Facebook censors another conservative voice

Pamela Geller reports:

In a breathtaking act of chutzpah, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to – wait for it – defend freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

Go here: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Makes The Case For Free Speech in WSJ OpEd While Censoring and Banning Conservatives

Then via Freedom Headlines:

By Freedom Headlines, October 17 2019:

Facebook is stepping up their game to try and prevent Donald Trump from winning reelection. They are quite literally meddling in the election process by using their influence and reach to censor the internet and prevent people with opposing views from sharing anything from a conservative viewpoint.

The social network giant just removed one of the largest (if not the largest) pro-Trump Facebook fan pages.

They cited that it was because, “It looks like recent activity on your Page doesn’t follow the Facebook Page Policies regarding impersonation and pretending to be an individual or business.”

. . .

“Donald Trump Is Our President” with 3,276,000 fans, which we paid FB around $100,000 to build, using ‘page like ads’ was removed yesterday. Please help me spread the word so we can help Facebook know and fix, what I am sure is an honest mistake.

I have made my identity perfectly clear, I am, in no way associated with President Donald J. Trump, nor have I ever claimed to be. This was/is a fan page, we make that abundantly clear in many places on the page.

On top of that Facebook approved the name change back in 2016 …. So why now, all of a sudden has my life’s work been ‘unpublished.’ I’m sure this is a mistake, but please help me alert FB so we can get this cleared up, thank you! – Mark Sidney

Full report with screenshots of postings is here. If you are on FB (I am not), perhaps you can register objections to this latest censorship.

# # #

Dallas Trump rally at 8pm

Right Side Broadcast Network (RSBN) is already linked up for President Trump's rally in Dallas this evening at 7pm Central Time (8 pm in Cleveland). Click here for streaming.

# # #

Unwatchable debate: October 15, 2019

Torture time. The Democrat debate starts at 8pm.

Stone-cold sober Stephen Green, a/k/a Mr. Vodkapundit, will be live drunk-blogging the Democrat debate tonight at 8pm. He watches so you don’t have to. Here’s the link.  

Please note: The drunkblog automatically refreshes, so stay at the top of the blog. You can check in from time to time, or scan through it in one hit after the debate is over. Even if you keep putting it off until tomorrow.

# # #

First Amendment documentary coming up

Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla were on Tucker Carlson’s program yesterday. They were there to unveil the trailer for their forthcoming documentary, No Safe Spaces. Fox News has an interview with Mr. Prager:

Radio personality Dennis Prager and comedian Adam Carolla's upcoming documentary "No Safe Spaces" is a film detailing the ongoing debate over the First Amendment on college campuses across the country and how identity politics enables it.

Prager and Carolla argue that younger generations have been trained to hate alternative, often right-leaning, opinions and unleash their anger on those with opposing views.

Prager says he's been working on the film since 2017 and was hoping for a PG rating but the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) wouldn't budge from its PG-13 designation.

“Despite our best efforts to meet the MPAA more than halfway, they have continued to deny us the PG rating our film deserves," Prager said in an exclusive statement to Fox News.

"Jordan Peterson’s and my quotes will stay and we will not censor the real-life punching of a conservative student. The much more graphic films that regularly receive PG ratings only serve to illustrate what I have experienced with Google in their efforts to make PragerU videos hard to find: powerful forces in Silicon Valley and Hollywood have one standard for ideological allies and another for people like me," he added of the film which mentions "sexually transmissible disease" and "Debbie Does Dallas" and a student is seen getting punched. 

"I will urge my friends and fans who only go to PG movies to ignore the MPAA’s fake PG-13 rating and go anyway. And please bring friends," Prager continued.

The film features commentary from a variety of Hollywood actors, scholars, academics, political figures, and media members, including Van Jones, Alan Dershowitz, Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, Cornel West, and Tim Allen.

Carolla also talks to fellow comedians about the challenge of doing stand-up on a campus today. Many comedians, such as Jerry Seinfeld, have said they will not appear on college campuses.

"No Safe Spaces" is scheduled for release Oct. 25.

The home page for this documentary is here. The film premieres in Phoenix/Scottsdale. No dates yet for northern Ohio. Will keep readers posted.

# # #

Fake News: blatant dishonesty at ABC

Meme credit: Dispropaganda.com

The corruption of the media is evident everywhere; turn on the TV news and it’s all propaganda. Kristine Marsh at Newsbusters has the latest ugly report:

ABC’s Tom Llamas reported on the “Slaughter in Syria” on Sunday’s World News Tonight, October 13:

“Weeks since President Trump ordered U.S. forces out of that region, effectively abandoning America’s allies in the fight against ISIS,” he gushed to open the segment. In the background, rapid gunfire and explosions across a night sky were shown, as Llamas described the scene:

This video right here appearing to be showing Turkey’s military bombing Kurdish civilians in a Syrian border town. The Kurds, who fought alongside the US against ISIS, now horrific reports of atrocities committed by Turkish-backed fighters on those very allies.

Again, on Good Morning America, October 14, correspondent Ian Pannell played this same video in a segment entitled "Crisis in Syria" and gushed, “This video obtained by ABC News appears to show the fury of the Turkish attack on the border town.”

Except, the video ABC played, appears to be from a nighttime machine gun event at the Knob Creek Gun Range in West Point, Kentucky. 

As verified by Becket Adams at The Washington Examiner:

The footage, which looks to be from 2017, shows American gun enthusiasts putting on a terrific pyrotechnic show for their audience in Kentucky. In fact, the Machine Gun Shoot and Military Gun Show, which involves the very popular night shoot, is an annual event at the Kentucky gun range. People love the show. They love it so much, in fact, that they record it and post footage of it to social media.

The video was caught by some Twitter users, who put the two videos side by side over the weekend. Finally, ABC was forced to apologize and take down the videos from their website:

CORRECTION: We’ve taken down video that aired on “World News Tonight" Sunday and “Good Morning America” this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy. ABC News regrets the error.

However, the damage has already been done. We will see if a correction comes on tonight’s World News Tonight broadcast.

The article and the videos are here. 

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Tomorrow is Columbus Day

Tomorrow is Columbus Day. Or is it? The other day, The Daily Signal reported:

On Tuesday, the Washington D.C. City Council approved a measure to abolish the celebration of “Columbus Day,” set to take place on Oct. 14. The holiday will be replaced by “Indigenous People’s Day.” The legislation was fast-tracked by the calling of an emergency session.

The District of Columbia was named after Christopher Columbus and bears numerous monuments and tributes to his legacy, including a large statue in front of Union Station, a famous train hub in the heart of the city. 

The report quotes an article by Jarrett Stepman, author of the new book “The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past.” Some highlights:

It is unfortunate to see what was once a uniting figure—who represented American courage, optimism, and even immigrants—is suddenly in the cross-hairs for destruction. We owe it to Columbus and ourselves to be more respectful of the man who made the existence of our country possible.

A few historians and activists began to attack Columbus’ legacy in the late 20th century. They concocted a new narrative of Columbus as a rapacious pillager and a genocidal maniac.

Far-left historian Howard Zinn, in particular, had a huge impact on changing the minds of a generation of Americans about the Columbus legacy. Zinn not only maligned Columbus, but attacked the larger migration from the Old World to the new that he ushered in.

It wasn’t just Columbus who was a monster, according to Zinn, it was the driving ethos of the civilization that ultimately developed in the wake of his discovery: the United States.

“Behind the English invasion of North America,” Zinn wrote, “behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private profit.”

So many errors in that sentence. Among them: The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which influenced the Declaration of Independence, specified the right to life, liberty, and “the means of acquiring and possessing [private] property” – not private profit. And as the profit motive relates to Columbus:

The truth is that Columbus set out for the New World thinking he would spread Christianity to regions where it didn’t exist. While Columbus, and certainly his Spanish benefactors, had an interest in the goods and gold he could return from what they thought would be Asia, the explorer’s primary motivation was religious.

Read the rest here. And Happy Columbus Day!

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Meme of the Day: Fake News

On Power Line's Week in Pictures:

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The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is hiring

Via Mary Kilpatrick at cleveland.com:

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections is hiring.

The board is looking for poll workers to help out on Election Day, Nov. 5. They’re especially in need of Independent and Republicans to work on bi-partisan teams at voting locations across the county.

Workers can earn up to $200. To apply call the Poll Worker Hotline at 216-443-3277 or visit the board’s website.

In the election, Cuyahoga County is asking voters to approve a charter amendment that would keep the sheriff as an appointed position but grant the office greater autonomy and bolster council’s oversight. Cuyahoga Community College is asking voters to approve a .4-mil property tax increase on top of an existing a 1.9-mil property tax that’s also up for renewal.

The ballot includes 69 school and municipal issues, in communities like Euclid, Cleveland Heights and Parma.

More information here.

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President Trump in Minneapolis today

Despite Mayor Jacob Frey's efforts to interfere with the President's rally this evening in Minneapolis (see here and here), the event is ON. From Freedom’s Lighthouse:

President Donald Trump will hold a massive Rally tonight in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the downtown Target Center. Trump supporters are already lined up early this morning, and the Rally promises to be must-see TV. The rally is scheduled to begin at 7 PM CT.

This will be Trump’s first rally since Democrats began their Kangaroo Court “Impeachment Inquiry,” and something tells me President Trump will have something to say about it tonight!

People forget that Trump lost Minnesota by only 1.5% or 44,000 votes. He is going to make a big push to win this long-held Democratic State in 2020.

NOTE: Trump is going right into radical Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar’s District with this rally. Trump may be able to use Omar and her radical views as a rallying cry to win Minnesota in 2020!

7 PM Central Time, so that’s 8 pm in Cleveland. Look for links sometime after 6 PM at Conservative Treehouse here. For Right Side Broadcasting Network streaming, click here.

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Indexing, advertising and payments: 3 threats to Free Speech

Daniel Greenfield has more on the threat to free speech, and how Big Tech censors information. At Front Page:

After the 2016 election, the claim that free speech had gone too far and needed to be controlled became widely accepted, first in the media, and then among the big dot coms who coordinated a censorship campaign with media fact checkers. The stated goal was to stamp out ‘disinformation’. And ‘disinformation’ was defined as any viewpoint that media lefties disagreed with or found disagreeable.

Fact checkers were embedded into Facebook and Google’s operations. Conservative content was censored, deranked, and pushed under corporate media content. The ‘disinformation’ pretext, which was supposed to describe foreign propaganda, was extended to apply to nearly any conservative view.

. . .

This push to suppress conservative content on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media companies is an attack on indexing. People find posts, articles, and videos through search engines, these days largely a Google monopoly, and peer feeds on social media. The indexing attack has been successful with conservative sites losing traffic, and conservatives being banned on social media.

But indexing is just one prong of the attack. The others are advertising and payments.

If you’re a leftist, you don’t want people finding conservative content. Going after indexing means that the people who aren’t specifically looking for conservative content won’t find it. The idea is to turn conservative media into a ghetto. The impact on elections and national debates is obvious.

. . .

There is much more in the full article here.

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Portage County Tea Party event on Saturday

From our friends and neighbors at Portage County Tea Party:

PCTEA WILL BE DOING A SIGN-WAVE

THIS SATURDAY - OCTOBER 12, 2019

What: Sign Wave Demanding Equal Justice Under the Law

When: 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Saturday, October 12, 2019

Where: Pedestrian Bridge over St. RT 8 behind Roberts Middle School, 3333 Charles Street, Cuyahoga Falls, OH 44221

Why: To Demand "Equal Justice Under the Law" and to defend the President from this Leftist Deep State coup attempt, and to Encourage AG Barr to investigate and prosecute, and encourage other citizens to protest nationally.

Bring: Signs that express your opinion and flags. (Click here for sign ideas)

Make the words FEW and LARGE - Cars are moving 70 mph!

Parking: There is parking at and around the school

PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND PLAN TO ATTEND!

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Cleveland did not make the cut

Good news Chicks on the Right linked to Business Insider’s list of the 50 “Most Miserable Cities in America”  Three cities in northern Ohio were on the list. Cleveland was not one of them. (The three were Youngstown, Warren, and Mansfield.)

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Young Black Leadership Summit links

The Young Black Leadership Summit took place at the White House yesterday. I tuned into One America News (OAN) for part of Candace Owens’s speech and most of President Trump’s speech. Conservative Treehouse has the video and transcript of the latter. Kyle Morris at Breitbart has a report on Candace Owens’s speech.

President Trump reiterated themes of particular interest to his audience, and the mutual admiration of the President and the Young Black Leaders was palpable. Also of interest was the number of trolls in the comments at Breitbart attempting to discredit Ms. Owens. 

Proof of the pudding for me: just look at the results that President Trump has delivered on his campaign promises, including those that benefit minorities. And as is pointed out by one of the speakers:

A while back, President Trump said, when he was talking to the black community, “If you vote for me, what do you have to lose?” Because the do-nothing Democrats have done nothing for the black community.  2020 is around the corner and we have a lot to lose now because President Donald J. Trump has done so much for the black community. 

Click here for Breitbart report of Candace Owens’s appearance.

Click here for Conservative Treehouse’s video and transcript of President Trump’s speech.

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Are You Registered To Vote?

From cleveland.com:

Monday [October 7] is the deadline to register to vote for November’s election, or for existing registered voters to submit updates.

Either process can be completed online at this link if the person has an Ohio driver’s license or an official state ID. Otherwise, paperwork can be completed in person or by mail.

The Cuyahoga County Board of Elections will stay open until 9 p.m. Monday to accept registrations, spokesman Mike West said. The office is on the east side of downtown, at East 30th Street and Euclid Avenue.

West said registrations can also be completed at any library. He said as long as the card is filled out and dated by the deadline, it will be accepted if it arrives over the next several days.

About 7.7 million Ohioans are registered to vote, though nearly 200,000 were recently purged from the voting rolls for inactivity. You can check the database at this link to see if your name, or the name of someone you know, was removed.

Contact information for each county elections board in Ohio can be found at this link.

Ohio election calendar is here.

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Impeachment theater

image credit: the superfins.com

Some pundits see this feeding frenzy over the House’s plan to Impeach President Trump as a deliberate attempt to distract from anticipated indictments and now the Biden Ukraine/China scandal.  Neither Adam Schiff nor Nancy Pelosi is specifying what might be presented formally as Articles of Impeachment, which is why Andy McCarthy calls the whole thing an “impeachment show for television.”  David Catron at the Spectator has another take:

It should by now be obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Democrats are determined to impeach President Trump with or without credible evidence that he has committed any act resembling “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The “whistleblower complaint” that Nancy Pelosi used as the pretext for launching her ersatz impeachment inquiry contains little but hearsay and fabrication, while her claim that it proves Trump has “violated the Constitution” fails the laugh test. In the end, however, impeachment is less about offenses committed by the president than the desire of the Washington establishment to put down what they see as a peasants’ revolt.

Impeachment is, in other words, an attempt to restore the old order that the voters overturned in 2016. It seeks to annul that election and return us to the nascent totalitarianism of the Obama era, an incipient autocracy the Democrats expected to be nurtured during the presidency of Hillary Clinton. Thus, when the hoi polloi got above themselves and put Donald Trump in the White House, his removal from office became the primary objective of Washington’s self-appointed Optimates. They began planning Trump’s impeachment before he was inaugurated because he is the leader of the insurrection, and they know full well that it can’t be put down until he is gone.

House Democrats must impeach the president despite the near impossibility of securing a conviction in the Senate. Indeed, their need to do so is more urgent now than ever because of the booming Trump economy and the weakness of their Democratic presidential candidates. As Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who has introduced several abortive impeachment resolutions, put it in May, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

Mr. Catron's full article is here.

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Capt. Luis Avila sings “God Bless America”

The Blog 100 Percent Fed Up has the report and the video (above):

President Trump spoke at a ceremony to congratulate Gen. Mark Milley on becoming the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then gave a huge bear hug to a wounded veteran.

Retired Army Capt. Luis Avila, who was severely wounded by a bomb in 2011 in Afghanistan, was warmly embraced by the president after the hero sang “God Bless America.”

The name Capt. Luis Avila was familiar to me. Cleveland Tea Party blogged on this veteran in July 2017:

Captain Avila served several tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq and lost his leg in an IED attack. This man was not expected to survive. He remains largely paralyzed, he is in a wheelchair, but just watch this short video. He can barely move his body, and yet he struggles mightily to salute, to literally salute, his Commander-in-Chief, President Trump (at about 1:40) and to bow in acknowledgement. It brought tears to my eyes. He is one of many Americans who knows that we have a CiC who loves our country and honors our veterans who defend our way of life.

There is another reason why I am posting this: the YouTube video of this man saluting his CIC now displays this message:

Video unavailable

This video is no longer available

because the YouTube account associated with this video

has been terminated.

I don't know the reason, but I don't like it. 

# # #

Peter Schweizer on Joe Biden

Secret Empires: 

How the American Political Class 

Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends

(image credit: Washington Times)

Trent Baker had three paragraphs at Breitbart summarizing Peter Schweizer’s appearance on Mark Levin’s show last night:

Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer joined Life, Liberty & Levin Sunday on Fox News Channel to explain Joe and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine connections.

Schweizer told host Mark Levin that the former vice president’s son was being paid by Ukraine despite not having expertise in the energy sector while Joe Biden was the “point-person” on former President Barack Obama’s administration in dealing with Ukraine.

“The key question here that nobody seems to want to ask in the media is: What was he being paid for? He wasn’t being paid for his expertise. What was he being paid for? And what were the Ukrainians expecting to get in return?” Schweizer stated. “I think when you overlay the financial payments with the fact that Joe Biden as point person on Obama administration policy to Ukraine was steering billions of dollars of Western money to Ukraine it becomes crystal clear exactly why they were paying him money. They wanted access and they wanted to influence Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has been around a long time here, and he had to know exactly why his son was being paid.”

Schweizer’s book Secret Empires is an excellent resource. If you are interested in his column-length reports, click here.

 # # #

Sarah Palin’s Lipstick

photo credit: American Thinker

Gordon Wysong at American Thinker vividly remembers Sarah Palin’s speech at the GOP convention in 2008. Mr. Wysong’s recollection will resonate with many Cleveland Tea Party readers:

The Democrats don’t have lousy Presidential nominee candidates merely because the good ones were keeping their powder dry.  A Black Swan candidate of 2008 is appreciably responsible for it, and no one seemed to notice.  When Sarah Palin became the focus of the hopes of committed conservatives, the swamp did everything in its power to destroy her.  Venal Republican operatives were so beset with personal jealousy, they were willing to crash the ship on the rocks to ensure against her ascendancy.

They won their battle, sadly.  But, a single line -- just one -- provided the foundation for conservatives.  Mrs. Palin told America “Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?  Lipstick!”

In one succinct line she captured the commitment and determination of conservatives seeking to protect something they love.

Fast forward a year, and those same conservatives saw Obama trying to destroy that which they love and without hesitation, these conservatives jumped into a new political movement.  Bolstered by their belief that Sarah Palin was an everyday somebody like them, and infuriated by her maltreatment, they populated the ranks of the Tea Party.  They were determined to protect America. Within months, they were activists.

As I recall, Sarah ad-libbed the joke because for some reason (???), the teleprompter went down for a few moments. Mr. Wysong's full article is here.

# # #

Life After Fox News

Paul Ryan cartoon from Cagle Comics at Utah Independent 

Yes, Fox is moving relentlessly leftward, and in our household, we click the “Mute” button during prime time viewing -- or turn the channel. Judi McLeod at Canada Free Press quotes Breitbart to begin her report:

. . . Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who currently sits on the board of Fox News Corp., and who, according to Vanity Fair, is reportedly urging Fox News to “decisively break” with President Donald Trump—news in the magazine’s report documenting the network’s “management bedlam”. (Tony Lee at Breitbart, Sept. 26, 2019)

Ryan, the longtime Trump antagonist, has reportedly been suggesting to Murdoch that “Fox should decisively break with the president” as Murdoch holds “strategy conversations with Fox executives and anchors about how Fox News should prepare for life after Trump.”

Downright laughable that while “strategy conversations” are taking place to decide how Fox News “should prepare for life after Trump” that legions in the unwashed masses are already preparing themselves for life after Fox News.

. . .

Full report is here. 

Related: While I find Mark Levin abrasive most of the time, he dials it down on his Sunday evening program on Fox. This Sunday, Peter Schweizer is the scheduled guest. Having read his books Clinton Cash, Extortion, and Secret Empires, I plan to tune in. Mr. Schweizer is the go-to source on the Joe Biden scandals.

# # #

Heather MacDonald: False Testimony

Heather MacDonald recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee on alleged racial bias in law enforcement. It is not a pretty report (“False Testimony: Sworn statements at a recent congressional hearing on policing veered sharply from the truth; here are the facts”). Here’s her opening and closing paragraphs:

The anti-police narrative depends on suppression of facts, and the duplicity of anti-cop forces reached a shameless new high at a congressional hearing last week. Committee members should sanction the false testimony, given under oath, and publicly correct the record.

The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.

. . .

The Republicans on the committee failed to push back against this narrative of systemic police bias, choosing instead to tell feel-good stories about “our brave men and women in uniform.” Such tales do little to rebut Black Lives Matter ideology, since both statements could be true:  individual officers display heroism, and policing is infected by “structural racism,” in Davis’s words. The only way to dislodge the “endemic racism” argument is to challenge its factual basis directly. I was the only witness at the hearing with the ability to do so, but the Republicans asked me not one question. This is not a matter of personal ego but rather of the public battle of ideas.

The Democratic committee members and their witnesses clearly laid out their agenda should they retake the White House and Senate: mandatory implicit-bias training for cops, a huge waste of money that could be spent instead on tactical and de-escalation training; mandatory racial-profiling data collection, which will be measured, misleadingly, against a population benchmark; racial quotas for police hiring, which require lowered standards; and more federal consent decrees for police departments, which cripple the ability of cops to engage in proactive policing and divert millions of dollars into the pockets of federal monitors. As inimical as these policy items are to effective policing, the narrative that drives them—that the police are a threat to black communities—is more dangerous still. That narrative rests on duplicity, as amply demonstrated at last week’s hearings. Republicans, who invoke patriotism on a regular basis, are doing the country no favors by ceding the criminal-justice narrative to the activists and race-baiters.

Her full report is here. Sad to say, GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee include Jim Jordan and Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Andy Biggs of Arizona. (E-mail links for Jordan and Chabot are embedded in case you would like to email them with the link to MacDonald's report.)

# # #

Cleveland Tea Party Goes to Washington

Meeting Sen. Jim DeMint

Good news, bad news. . .

So there we were last Tuesday, sitting in the lobby of the Trump Old Post Office Hotel in DC, minding our own business, when who should walk by but Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Mark Meadows. I gave Rep. Jordan a thumbs-up, and they both stopped to shake hands with us and exchange pleasantries. Unfortunately, I missed the golden opportunity to ask Rep. Jordan a question that is probably on all our minds, and they carried on.

But then, who should I spy at the next table but former Senator Jim DeMint. So I went over and barged into his conversation. And I asked him point blank: will there be any indictments?  He responded that he had just had lunch with Reps. Jordan and Meadows and that they had discussed that very issue.  Sen. De Mint told me that they were guessing that some indictments would be coming down in 2 to 3 weeks, but that there would not be enough indictments. And he gave my husband a copy of his and Rachel Bovard’s new book, Conservative: Knowing What to Keep.  

# # #

Ohio HB 6: keep it or repeal it

Is this mailer true or false?

The other day, I was asked to sign a petition to get a Repeal of Ohio HB 6 on the ballot. You may be asked also. Here’s one report from about a week ago posted at JD Supra:

. . . a group called “Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts” (OACB) has begun the process of placing a referendum on the November 2020 ballot to repeal the law. OACB took the initial required steps of submitting at least 1,000 signatures along with a summary of the proposed referendum to the Attorney General, and after revising and resubmitting the summary it was approved as of August 30, 2019, as “fair and truthful” with the necessary valid signatures as required by law. The petitioners must now submit 265,774 signatures of registered Ohio voters (from at least 44 of the 88 Ohio counties, with at least 3 percent of total voters from each of those counties) by October 21, 2019, to place the referendum on the November 2020 ballot. If OACB meets these requirements, HB 6 is stayed until Election Day 2020.

Read the rest of the JD Supra report with some analysis here. The ads and mailers about this controversial legislation are confusing – especially the claim that

China’s Communist regime could gain control of Ohio’s electricity grid if voters repeal House Bill 6

Both sides are spending a ton of money, the media is making a lot of money, and Cleveland.com concluded its editorial on the subject as follows:

The aggressive tactics and scaremongering by those who want to deny Ohioans a statewide vote on HB 6 must stop.  Now.  Chinese business loans don’t threaten Ohio. But demagogic campaigning unquestionably does.

Yes, but if the Editorial Board of cleveland.com is in favor of something, I am usually against it. Still, I found the comments section somewhat helpful. And I expect the campaigning will only increase over the next few weeks.

I’ve read through five or six other reports/analyses, pro and con, of the repeal vs enacting HB 6, and I confess I am still not clear as to which side has the better argument. This may be an instance when neither HB6 nor its repeal is good for Ohio. At any rate, I'll post again if I find a more accessible analysis.

# # #

Sen. Portman votes to obstruct again

cartoon by Michael Ramirez

  

Sean Moran at Breitbart reports:

Senate Passes Democrat Motion
to End Border Wall National Emergency

Senate Democrats passed Wednesday a motion to end President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border.

The Senate passed S.J. Res. 54, 54-41, which would terminate President Trump’s national emergency declaration on the southern border. The resolution was created by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) and co-sponsored by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Sen. Collins said the bill is not about “whether you’re for or against a border wall.” The Maine senator, who is up for a tough reelection fight in 2020, claimed that she has “consistently supported” funding for physical barriers on the southern border.

However, Congress has failed to provide significant funding to help secure America’s southern border by building a border wall. With Congress’ failure to provide funding, President Trump declared a national emergency to build the border wall, which diverted military funding so that the president can build a wall along the southern border.

The Republicans that voted for the resolution to end the national emergency to build a border wall are Sens. Collins, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mike Lee (R-UT), Rob Portman (R-OH).

. . .

Congressional Democrats failed to pass the resolution to override Trump’s national emergency in March, which failed to override the president’s veto.

This latest attempt will probably also fail despite the RINOs and the media’s best efforts.

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