Here are my observations and opinions from my selected news of the day.

THE DOJ IG REPORT is finally scheduled to be released on December 9, 2019, and as expected, Democrats and the media are out there spreading the word that it isn’t legitimate because it will be a product of the Trump Justice Department.

“Naturally,” says the National Sentinel, “the deep state and their Garbage Party enablers are crying foul and blaming (Attorney General Bill) Barr for ‘destroying the integrity’ of the Justice Department and the FBI.”

They see it as a political attack on individuals of the previous administration, the Deep State, if you will.  Well, turnabout is fair play.  It was those in the Deep State who weaponized the DOJ and the FBI into a political attack on the Trump campaign and administration.

And, they conveniently forget that Inspector General Michael Horowitz was nominated by President Obama in 2011 and confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate in March 2012.  “The extraordinary dedication these men and women bring to their new roles will greatly serve the American people,” said Obama while announcing Horowitz and four others to administrative posts.

As far back as May of 2018, James Gagliano, a retired FBI special agent and a law enforcement analyst for CNN, predicted the IG report will be “worse than expected,” after speaking to sources, adding that it will be “a fairly damning indictment of FBI’s seventh floor during the (James) Comey era,” according to Tom Tillison, BizPAC Review.

Also, in 2018, the website RedState headline read, “The DOJ IG Report Must Be Devastating Because the Media Has Already Started the Spin Cycle,” noting that the Washington Post was saying Horowitz “risks becoming a political weapon.”

“We’ve been patiently waiting months now for the hammer to drop on Obama’s merry band of deep state douchebags who targeted the 2016 Trump campaign and since, President Trump himself, and that appears to be finally happening,” the National Sentinel published last month.

A FAVORITE FLASHBACK – With the stock market hitting another new high, I thought it would be fun to look back at New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s prediction, made minutes after Donald Trump’s election in 2016.

“It really does now look like President Donald J. Trump, and markets are plunging.  When might we expect them to recover?  If the question is when markets will recover, a first pass is never.

The Nobel Prize for Economics winner went on to say, “Under any circumstances, putting an irresponsible, ignorant man who takes his advice from all the wrong people in charge of the nation with the world’s most important economy would be very bad news.  (Could it be that he was upset that Trump didn’t seek his advice?)

“What make it especially bad right now, however, is the fundamentally fragile state much of the world is in, eight years after the great financial crisis.  So, we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.  A terrible thing has just happened.”

A BLOOMBERG FLASHBACK – Since Michael Bloomberg will not allow his Bloomberg News staffers to write about his missteps, I thought I would remind my readers of one that didn’t go over well.

In April 2018, appearing with Christine Lagarde then of the International Monetary Fund, he talked about raising taxes on poor people, calling such tax hikes a “good thing,” referring to low income individuals as “those people.”

Bloomberg says that because they don’t have a lot of money, “higher taxes should have a bigger impact on their behavior and how they deal with themselves.”

Citing his tax on sugary drinks so people will live longer – they will drink less, noting that such drinks are major contributors to obesity and obesity is one of the major contributors to heart disease, cancer and a variety of other things.

Bloomberg agreed with Lagarde when she said, “they say that two things in life are certain; one is death, the other is tax.  So you use one to defer the other.”  To which he responded – “That’s correct. That is exactly right.  Well said.”

“Taxes or life. Which do you want to do? Take your poison, says Bloomberg.

The result of such taxes, according to Americans for Tax Reform, low income people have less income in their pockets.

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, where 70 percent of voters voted for Hillary Clinton, voters resoundingly rejected in 2017 the soda tax Bloomberg has been pushing all over the country. Chicago residents were so reviled by the tax that it was overwhelmingly repealed.

So, with Warren and Sanders, you have two Democrat candidates who want to tax the rich – those who invest in America and create jobs – and with Bloomberg you have a candidate who thinks nothing of taxing the poor.

AN OBAMA ERA FLASHBACK – Most of you will have forgotten how President Obama was confidently telling everyone that he was convinced that China was serious about cutting its carbon dioxide emissions, having met with President Xi Jinping in 2014 to set targets, and again in 2015 to “layout additional actions,” and in 2016 to sign the Paris Accord.

“We may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save the planet,” Obama declared. In 2015, however, it came to light that China had far more coal plants than it had earlier admitted.  Incidentally, it continues to build new coal plants.

“Of course, anyone who looked at what China was promising could see that it was a sucker’s bet,” writes John Merline in Issues & Insights, noting that China said only that it would try to “stabilize” CO2 emissions by 2030.

ONE LAST FLASHBACK – As a former public affairs veteran of the Air Force, I was interested in this photo of an A-10 Thunderbolt, formerly known as the Warthog, being flown by Lt. Col. Bartley Ward, during a training mission at Selfridge Air Force Base, Michigan earlier this month.

During the mission, Ward surpassed his 3,000th flight hour in the aircraft.

Many of you may be aware that Arizona’s Sen. Martha McSally was the first female U.S. fighter pilot to fly in combat (Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan) and the first woman to command a fighter squadron, the A-10-equipped 354^th Fighter Squadron at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.

She fought in Congress to save the A-10 as a close-support asset.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.