The US-China confrontation.

A (Trade) War with China is Inevitable  . . . "Since coming into office, Trump has targeted China for being an unfair, predatory trading partner. Trump has picked up the protectionist rhetoric that was traditionally the province of the Democratic Party, outflanking the pro-labor elements of the left and thereby gaining the support of the Rust Belt states in 2016. The defeat of Hillary Clinton was not only a defeat for the leading Democratic contender for the White House, but also marked the end of the comfortable and very corrupt consensus around supporting “free trade” with totalitarian police states like China.
"Each time that Trump has imposed tariffs on Chinese products or set a deadline for the ongoing negotiations, the financial markets have quavered in fear, reflecting the abhorrence investors have for disruptive change. But most investors looking at China also reflect an infantile naivete when it comes to the true nature of the communist state. “When the time comes to hang the capitalists, they will bid against each other for the sale of the rope,” Vladimir Lenin is reported to have said." . . .

U.S. Hikes Tariffs on China to 25 Percent as Trade Deficit Narrows, Negotiations Continue  . . . "On Friday, the U.S. hiked tariffs on China from 10 percent to 25 percent, a sharp increase worth more than $200 billion amid ongoing trade negotiations. At 9:00 AM EST, the world’s largest and second largest economies will resume talks.
“ 'Talks with China continue in a very congenial manner – there is absolutely no need to rush – as Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products,” President Trump tweeted early Friday morning. “These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.' ” . . .

. . . "The Chinese vowed to retaliate.

“China deeply regrets that it will have to take necessary countermeasures,” China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement.

"While Wall Street and D.C. have largely opposed President Donald Trump’s tariff strategy, it is clearly working to reduce the trade gap between the two nations." . . .

Flashback Video: When Democrats Were Against Holding The AG In Contempt…

Weasel Zippers   2012: House holds Holder in contempt over Fast and Furious; Democrats charge racism  . . . "More than half of the House’s 191 Democrats marched out of the chamber before the first vote to protest the proceedings rather than cast ballots. Some accused the Republicans of racism for challenging Holder." . . .

There will be a theatrical show for the skulls full of mush out there.

Congress contempt citations pretty toothless, says Brit Hume. Eric Holder, Lois Lerner proved that.

Tony Branco

Dems Invite Controversial Imam Who’s Expressed Support For Hamas To Give Prayer On House Floor

Daily Caller  "A Muslim cleric who called for violence against Israel and expressed support for Hamas gave the opening prayer before the House of Representatives Thursday, angering several representatives.

Omar Suleiman, an imam and president of the Yaqeen Institute, delivered the invocation at the invitation of his congresswoman, Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency. Republican New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, who is Jewish, decried the invitation in light of the fact that Suleiman has repeatedly called for a third Intifada against Israel, referred to Jews as “Zionists” and called them “enemies of God,” and defended the terrorist organization Hamas on social media.

"Suleiman has also openly supported the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and Israeli businesses. The BDS movement has several financial and personal ties with Palestinian terror groups." . . .

The Little-Known Story Of Mary Jo Kopechne

Heavy.com

Powerline Blog  "I am so old, I actually remember when Chappaquiddick happened. Some years later, I looked into the facts and found that they are quite clear: Senator Ted Kennedy, then 37 years old, drove his car off a bridge and saved himself, leaving a young woman to die, when she could have been rescued if he had simply called for help like a normal human being. Instead, he tried to convince his cousin to take the fall and, failing that, lawyered up. Ted Kennedy is not history’s most contemptible man, but he is easily in the bottom one percent." . . .
. . . "There isn’t any doubt about that. But liberals like Ted Kennedy have always believed that some people are important, and others aren’t. Mary Jo Kopechne was in the latter category. She was collateral damage in the Left’s attempt to remake American society. If she is mostly forgotten today, it is because most news outlets shared Ted Kennedy’s political goals and were happy to cover up his craven cowardice." . . .

Progressives Face a Bleak Post-Mueller Landscape

Victor Davis Hanson

There will be no indictments of Trump for either collusion or the obstruction of justice during the investigation of that non-crime. So now what?

"Democrats have grown infuriated by Attorney General William Barr’s indifference to their hysteria over the Trump–Russia collusion narrative.

"Barr recently released a brief summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s conclusions that Donald Trump did not collude with the Russians to warp the 2016 election. Barr added that Mueller had not found enough evidence to recommend that Trump be indicted for obstruction of justice for the non-crime of collusion.

"Progressives, who for 22 months had insisted that Trump was a Russian asset, were stunned. But only for a few hours.

"Almost immediately, they redirected their fury toward Barr’s summation of the Mueller report. Yet few rational people contested Barr’s synopses about collusion and obstruction.

"Both the Mueller report and Barr’s summation can be found on the Internet. Anyone can read them to see whether Barr misrepresented Mueller’s conclusions.

"Again, there have been few criticisms that Barr was wrong on his interpretation that there was no collusion and not enough evidence to indict on obstruction of justice." . . .

The Persecution of Attorney General Bill Barr

Rich Terrell

The Morning Briefing: Clowns Vote to Hold Barr in Contempt . . . "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." . . .

William French writes at National Review: Against the Persecution of Bill Barr

"The Democratic party’s current war on Attorney General William Barr is one of the most misguided, misplaced bursts of outrage that I’ve seen during the first term of the Trump administration. Barr protected the Mueller investigation, he went above and beyond legal requirements to release Mueller’s report to the public, and he has offered to congressional leaders far more details about the investigation than are publicly available. Yet now he’s subject to congressional contempt proceedings?  "This is nonsense." . . .

One can fake sincerity (Joe Biden does it well) but fear shows itself truly.

 Attorney General William Barr mentions spying, and fear roils the Democrats
. . . "But in Washington, they don’t call it fear. They pretend, rather, that it is the anger of the righteous. Yet it is fear just the same, that treacly Washington bureaucratic and political fear." . . .
. . . It is the same fear that was felt in Rome and later in pre-revolutionary France, and now they feel it in Washington.

"And the man who is causing it all is Attorney General William Barr.

"Because when Barr explained, almost casually and quite publicly just a few weeks ago, that he was looking into the origins of the inquisition of President Donald Trump and that discredited Russian collusion business, and into the “spying” on the Trump campaign, something happened.

"The Washington establishment’s fear rolled over him in waves." . . .

Update: Dems Hold Barr In CONTEMPT, Proving They're Long On Partisanship, Short On Historical Memory

. . . Most Democrats strongly condemned Republicans seven years ago when the House (including several Democrats) voted to hold President Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder in criminal and civil contempt of Congress for failing to turn over thousands of pages documents related to the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. Key distinctions between the two situations illustrate why there is no Republican support for a contempt vote today."

Mike Harris

Follow-up update: Democrat Penn state Rep. Brian Sims: The decline of public discourse even in the halls of governments

To "Dox": Dox definition, to publish the private personal information of (another person) or reveal the identity of (an online poster) without the consent of that individual: The professor was doxed by a bitter student who failed her class. Several players doxed the programmer because the final version of the game disappointed them.  

Democrat Offered Reward to ‘Dox’ Pro-Life Teens "Teenage girls praying outside an abortion clinic in Philadelphia were harassed by a Democrat state politician, and the father of two of the teens has contacted police after the girls were apparently “doxed” by abortion supporters." . . .
"Joe Garecht says his wife, two of their daughters, and one of his daughter’s friends were praying in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic April 18 —the Thursday before Easter — when they were approached by Pennsylvania state Rep. Brian Sims who “yelled at them for ten minutes, then comes back with his phone and starts recording video.” Garecht said his wife didn’t recognize Sims, who was elected in 2012 as the first openly homosexual member of the state legislature. The Garechts also didn’t realize Sims had posted the video online, offering $100 “to anyone who will identify” them.
. . . "In the video, Sims calls them “a bunch of pseudo-Christian protesters” and says “there’s nothing Christian about” opposing abortion. The Garechts are devout Catholics; two of the girls in the video are home-schooled, while the oldest Garecht daughter now attends a Catholic day school. In the video, Sims can be seen calling them “a bunch of white people,” at which point Garecht’s daughter’s Hispanic friend says, “I’m not white.” . . .

In 2017, CNN applauded harasser of women and teenage girls Brian Sims . . . "And the CNN producer portrayed Sims as virtuous for pursuing an online critic and his grandmother.  (Sims would make that ominous "get the household" tactic a component of future misdeeds.)"  Perhaps Sims will provide Bail for this Democrat.

"It seems that the Brian Sims I interviewed in 2013 is not the same Brian Sims anymore." It was . . . "a column about a politician who is as passionate in his support for abortion rights as I am in my opposition to abortion."

The Next Battlefront: Social Media

Sims

Does Brian Sims Hear Himself?  National Review.
"Representative Sims is a low kind of man with a low kind of mind, but Representative Sims is, in fact, representative . . ."
 . . . "Some fanatics are dangerous. Almost all of them are boring. They are tedious in themselves and the cause of tediousness in others. Forgive me for repeating this story: I once had a student who discovered the Palestinian cause in college, as a certain kind of WASP suburbanite does, and she endeavored to turn every conversation to the evils of Israel, rarely speaking a sentence that did include the word “Zionist,” which she pronounced in a distinctly low-pH way. I shared with her Winston Churchill’s observation that a fanatic is “a man who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” She did not miss a beat. “Exactly. It’s like when you’re debating with a Zionist . . .”



Immoralists: The Example of Brian Sims  . . . "Strangely, the strange man condemns the protester as “extremely racist.” He announces, “If you’re a white person like I am we have a lot of catching up to do. We have a lot to apologize for. I’m going to start by apologizing for this woman.”
Why not apologize for Planned Parenthood’s racism?
"Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger spoke at a Ku Klux Klan gathering in 1926. She called “the aboriginal Australian” the “lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development.” In one letter, she used the n-word to refer to a black man.
" 'The Jewish people and Italian families,” she testified before the New York legislature, “who are filling the insane asylums, who are filling the hospitals and are filling our feeble-minded institutions, those are the ones the tax payers have to pay for the upkeep of, and they are increasing the budget of the state, the enormous expense of the state is increasing because of the multiplication of the unfit in this country and in the state.' ” . . .

UPDATE, 6:30 CDT: Pro-Life Rally Garners Over 1,000 Participants In Response To Rep. Brian Sims. Here Are The Highlights.  . . . "Another moving moment came when prayer broke out for the unborn. As noted by Nate Madden of The Blaze, the prayer outside the clinic comes just days after Rep. Sims live-streamed himself harassing teen girls for praying outside that very clinic." . . .  Video 

. . . "Garecht and her husband have helped raise over $118,000 for the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia since Monday.
"The rally also challenged a false narrative too often perpetrated by the Left and their mainstream media allies: the pro-life position is not one held by “the patriarchy”:" . . .

. . . "Every speaker at the Pro-Life Rally today except for @MattWalshBlog is a woman. No "male-dominated" pro-life movement here! @abbyjohnson @lilagracerose Dr. Monique Ruberu Richara Krajewski Ashley Garecht Tina Whittington Toni McFadden Marilyn Musgrave @LaurenMuzyka