The ‘baseless smear’ that can’t be debunked

Brent Scher:

“…Media outlets scrambled to prove false the accusation that Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) married her brother after President Donald Trump mentioned it, but none have been able to definitively reach an answer, largely due to Omar’s unwillingness to provide information.

Trump was asked about the accusation that Omar’s husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was also her brother during a scrum with reporters last Wednesday and said he had heard talk that she married her brother but knew “nothing about it.”

National media had largely kept away from judging the merits of the accusation that she was related to her second husband, which have circulated since her entry into politics in 2016, but after Trump’s comment many came to quick conclusions. CNN’s Jim Acosta jumped in immediately to criticize Trump for diving in on “disgusting lies.”  The Daily Beast‘s Will Sommer published a lengthy piece on Friday that did little to nothing to debunk what he calls a “baseless smear.”

The closest thing to evidence against the claim presented in Sommer’s piece is a reference to a time Omar showed a Star Tribune reporter pictures on her cell phone of immigration documents with a list of members of her family. Sommer’s piece fails to mention that Omar declined to provide copies of any of the documents to the reporter or allow him to make record of the information he was briefly allowed to view.

Omar didn’t respond to requests for comment from the Daily Beast. Her congressional office currently is alerting reporters through auto-reply that it’s not responding to press inquiries, including one from the Free Beacon, into whether any other outlets have been shown documents Omar purports to be evidence against the claim she married her brother.

That one time Omar allowed a reporter to view documents on a cell phone was also the extent of substantial evidence against the claim presented in the New York Times fact-check of Omar’s marriage. (The Times also uses faulty math to indicate, based on their dates of birth, that it’s impossible for Omar and Elmi to have the same mother. It’s not.)

PolitiFact, perhaps wisely, didn’t dive into the marriage question after Trump’s Wednesday remark, but rather went to the Star Tribune to ask about its attempts to gather facts needed to reach a conclusion. The Minnesota paper’s political editor told PolitiFact his interest in the marriage controversy began because his reporters “were not getting a lot of answers” from Omar on her incorrectly filed tax returns, in which she claimed to be married to her current husband, Ahmed Abdisalan Hirsi, when she in fact was not…”

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The Democrats are determined to repeat the mistakes of 2016.

Worth clicking over for a read

DAVID CATRON:

“…The lesson the Democrats seem to have learned from 2016 isn’t that they failed to earn the people’s votes, but rather that the electorate didn’t deserve the benign leadership offered by their standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Or, as she herself put it, “I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was looking backwards.” One would think that, after two years of such self-flattering rationalization, the Democrats would wake up to reality and stop denigrating the people whose votes they must have to win elections…”

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Comey’s Under DoJ Scrutiny for Leading Probe While Misleading Trump

I believe senior management in the Obama DOJ/FBI/CIA were corrupt and working together to prevent Trump from being elected and later from exercising his authority as president. These people must be held accountable.

Paul Sperry:

“…It is one of the most enduring and consequential mysteries of the Trump-Russia investigation: Why did former FBI Director James Comey refuse to say publicly what he was telling President Trump in private — that Trump was not the target of an ongoing probe?

That refusal ignited a chain of events that has consumed Washington for more than two years – including Comey’s firing by Trump, the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and ongoing claims that Trump obstructed justice.

Now an answer is emerging. Sources tell RealClearInvestigations that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon file a report with evidence indicating that Comey was misleading the president. Even as he repeatedly assured Trump that he was not a target, the former director was secretly trying to build a conspiracy case against the president, while at times acting as an investigative agent.

Two U.S. officials briefed on the inspector general’s investigation of possible FBI misconduct said Comey was essentially “running a covert operation against” the president, starting with a private “defensive briefing” he gave Trump just weeks before his inauguration. They said Horowitz has examined high-level FBI text messages and other communications indicating Comey was actually conducting a “counterintelligence assessment” of Trump during that January 2017 meeting in New York.

In addition to adding notes of his meetings and phone calls with Trump to the official FBI case file, Comey had an agent inside the White House who reported back to FBI headquarters about Trump and his aides, according to other officials familiar with the matter…”

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Chinese Communist Party Funds Washington Think Tanks

This is an important story. The Chinese are also aggressively trying to penetrate U.S. and western academia.

Bill Gertz:

“…The influence operations are conducted by the United Front Work Department, a Central Committee organ that employs tens of thousands of operatives who seek to use both overt and covert operations to promote Communist Party policies.

The Party’s United Front strategy includes paying several Washington think tanks with the goal influencing their actions and adopting positions that support Beijing’s policies.

“The [Chinese Communist Party] has sought to influence academic discourse on China and in certain instances has infringed upon—and potentially criminally violated—rights to freedoms of speech and association that are guaranteed to Americans and those protected by U.S. laws,” the report says.

“Despite the CCP’s candid discussion of its United Front strategy, the breadth and depth of this issue remain relatively unknown to U.S. policymakers.”…”

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Docking

NASA Photo AS11-36-5313, Apollo 11. View from the Command Module during docking with the Lunar Module. This occurred about 40 minutes after Trans Lunar Injection (TLI).  The Command Service Module (CSM) separated from the third stage, turned 180 degrees and docked with the Lunar Module (LM) that rode below the CSM during launch. The CSM and LM separated from the spent third stage 50 minutes later.

The New Face of the Democratic Party

This article is pretty close to my own thinking on the latest Trump vs. Squad stuff. I think the president has maneuvered the Democrats and the MSM into defending the Squad. See any articles about Biden? Was Biden interviewed by Gayle King about the dust-up? You might say “well it’s too early in the cycle for any of this to make a difference.” I disagree. The President has branded the Squad and by self-selection the Democrats and MSM as far-left and anti-American. I think the branding takes and lasts.

Ned Ryun:

“…As the Left collectively melts down over Donald Trump’s tweets about the socialist “squad,” calling calling him every name in the book from racist to xenophobic, the fact is, the president just flipped everything on its head. From Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having a very public spat to the entire Left and Democratic party reflexively defending the four socialists, Trump has made sure that the far-left Communist-loving progressive women are, in fact, the face of the Democratic Party…

…Every time Trump goads Democrats or the liberal media—but I repeat myself—they take the bait. Every. Single. Time. You would think at some point, after two-and-a-half years of this, Democrats would realize they’ve let Trump become their Pied Piper; he calls the tune and they dance to it.

But they don’t. What he has done this time is to put the four freshmen communists (let’s drop the “socialist” moniker and call them what they are) front and center. To “own Trump,” and because of intersectionality and the far left beliefs that have captured many of the Democratic activists and small-dollar donors, Democrats mindlessly have come to the defense of these women.

But to own Trump, Democrats also have to own everything these women stand for, including their refusal to disavow Antifa and al-Qaeda. What are the repercussions of this? Well, it allows Trump to do exactly what he’s wanted to: make 2020 a referendum on the competing worldviews of coercive socialism versus a free market, capitalistic approach, but also to show how un-American the Left truly is…

…He’s succeeding thanks to the mindlessness of Trump Derangement Syndrome but also because of the shallow, short term thinking and behavior of the Democrats. The Democrats have chosen or, perhaps one could argue, were actually compelled by the grassroots, to embrace the communist vipers. Problem is these movements, as history shows us with the Jacobins of the French Revolution, become all consuming fires, many times annihilating those who started the conflagration. Just ask Robspierre…”

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Doug Santo