CNN claims to have confirmed some of the fake news Russian dossier
We all remember the fake news story Buzzfeed and CNN ran a short time ago about a Russian dossier–which Buzzfeed admitted when released it was not confirmed–which supposedly contained very damaging information about Donald Trump, including what he allegedly paid a Russian prostitute to do on a bed he believed Barack Obama once slept in.
Well CNN is back at it again in an article entitled US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russian dossier. Here is more:
For the first time, US investigators say they have corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35-page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent, multiple current and former US law enforcement and intelligence officials tell CNN.
Between the title of the article and the first paragraph of the story it would like like on the surface as if this was going to be very damaging for Donald Trump but then the story continues thusly:
Donald Trump will not appeal travel ban suit to the Supreme Court, will issue new orders next week
It is now being reported in this story that Donald Trump will not appeal the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal decision which upheld the temporary restraining order on the President’s travel ban. Here is more:
The Trump administration is not currently planning to appeal a temporary hold on his travel ban to the Supreme Court, a White House official said Friday.
But the White House said it will forge ahead on the broader battle against a lawsuit challenging the executive order.
The administration plans to continue its defense of the order on the merits, which is playing out in a Seattle-based federal district court, the official said.
Donald Trump has apparently decided to defend the travel ban in the Seattle court case instead. With the Supreme Court likely to tie on the issue 4-4 the restraining order would have remained in place while the lawsuit played out anyway so this seems like the proper way to go–why waste more time on a battle which does not seem to be winnable?
There are many people who have concerns about the potential conflicts of interest that might arise due to Donald Trump’s business ventures. Of course the left did not care about Hillary Clinton’s conflicts of interests while she was running for President so this is more than a little hypocritical but still the problem does exist so we must put aside the hypocrisy to delve into this post. After all we would also be hypocritical if we ignored this story after we attacked Hillary Clinton’s conflicts of interest while she Secretary of State and the potential that it would continue if she won the Presidency.
Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News earlier today and while apparently in her official capacity as councilor to Donald Trump she used the opportunity to endorse Ivanka Trump’s clothing line, offering what she called “a free commercial.”
Top Republicans discuss a carbon tax with the White House
We thought when Donald Trump won the election that the talk about cap and trade and carbon taxes were dead issues, but apparently they are not because according to this story top Republicans and business leaders are trying to convince the administration a carbon tax is the way to go in return for regulatory cuts.
Here is more:
A group of prominent Republicans and business leaders pitched a tax on carbon dioxide to top White House aides Wednesday, selling the plan as an economic win that could drive job growth and yield environmental dividends too.
Former Secretary of State James Baker and other members of the new “Climate Leadership Council” pressed the case in a 45-minute meeting in the Roosevelt Room that included President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser Gary Cohn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and senior aide Kellyanne Conway.
“The signs were very encouraging,” Ted Halstead, who founded the council, said after the meeting. “Two weeks into this new administration, we have positioned our solution as the most promising climate solution — if they want to go there.”
And they had a brief meeting with Mike Pence:
In an attempt to prove the lie that 97% of all scientists believe that global warming is not only real but also man-made a couple of controversies have come to light. Or rather they should have come to light but they were ignored by the mainstream media and the global warming alarmists. There was Climategate in which the IPCC and colleges were fudging the global temperatures in order to “hide the decline” and there was the fact that NASA was changing historical global temperatures to exaggerate the impact of global warming and hide the global warming pause.
There were also rumors that NOAA was also manipulating the data and now according to a whistle-blower we have confirmation NOAA manipulated the data prior to the United Nations conference on global warming back in 2015.
Here is more:
Sunday, February 5th open thread: ‘Stressed Out’
Here is the open thread for Sunday, February 5th. Please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues arise during the course of the day. Nothing is off-topic here.
Last week we discussed 9 stories, did you miss any of them? If so there is an easy way to make sure it does not happen again. I understand that all of you are busy and cannot always find the time to check the blog for updates so why not subscribe to America’s Watchtower and receive email updates whenever I write a new post? That is the easiest way to follow the blog to ensure you never miss another post.
In addition to subscribing you can also follow America’s Watchtower on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the links on the right. But you will get more than that for I often post links to articles I probably will not be writing about so it is a great way to keep up with what is happening.
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Here is a unique duo that calls themselves Twenty One Pilots performing their hit single “Stressed Out” live last year. For more information on this one of a kind act check out this story and you will learn the reason behind the dark makeup on the singer’s hands and neck as well as the subtle Christian message behind many of their songs.
I think my favorite lyric from Twenty One Pilots comes from the song “Car Radio.” In that song he sings about his car radio being stolen and because of this he has no distraction and is forced into thinking: “There are things we can do but from the things that work there are only two. And from the two that we choose to do peace will win and fear will lose, it is faith and there’s sleep.We need to pick one please because faith is to be awake, and to be awake is for us to think, and for us to think is to be alive. And I will try with every rhyme to come across like I am dying to let you know you need to try to think.”
frui diem
Politico: ‘Donald Trump might be more popular than you think’
Many of us on the right came to the conclusion long ago that the mainstream media was using polls on various issues not to gauge public opinion, but rather to influence public opinion and drive the liberal narrative by trying to convince the American people into what they should believe by telling us what the majority of the American people think, or more accurately, how the mainstream media wanted to portray what the majority of the American people are thinking.
The most recent and glaring example of this was the polls leading up to last November’s Presidential election: we were told that Hillary Clinton was headed to a landslide victory and that Donald Trump did not stand a chance to become the next President of the United States.
The polls were wrong because they were based on the national popular vote and not the Electoral College and this was done purposely in an attempt to stifle the conservative vote. Why go to the polls for a lost cause?
But the cause was not lost because the polling system was intentionally flawed and conservative voters realized what the game was. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, as predicted, but Donald Trump won the votes which counted because the voters were no longer listening to the mainstream media and they realized the popular vote means nothing. If Hillary Clinton realized this and campaigned properly perhaps she would be the President but she bought into the flawed polls and assumed she was the heir apparent…
Federal Judge blocks Donald Trump’s travel ban
Last night a Federal Judge who also happens to be a Bush appointee, James Robart, issued a temporary restraining order and called for an immediate halt to Donald Trump’s executive travel ban.
Here is more:
A federal judge in Seattle placed a nationwide temporary restraining order on President Trump’s travel ban after the executive order was challenged by the Washington state attorney general.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed the challenge to the executive order, signed last Friday, on Monday, making Washington the first state to take the order to court. Ferguson charged that the executive order blocking refugees and temporarily stopping entrance into the United States from seven Muslim-majority nations violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, due process in the Fifth Amendment, and the the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.
U.S. District Court Senior Judge James L. Robart, a George W. Bush appointee, found that Washington state met certain standards of their case — including a likelihood that their lawsuit could succeed — to temporarily block the order.
Robart ordered federal officials to stop enforcing the 90-block on visitors from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and Yemen. He also ordered a halt to the suspension of the refugee admissions program, along with the section of the executive order giving religious minorities preference in the refugee process and a section of the order stating “the entry of nationals of Syria as refugees is detrimental to the interests of the United States” and freezing admissions indefinitely. The ruling also suspends a provision that gives the secretaries of State and Homeland Security case-by-case discretion to rule on individual refugees while the ban is in place.
The temporary restraining order “is granted on a nationwide basis,” Robart wrote, and prohibits enforcement of those executive order provisions “at all United States borders and ports of entry pending further orders from this court.” The parties will be back in court on Monday
Needless to say the Trump administration is going to appeal the decision:
Republicans can break a Supreme Court filibuster without using the so-called ‘nuclear option’
We all know what the so-called “nuclear option” is so I will not go into it here but I will say I call it so-called because when Harry Reid and the Democrats used it they rebranded it as the “Constitutional option” but now it has been unbranded and is once again the “nuclear option” because the Republicans have the power to invoke it.
Donald Trump has told Mitch McConnell to invoke the so-called nuclear option if the Democrats try to filibuster Neil Gorsuch but according to this story the Republicans can break the filibuster without it.
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