they call him a liar. If he says he loves Putin, they declare he loves Putin. By now, most of us understand that Trump doesn't operate that way. Not the press.

To be fair, there are some commentators with honest concerns. They feel that, as president, Trump's words should have more weight than a negotiator's words. He shouldn't say it's over unless it's really over. He shouldn't say he loves you if you happen to be a gangster piece of garbage like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un. Fair enough. There's a price you pay for everything, and there's a price America will pay for having a president who approaches truth as a negotiator.

But as we saw this week, there are lots of benefits as well.

As the week began, the press and politicians on both the left and right were in a full, hen-clucking hysteria over Trump's trade policies. "Tariffs are the greatest,"Trump tweeted. And in the press and Congress, players on both sides were declaring free trade was dead and the end of the economy was nigh. They neglected to recall that Trump had also said at the G7 summit back in June that all tariffs and trade barriers should be lifted. "No tariffs, no barriers, that's the way it should be."

Tariffs and the threats of tariffs were clearly Trump's way of bringing our trading partners to the table. He said this too. "They're all coming," he declared in a speech just this week. "They don't want to have those tariffs put on them, they're all coming to see us."

And so it was. On Thursday, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker agreed to negotiate with no preconditions for zero tariffs and subsidies. This may not be victory for Trump, but it's certainly a victory for him, the justification of his strategy and a confirmation of his skills.

How did our corrupt and dishonest press report it? The original headline in the New York Times (a former newspaper) read: With Surprise Deal, U.S. and E.U. Step Back From Trade War. Which raises the question: surprise to whom? Not to Trump. He said it was going to happen! A surprise only to the New York Times, so immersed in its own false narrative that reality takes them off guard. Likewise, the networks, who played the whole thing as if Trump had either backed down or blundered into the success he engineered and predicted.

In the same vein, the press also virtually ignored evidence Trump had made progress with North Korea. And the Democrats attacked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for pointing out that Trump's tough Russia policies belied his words.

All of this makes for a complex world for the rest of us. We have a president who speaks like a negotiator, treating truth as a process, different at different stages. We have a news media so choked with leftist hatred and rage, it no longer has any commitment to the truth at all. How to know what's real and what's illusion?

Results are all we have to go by. As of right now, the negotiator is doing pretty damned well.

https://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/trump-negotiates-the-press-lies/

WHAT THE FBI DIDN’T TELL THE FISA COURT

 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, FBI, FISAGATE

The release of a heavily-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap Carter Page triggered a debate over whether the FBI gave the FISA court judges enough information to assess the anti-Trump motives of the people behind the Steele dossier. That dossier was at the core of the FBI’s application.

Defenders of the FBI point to a footnote in the FISA application with this sentence: “The FBI speculates that the identified U.S. person was likely looking for information that could be used to discredit Candidate #1’s campaign.” The “identified U.S. person” is Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS opposition researcher who recruited former British spy Christopher Steele to search for Russia-related dirt on Trump, referred to as “Candidate #1” in the application.

However, Byron York counters that the footnote did not disclose the bias of Christoper Steele, the operative upon whose information Simpson relied. Rather, the FBI vouched for Steele without noting his bias, and tried to create the impression that, whatever Simpson’s biasmight be, it did not infect Steele’s investigating and the resulting dossier.

The FBI vouched for Steele, telling the FISA court:

“Source #1’s [Steele’s] reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings and the FBI assesses Source #1 to be reliable. Source #1 has been compensated [REDACTED] by the FBI and the FBI is unaware of any derogatory information pertaining to Source #1.

In addition, the FBI told the court that it “believes Source #1’s reporting herein to be credible.”

The FBI tried to use Steele to wash away any problem of bias by Simpson by asserting that Simpson “never advised Source #1 [Steele] as to the motivation behind the research into Candidate #1’s ties to Russia.” Thus, the FISA court was led to believe that the dossier was untainted by bias because, regardless of Simpson’s motivation, Steele’s work was unaffected since he didn’t know the people paying him were out to stop Trump.

It seems implausible that Steele, a veteran operator, wouldn’t know the motivation and intentions of the people who hired him, but let’s assume he didn’t. If Steele himself was out to stop Trump, that could easily skew his work.

At a minimum, the FBI would need to inform the FISA court of this possibility, just as it informed the court that Simpson was “likely looking for information” with which to damage Trump. Otherwise, the FBI would be deceiving the court by withholding important information relevant to Steele’s credibility, for which the FBI was vouching.

But the FBI did not so inform the FISA court.* As Byron says, “In the initial and later applications, the FBI did not even hint that Steele, referred to as “Source #1″ in the application, was biased against Trump.”

Did the FBI know of Steele’s bias when it made its submissions to the FISA court? Yes it did.

In the book Russian Roulette, authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn — both of whom were briefed by Steele about his findings during the campaign — reported that the FBI was aware of Steele’s anti-Trump motivations. FBI officials “knew from the outset that Steele had an agenda and that he was likely working for the Democrats,” they wrote.

In fact, Steele made his bias manifest to high-ranking Justice Department official Bruce Ohr a month before the initial FISA application was filed. He told Ohr he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president,” according to Ohr’s own account quoted in a memo by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes memo. In addition, according to Nunes, this evidence of Steele’s bias was recorded by Ohr at the time, and subsequently in official FBI files.

Yet, from all that appears, this information was never included in the FISA applications — not in the initial October 2017 application, and not in the subsequent renewal applications of January, April, and June of 2017.

In sum, the FBI deceived the FISA court in obtaining the warrant to spy on Carter Page. It based a substantial part of its warrant application on Steele’s work knowing that Steele had a strong and clear anti-Trump bias, but did not so advise the court and, indeed, tried to create the impression that Steele was untainted by such bias.

*At least, that’s how it seems. Byron cautions that we can’t be certain because of the heavy redactions in the documents released to the public. However, Rep. Nunes and Sen. Charles Grassley have seen the unredacted versions and they say the documents don’t disclose Steele’s anti-Trump posture.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/what-the-fbi-didnt-tell-the-fisa-court.php

CNN: THE OPPO RESEARCH ARM OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN 2018 ELECTION, MEDIA BIAS

Everyone knows that CNN is maniacally devoted, 24/7, to trying to destroy the Trump administration. But it doesn’t end there. CNN is all in for the Democratic Party, and is doing its part to help the Dems capture the House in November.

See, e.g., the KFile, billed by CNN as “the leading investigation team for the social, mobile generation.” KFile features content by Andrew Kaczynski, pretty much all of which consists of anti-GOP smears. Kaczynski came to CNN via Buzzfeed, which you should keep in mind next time someone tells you that CNN represents legitimate journalism.

Kaczynski has a vendetta against my Congressman Jason Lewis, who represents Minnesota’s 2nd District. The 2nd is a swing district that the Democrats hope to capture this year; hence Kaczynski’s interest. Before he ran for Congress, Jason was a talk radio host for approximately 20 years. Shockingly, in his thousands of hours on the air, he occasionally said something controversial. In 2016, when the 2nd District seat was open, the Democrats tried to mine long-forgotten audio of Lewis on the radio for sentence fragments they could use against him. At one point, they suggested that he was pro-slavery. Happily, it didn’t work. Lewis won and is now running for re-election.

CNN is recycling old Democratic Party opposition research on KFile, and Kaczynski, by his own account, has been listening to hours of Jason Lewis on the radio, looking for nuggets that CNN can promote. (A normal person would learn a lot from listening to Jason’s radio show, but Kaczynski is beyond hope.) Kaczynski explains that he obtained 15 months worth of audio from Jason Lewis’s show from one Michael Brodkorb. Brodkorb was, at one time, a Republican operative in Minnesota. His career crashed after it emerged that he was having an affair with the Minnesota Senate Majority Leader. He later literally crashed, and subsequently embarked on the familiar career of a former Republican, feeding anti-GOP talking points to Dems. What a pair!

You might think that this sort of poison pen journalism by CNN is futile, but that wouldn’t be right. Other Democratic Party media have eagerly republished smears against Lewis that originated at KFile. The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Time magazine have all republished Kaczynski’s “discoveries.” The irony is that the Democrats tried the same approach in 2016, only to have two local television stations run fact checks. They found that the Democrats’ anti-Lewis ads “mislead the viewer.” Here we go again.

The CNN-generated hysteria reached a point where The Hill headlined: “Media frenzy stirs up violence against Minnesota congressman.” The column, by John Lott, recounted some of the Democrats’ smears:

CNN’s K-File wasn’t done with Lewis. On Friday, it ran another story on Lewis’ “long history of racist rhetoric about African-Americans.” They were upset about another 2012 monologue.

“What the welfare state has done to the black community, a hundred years of racism could not do. A hundred years of racism could not break it up, it could not destroy black families. Jim Crow could not do it. But what dependency has done, is it has caused unwanted pregnancy, illegitimacy.”

Lewis could have simply quoted black economists Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams. In a 2011 interview with Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal, Williams argued: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do. And that is to destroy the black family.”

So are Sowell and Williams racist?

I would add that Lewis could also be quoting, or anticipating, Candace Owens. Lott notes that Lewis’s family, like so many others, has been threatened by Democrats:

[T]here is a real cost to this media bias. Right after the news stories broke last week about his “slut” comments, Lewis told me his two daughters were threatened with violence. Last year, mobs surrounded Lewis’ home and frightened neighbors into calling the police. Threats were made about his townhall meetings.

The dark side of this “fake” news is that violence is being stirred up against people based on media lies.

That is today’s Democratic Party, as exemplified by CNN.

Will CNN succeed in flipping Minnesota’s 2nd District to the Democrats? I doubt it. The Democrats are running the same candidate as in 2016, Angie Craig. But Lewis won in 2016, and is now the incumbent rather than contending for an open seat. It is noteworthy that the Democrats can’t point to anything objectionable he has done in his time in Congress. On the contrary, his most important vote was in favor of the popular Republican tax reform bill.

But let’s not take any chances. Most observers think the Democrats will, indeed, capture the House in November. Among other things, this will enable them to shut down the investigations that have slowly shed light on the extraordinary abuses of power that occurred during the Obama administration. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing. So if you want to fight back against the CNN/Democratic Party complex, go here to contribute to Jason Lewis’s campaign.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/07/cnn-the-oppo-research-arm-of-the-democratic-party.php