LIZ SHELD:

“…The House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General Bill Barr in contempt because he refused to turn over the unredacted Mueller report, including material he is legally prevented from releasing to Congress. A copy of the complete report, without the grand jury material, is available for some members to view. No Democrats have gone to read it. Nadler, the chairman of the committee, could go to court to get an order to release the material but he hasn’t done that, so one has to wonder if he wants the complete report or he wants to damage the attorney general. That’s a rhetorical question. Of course the goal is to create a spectacle and damage Barr.

At the same time as Nadler began his circus, the administration claimed executive privilege over the redacted parts of the report…”

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More Women Donated To Trump Campaign In First Quarter Than Any 2020 Democrat.

Democrats in Control! (and Fixing the Important Issues)

CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI:

“…Working its way though the legislature right now is S2776. As written, the legislation would ban food service businesses and other retailers who have stores larger than 1,000 square feet from providing their customers with plastic bags. The bill would also naturally ban plastic straws…

and

…Smith stands a good chance of getting his paper bag ban through. He claims to already have the support of Senate leadership. The state’s grocery store association is also on board with the policy.

Still, one wonders what the practical effects of Smith’s amendment, as well as the wider plastic bag ban, will be.

A recent study of plastic bag bans in California found that the policy—while still reducing plastic bag consumption overall—did lead to a 120 percent spike in the purchase of smaller garbage bags.

As it turns out, the single-use plastic bags people used at the grocery store were hardly single-use at all, but rather were reused to line waste baskets or clean up after pets. When the free option disappeared, people simply started purchasing unprohibited garbage bags.

New Jersey’s bag ban would seem to have a similar potential for this kind of substitution. While it bars stores from handing out thinner plastic bags, it still allows them to provide customers with plastic tote bags provided they’re thicker than 10 mils.

As written, stores could well end up ditching their current carry-out bags for another type of thicker plastic bag, which would seemingly increase overall plastic consumption…”

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Paul Bedard:

“…The House Democrat demanding President Trump’s tax returns is coming under fire for not releasing his returns and spending lavishly on lobbyists and potential donors.

Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, hasn’t released his recent returns, though said he planned to in the future.

Neal is seeking six years of Trump’s tax returns. The president and his team have refused to comply.

Neal’s suggestion he’d release his returns later came after he didn’t respond to a question about releasing his taxes in a 2017 Roll Call survey.

Pressed last month on the issue, he told the Washington Times, “Oh, sure yeah, down the road, sure that’s nothing.” He added, “I’ve done that in the past, by the way,” he added.

Back home, he was criticized for demanding Trump’s returns but not releasing his. Mass Livereported: “Neal has been drawing charges of hypocrisy for not releasing his own taxes. Although he said Thursday that he likely would release them, he did not give a date…”

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The Democrats’ open campaign to get rid of Trump extra-constitutionally, using every institution they control from the FBI to the media, is enormously destructive. The consequences need to be severe enough to ensure it is not repeated.

Robert W. Wood:

“…The fervent quest for President Trump’s tax returns continues, and is actually heating up. So with all the tax return fever, shouldn’t he just hand them over? Like MAGA hats and the Wall, President Trump’s tax returns are polarizing, perhaps even a flash point. Scuffles over President Trump’s tax returns are hardly new, although the stakes and the forum may be changing. Anyone else would surely have handed them over before the 2016 election. But at this point, the President should arguably keep them private until the courts order otherwise. His administration may well help him do that. It is not surprising that the President’s tax advisers are telling him to sit tight. In fact, as a lawyer for clients with tax problems, it hard for me to conjure up a tax reason for the President to reveal his returns for dissection. Of course, this isn’t really about taxes. But political considerations may well cut the same way. Any scrutiny he faced as a candidate will pale against today’s feeding frenzy. Trump’s tax returns will be pilloried by armies of experts, perhaps even placing him on the grassy knoll with Ted Cruz’s father. Even if his storied audit is over, Congressional or public viewing could change that. His tax returns could become the new Mueller investigation…”

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DEBRA HEINE:

“…The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ruled that the Trump administration can continue to send Central American migrants back to Mexico while their requests for asylum in the U.S. are adjudicated. The three judge panel struck down a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking the policy, allowing it to continue on a temporary basis, while the court considers broader issues in the case.

The decision from the San Francisco-based appeals court was a surprise victory for the White House, as the administration has lost several other immigration-related rulings by the left-leaning court in the past…”

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Interesting insight into Chinese affairs. Worth clicking over.

Yi-Zheng Lian:

“…The endgame in the trade war between China and the United States seems near. President Trump, betting with real currency — American strength — apparently has the upper hand, and the concessions President Xi Jinping is likely to make won’t be mere tokens. When — if? — an agreement is finally announced, Mr. Trump will surely fire off bragging tweets, partly to shore up his credentials for a second term, amid personal and policy troubles. For Mr. Xi, almost any deal could mean a very serious loss of face…”

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Conrad Black:

“…To raise his victory from the Obama 2012 level to that of Johnson in 1964 and Nixon in 1972, he should move into the careful mode of tweet restraint, conciliatory gestures, and the assurance of a confident president who no longer has a partisan leopard on his back. The partisan press is finally becoming more subtle. Bob Woodward has expressed concern about spying on the Trump campaign; CNN commentators are sometimes even-handed, as in Jake Tapper’s questioning why Senator Klobuchar gave Mr. Trump no credit for the economy’s good health.

The end of the Mueller episode, a Democratic chimera and Trump nightmare, opens the way to partisan de-escalation. The desperate nonsense of Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff can easily be bypassed. The country wants a restoration of dignity, and the president must lead the way. He behaved with exemplary discretion and consideration in the Kavanaugh/Ford stage of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when one misplaced word would have blown the process up in a puff.

Now is the time for more of the same, which he can provide from a position of strength. The only argument left to the Democrats, that he’s not fit to be president, is the easiest of all to debunk. As this process of de-escalation takes its course, the president should commute the sentences of all nonviolent federal first offenders who have served half or more of their sentences, and tangibly encourage the states to do the same.

It is the right thing to do, to ameliorate the evils of the incomparably severe American criminal-justice system, and it would win the votes of millions of non-white victims of the appallingly punitive and rigged system, and millions of white families also. Over 100 million Americans are in families who have been afflicted by the wickedness and severity of the American justice system. They are ready to vote for a reforming president.

President Trump can turn a likely clear win into a mighty landslide. I believe he will do it…”

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Another Green Failure.

Michael Shellenberger:

“…Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.

“Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset,” thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.

With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.

But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it…”

It will cost Germany $3-$4 trillion to increase renewables as share of electricity from today’s 35% to 100% between 2025-2050

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SCOTT MCKAY:

“…The Democrat Party has run afoul of the ancient nostrum that if you strike at the king, you must kill him, and the price for that mistake will soon be upon them. Because what Barr has perceived, which no one seriously doubts — and that includes those Capitol Hill Democrats who so loudly denounce the Attorney General — is the entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was a bought-and-paid-for lie of the Clinton campaign, fed through the intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of the Obama administration to give it false legitimacy and to weaponize it against Candidate and then President Trump, and perpetuated in an attempt to destroy his presidency and effect a de facto coup d’état against the duly-elected leader of the free world.

And Barr is now the instrument of the destruction of those Obama administration and Clinton campaign operatives, who are now faced with horrors — legal, financial, and reputational — to come which may not be avoided. Investigations have begun; recriminations are coming.

And what is worse, those Democrat operatives have no respite ahead from the factual record. It will be found, from the evidence, that the FISA warrants allowing the Obama administration to spy on individuals associated with the Trump campaign were attained through deliberate falsehood and abuse of power, and it will likely be in evidence, when the investigations get to the appropriate point, that this abuse came from the highest levels of government.

Furthermore, the investigation will prove not only that the Obama administration covered up criminal activity associated with and underlying Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business as Secretary of State under Obama, activity not only tolerated but participated in by officials at the highest levels of government.

And nothing can stop this…”

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Julie Kelly:

“…Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination for president one year from now, the party’s deep pockets already are prepping the groundwork to make sure that history—or herstory, if you will—does not repeat itself in 2020. The Democratic presidential candidate’s path to the White House doesn’t run along the Acela Corridor or the Pacific Coast Highway, but rather across Interstate 94 in the upper midsection of the country. Democrats learned this the hard way in 2016.

For all her excuses—Russian social media bots, former FBI Director James Comey, traitorous married white women—Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election for one reason: She failed to carry the Midwest, including the crucial states of Michigan and Wisconsin….

…But it wasn’t just Clinton’s unbridled hubris and political miscalculation that caused the Midwest’s blue wall to unexpectedly crumble on November 8, 2016. Donald Trump, the brash Manhattan billionaire with no ties to the Heartland, at the same time connected with the voters whom Clinton decided to ignore. Subsequently, he did something in 2016 that no Republican presidential candidate had been able to do since the glory days of Madonna and Michael J. Fox: nearly running the electoral table in the Midwest.

Trump was the first Republican since 1988 to win the state of Michigan; to put that in political context, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the shadow speaker of the House of Representatives, hadn’t even been born yet. The last Republican to win the state of Wisconsin was Ronald Reagan in 1984.

Although Trump’s margin of victory in both states was slim, that doesn’t tell the full story. Barack Obama trounced Mitt Romney in Michigan and Wisconsin, even though Romney’s running mate, the former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, was a popular Badger State native. Trump amassed 160,000 more votes in Michigan than Romney won in 2012. The only Midwestern state that Clinton won comfortably was her home state of Illinois. She scraped by in Minnesota, beating Trump by roughly forty thousand votes, four years after Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney there by nearly one-quarter of a million votes.

So, Democrats already are preparing to make sure that electoral nightmare doesn’t recur in 2020. Earlier this year, Priorities USA, a super-PAC populated with Obama and Clinton loyalists, announced it would spend $100 million in an “early engagement” program to start shoring up Democratic voters for the 2020 election. Two of the four states targeted in the first phase of the program are Michigan and Wisconsin…”

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ANDREW C. MCCARTHY:

“…Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely: The Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails related to Hillary Clinton. From there, through either intentional deception or incompetence, the foreign ministries of Australia and the United States erected a fraudulent story tying the Trump campaign’s purported knowledge to the publication of hacked Democratic National Committee emails…”

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During a CNN panel discussion Monday morning, anchor Alisyn Camerota expressed “exhaustion” with covering the Trump administration, saying it had “broken [her] spirit” to see the president accused of a long list of crimes but “nothing happens.”

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