Here are my observations and opinions on my selected news of the day.
Omar and Pelosi, all smiles now. (greg nash photo)
RESOLUTION NOT RESOLUTE – H. Res 183 is the seven-page watered-down resolution that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her band of leftists authored rather than taking Rep. Ilhan Omar to the woodshed and removing her from the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Rather than call out Omar for her anti-Semitic comment, H. Res 183 contains an exhaustive list of “hates” now considered to be intolerable, but alas, Brussels sprouts did not make the list.
NOT WHAT THE MEDIA WANTED TO HEAR – Judge T.S. Ellis III: “(Manafort) is not before the court for any allegations that he, or anyone at his direction, colluded with the Russian government to influence the 2016.”
Oh, my, that isn’t what the media wanted to hear. Since the charges were made, the media and Democrat Congressional investigators have tried to tie him to his work for the president.
Not only was he not sentenced for his work with Trump, we know that if it were not for his brief stint with the campaign, Special Counsel Robert Mueller would not have uncovered the bank fraud and tax issues of which he was charged.
How often have you heard the likes of Democrats Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Mark Warner casually mention all of the indictments against members of the Trump team?
On February 15, 2019, I criticized the media for its assertion that Manafort should spend the rest of his life in prison. For what? He didn’t kill anyone. Judge Ellis agreed, saying that the guidelines calling for Manafort to spend 19 to 25 years (probably life for him) in prison were “out of whack,” while indicating the roughly 4-year sentence as “suitable punishment” for the crimes Manafort committed.
Always ready to hit the president, the left-leaning Arizona Republic’s page one story, “Ex-campaign boss for Trump is sentenced,” is still another example of fake news as it isn’t until one reads paragraph seven in the page 12 continued jump that the paper reveals “But the charges against Manafort were unrelated to his work on the campaign or the focus of the Mueller investigation: whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russians.”
The Wall Street Journal, known for it’s left-leaning news side, avoided including Trump in its headline, “Manafort Sentenced to 47 Months,” but its account included a rather weak unapologetic statement that “Judge Ellis said he viewed the matter as a regular tax and bank-fraud case, despite the role of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in the case.”
THE DRUM BEAT AGAINST MC SALLY continues in the left-leaning Arizona Republic. In Friday’s edition they even elicited the commentary of Karina Bland, who normally covers soft, tug at your heart, cat rescue stories, to deliver a zinger at Senator Martha McSally.
Bland writes about McSally’s recent hearing during which she revealed that fact that she was raped by a superior officer during her stint in the Air Force, and the story of Kathryn Smith, an Arizona resident, who experienced sexual harassment while attending the Air Force Academy.
McSally and Bland differ on a bill that stipulates whether such cases should be handled by commanders or military lawyers.
Columnists like to leave readers with a message, and Bland concluded with a quote by Smith that fits the paper’s agenda to end McSally’s term in 2020: “People are looking to her for guidance on this issue, so lead … lead or get the hell out of the way.” Shame on the Republic.
THE FAKE NEWS CONTINUES – As I have mentioned before, material information omitted from a story constitutes fake news. In its Friday edition, the Arizona Republic published an Associated Press piece, “Foreign leaders present lavish diplomatic gifts to Trump,” without mentioning the fact that throughout history, presidents have received unique gifts from world leaders as a sign of respect of the relationship between the two countries.
While the headline seems to infer that the president’s acceptance of “lavish” gifts is unethical, the AP writer Matthew Lee failed to mention that such gifts are accepted as a matter of protocol and are handled by the National Archives and Records Administration. Once a president’s term has ended, the collection generally moves to a presidential library.
The Valkyrie returns. (USAF Photo)
RETURN OF THE VALKYRIE – Some of you may recall the North American XB-70 Valkyrie of the 1950s that was eventually scrapped in 1961. You can see one at the Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. On March 5, 2019, a new jet-powered drone fighter, the XQ58-A has been dubbed the Valkyrie and completed its inaugural flight out of the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona.
This Valkyrie is being developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory and Kratos Defense and Security Solutions.
NOTE TO ALL “CHICKEN LITTLE’S” – The Notable & Quotable column that periodically appears in the Wall Street Journal never fails to draw my attention, and Friday’s column – “Warming” – didn’t disappoint.
Scare monger Noel Brown (xyz.net)
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000,” it begins, reporting the June 29, 1989 dire warning of Noel Brown, director of the N.Y. office of the U.N. Environment Program.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond control. Sound familiar?
He warned of coastal regions being inundated and that shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s dust bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheat fields.
Incidentally, in 1998 Brown was a recipient of the World Academy of Arts and Science Award for Distinguished Public Service and his lifetime commitment to environmental sustainability. There was no mention of the impending doom expected the follow year.
REMEMBER WHEN there used to be a Blockbuster Video Store in every other strip mall? Now only one remains … in Bend, Oregon, a store that has been open for more than 20 years. The manager ther says the classic older titles are the store’s “bread and butter.”
AND FINALLY, from a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Dr. Vin Gupta, an assistant professor of global health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation:
“Fellow Democrats may accuse me of seeking compromise when they are craving revolution (with Medicare-for-all), however it is left to us and our patients to contend with the consequences of inaction. Stop the empty rhetoric and pursue attainable paths in the immediate interest of our patients’ lives and their pocketbooks.”
May God bless the United States of America.
