Key Beto O'Rourke aide leaves the campaign

Get off the skateboard, get off the countertops, get off the shallow platitudes, kid.

Rick Moran  . . . "So much for the "temporary employee" narrative. So there is definitely something else going on that caused Bond to leave. O'Rourke is the former media golden boy, being supplanted by South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg (pictured, right) as an object of worship by the press. Bond's radicalism may have proved to be too much for O'Rourke who is tacking to the middle after his announcement.

As a presidential candidate, O’Rourke has tacked more towards the center of the party, saying early in his campaign that he was “no longer sure” that the single-payer Medicare for All bill written by Sanders, which he said he supported in his Senate race, was “the fastest way” to achieve universal health care. He's instead backed a plan that gives people the option to buy into Medicare.

"Beto is on the way down and is casting about for ways to jump start his campaign again. Mayor Pete has sucked most of the oxygen out of the race - at least to this point - and the O'Rourke campaign is suffering because of it. Perhaps a professional at the top of the campaign can reinvigorate the troops and get Beto back on track."

The guy who believes we should tear the border wall down and the guy who repeats an advisor who wants to tear the wall down is only different in degree. TD

Adam Schiff: The Media’s Pin-Up Doll

Julie Kelly  "There are times that even The Onion—the popular satirical newspaper—can’t compete with the outlandish coverage produced by allegedly legitimate news publications. Newsweek magazine’s front-cover swoon over Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) this week is one such example. (Emphasis on "Democrat -California" mine, TD)

"The interview portrays Schiff as a warrior-martyr, fighting the evil Trump regime for the good of the country. He blasts Attorney General Bill Barr; regurgitates long-disproven allegations of Trump-Russia collusion; and again insists many of his Republican colleagues have private misgivings about President Trump but refuse to air those grievances in public for fear of retribution.

"For anyone even remotely aware of Schiff’s congenital dishonesty and malfeasance, the Newsweekprofile is as comical and ironic as any Onion parody could dream to be. Except one can assume the author and editors want the article to be taken seriously by its unserious readership.

"Newsweek’s cover photo appears tweaked to bulk up his thin neck, which the president and some of Schiff’s Republican colleagues in the House have mocked with glee. (Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida last week introduced a bill entitled the PENCIL Act that demands Schiff be removed as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. President Trump recently called the California congressman, “little pencil-necked Adam Schiff.”) In an attempt to transform the geeky gadfly into a bad-ass, Newsweekaccompanied the photo with a Schiff quote: “No one escapes the law.” Scary.

"But the reality about Adam Schiff is that in a Democratic House caucus populated by schemers, shysters, haters, and flat-out embarrassments, Schiff stands apart.

"An original architect of the Trump-Russia collusion fable since the summer of 2016, Schiff shamelessly continues to lie to the American public with claims that the president and his team conspired with the Kremlin to win the presidential election. He is the Jussie Smollett of the collusion hoax, insisting a crime really occurred even when every piece of evidence not only refutes that it ever happened but shows he was one of the original perpetrators." . . .

CNN, MSNBC: Where is your journalistic pride? Or even a conscience?

CNN..MSNBC, are you listening?

Media & Democrats, For The Good Of The Nation, It’s Time To Admit You Were Wrong And Ask To Be Forgiven…

DC Whispers  "This week’s far left news coverage of the Mueller Report fallout has been a bizarre affair that has CNN, MSNBC, etc., still refusing to admit their wrongdoing and in some cases actually continuing to push the impeachment narrative. Let that sink in. When media figures are still demanding impeachment of a president who was found to have done NOTHING WRONG it only further emphasizes the point that this entire Mueller boondoggle was never about the truth but only a means by which these people wanted to harm President Trump, his tens of millions of supporters, and by doing so, all of America.

"Will they ever grow up and admit the error of their hate-inspired ways? We now live in a time of full employment, higher wages, more start-up businesses being created by women and minorities than at any time in U.S. history, and these anti-Trumpers wish to bring an end to all the good that is now happening to so many all across the country. It’s truly disgusting and we are well past enough being enough."  Read more.

CNN Op-Ed Admits "Mueller's Report Looks Bad For Obama"

CNN reports: Mueller's report looks bad 
for Obama  "The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it." . . .

Zero Hedge  "With Congressional Democrats tantruming over redactions, presidential candidates out-virtue-signalling one another in denigration of Trump (for what it is unclear) calling for impeachment (again, for what is unclear) and the liberal media desperate for a distraction from the embarrassment of their two-year harassment in lieu of the main headline - "no collusion, no obstruction;" few if any among the mainstream have noticed (or mentioned) one tiny little detail in the Mueller Report... the 'confirmed' interference by Russia in the 2016 US Election took place - knowingly - under President Obama's watch." . . .
. . . 

The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.

The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump".

"Is this some kind of penance on this holy weekend for CNN's past sins of omission? Perhaps. But Jennings then asked the hard question: Why did Obama go soft on Russia? . . .

I guess if I had failed to stop Russia from marching into Crimea, making a mess in Syria, and hacking our democracy I'd be looking to blame someone else, too.

"Mitt is "sickened"...and sickening

I voted for him over Obama and still would, which shows you only how much I feared and held in contempt Barack Obama. TD

"Former Gov. Jon Huntsman once called Romney “a well-lubricated weather vane”? He sure called that spade a spade." SLTrib

Monica Showalter  . . . "So there he went, looking for the minutia of the report, zeroing in on an errant statement here or there from a presidential spoke[s]woman (as if no presidential spokesperson has ever 'misspoken' in the past, and none would dream of doing during a past Democratic administration).

"He ought to be 'sickened' by the Mueller report itself.  And the disgusting spectacle of how the Special Counsel's investigation was pretexted from the work of politically motivated Democratic operatives, who not only sought to prevent candidate Donald Trump's election, but also sought to topple him from power after he was elected president.  Their phony 'Steele dossier' — created by Russians, no less — is what led to the corrupted pre-Mueller investigations of the Trump administration, leading to the Special Counsel's appointment.  These activities involved unprecedented and seemingly illegal spying on a presidential candidate in unprecedented corruption.  The president was guilty of nothing but losing his temper and using the F-word once, according to the report." . . .

Mitt Romney Wants Everyone To Know His Opinion on Mueller Report…  "If you left a bait bucket -wrapped in a plastic bag- sitting in the sun for three days, the results would be appropriate for Mitt Romney’s latest brand of cologne." . . .

Thanks for this, Utah.

When will his political colleagues, tell Mitt to “stick a mitten in it”?  "Every time a picture of the too-precious-for-words Mitt Romney turns up on the Internet, it’s a reminder of those long ago classroom days, when smarmies called out: “Teacher, teacher, Larry’s chewing gum!”

"The holier-than-thous who ratted out gum chewers, who will always be there, stand out like proverbial sore thumbs, when they ‘graduate’ to politics.

"The perfectly-coiffed, pixie dust polished Romney is now calling out: “Teacher, teacher, the president’s a bad boy!”

"That’s why some of us are on board with outspoken former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who lashed out at the sanctimonious senator from Utah after he said he was “sickened” by the level of dishonesty from President Trump’s administration in response to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report into Russian interference in the 2016 election." . . .

“Know what makes me sick, Mitt? Not how disingenuous you were to take @realDonaldTrump $$ and then 4 yrs later jealously trash him & then love him again when you begged to be Sec of State, but makes me sick that you got GOP nomination and could have been @POTUS,” Huckabee tweeted Friday. (Fox News, April 20, 2019). . . 

Only Donald Trump has the strength to withstand vengeful Democrats and their subservient press

Brutal: Liberal Reporter Tells Colleagues To Get Off The Russian 'Collusion Crackpipe'  "Well, the day has come. The Mueller report has been released and guess what; Attorney General William Barr’s summary was accurate. There was no collusion. There was no conspiracy. On the obstruction charges, there wasn’t enough evidence to bring forward formal charges. Here is where Democrats will make their last stand. Obstruction junction is ahead. It’s the only thing the Left can keep going from this clown show. I’m all for it. The longer the liberal media looks like idiots, the better it is for us. And if the Russian collusion myth was bad, the obstruction nonsense will be a whole other level. And yes, former Young Turks reporter Michael Tracey was there to provide brutal analysis on the report. Tracey is a progressive. He does not hide that fact, but he’s also an original Trump-Russia collusion skeptic. Line-by-line Tracey guts every linchpin of this whole myth that was peddled for two years by the Democrat-media complex." . . .

7 Ways The Mueller Report Exposed The Media’s ‘Bombshell’ Fake News Stories  "After two and a half years of countless mainstream media “scoops” and “bombshells” that turned out to be false or nonexistent, the American people finally have some concrete answers on Russiagate. When Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his 448-page report on Russian interference in the 2016 election on Thursday, some of the investigation’s conclusions debunked once and for all many misleading, and anonymously sourced, conspiracy theories.
"Here are some of the most prominent stories the press got wrong about the Russian collusion narrative." . . .

Jim Jordan Torches Dem Leaders After Discovering Their Secret Agreement to Target Trump  "The Mueller Report conclusion that there was no collusion and no obstruction has forced Democrats to go into full meltdown, they just can’t take the results.
"That was the ‘insurance policy’ they figured would take Trump down." . . .

The Constitution Was Never Pro-Slavery

National Review

It was deliberately written to avoid establishing a legal precedent for ownership of human beings

. . . "What often comes next is a demand to rid the Constitution of the vestigial props for slavery that have somehow survived into our times, usually beginning with the Electoral College. Or maybe, as with University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson, it leads to a call for junking the whole “We the People” business and starting over with a new constitutional convention.
"The accusing finger that links slavery and the Constitution would have surprised no one more than the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. At the outbreak of the Revolution, every one of the newly independent states had legalized slavery. (The numbers varied widely from place to place: Georgia had 18,000 slaves, Pennsylvania 6,000, Virginia 200,000, Massachusetts 5,200, and New York 17,000.)
"But opinion about the moral legitimacy of slavery was shifting. Benjamin Franklin bought and sold slaves in colonial Philadelphia, but by 1772 he had begun denouncing slavery as “a constant butchery of the human species' ”  . . .

Hillary's Two-Year Tantrum

Tim Ziegler  "For the last two years we have all been forced to endure the temper tantrum thrown by Hillary Clinton over her second Presidential campaign loss just as the spectators in a grocery store aisle watch the young mother attempt to discipline her out-of-control toddler as it thrashes itself screaming across the floor.

"The American people defeated Hillary in the Democrat Primary season of 2008. The popular version of that loss is that Obama overwhelmed the party with his charm. The reality is that Democratic Party voters chose his inexperience, melanin level, and vacuous campaign of "Hope and Change" over the known petulance and criminality that they had witnessed during the 1990s by the Clinton administration and didn't want to give the keys of the republic to the Clintons again.

"Hillary and Patti Solis-Doyle ran a disastrous campaign in 2008 that was only superseded in its ineptitude by Hillary's and John Podesta's campaign of 2016. Barack Obama became the candidate and then president for two terms because of the second worst presidential campaign in American history.

"Hillary's overarching personal ambition was that she was destined to be President of the United States. It wasn't that she was a popular candidate. It was merely her turn.

"Clinton couldn't win that nomination in her own right. She had neither the courage nor the interpersonal and political skills that a politician like her husband Bill, who was brought along for the ride because he possessed the skills but not the ambition to be President. Bill demonstrated that his true desire was the access to myriad females that the offices of state attorney general, governor of Arkansas, and then POTUS afforded him. It was Hillary's ambition for him to be president so that she could wield the power behind the throne.

"It isn't just the campaigns that were utter disasters, but also her tenure as secretary of state. " . . .

Rebuilding Notre Dame Requires Rebuilding The Culture That Created It

All illustrations added by TD

The symbolism of the burning cathedral is unmistakable: the West has officially entered a post-Christian phase in history.  
. . . "This is what French leaders and the majority of people around the world are lamenting.  In the fire that struck the great cathedral, they saw the destruction of the ideal tourist site.

"Thus, instead of responding with outrage to find the person who set fire to an enormous stone structure that has weathered nine centuries of so many wars and revolutions, officials quickly chalked it up to an accident related to renovation efforts and have already discussed plans for rebuilding. This is just an unfortunate thing that has no meaning or motive behind it—something to be sad, but not angry, about." . . .

. . . A Naive, Superficial Response
"Except that these things do have meaning. Only those who see Notre Dame as merely an exquisite monument could respond to it in such a superficial, willfully naïve way. Consider the context of the fire. It happened at the beginning of Holy Week amidst a nationwide crisis of church desecration, to Notre Dame Cathedral, the most famous cathedral in the world and most visited site in Europe. It seems proper to seek a better explanation. It may very well be an accident—and if so, that’s quite an accident—or it may be something more sinister.

"Because leadership and the media in France have already adopted an appeasement policy that refuses to acknowledges possible crimes among certain minority groups or possible government incompetence or corruption, it highly unlikely that anyone will learn the truth behind the fires. Already, they have quickly ruled out the possibility that this was not an accident, yet without much evidence. Nevertheless, the symbolism of the burning cathedral and the lame response is unmistakable for those loyal to France or to the Catholic Church: the West has officially entered a post-Christian phase in history." . . .

Inquisitio Requiescat in Pace*

In the end we are left with the beginning: Mueller’s team started with the supposed guilty man and searched desperately but ultimately in vain to find the crime.

Earl of Taint

Victor Davis Hanson  "The variously dubbed dream team/all stars/hunter-killer/army of Mueller’s lawyers, after 22 months, $30 million, and 400 pages plus of legalese did not find “Russian collusion,” the original reason to be of their investigation. At what early point the team realized that fundamental truth is of importance, but will never be fully disclosed.

"Nor did team Mueller find actionable “obstruction” efforts (promiscuous use of executive privilege, firings of Mueller team members, refusal to let high Trump staffers be questioned, etc.) to impede its investigation of a non-crime as lawyers went into every rumored Carter Page, Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, Jr. etc. cul de sac. In exasperation Mueller leveraged almost anyone peripherally related to the Trump campaign either to indict him on mostly process crimes, or to air their incriminating “Trump said this” versions of private conversations.

"And because Mueller felt it necessary to include in his report suggestions of Trump’s mercurial talk, obfuscations, and shenanigans that did not constitute actual crimes as opposed to thought crimes (those falsely accused of a felony have a tendency to become furious and sound off), the question arises that, if Mueller felt it so necessary to include in his report any material he swept up as he vacuumed around, why not at least suggest that the FBI Director and members of DOJ did not honestly inform a FISA court of the true nature of the evidence for their writ — given the centrality of surveilled conversations within the Mueller report?" . . .

Tony Branco

*Definition of requiescat in pace: Rest in Peace;  may he/she rest in peace —abbreviation RIP —used on tombstones.

Brit Hume Calls Out Adam Schiff For Saying Mueller Didn’t Find Trump Innocent;

Daily Caller  "Fox News senior correspondent Brit Hume called out California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff for suggesting special counsel Robert Mueller’s report released Thursday failed to exonerate President Donald Trump.

"Schiff said, “If the special counsel … had found evidence exonerating the president, he would have said so. He did not. He left that issue to the Congress of the United States, and we will need to consider it.”

"Hume replied to that contention in a tweet:

Brit Hume

✔@brithume

And if he found conclusive evidence Trump had obstructed justice, he would have said that. He didn’t. Schiff is spouting nonsense.

"Those who suggested that the president colluded with the Russians before the release of the report now appear to be focusing on unsubstantiated obstruction of justice charges. This focus is based on an inconclusive line in Meuller’s report, which says investigators were “unable to reach” a judgment that Trump “clearly did not commit obstruction of justice:

If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, however, we are unable to reach that judgment. The evidence we obtained about the president’s actions and intent presents difficult issues that prevent us from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred.

"The report’s emphatic conclusion that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russian forces during the 2016 election prompted the president to remark that it was “a good day.” (RELATED: Schiff Asks Supporters To Dig Deep For The ‘One Term President Fund’ To Defeat Trump)

"Schiff, who has long maintained he has “evidence” of Russian collusion has also criticized attorney General William Barr for suggesting the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign. " . . .