'Stop the Steal' Republicans Now Dominating State Legislators (VIDEO)

Wyoming's state Republican Party chairman isn't a particularly "stop the steal" guy, or at least not from what I read at the story from the other day, "W. Frank Eathorne Shakes Up the Wyoming Republican Party (VIDEO)."

But Eathorne's a Trump man through and through, and that goes for a lot of another state party political leaders as well (regardless of gender).

At the New York Times, "How Trump’s 2020 Election Lies Have Gripped State Legislatures":

LANSING, Mich. — At least 357 sitting Republican legislators in closely contested battleground states have used the power of their office to discredit or try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to a review of legislative votes, records and official statements by The New York Times.

The tally accounts for 44 percent of the Republican legislators in the nine states where the presidential race was most narrowly decided. In each of those states, the election was conducted without any evidence of widespread fraud, leaving election officials from both parties in agreement on the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The Times’s analysis exposes how deeply rooted lies and misinformation about former President Donald J. Trump’s defeat have become in state legislatures, which play an integral role in U.S. democracy. In some, the false view that the election was stolen — either by fraud or as a result of pandemic-related changes to the process — is now widely accepted as fact among Republican lawmakers, turning statehouses into hotbeds of conspiratorial thinking and specious legal theories.

357 lawmakers took concrete steps to discredit or overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That amounts to 44 percent of the Republican lawmakers in those states.

23 percent took steps to delay the vote count or overturn the election by supporting lawsuits or by signing letters to Congress or former Vice President Mike Pence.

11 percent supported sending alternate slates of electors to Congress that would override the choices of voters in those states.

7 percent supported a legally dubious theory of “decertification” of the 2020 election, which legal experts say has no basis in U.S. election law.

24 percent of the Republican lawmakers voted for an outside, partisan review of the 2020 election (often referred to as an “audit”). The reviews have been used to justify new voting laws and efforts to decertify the 2020 election.

Legislators in Florida and North Carolina did not face as much pressure to overturn the election because Mr. Trump carried both states. In Nevada, Democrats control the Legislature, and though the state Republican Party pushed for alternate electors, no legislators took action...

Election and democracy experts say they see the rise of anti-democratic impulses in statehouses as a clear, new threat to the health of American democracy. State legislatures hold a unique position in the country’s democratic apparatus, wielding a constitutionally mandated power to set the “times, places and manner of holding elections.” Cheered on by Mr. Trump as he eyes another run for the White House in 2024, many state legislators have shown they see that power as license to exert greater control over the outcome of elections.

In an interview with The Times, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in deciding whom to endorse in state legislative races, he is looking for candidates who want state legislatures to have a say in naming presidential electors — a position that could let politicians short-circuit the democratic process and override the popular vote.

The Times’s review provides only a glimpse of the ways that state legislatures fueled the movement to deny and challenge the 2020 results. The analysis focused on concrete actions and did not include lawmakers’ posts on social media or statements they made in campaign speeches.

Some legislators who were among the most vociferous in their support of subverting the election have tried to use their 2020 efforts as a springboard to higher office, all while still pledging to further remove democratic guardrails...

 

Vladimir Putin's Trifecta

From Allahpundit, at Hot Air, "Is Putin trapped?":

His [Putin's] decision to attack Ukraine is frequently described as a “gamble” but consider how much of a gamble it is. He didn’t merely place a huge bet, he bet on a trifecta. First, that Russia could take Ukraine quickly without much blood spilling. Second, that Zelensky would go wobbly and Ukrainian resolve would break, clearing the way for a puppet ruler to be installed without much resistance. And third, that the west would be too weak and divided to impose painful sanctions on Russia at a moment of high inflation, knowing how westerners will end up sharing that economic pain.

That first bet is still winnable, I suppose, but each day that passes makes it less likely. “We have indications that the Russians are increasingly frustrated by their lack of momentum over the last 24 hours, particularly in the north parts of Ukraine,” a senior defense official told Fox News. “We also continue to see indications of viable Ukrainian resistance.” A British defense minister claimed last night that Russian battle plans are way off schedule. Ukrainian air defenses are reportedly still operating despite Russia’s best efforts to eliminate them...

A good post. More here.

Ukraine Soldier's Viral Tweet on Russian Invasion: 'We've got everything. Your ass is ours, fellows!' (VIDEO)

Except for those fleeing the country (for good reason), Ukrainians are very upbeat. Yesterday morning it was all gloom and doom on the telly, but today it's looking like a long grind --- and the more we see of Russian forces, the less formidable they look. 

Added subtitles.

Translation by @joelreymont and @SandiResistz . pic.twitter.com/dYhwu8DshA

— Peedu Tuisk (@peedutuisk) February 25, 2022

Ukraine's Reckless Blunder

This is the hardest, most brutally honest piece I've read on the conflict thus far, "Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble":

Russian President Vladimir Putin chose this war, Joe Biden said in his Thursday afternoon speech to America regarding the conflict in Ukraine. That is true, but U.S. elites also had something to do with Putin’s ugly and destructive choice—a role that Democrats and Republicans are eager to paper over with noble-sounding rhetoric about the bravery of Ukraine’s badly outgunned military. Yes, the Ukrainian soldiers standing up to Putin are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a weapon, first against Russia and then against each other, with little consideration for the Ukrainian people who are now paying the price for America’s folly.

It is not an expression of support for Putin’s grotesque actions to try to understand why it seemed worthwhile for him to risk hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of thousands of servicemen, and the possible stability of his own regime in order to invade his neighbor. After all, Putin’s reputation until this moment has always been as a shrewd ex-KGB man who eschewed high-risk gambles in favor of sure things backed by the United States, like entering Syria and then escalating forces there. So why has he adopted exactly the opposite strategy here, and chosen the road of open high-risk confrontation with the American superpower?

Yes, Putin wants to prevent NATO from expanding to Russia’s border. But the larger answer is that he finds the U.S. government’s relationship with Ukraine genuinely threatening. That’s because for nearly two decades, the U.S. national security establishment under both Democratic and Republican administrations has used Ukraine as an instrument to destabilize Russia, and specifically to target Putin.

While the timing of Putin’s attack on Ukraine is no doubt connected to a variety of factors, including the Russian dictator’s read on U.S. domestic politics and the preferences of his own superpower sponsor in Beijing, the sense that Ukraine poses a meaningful threat to Russia is not a product of Putin’s paranoia—or of a sudden desire to restore the power and prestige of the Soviet Union, however much Putin might wish for that to happen. Rather, it is a geopolitical threat that has grown steadily more pressing and been employed with greater recklessness by Americans and Ukrainians alike over the past decade.

That Ukraine has allowed itself to be used as a pawn against a powerful neighbor is in part the fault of Kyiv’s reckless and corrupt political class. But Ukraine is not a superpower that owes allies and client-states judicious leadership—that’s the role of the United States. And in that role, the United States has failed Ukraine. More broadly, the use of Ukraine as a goad against enemies domestic and foreign has recklessly damaged the failing yet necessary European security architecture that America spent 75 years building and maintaining.

Why can’t the American security establishment shoulder responsibility for its role in the tragedy unfolding in Ukraine? Because to discuss American responsibility openly would mean exposing the national security establishment’s role in two separate, destructive coups: the first, in 2014, targeting the government of Ukraine, and the second, starting two years later, the government of the United States....

What kind of strategy dictates that a state hand over its security vis-a-vis local actors to a country [the United States] half the world away? No strategy at all. Ukraine was not able to transcend its natural geography as a buffer state—and worse, a buffer state that failed to take its own existence seriously, which meant that it would continue to make disastrously bad bets. In 2013, the European Union offered Kyiv a trade deal, which many misunderstood as a likely prelude to EU membership. Young Ukrainians very much want to join the EU, because they want access to Europe so they can flee Ukraine, which remains one of the poorest countries on the continent.

The trade deal was an ill-conceived EU project to take a shot at Putin with what seemed like little risk. The idea was to flood the Ukrainian market, and therefore also the Russian market, with European goods, which would have harmed the Russian economy—leading, the architects of this plan imagined, to popular discontent that would force Putin himself from office. Putin understandably saw this stratagem as a threat to his country’s stability and his personal safety, so he gave Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych an ultimatum: either reject the deal and accept Moscow’s $15 billion aid package in its place, or else suffer crippling economic measures.

When Yanukovych duly reneged on the EU deal, the Obama administration helped organize street demonstrations for what became history’s most tech-savvy and PR-driven regime change operation, marketed to the global public variously as Maidan, EuroMaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, etc. In February 2014, the protests forced Yanukovych into exile in Moscow. Consequently, Nuland and other Obama administration officials worked to assemble a new Ukrainian government friendly to the United States and therefore hostile to Russia.

In late February, the Russians responded to the American soft coup in Ukraine by invading Crimea and eventually annexing it and creating chaos in Eastern Ukraine. The Obama administration declined to arm the Ukrainian government. It was right to avoid conflict with Moscow, though by leaving Kyiv defenseless, it showed that the White House had never fully gamed out all the possible scenarios that might ensue from setting a client state on course for conflict with a great power. Instead, Obama and the Europeans highlighted their deadly miscalculation by imposing sanctions on Moscow for taking advantage of the conditions that Obama and the Europeans had created.

The White House seems to have taken a perverse pride in the death and destruction it helped incite in Eastern Europe. In April 2014, CIA Director John Brennan visited Kyiv, appearing to confirm the agency’s role in the coup. Shortly after came Vice President Biden, who took his own victory lap and counseled the Ukrainians to root out corruption. Naturally, a prominent Ukrainian energy company called Burisma, which was then under investigation for corruption, hired Biden’s son Hunter for protection.

By tying itself to an American administration that had shown itself to be reckless and dangerous, the Ukrainians made a geopolitical blunder that statesmen will study for years to come: A buffer state had staked its future on a distant power that had simply seen it as an instrument to annoy its powerful neighbor with no attachment to any larger strategic concept that it was willing to support. Russia then lopped off half of the Donbas region on its border and subjected Ukraine to a grinding, eight-year-long war, intended in large part to underline Russian capacity and Ukrainian and American impotence.

Ukraine then made a bad situation even worse. When the same people who had left them prey to Putin asked them to take sides in an American domestic political conflict, the Ukrainians enthusiastically signed on—instead of running hard in the opposite direction. In 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign came calling on Ukrainian officials and activists to lend some Slavic authenticity to its Russia collusion narrative targeting Donald Trump. Indeed, Russiagate’s central storyline was about Ukraine. Yes, Trump had supposedly been compromised by a sex tape filmed in Moscow, but Putin’s ostensible reason for helping Trump win the presidency was to get him to drop Ukraine-related sanctions. Here was another chance for Ukraine to stick it to Putin, and gain favor with what it imagined would be the winning party in the American election.

With the CIA’s Brennan and a host of senior FBI and DOJ officials pushing Russiagate into the press—and running an illegal espionage campaign against the Trump team—Ukrainian political figures gladly joined in. Key participants included Kyiv’s ambassador to Washington, who wrote a Trump-Russia piece for the U.S. press, and a member of the Ukrainian parliament who allegedly contributed to the dossier. The collusion narrative was also augmented by Ukrainian American operatives, like Alexandra Chalupa, who was tied into the Democratic Party’s NGO complex. The idea that this game might have consequences for Ukraine’s relations with its more powerful neighbor doesn’t seem to have entered the heads of either the feckless Ukrainians or the American political operatives who cynically used them...

RTWT.

 

Hoo Boy!

Holy cow!

I've been off everything today, and frankly, I just scheduled my sixth "discussion forum" a little while ago, to go live at 12:01am on Tuesday, in less than 50 minutes from now, and the first thing I see when I click over to Instapundit is this, dang!

It's Sharyl Attkisson:

Bernie Sanders Is a Hardline Communist

[Re-upping this piece from almost exactly four years ago, so hilarious.]

From Paul Sperry, at the New York Post, "Don’t be fooled by Bernie Sanders — he’s a diehard communist":

As polls tighten and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders looks more like a serious contender than a novelty candidate for president, the liberal media elite have suddenly stopped calling him socialist. He’s now cleaned-up as a “progressive” or “pragmatist.”

But he’s not even a socialist. He’s a communist.

Mainstreaming Sanders requires whitewashing his radical pro-Communist past. It won’t be easy to do.

If Sanders were vying for a Cabinet post, he’d never pass an FBI background check. There’d be too many subversive red flags popping up in his file. He was a Communist collaborator during the height of the Cold War.

Rewind to 1964.

While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of the Socialist Party USA. He also organized for a communist front, the United Packinghouse Workers Union, which at the time was under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

After graduating with a political-science degree, Sanders moved to Vermont, where he headed the American People’s History Society, an organ for Marxist propaganda. There, he produced a glowing documentary on the life of socialist revolutionary Eugene Debs, who was jailed for espionage during the Red Scare and hailed by the Bolsheviks as “America’s greatest Marxist.”

****

Sanders still hangs a portrait of Debs on the wall in his Senate office.

In the early ’70s, Sanders helped found the Liberty Union Party, which called for the nationalization of all US banks and the public takeover of all private utility companies.

After failed runs for Congress, Sanders in 1981 managed to get elected mayor of Burlington, Vt., where he restricted property rights for landlords, set price controls and raised property taxes to pay for communal land trusts. Local small businesses distributed fliers complaining their new mayor “does not believe in free enterprise.”

His radical activities didn’t stop at the ­water’s edge.

Sanders took several “goodwill” trips not only to the USSR, but also to Cuba and Nicaragua, where the Soviets were trying to expand their influence in our hemisphere.

In 1985, he traveled to Managua to celebrate the rise to power of the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista government. He called it a “heroic revolution.” Undermining anti-communist US policy, Sanders denounced the Reagan administration’s backing of the Contra rebels in a letter to the Sandinistas.

His betrayal did not end there. Sanders lobbied the White House to stop the proxy war and even tried to broker a peace deal. He adopted Managua as a sister city and invited Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to visit the US. He exalted Ortega as “an impressive guy,” while attacking President Reagan.

“The Sandinista government has more support among the Nicaraguan people — substantially more support — than Ronald Reagan has among the American people,” Sanders told Vermont government-access TV in 1985.

Sanders also adopted a Soviet sister city outside Moscow and honeymooned with his second wife in the USSR. He put up a Soviet flag in his office, shocking even the Birkenstock-wearing local liberals. At the time, the Evil Empire was on the march around the world, and threatening the US with nuclear annihilation.

Then, in 1989, as the West was on the verge of winning the Cold War, Sanders addressed the national conference of the US Peace Council — a known front for the Communist Party USA, whose members swore an oath not only to the Soviet Union but to “the triumph of Soviet power in the US.”

Today, Sanders wants to bring what he admired in the USSR, Cuba, Nicaragua and other communist states to America.

For starters, he proposes completely nationalizing our health-care system and putting private health insurance and drug companies “out of business.” He also wants to break up “big banks” and control the energy industry, while providing “free” college tuition, a “living wage” and guaranteed homeownership and jobs through massive public works projects. Price tag: $18 trillion.

Who will pay for it all? You will. Sanders plans to not only soak the rich with a 90%-plus tax rate, while charging Wall Street a “speculation tax,” but hit every American with a “global-warming tax.”

Of course, even that wouldn’t cover the cost of his communist schemes; a President Sanders would eventually soak the middle class he claims to champion. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, right?

Still more.

Frankly, all of this is public information.

Folks should read the Bernie Sanders entry at Discover the Networks. Diehard Communist is right.

'One has to wonder whether the dismissal of the entire field isn't just a machination to generate a late draft-Hillary movement...'

Following up, "Is There Anybody Else?"

Interesting. I hadn't thought of a "draft Hillary late" movement, but then, I don't think the country --- much less the Democrats --- could stand a third attempt by Crooked Hillary to win the presidency.

See Ed Morrissey, at Hot Air, "“Anxiety Rises”: Biden Opens Up Biggest Lead As Dems Fret Over 2020 Options."

Tulsi Gabbard Slams Hillary Clinton, the 'Queen of Warmongers'

Just beautiful.

At Epoch Times, "Gabbard: Clinton Smeared Me Because ‘She Won’t be Able to Control Me’ If I’m Elected President."

And on Tucker's below:

Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 18, 2019

... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.

It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) October 18, 2019

Hillary Clinton Asked to Leave Costco

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "I’m so old, I can remember when the Babylon Bee was still a satiric Website, before morphing into America’s Paper of Record..."

Hillary Clinton Asked To Leave Costco After Repeatedly Accusing Sample Lady Of Being A Russian Assethttps://t.co/G6UAE7bhSW

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 18, 2019

Our Poisoned Information System

From Charlie Warzel, at the New York Times, "Epstein Suicide Conspiracies Show How Our Information System Is Poisoned." (Via Memeorandum.)

The system is poisoned all right, but it's not like the Old Gray Lady is completely innocent here. Dan Gainor points out the two-year long Russia conspiracy hoax as an example.

In any case, FWIW:

Strong column by @cwarzel. Begs the question: would things improve if all journalists got off Twitter? https://t.co/qEptXGel4X

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) August 11, 2019

Imagine the dystopia that is a country divided in a hashtag battle accusing a former president and the current president of staging the suicide of a pedophile emperor to cover up their child molestation.#TrumpBodyCount#ClintonBodyCount

— Cameron Kasky (@cameron_kasky) August 10, 2019

This creates big incentives to game trending. Either:
1) press will cover it & amplify
2) press will debunk & still amplify, while creating controversy
3) press will very occasionally ignore,then conspiracy press will cover to ask why 🤔

if you make it trend, you make it true.

— Renee DiResta (@noUpside) August 10, 2019

Mr. Epstein’s apparent suicide is, in many ways, the post-truth nightmare scenario. The sordid story contains almost all the hallmarks of stereotypical conspiratorial fodder: child sex-trafficking, powerful global political leaders, shadowy private jet flights, billionaires whose wealth cannot be explained. As a tale of corruption, it is so deeply intertwined with our current cultural and political rot that it feels, at times, almost too on-the-nose. The Epstein saga provides ammunition for everyone, leading one researcher to refer to Saturday’s news as the “Disinformation World Cup.”

At the heart of Saturday’s fiasco is Twitter, which has come to largely program the political conversation and much of the press. Twitter is magnetic during massive breaking stories; news junkies flock to it for up-to-the-second information. But early on, there’s often a vast discrepancy between the attention that is directed at the platform and the available information about the developing story. That gap is filled by speculation and, via its worst users, rumor-mongering and conspiracy theories.

On Saturday, Twitter’s trending algorithms hoovered up the worst of this detritus, curating, ranking and then placing it in the trending module on the right side of its website. Despite being a highly arbitrary and mostly “worthless metric,” trending topics on Twitter are often interpreted as a vague signal of the importance of a given subject.

There’s a decent chance that President Trump was using Twitter’s trending module when he retweeted a conspiratorial tweet tying the Clintons to Epstein’s death. At the time of Mr. Trump’s retweet, “Clintons” was the third trending topic in the United States. The specific tweet amplified by the president to his more than 60 million followers was prominently featured in the “Clintons” trending topic. And as Ashley Feinberg at Slate pointed out in June, the president appears to have a history of using trending to find and interact with tweets.

On Saturday afternoon, computational propaganda researcher Renée DiResta noted that the media’s close relationship with Twitter creates an incentive for propagandists and partisans to artificially inflate given hashtags. Almost as soon as #ClintonBodyCount began trending on Saturday, journalists took note and began lamenting the spread of this conspiracy theory — effectively turning it into a news story, and further amplifying the trend. “Any wayward tweet … can be elevated to an opinion worth paying attention to,” Ms. DiResta wrote. “If you make it trend, you make it true.”

That our public conversation has been uploaded onto tech platforms governed by opaque algorithms adds even more fodder for the conspiratorial minded. Anti-Trump Twitter pundits with hundreds of thousands of followers blamed “Russian bots” for the Clinton trending topic. On the far-right, pro-Trump sites like the Gateway Pundit (with a long track record of amplifying conspiracy theories) suggested that Twitter was suppressing and censoring the Clinton hashtags.

Where does this leave us? Nowhere good.

Democrat 'Talking Points' on Jeffrey Epstein Suicide

The most telling line is point three, "Do not link to the current court documents regarding Epstein or use them in constructing your argument," because that would clearly implicate the degenerate Democrat Party and exonerate President Trump, and we can't have that.

Via Conservative Treehouse, "Far-Left Panic Over Epstein’s “Suicide” – Shareblue Dispatches Urgent Talking Points For On-Line Activists…"

Jeffrey Epstein's Suicide is 'Unfathomable'

Following-up, "#ClintonBodyCount."

At Instapundit, "OH, I DUNNO, I THINK I CAN FATHOM IT."

How does one commit suicide while on suicide watch...or was it not suicide? https://t.co/7PX3iHG9Ri

— ColorMeRed 🇺🇸 📌 (@ColorMeRed) August 10, 2019

That is difficult to believe. Epstein already made one suicide attempt and everyone knows that pedos are not very popular with the prison population. How many inmates could implicate several Presidents as well as a Prince of England not to mention many other high powered names?

— ColorMeRed 🇺🇸 📌 (@ColorMeRed) August 10, 2019

#ClintonBodyCount

It should be #ClintonBodyCount trending, not #TrumpBodyCount, but this is the duplicitous left we're dealing with.

On Twitter:

My God, they’re already covering it up. Twitter has completely replaced the hashtag #ClintonBodyCount with #TrumpBodyCount on the trending newsfeed even though the numbers were higher.

The media bias is UNREAL at this point. pic.twitter.com/38QBO7HBIB

— Mindy Robinson 🇺🇸 (@iheartmindy) August 10, 2019

People close to Epstein fear he was murdered...as Epstein told authorities someone tried to kill him in a previous incident weeks earlier. He was described as being in good spirits in recent days... https://t.co/J9QNSo1N2v

— Carol Leonnig (@CarolLeonnig) August 10, 2019

Dazed and Confused

Previously, "Mueller Tesimony: Dueling Circus Realities."

And at VodkaPundit, "Drunkblogging the Mueller Hearing."

Matt @DRUDGE has gone a little TDS lately, but this is on the money. pic.twitter.com/7lbzdmPHGy

— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) July 24, 2019

Mueller Tesimony: Dueling Circus Realities

The Mueller testimony is live right now, and I'm unimpressed.

Here's Politico, "Mueller refutes Trump’s ‘no collusion, no obstruction’ line."

Actually, this whole thing's a dud. Mueller claims he hadn't heard of Fusion GPS.

I just tuned in, though I'll post highlights this afternoon.

Meanwhile, at this morning's LAT, a pre-analysis, "Democrats and Republicans prepare for Mueller testimony, but with competing goals":

WASHINGTON —  As a senior Justice Department official and then FBI director for 12 years, Robert S. Mueller III carefully guarded his reputation as a straight shooter in the midst of political upheaval and partisan warfare.
His square-jawed, just-the-facts approach will be put to the ultimate test Wednesday when the former special counsel testifies for five hours in nationally televised House hearings about the Russia investigation, which examined Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election and President Trump’s attempts to shield himself from the probe.

Democrats and Republicans are plotting ways to transform his testimony — first to the House Judiciary Committee and then to the House Intelligence committee — into a series of politically charged sound bites they can use to attack or defend the president.

Democrats plan to steer Mueller toward the most damning parts of his final report, particularly incidents where Trump directed underlings to fire Mueller — none did so — or discourage witnesses from cooperating with the special counsel’s office.

The key question is whether Democrats can get Mueller to say point blank that Trump would have faced criminal charges if he weren’t the president, a declaration that would further blunt Trump’s false claims of full exoneration.

Republicans are expected to pursue a two-pronged approach. They’ll try to undermine Mueller’s credibility by suggesting his team was politically biased against Trump. They also want to highlight conclusions in the report that benefit the president, such as Mueller’s determination that he could not establish a criminal conspiracy between his campaign and Moscow.

Both Democrats and Republicans have at least one thing in common: They expect to face a reluctant witness with a history of terse, dry answers to overheated congressional questioning.

“I think he will be equally parsimonious with both sides,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Mueller did not want to testify, telling reporters on May 29 that he would not go beyond the details contained in the 448-page report released six weeks earlier. But he agreed to appear on Capitol Hill after Democrats issued him a subpoena.

Jim Popkin, a spokesman for Mueller, said he’s preparing for the hearing with a small group of former officials from the special counsel’s office.

“This is someone who has prided himself over the years for very careful preparation. He will be extremely well prepared come Wednesday,” Popkin said Monday.

Mueller will make an opening statement and submit a redacted copy of his report for the record.

“I think it’s safe to say that on Wednesday he will stick to the four walls of the Mueller report as much as he can,” Popkin said.

In a Monday letter, the Justice Department told Mueller that his testimony “must remain within the boundaries of your public report” to avoid infringing upon executive privilege and other confidentiality requirements. The letter said Mueller had requested guidance from the department earlier this month, a suggestion that he may rely on it to avoid answering questions he wants to avoid.

Democrats have made no secret of their goals — they worry that Trump paid little price for pushing legal and political boundaries, and they’re concerned that voters struggled to digest the lengthy report.

“Not everybody will read the book, but people will watch the movie,” said a Democratic staff member on the Judiciary Committee, who requested anonymity to discuss preparations for the hearing...

Ben Shapiro Responds to Democrats' Reaction After the Mueller Report Lands (VIDEO)

Shapiro's got a new book out, at Amazon, The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great.

And at Fox News:

Democrats Crushed as Mueller Report Lands with a Thud

The big, big news yesterday.

I'm visiting my sister's house in Yucca Valley and she had on CNN all afternoon, so I watched for a while. I mean, even leftist Jeffrey Toobin says the report is a big victory for President Trump.

All the latest is a Memeorandum, "AG Barr aims to release Mueller report ‘top-line’ conclusions Saturday night, won't ‘parse words, play games,’ source says."

And at Tucker Carlson's show last night, the analysis from Laura Ingraham:

What the Establishment Misses About Trump's Foreign Policy

From Professor Randall Schweller, at Foreign Affairs, "Three Cheers for Trump’s Foreign Policy":

No more Uncle Sugar, no more multilateralism, no more free riding: Three cheers for Trump's foreign policy. https://t.co/uteDMsvf9o

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 16, 2018

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election heralded nothing less than certain catastrophe. At least, that was and remains the firm belief of “the Blob”—what Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration, called those from both parties in the mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment who, driven by habitual ideas and no small amount of piety and false wisdom, worry about the decline of the U.S.-led order. “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman forecast after Trump’s victory. Others prophesied that Trump would resign by the end of his first year (Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal), that he would be holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in six months (the liberal commentator John Aravosis), or that the United States might be headed down the same path that Germany took from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. That last warning came from former U.S. President Barack Obama last December at the Economic Club of Chicago, where he invoked the specter of Nazi Germany. “We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly,” he said. “Sixty million people died, so you’ve got to pay attention—and vote.”

So far, the world has not come to an end, far from it. A year into Trump’s first term, the Islamic State, or ISIS—a fascist organization, by the way—had been virtually defeated in Syria and eliminated from all its havens in Iraq, thanks to the Trump administration’s decision to equip the largely Kurdish militia fighting ISIS in Syria and give U.S. ground commanders greater latitude to direct operations. All the while, Trump has continued the Obama doctrine of avoiding large-scale conventional wars in the Middle East and has succeeded where his predecessor failed in enforcing a real red line against Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas in Syria by launching targeted air strikes in response. In North Korea, Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” has cut the country’s international payments by half, forcing Kim Jong Un to realize that his only choice is to negotiate.

On the domestic front, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent in May, a level not seen since the heady days of the dot-com boom—with unemployment at an all-time low among African Americans; at or near multidecade lows among Hispanics, teenagers, and those with less than a high school education; and at a 65-year low among women in the labor force. Meanwhile, on Trump’s watch, the stock market and consumer confidence have hit all-time highs, the number of mortgage applications for new homes has reached a seven-year high, and gas prices have fallen to a 12-year low. Finally, with Trump pledging to bring to an end the era in which “our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own,” illegal immigration was reduced by 38 percent from November 2016 to November 2017, and in April 2017, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded 15,766 apprehensions at the southwestern border—the lowest in at least 17 years.

As his critics charge, Trump does reject many of the core tenets of the liberal international order, the sprawling and multifaceted system that the United States and its allies built and have supported for seven decades. Questioning the very fabric of international cooperation, he has assaulted the world trading system, reduced funding for the UN, denounced NATO, threatened to end multilateral trade agreements, called for Russia’s readmission to the G-7, and scoffed at attempts to address global challenges such as climate change. But despite what the crowd of globalists at Davos might say, these policies should be welcomed, not feared. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relations marks a United States less interested in managing its long-term relationships than in making gains on short-term deals. Trump has sent the message that the United States will now look after its own interests, narrowly defined, not the interests of the so-called global community, even at the expense of long-standing allies.

This worldview is fundamentally realist in nature. On the campaign trail and in office, Trump has argued that the United States needs its allies to share responsibility for their own defense. He has also called for better trade deals to level a playing field tilted against American businesses and workers and to protect domestic manufacturing industries from currency manipulation. He is an economic nationalist at heart. He believes that political factors should determine economic relations, that globalization does not foster harmony among states, and that economic interdependence increases national vulnerability. He has also argued that the state should intervene when the interests of domestic actors diverge from its own—for example, when he called for a boycott against Apple until the company helped the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the terrorists who carried out the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California.

This realist worldview is not only legitimate but also resonates with American voters, who rightly recognize that the United States is no longer inhabiting the unipolar world it did since the end of the Cold War; instead, it is living in a more multipolar one, with greater competition. Trump is merely shedding shibboleths and seeing international politics for what it is and has always been: a highly competitive realm populated by self-interested states concerned with their own security and economic welfare. Trump’s “America first” agenda is radical only in the sense that it seeks to promote the interests of the United States above all...

Still more.

Hillary Clinton Incites Violence Against Republicans (VIDEO)

I just wish this woman would go away and retire from public life. And I mean permanent retirement. Not even those twilight years interviews with Barbara Walters (or whoever's taken Ms. Barbara's place; Elizabeth Vargas? Who knows?)

In any case, she's detestable. I dislike her more every time she opens her yap.

At Twitchy, "‘AntiFa Gam Gam’? Nothing to see here, just Hillary Clinton inciting violence against Republicans [video]."

And watch:

Time for Truth

From VDH, at RCP, "The Truth Will Set Us All Free."

Read this now. https://t.co/bQ7Ghjcag8

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) August 31, 2018