White House warns: U.S. could use its 'nuclear capability' if North Korea attacks an ally

Via Billy

The White House warned North Korea that any attack on American allies or territory could result in a nuclear weapon being used on the country.

President Trump spoke with Japanese Prime minister Shinzo Abe for the second time this weekend on Sunday and told him the United States would back Japan up in case of any attack from North Korea.

The statement came after Trump sent Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to tell reporters Trump had been briefed on all options to respond to North Korea's sixth nuclear test, said to be a hydrogen bomb.

Mattis said the United States has the ability to "annihilate" North Korea, but doesn't want to and will continue to use diplomatic means to de-escalate the situation.

More @ Washington Examiner

Reconstruction

 

Reconstruction. There is no part of American history in which what is taught these days is more distorted by false assumptions and assertions. For leftists, Reconstruction can be celebrated as a high point of revolutionary change and egalitarian forward thrust in American history. This interpretation is untrue in the terms in which they portray it, but that is the dominant, indeed only mainstream view today. This is the part of American history, then, that is most in need of honest understanding. You will be getting a lot of that this week. In fact, the scholars gathered here have things to teach about Reconstruction, both old things and new things, that cannot be heard anywhere else in the whole vast apparatus of American education.

First, the term “Reconstruction.” It does not refer to rebuilding.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Trump Rolls Back Onerous Diversity Regs

Via Billy

 

The Trump administration blocked Obama-era rules that would have saddled employers with hundreds of millions of dollars in compliance costs and increased paperwork loads by millions of hours each year.

The Office of Management and Budget instructed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to shelve a rule change that would have required employers to submit 20 times as much data to the agency as previously required. The Obama administration called for the new standards, which would have affected 61,000 American companies with more than 100 workers and federal contractors with more than 50 workers, to demonstrate his commitment to closing the much-disputed "gender wage gap." Obama's EEOC called for businesses to provide 3,660 different data points about each employee and their pay structure, up from the 188 points.

More @ The Washington Free Beacon

Antifa opening eyes and making new conservatives

Via Billy

The events a week ago in Berkeley, California are sinking in, and maybe opening a few more minds.  Police there stood aside allowed hundreds of uniformed, masked, armed-with-clubs thugs beat-up a handful of harmless free speech and anti-Marxist demonstrators. All of this recorded on countless cell phones. Reporters, including a local TV anchor, were attacked and intimidated along with other helpless people surrounded by the club-wielding militia.

Neoneocon has a fascinating example of one such person undergoing political change, who has posted a YouTube video:

More @ American Thinker

Herbert Hoover's lesson for today's America

Via Billy

It is a testimony to the promise of our country to stand inside the home of young Herbert Hoover. The scope of where the Hoover family began, lived and ended each day can be observed in the blink of an eye.

One room served as a bedroom for the future president along with his parents and two siblings. The other room was their living room, dining room, and kitchen. The rooms are literally side-by-side.

They had little, they soon had less, yet Hoover persisted.

"This cottage where I was born is physical proof of the unbounded opportunity of American life," Hoover once wrote.

It's hard to disagree.

Few today know much about the poor little Quaker boy who was orphaned at age nine, separated from his siblings, and sent off to Oregon to be raised by an uncle; most students learn in school that he was America's president when the stock market crashed in 1929 and that he failed to right the country as it slipped, then fell, into the Great Depression.

More @ Washington Examiner

Steven Mnuchin proposes cutting off 'all trade' with countries that do business with North Korea

Via Billy

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin promised to consider a sanctions package that may cut off "all trade and all other business" with North Korea's trading partners after North Korea's latest nuclear test, saying the rogue country's behavior is "unacceptable."

"We are going to strongly consider everything at this point and, again, I will draft a package for [President Trump's] strong consideration that would go as far as cutting off all trade and other business," Mnuchin said in response to whether a package would also censure Chinese financial institutions and companies on "Fox News Sunday."

"This behavior is unacceptable, and if countries want to do business with the United States, they obviously will be working with our allies and others to cut off North Korea economically."

President Trump later backed up Mnuchin's statement in a tweet.

More @ Washington Examiner

Albany Confederate statue has long history

Via Billy

 

 

Albany statue was erected as reminder of tremendous loss of life during Civil War

As Civil War monuments and memorials across the country continue to be vandalized, defaced or damaged by people/protesters moved by strong personal convictions, racial motivations, political agendas or simply by an ability to be provocatively offended by social conventions and societal norms that existed, in all their ugliness, more than 152 years ago, The Albany Herald looked into the history of a Confederate monument that once was located in downtown Albany.

Long moved from downtown, today the monument sits as the centerpiece of Confederate Memorial Park on Philema Road.

More @ Albany Herald

Trump complained he’s reading fewer articles from right-wing sites

 

 

Get rid of Kelly.

White House chief of staff John Kelly has severely cut down on the number of news articles President Trump receives from conservative-leaning and right-wing news organizations, according to a new report.

The New York Times reported Friday that Kelly has restricted what information ends up in Trump’s daily digest of articles. Because Trump does not have an Internet browser on his phone and doesn’t use a computer, he relies on hard copies of news articles.

But after a few weeks of Kelly in the chief of staff role, Trump reportedly complained to a friend about the lack of articles from right-wing websites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, according to The Times.

More @ The Hill

1975: Thais Wouldn't allow US to retrieve SVAF F5's

Via Quan Nguyen Thanh

 

 

So much for our "ally" who sent troops to join us in the fight.

"The Thais would not let us fly the F-5s off the base as they owned it and we were just paying a lease. The USS Midway was stationed off the coast and they tried hoisting them out to the carrier. It didn't work very well, we dropped a few in the ocean and finally gave up. So, to answer your question, yes the Thais ended up with most of the aircraft."
Photo and caption by Bob Phillips.

Why a Mueller-Schneiderman team on Russia could be good news for Trump

Via Billy

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's reported involvement in the Justice Department's ongoing Russia probe could give new ammunition to critics of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is aggressively investigating former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Schneiderman and Trump first crossed paths in 2010, when the former Democratic state senator solicited a donation from Manhattan's iconic real estate mogul during his bid for attorney general.

After defeating his Republican opponent, Schneiderman announced that he would press forward with a case against Trump's now-defunct online college, frustrating the wealthy New York businessman who had contributed $12,500 to his campaign.

Two years into his tenure as attorney general, Schneiderman sued Trump for fraud, seeking millions of dollars in restitution for former students who claimed they were swindled by Trump University.

Trump agreed to a $25 million settlement just days after he won the 2016 election, but not before his campaign spokesman had blasted Schneiderman as a "partisan hack who has turned a blind eye to the Clinton Foundation for years."

More @ Washington Examiner

Standoff brews between Senate, FBI over Trump dossier

Via Billy

Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley and the committee's ranking Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, want to interview two high-ranking FBI officials about some key aspects of the bureau's role in the Trump-Russia investigation -- the Trump dossier, the firing of James Comey, and more. But the FBI doesn't want those officials to talk -- even though the Judiciary Committee has oversight responsibility for the FBI, and even though the request is bipartisan, and even though there appears to be no conflict with the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation conducted by special prosecutor Robert Mueller.

A standoff could be developing.

It began on July 11, when Grassley and Feinstein wrote letters to James Rybicki, who was Director Comey's chief of staff, and Carl Ghattas, head of the bureau's national security branch. "The committee is investigating the removal of FBI Director James Comey, Russian interference in the 2016 election, and allegations of improper interference in law enforcement investigations," the chairman and ranking member wrote. "Please make yourself available for a transcribed interview during the week of July 24, 2017."

More @ Washington Examiner

Trump: North Korea's words, actions 'hostile and dangerous' to US

Via Billy

President Trump early Sunday characterized North Korea's actions as "hostile and dangerous to the United States" after Pyongyang's latest test of a nuclear weapon.

"North Korea has conducted a major Nuclear Test," he tweeted.

"Their words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States," he added.
"North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success."

 North Korean state television earlier in the day described a test of a miniaturized hydrogen bomb capable of fitting on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) as a "perfect success" and a "meaningful" step forward.

More @ The Hill

Every Cop Involved in the Arrest of This Utah Nurse for Refusing to (Illegally) Draw a Patient’s Blood Needs to Be Fired (UPDATED)

Via comment by Papa on Papa has left a new comment on your post Shock Footage: Police Drag and arrest Nurse Attemp...

The Supreme Court decision forbidding unwarranted blood collection is a year old.

Shall we ease into our Labor Day weekend with an absolutely repulsive video of a police detective abusing his authority against a completely innocent person for no real justifiable reason? Oh, why not?

Behold, Salt Lake City Police Det. Jeff Payne arresting Nurse Alex Wubbels in July for refusing to violate an unconscious—comatose, actually—man's rights by drawing his blood for the police without any sort of warrant whatsoever.

 What Payne did here is patently, inescapably wrong in just about every possible way. Just one year ago the Supreme Court ruled that police must get a warrant or consent in order to draw a person's blood. It's utterly inconceivable that Payne, who is a trained phlebotomist with the police, did not know this. According to coverage from the Salt Lake Tribune, Payne acknowledged that he didn't have probable cause to get a warrant, but nevertheless insisted he had the authority to demand Wubbels draw blood.

More @ Reason

It Wasn’t Comey’s Decision to Exonerate Hillary – It Was Obama’s

Via John "While we may not think of Trump as naive or as an "innocent"........but when compared with such vicious evil-doers as Obama and the Clinton Crime Family, Trump is virtually a babe in the woods......and it shows. He needs to call them out, highlight their crimes, expose their evil nature for even the most gullible of liberals to see, all of it."

~ J....
"Everyone is equal under our laws, right?   Only some people are a lot more 'equal'.  It's hard for me to fathom how these criminals can get away with what they do. Al Capone is, no doubt, extremely jealous of the way the clintons and their fellow criminals get away with just about anything they want. The swamp still harbors the snakes it always has and there is no sign that's really changing much, at least not so far."
--J

*************************

 

The thing to understand, what has always been the most important thing to understand, is that Jim Comey was out in front, but he was not calling the shots. On the right, the commentariat is in full-throttle outrage over the revelation that former FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. The news appears in a letter written to new FBI Director Christopher Wray by two senior Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Lindsey Graham. Pundits and the Trump administration are shrieking because this indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

 

More @ NRO