Radio America Online News Bureau

News & Politics

Cuomo & American Greatness, Warren’s Terrifying Economic Plan, Swalwell 2020?

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America react to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo slamming President Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan by saying “it was never that great.”  So what do most on the left really believe?  They also shudder at Elizabeth Warren’s plan to make any company earning more than a billion dollars in revenue each year to get permission to operate from the federal government and allow the government to dictate compensation, personnel policies, and who can be on the board of directors.  And while David remembers his own consideration of a 2016 presidential run, they marvel that people like California Rep. Eric Swalwell are seriously considering a 2020 bid.

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Coalition Urges McConnell to Confirm Trump Judicial Nominees

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While conservatives and liberals prepare for the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a coalition of conservative legal voices are pleading with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to brush aside stalling tactics from Democrats and confirm a major backlog of judicial nominees before Kavanaugh’s hearings next month.

Led by Rob Henneke of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the coalition sent a letter urging McConnell to change the rules if necessary to allow up or down votes in 152 district and appellate court nominees.

“The quality of the pending nominees and confirmed judges is outstanding. The confirmation of constitutionalist judges to these lifetime appointments will impact our nation for decades to come and will be the lasting legacy of this period in history,” states the letter.

Henneke says the Senate needs to buckle down and get these nominees across the finish line.

“There is a backlog.  It is growing every day, and it’s presenting a problem as far as the judiciary being able to get it’s job done,” said Henneke.

The nominees have all had confirmation hearings and committee votes, but Democrats are using Senate rules to grind the confirmation process to a halt.  Henneke says McConnell must be willing to make rule changes, starting with the 30-hour rule to debate each nominee.

“The Democrats are claiming that 30 hours for every nominee.  They’re not actually talking about the nominee.  There’s nobody on the Senate floor.  They’re just forcing that clock to run for each and every single nominee to slow down the process,” said Henneke, who has two ideas to trump the Democrats’ strategy.

“One is to shorten the period of time from 30 hours to a much more reasonable period of time and then to actually require and then to actually require there to be debate or discussion about a particular nominee or that time period would be waived or would expire,” said Henneke.

McConnell cancelled some of the August recess.  Lawmakers returned to Washington Wednesday and plan to tackle two nominations this week.  Henneke says they need to do better.  He wants to see Republicans willing to put in the long hours to “clear the deck” of these stalled nominations.

“The Senate needs to put more hours into this process.  We would encourage the Senate to be working 24/7 to clear the deck and to confirm all of the pending nominees.  That may require later hours and more days for the Senate to be in session,” said Henneke, who says McConnell needs to stop considering rule changes and just implement them.

“The threats need to turn into action and we need our Senate leadership and Leader McConnell to impose what he can do to get the job done,” said Henneke.

He says getting all 152 confirmed would have a major impact on the federal judiciary.

“I think it would be transformative in putting constitutional, rule of law jurists on the bench who will decide cases, not based on partisanship or policy but on what the law says and what the United States Constitution says, which is what the role of the judiciary is and should be,” said Henneke.

He says allowing the backlog to persist would shift from frustrating to disastrous if Democrats win the majority in the midterm elections.

“They don’t get confirmed, and we lose this opportunity for now and for generations to come to have reform of the federal judiciary that’s going to uphold the Constitution and defend the rule of law and that would be catastrophic for the future of our country,” said Henneke.

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Phillips vs. Colorado Again, Horrific Priest Abuse & Cover-up, Economics of Abortion

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America take on three heavy topics, starting with Colorado baker Jack Phillips now having a powerful case of discrimination against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission after the commission ruled Phillips had violated the rights of a transgender lawyer for not customizing a cake for their gender transition or one depicting Satan engaged in a sex act.  They also hammer the Catholic church in Pennsylvania over the new grand jury report that reveals more than 3oo priests horrifically abusing more than a thousand children over the decades and the despicable lengths officials in the church went to in order to silence accusers and keep the priests in active ministry.  And they shred Chelsea Clinton’s absurd contention that abortion has been great for the economy because it allows more women to stay in the workforce.

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D’Souza Talks Antifa, Trump & Midterms

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Author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza says the violent “anti-fascist” protesters are the real fascists, that white nationalism is rooted on the left, and that Republican operatives urging conservatives to vote for Democrats this year as a check on President Trump “need to have their heads examined.”

D’Souza’s latest project is “Death of A Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party.”  It seeks to draw parallels from the outrage following the election of President Trump to the volcanic opposition to the 1860 victory of Abraham Lincoln.

This past weekend, Antifa protesters took to the streets of Charlottesville and Washington and spent most of their time hurling epithets at police and the media.  D’Souza says Antifa might claim to be opposing fascism but they clearly embody what they say they hate.

“They’re posing as anti-fascists.  Of course they dress like fascists.  They act like fascists.  They have the same intolerance as fascism.  And let’s notice that their target isn’t fascists.  When you’re targeting cops and Republicans and patriots and Christians, you’re actually not targeting fascists but anti-fascists.

“So we have an amazing situation in which the fascists – Antifa – are pretending to be anti-fascists and targeting anti-fascists, whom they claim are fascists,” said D’Souza

So why does the far left have a compulsion towards violence?

“Their view is that since Trump is like Hitler circa 1933, they are fully justified in using, as they say, any means necessary to eject him, including illegal means, including violence,” said D’Souza, who also asserts that fascism is a far left ideology that academic liberals twisted to blur the coziness between the American Democrats and fascist leaders before World War II.

“Fascism is properly defined as the ideology of the centralized state, when you have the state organizing and running the private economy, when you have the states running the lives of citizens.  That’s fascism.  That’s how Mussolini understood it.  That’s how Hitler understood it,” said D’Souza.

Antifa took to the streets to counter a planned rally by white nationalists who never showed up.  The tension between the two sides is often characterized by the media as right versus left.  D’Souza says that’s wrong because both are on the left.  He says this is made clear as he interviews white nationalist figures Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer in “Death of A Nation.”

“These guys actually have backgrounds in the left.  They’re not right wingers and yet the media doesn’t report this.  Why?  Because they’re trying to pin the fascist and racist tail on the Republican elephant,” said D’Souza.

D’Souza says white nationalism is a “spent force” that usually cannot muster more than a few dozen people to events that are then dwarfed by counterprotesters.  But if white nationalists are of the the left, why did so many openly endorse President Trump in 2016?

D’Souza says it was their ticket to short-term relevance.

“They call (the rally) ‘Unite the Right’ because they want to feed the left wing narrative that they are somehow representative of Trump and this somehow gives them an inflated notoriety.  In exchange, what they’re giving the left is that they’re confirming and corroborating the left’s narrative,” said D’Souza.

Liberal protesters take to the streets en masse in opposition to most Republican presidents but D’Souza says it’s worse this time because Trump fights back.

“Trump realizes that he’s in a big fight.  The Left does not hold back.  The traditional Republican strategy of going under your desk or running for the exit doesn’t really work in this situation,” said D’Souza.

He says the next big fight is in the the midterm elections.  D’Souza says Democrats already have several racial and ethnic groups dependent upon government to supply what they need to exist and handing them the majority means they will only look to expand what he calls “plantation politics.”

“They’d love to have everybody in this position of ethnically-enforced dependence.  It’s actually a horrible system and it would make this a horrible country, which is why we have to work really hard to prevent that nightmare from becoming a reality,” said D’Souza.

Several anti-Trump Republican operatives like Michael Gerson and Steve Schmidt are urging conservatives to vote for Democrats under the logic that the GOP has been corrupted by Trump and must be destroyed so it can be rebuilt again.

D’Souza rejects that entirely.

“These people literally need to have their heads examined,” he said.  “They’re talking absolute nonsense and should be completely ignored.”

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Corruption Crackdown, 9th Circus on Guns, Vote Dem to Fix GOP?

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America applaud the West Virginia legislature for impeaching four of the state’s five state supreme court justices for gross mismanagement of taxpayer dollars.  They also roll their eyes as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upholds a California law requiring any guns subsequently purchased in the state must include features that don’t actually exist.  And they unload on “conservatives” from Michael Gerson to Steve Schmidt, who contend that conservatives need to vote for Democrats because supposedly the only way to save the Republican Party is to burn it to the ground.

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Omarosa Taping ‘A Serious Breach’

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Former Trump administration staffer and former reality television star Omarosa Manigault Newman is releasing clips of secret recordings she allegedly made in the most sensitive areas of the White House, and a former White House information official says that could mean big trouble.

Manigault Newman is publicizing the conversations she had with President Trump and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly from around the time she was fired from the administration.  She says the discussion with Kelly took place in the White House Situation Room, which is designated as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” or SCIF, pronounced “skiff.”

“If this turns out to be true that a recording device was in the White House Situation Room, of all places, that would be an incredibly serious breach of not only trust but a breach of a classified facility on a level that is very, very serious,” said Theresa Payton, who served as White House Chief Information Officer in the George W. Bush administration.  She is now CEO at Fortalice Solutions, a cybersecurity consulting firm.

Payton says there are severe consequences for flouting protocol in these facilities.

“This is considered a grave security breach so there’s a lot of different actions that could choose to take.  Some of those actions that they could entertain are revoking a security clearance, recommending an individual to not clear again.

“They could take legal action.  That’s typically rare unless secrets were sold to the adversary or a real grave breach happened,” said Payton.

She says it is understood by anyone with security clearance that electronic devices have no place in a SCIF.

“Classified conversations, classified phone calls, classified documents are handled within that facility.  Often times, that facility has no windows.  There’s a series of doors that you have to punch in codes and slide cards into.  There’s a whole sense of protocol.  You can’t accidentally trip into a conference room that’s a SCIF,” said Payton.

Outside the SCIF are usually a series of lockers or storage boxes for people entering the SCIF to leave all electronic devices.

“You never know if those devices are compromised and could be turned into listening and recording devices that could be used by the adversary and/or if they would potentially be connecting to other devices that could be in the room that have been cleared to be in the room for phone calls or video conferences,” said Payton.

The list of banned items includes smartphones, laptops, and tablets but also items like fitness trackers.

There are signs posted prominently outside the SCIF for people to unload their devices but for staff there is frisking or wanding involved.  They are given multiple classes on the proper handling of classified informationand are expected to honor their promises to follow protocols.

“You’re somewhat on the honor system because you are a trained individual and you signed a document saying, “I understand the training.  I understand the law and I will follow it.’  Nobody’s frisking you because they expect you to because they expect you to implement the training you were given and to honor the agreement that you signed,” said Payton.

Payton adds that guests to the White House and other sensitive facilities are put through a number of detectors and instructed to hand over their electronic devices before entering a SCIF but she says there are rarely pat downs for those people either.

She says the fight against cybercrime is far more complicated than when she served in the White House and says it is a constant challenge to stay ahead of people who wish to do far more harm than Omarosa.

“As we improve the defenses at the White House, the adversary realized, ‘This is getting hard.’  And they don’t suddenly say, ‘This is so hard, I should just go be a good person and bake pies for my neighbor.’  They up their game.

“It’s almost like an arms race if you will on the cybersecurity side to stay one step ahead of the adversary,” said Payton.

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White Nationalists Wither, Antifa Violence Largely Ignored, Omarosa vs. Trump

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David French of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are encouraged to see a pathetic turnout at the white nationalist rally in Washington D.C. on Sunday, and they hope the media will stop giving airtime to this fringe group.  They also call on the media to cover the violence of the leftist protest group Antifa the same way they cover the alt-right.  And they believe President Donald Trump hired Omarosa Manigault for the wrong reason– because she said “GREAT” things about him– which led to the fallout where she now calls him a racist.

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Liberal Policies Makes Wildfires Much Worse

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Firefighters spent much of the past week battling the largest wildfire in California history, but an environmental policy expert says things are not getting worse because of climate change but because California is dry and liberal forest policies are making fires bigger, making the air quality worse, and putting lives and homes in danger.

Earlier this week, California officials declared the Mendocino Complex fire the largest in state history, responsible for charring tens of thousands of acres.  Other fires threaten lives and property elsewhere in the state.

Environmental activists claim that human activity is leading to a more volatile climate that makes hurricanes more intense, heatwaves and droughts more intense and snowfalls deeper.

But what do the facts show?

“Climate does play a role in all of this, but not in a way that environmentalists would have you believe,” said Dr. Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Cohen says the California climate is always conducive for wildfires.

“The climate in California is arid.  It always has been and always will be.  At times it is subject to drought and sometimes even extreme droughts.  California has recently recovered from an extreme drought,” said Cohen, noting the drought was rates the eighth worst in the past century.

But Cohen says the arid nature of the state is only one major factor in the huge fires.

“This dry climate is exacerbated by strong winds.  There are strong winds in southern California – the infamous Santa Anna winds – and strong winds in northern California.  It is not uncommon for these winds to gust up to 60 or 70 miles per hour,” said Cohen.

He also points out the fires find plenty of additional fuel thanks to counterproductive environmental policies.

“California has a lot of public land, federal land and state land, and there are strict restrictions on a lot of that regarding logging and even removal of dead and diseased trees.

“You have tinderboxes brought to you courtesy of either the federal government, or the state government, or – tragically in some cases – both,” said Cohen.

Cohen adds that by bending over backwards on behalf of the environment, liberals are actually harming it.

“Fires are actually a normal and perfectly healthy way of dealing with overgrown forests, but when those forests are mismanaged as U.S. Forest Service land has been mismanaged, not for years but for decades with overgrown forests, these forests are an open invitation to the tragic wildfires that we’re seeing here now,” said Cohen.

The impact is not limited to the forests.  California’s already fragile air quality also suffers.

“You can tighten up the Clean Air act as much as you wish, but once you have these forest fires taking off the way they are out West, the quality of air suffers.  It is absolutely filthy.  You would think environmentalists would be deeply disturbed by this.  As a matter of fact, they show no signs of doing so whatsoever,” said Cohen.

Cohen says liberal policies are also why we see families and homes devastated in these fires.  Cohen says liberal policies consistently drive the cost of living higher and higher in big cities from San Francisco to Los Angeles to San Diego.  That forces middle class families into areas of the state far more prone to the fires.

According to Cohen, the Healthy Forest Initiative in the George W. Bush administration helped to move things in the right direction by allowing some thinning of forests on federal lands, but he says reforms need to go further.

“[They need to] make it easier for Forest Service personnel to thin trees that they know should be removed so that when the next wildfire comes along it will not enter a tinderbox and devastate thousands upon thousands of acres of land,” said Cohen.

As for the environmentalists, Cohen says they won’t allow any common sense intervention in the forests, despite the impact fires are having on the air and land.

“Their reaction is very simple.  Leave it alone.  Don’t harm nature.  Don’t interfere.  Let nature take its course.  That’s as far as they are willing to go.

“It’s an interesting way of looking at the world, in which you place a higher value on a nature that really doesn’t exist in a way in which they mean it at the expense of human beings who are caught up in the grotesque mismanagement of nature,” said Cohen.

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Hamas Attacks Proves Iran in Turmoil

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Middle East tensions are heating up again as Israel mounts a military response to nearly 200 Hamas rockets fired into Israel, but a Reagan-era Pentagon official says the real headline here is that the benefactors of Hamas are rattled.

“I think it’s because its patron, Iran, is in trouble.  The Iranians are making a concerted effort, I think, to attack Israel while they can,” said Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney, who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.

“The regime, the mullah-ocracy if you will, is increasingly facing pressure from its own people, among others things, to stop supporting Hamas and for that matter Bashar Assad in Syria and Hezbollah,” added Gaffney.

Instability has arisen in Iran before, most notably in the 2009 Green Revolution against the mullahs and then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after clearly rigged elections.

But Gaffney says the current protests are unlike anything we’ve seen before.

“What seems to be different about what’s happening now is that it’s not just certain strata of society that are opposing the government in a visible, public way, as was true in the Green Revolution.

“You have masses of people from across the demographic, political, economic spectrum, many of whom are facing the fact that there’s no longer any water for them to drink.  There’s no employment opportunities.  They’re fleeing their cities and towns and going elsewhere in search of basic necessities,” said Gaffney.

The Israeli military has already carried out airstrikes against Hamas targets in Gaza after 180 rockets were fired into Israel.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ordering “strong action” in retaliation as well.

Gaffney says it’s a complicated issue for Israel.  On the one hand, Netanyahu cannot allow his country to be attacked without a fierce response.  At the same time, Hamas consistently embeds its military elements in civilian locations like hospitals and daycare centers.  When Israel attacks the military assets, Hamas and much of the world inevitably accuse it of carry out human rights atrocities.

But Gaffney says both sides need to walk a diplomatic tightrope.

“I think both sides are trying to walk that fine line.  The folks in Hamas understand that Israel can do very considerable harm to their infrastructure and operations.  On the other hand Israelis understand almost anything they do is going to be met with intense criticism by countries elsewhere,” said Gaffney.

The U.S. will be one of the few nations to defend Israel at the United Nations and elsewhere.  But Gaffney says President Trump can achieve greater stability in the Middle East by choking the economic life out of Iran and all of its proxies in the region.

Specifically, he implores Trump to keep up pressure through economic sanctions.  Earlier this week, the U.S. reimposed sanctions on items ranging from carpets to gold and from pistachios to automobiles and aircraft.  Another round of sanctions are scheduled for early November, which will target Iran banks and the oil industry.

“This is a moment when economic warfare against the regime and making very clear our desire to help the Iranian people and stand with them will have a very salutary effect,” said Gaffney.

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Media Buries Terrorist Compound Story, No Death in Single Payer? Nelson Cries Russia

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Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are baffled by the lack of media coverage about a New Mexico compound where starving children were reportedly being trained to carry out school shootings, and they find, once again, that the FBI responded slowly to compelling tips.  They also continue to find entertainment in socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is now claiming that medicare-for-all would eliminate funeral expenses.  And they wonder why Florida Sen. Bill Nelson had made claims about Russian interference in the election when no state official has heard anything about it.

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