Liberty Roundup for Week of May 23rd
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
Video: Johnny Depp goes to Fairfax for Justice...Fans Go Wild at End
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9R-MjeAl-Y
Tragedy strikes and opportunists circle America
By Rick Manning
There are few words available to describe the shock and loathing in the wake of the murder of innocent children. The tragedy at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas crystallizes these feelings as people seek to grapple with what went so wrong with an eighteen-year-old that he would choose to murder children, an adult in the school as well as shot his own grandmother before traveling to the school.
Before the shock and dismay can even take hold and well before any honest understanding about what precipitated the carnage, the president jumped on television in a bald-faced attempt to score political points rather than provide a voice of healing and comfort, asking Congress to renew what he called the “assault weapons ban” on certain semi-automatic rifles.
By setting simplistic battle lines, once again, the opportunity to get to the bottom of root causes and hopefully to prevent potential future attacks have been thwarted by a headlong rush to political rhetoric rather than honest, sensible solutions.
With Biden’s gun ban rhetoric, the opportunity to look at and learn from the assailant and the protective systems in place in the schools to hopefully create a better opportunity to protect our nation’s children from future attacks by the insane are thwarted.
But rather than being a leader, Biden chose to demonize his political opposition through the hollow, meaningless call to “take on the gun lobby,” a hollow line from a man who is a political dependent of those responsible for the national violent crime spree resulting from the defund the police, end cash bail, stop prosecuting property crimes, and open borders policies which have led to violent mobs to overrun our cities.
Maybe someday, our society will be able to have a real discussion about evil and things that can be done to stop pouring it into the ears of our children but when a politician uses the still warm bodies of dead children with zero facts other than a raw political, emotional appeal the opportunity for anything but national sorrow to come from their deaths.
It is sad. And it further divides our already divided country.
America needs prayer for God’s blessing to return to our people and land. The first responders, doctors, nurses and hospital personnel who dealt with the violence first-hand, as do those injured and other direct survivors need our prayers for their complete healing and restoration. The families of those who died – from the children to the teacher to, yes, the shooter’s own family – also need focused, intense prayer for their grief, but also for a superhuman ability to forgive the man who was so possessed by evil that he plotted and perpetrated this carnage. It is through this forgiveness that healing comes as difficult as that may seem to achieve.
America deserves more than failed political rhetoric. Those children deserve more than they typical ghoulish response from politicians who thrive on human suffering seeking gain out of the pain of others.
America needs prayer that we don’t throw away the blessings of freedom in response to evil attacks directed at the DNA of our nation.
It is a time of tragedy. All of America grieves but beware the opportunists who seek political advantage out of this grief.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2022/05/tragedy-strikes-and-opportunists-circle-america/
Sussman brought fake Trump-Russia Alfa Bank allegations to the Clinton campaign almost two months before he gave them to the FBI
By Robert Romano
Former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook has testified in the trial of Michael Sussmann that Hillary Clinton “agreed to” a plan to take unsubstantiated allegations that Trump Tower was engaged in secret, back-channel communications with the Moscow-based Alfa Bank to the press, but not to the FBI.
Sussmann, a former Perkins Coie lawyer who represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, is accused of lying to the FBI about who he represented, telling FBI Counsel James Baker that he was acting as a concerned citizen when he brought data purporting to show the connection between former President Donald Trump (then candidate Trump) and Russia.
The text that Sussmann sent to Baker, dated Sept. 18, 2016, stated, “Jim — it’s Michael Sussmann. I have something time-sensitive (and sensitive) I need to discuss. Do you have availability for a short meeting tomorrow? I’m coming on my own — not on behalf of a client or company — want to help the Bureau. Thanks.”
In testimony, Baker has stated that he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann had denied acting on behalf of a client at the meeting itself, explaining, “He said that he was not appearing before me on behalf of any particular client…”
Yet, Sussmann’s own records show he billed the Hillary Clinton campaign for his time around the time of the FBI meeting.
Both Mook and Sussmann’s former partner at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, have both testified that they were unaware that Sussmann had approached the FBI.
Mook said, “Going to the FBI does not seem like an effective way to get information out to the public… You do that through the media, which is why the information was shared with the media.”
Elias, for his part, said he didn’t learn of the meeting until Sussmann was indicted.
There’s just one problem. If the allegation was not campaign work product, then why did the campaign send it to the press? How did it even know about it?
That’s easy. Sussmann is the person who brought the Alfa Bank connection to the Clinton campaign in the first place, who then approved it for distribution to the press, according to Christopher Steele, the former British spy hired by Fusion GPS who was hired by the Clinton campaign and the DNC in June 2016 who falsely alleged candidate Trump was a bought and paid for Russian agent. In 2020, Steele stated in a defamation trial brought by Alfa Bank that the source of the Alfa Bank allegations as it related to his own reporting was none other than Sussmann: “I’m very clear is that the first person that ever mentioned the Trump server issue, Alfa server issue, was Mr. Sussmann.” Steele said the meeting occurred on July 29, 2016.
By then, Steele was already providing the FBI with his reports, between July and Oct. 2016, according to the Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, including a Sept. 14, 2016 report. That was five days before the Sussmann meeting with Baker on Sept. 19, 2016.
If Sussmann was just acting as a good citizen by bring the Alfa Bank allegations to the FBI — and it was not a Clinton campaign work product — then why was it brought to Steele (also an FBI confidential source) months earlier in July 2016, who similarly was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign? Why didn’t Sussmann go to the FBI first?
In other words, even if Sussmann’s link to the Alfa Bank story somehow had nothing to do with the campaign, his first destination with the story was not to the FBI, it was the Clinton campaign’s opposition research department — Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele — who his own law firm had hired.
Eventually the Clinton campaign got the Alfa Bank story published by Slate's Franklin Foer on Oct. 31, 2016, and again in the New York Times on Oct. 31, 2016, entitled, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” by Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers.
But when asked if the meeting where Hillary Clinton had agreed to sending the Alfa Bank story to the press had occurred in Sept. 2016 prior to contacting the New York Times or in Oct. 2016 prior to contacting Slate, Mook answered, “I don’t recall.” Special Counsel Robert Durham’s prosecution have already included evidence that both the Times and Slate were in contact with Fusion GPS about the Alfa Bank story.
Steele’s own work on the Trump-Russia dossier was used to then get a meeting with himself and State Department officials on Oct. 11, 2016, where he discussed his many allegations against Trump, including the Alfa Bank story, adding details to the story. In Horowitz’ words, Steele told State about “[t]he role of Alfa Bank, one of Russia's largest privately owned banks, as a conduit for secret communications between Manafort and the Kremlin."
Fusion was paid $50,000 a month and Steele was paid $168,000 from Perkins Coie. Both Sussmann and Steele were used by the FBI as confidential human sources.
As for why this all happened, all you have to read is the Oct. 31, 2016 New York Times story by Lichtblau and Myers. The story explained, “Hillary Clinton’s supporters, angry over what they regard as a lack of scrutiny of Mr. Trump by law enforcement officials, pushed for these investigations. In recent days they have also demanded that James B. Comey, the director of the F.B.I., discuss them publicly, as he did last week when he announced that a new batch of emails possibly connected to Mrs. Clinton had been discovered.”
The story continued, “Supporters of Mrs. Clinton have argued that Mr. Trump’s evident affinity for Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin — Mr. Trump has called him a great leader and echoed his policies toward NATO, Ukraine and the war in Syria — and the hacks of leading Democrats like John D. Podesta, the chairman of the Clinton campaign, are clear indications that Russia has taken sides in the presidential race and that voters should know what the F.B.I. has found.”
As it turns out, the Lichtblau and Myers account stands out as one of the first and only accurate accounts of how Spygate really began.The headline itself gives it away, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia” the implication of which was the FBI was investigating Trump. They needed the investigation in order to get the story published.
The Clinton campaign was upset that their candidate, Clinton, had an FBI investigation into her private email server that was illegally storing classified information, and that the Trump campaign didn’t have an FBI investigation of its own to hamper its campaign. So, to even things out, the Clinton campaign produced an investigation in fact so that their journalists would have a basis to report on it.
That's what happened with the Sept. 2016 Michael Isikoff Carter Page story, reporting on a purported Justice Department investigation of Page for Russia ties, that was then used in a circular fashion as a part of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Page approved. Similarly, in Jan. 2017, when former FBI Director briefed then President-Elect Trump on some of the Steele dossier allegation, that then once again provided a basis to report on the FBI’s investigation of Trump.
And it’s exactly the case that Durham is making to jurors in the Sussmann case, stating, “You will see that when the reporter didn’t publish this story right away, the defendant and others decided to bring this information to the FBI and to create a sense of urgency, to also tell the FBI that a major news organization was running a story within days. That’s when the defendant requested the meeting with the FBI general counsel and told him that he was not doing this for any client.”
This was not some elaborate Russian disinformation scheme to somehow trick the FBI into investigating Trump, but a product of the Clinton campaign’s own vivid imagination, desperate to create a major hit against the opposing candidate in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.
But the damage done by Spygate to the Presidency is incalculable, as a top-secret investigation of the Republican presidential candidate, Trump, was carried over into his administration after he won the election on made-up charges of Russia stealing the election in concert with the Trump campaign, and then the Justice Department kept it going for two more years after it was discovered to be a hoax. This is one of the greatest political scandals in history.
At the end of the day, did Clinton even need to tell her team to get this fake story into the FBI? By the time there was a discussion in the campaign about getting the story to the press in Sept. or Oct. 2016, her opposition research team via Steele and eventually Sussmann had already been talking to the FBI for months. Whether it was that Clinton asked for the official investigatioin into Trump explicitly, or with a wink and a nod, at this point, what difference does it make?
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Video: Biden Said The Quiet Part Out Loud about Gas Prices
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmRTXbbfkNc
Elon Musk is right. Humanity faces a ‘population collapse’ and labor shortages thanks to low fertility that will hinder the global economy.
By Robert Romano
Fertility in the U.S. remains below 2 live births per woman for the thirteenth year in a row, at 1.66 live births per woman in 2021, up slightly from 1.64 in 2020, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 2.1 live births per woman is considered the rate needed for population replacement to occur.
These are the lowest numbers on record ever, even lower than the 1970s when the prior low was 1.74 in 1974, after birth control became widely available in the 1960s that marked a massive cultural change all over the world, with increased numbers of women going to college and joining the labor force as a direct result.
A lot of attention is being paid to the potential overturning of the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which found state laws prohibiting abortion to be unconstitutional, but by far the more important and impactful decision, particularly on fertility, was the 1965 decision Griswold v. Connecticut, that overturned state laws prohibiting contraception.
But even before then, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the birth control pill in 1960 is when fertility began declining. Fertility peaked in the U.S. at 3.77 live births per woman. By 1965, when Griswold was decided, fertility was already down to 2.91 live births per woman. The mere invention of the pill and its widespread distribution was enough to turn the tide.
Keep that causation in mind. Widespread access to birth control is what made the expansion of higher education, particularly female access to higher education, the past half century possible.
This can be easily observed in the labor participation rate for women measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that is, the percent of those working or looking for work. In 1948, 33 percent of women had jobs or were looking for jobs. By 1960, it was almost 38 percent. By 1970, it was 43 percent. By 1980, it was 52 percent. By 1990, it was 58 percent. By 2000, it reached about 60 percent, its peak, before declining in the 2000s as Baby Boomers began retiring.
This has proven true among minorities, too, with higher degrees of educational attainment leading to greater labor participation and lower overall unemployment rates, and yes, lower fertility, too.
Looking at CDC fertility data by race and ethnicity, comparing 2008 to 2020, fertility for non-Hispanic whites has decreased from 1.83 live births per woman to 1.55 in 2020, for non-Hispanic blacks from 2.1 to 1.7, for non-Hispanic Native Americans from 1.84 to 1.51, for non-Hispanic Asians from 2.05 to 1.39 and for Hispanics 2.91 to 1.87.
The difference observed on fertility on race and ethnicity here simply reflects higher rates of college education among whites and Asians. Educational attainment is the single greatest factor.
The drop in fertility has also spanned every single state in America, red states and blue states. Even Utah, the most reproductive state in the America in 2008 at 2.57 live births per female, measured just 1.9 live births per female in 2020.
Fertility Rates by State: 2008 and 2020
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Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So, what’s happening here on the micro level? Generally, we can see that the higher the level of educational attainment, the lower the unemployment rate and the higher incomes tend to be.
But there’s more to it than that. Women have a limited time to reproduce, about 30 years or so, and the longer they wait, the less likely it is to happen, and the fewer children they end up having as a result.
For the ones who go to college, then, the decision to have children is being deferred until after graduation. Meaning, college-educated women are getting married later and therefore having families later. And the ones who do have kids, on average, are having less than two, across the board. It might be as simple as that.
Long term, billionaire Elon Musk warns this will lead to labor shortages and “population collapse”. In July 2017, he warned on Twitter, “The world's population is accelerating towards collapse, but few seem to notice or care.” And in July 2021, he declared, “Population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.” He’s right.
Generally, as fertility continues to decline, the U.S. population and eventually the world population will begin to decline. This in turn will lead to slower growth or no growth and deflation in the long term like it has in Japan and Europe.
What does it look like? Imagine large cities that were built for much larger populations, having lots of buildings completely empty and in disrepair. Infrastructure collapsing. An inability to meet demand via production even while demand declines long term.
If price declines become a years-long phenomenon, it could lead to a depression and catastrophically high unemployment. That would lead to greater demand for government services like universal basic income and debt forgiveness to offset the deflation. It’s hard to make a profit when prices are declining. As a result, free market systems suffer and eventually die if the situation becomes prolonged.
The last time the world experienced a prolonged depression in the 1930s, the increased political instability that resulted enabled radical changes to occur to world history, with fascists and communists seizing power, leading to the catastrophe of World War II, where 50 million people died from the conflict, and another 20 million or so from disease and starvation.
Today, we can already see the cracks that have formed throughout our civil society. The labor shortages are here, with 11.5 million job openings in March, the most ever on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The economic and political instability are already here. This did not happen overnight. And it will not be fixed overnight, if it is ever fixed.
As a sidenote, this author began warning about this problem in 2015, in two reports: “The real deflation,” and “America’s lost decade is here.” I believe that population growth is integrally connected to economic growth. It’s essential. And I think removing the growth engine for the economy at a time when we need more research and innovation than ever was incredibly short sighted. How many Einsteins were we deprived of because of declining fertility? We’ll never know.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.
Video: The Nazification of American Medicine: Government Edicts Preempting Medical Science
To view online: https://rumble.com/v165yaq-the-nazification-of-american-medicine-government-edicts-preempting-medical-.html