RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-pre-emptive-smear-11556838611

Doing her best to raise the level of civility in Washington, Nancy Pelosi called William Barr a liar on Thursday. The House Speaker even accused the Attorney General of committing a “crime” when he testified to Congress about a memo he issued outlining the main conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.

The Speaker says the AG lied last month when he said he didn’t know what members of the special counsel’s team were referencing when they complained his memo didn’t accurately portray their findings. Mr. Barr said he didn’t know but that “they probably wanted more put out.” At most this is a small evasion. Mr. Barr had talked to Mr. Mueller, who had told him nothing in the AG’s summary was inaccurate and was unspecific in his objections beyond wanting more of his report released. The AG should have anticipated that Mr. Mueller’s March 27 letter to him would leak, but he didn’t lie about its contents.

The real reason for Mrs. Pelosi’s slander is what else Mr. Barr said the last time he was before Congress. He said that spying on a political campaign was a “big deal,” that he thought the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign in 2016, and that he intends to find out what happened and why. Democrats want to intimidate him to drop this or discredit him before he can release his findings.

https://www.axios.com/what-amazon-knows-about-you-2df28404-b975-4bc8-b2da-ac702e601cf8.html

Depending on how much you shop, watch and read with Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth may know more about you than any other company on earth.

The big picture: Naturally, they know what you’ve browsed or bought on their main service. They also know what you’ve asked Alexa, watched on Prime, and read on your Kindle. They know even more thanks to their ownership of Whole Foods, Ring, Eero, Twitch, Goodreads, IMDB and Audible.

Details: As with Google or Facebook, what Amazon knows depend on how much you rely on its services. That said, these days Amazon’s services are all around us. Here are some of the different types of information gathered by various Amazon services.

Amazon.com: Everything you have bought, plus the things you have just put in your cart, or searched for, or added to a wish list, or just browsed on Amazon (and Amazon-owned sites like Zappos and Diapers.com). And they know all of your addresses and the names and addresses of anyone you’ve ever sent stuff to.
Kindle (digital books) and Audible (audio books): All the books you’ve read, plus how far into the book you got. Amazon also knows which books you have browsed or sampled, and what passages you’ve highlighted in Kindle.
Fire tablets: Amazon’s tablets run a custom version of Android, providing the company with lots of data since it, not Google, powers the browsing and app store on the devices. For search, users have a choice of Bing, Yahoo, Google or DuckDuckGo.
Prime Video (streaming video): What you’ve watched, browsed and search for.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

It wasn’t so much the release of the Mueller report – that was expected, as were its contents, at least by people like me – it was the reaction of Democrats, and others with TDS (Trump Derangemnt Syndrome), which showed that hatred for the President supersedes concern for liberalism. The report stated that no member of the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to sway the 2016 election. The report also said that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges of obstruction against the President. A bill of clean health, presented by a man who was no fan of the President, should have been reason to move onto other issues:immigration, healthcare, defense, taxes and debt, even Socialism, if that’s what the people prefer – issues on which reasonable people disagree and that are of importance to us all, to our democracy. Instead, the left is playing to its extremist base – pursuing any avenue, including impeachment, that can hamper the President, in his quest for re-election. The Mueller investigation was initiated by Democrats, but it is a game on which there are two sides. In the next few weeks, Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to issue his summation of possible abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by top officials in the Obama Administration, and the role played by the Steele Dossier, which was compiled on behalf of Fusion GPS and paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the DNC. Personal hatred for Mr. Trump has been the driving force and the division it has caused will not soon be remedied.

That Robert Mueller was a biased investigator could be seen in his gratuitous observation that the special counsel’s report “does not exonerate” Mr. Trump. It is not the function of a prosecutor (or a special investigator) to “exonerate” anyone, or even offer opinions. His investigation was to gather facts and determine whether charges should be brought. If evidence of wrong-doing was there, an indictment from a Grand Jury would have been sought, or the impeachment process would have begun. If not, he should have said nothing. We live in a country under the rule of law, where an accused is innocent until proven guilty. With not enough evidence to charge Mr. Trump with a crime, Mr. Mueller’s job was done. Mr. Trump and his campaign did not collude with the Russians. It is odd that the mainstream media did not revel in the fact that while Russia attempted to interfere in our election, they were unsuccessful. That should have been reason to celebrate. It apparently was not. Calls for impeachment grew louder. The Pandora Box being opened by those like Elijah Cummings (D-MD), Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) will reverberate down through the years and will come to haunt those who believe a desired end justifies any means, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/bill-barr-robert-mueller-letter-dumb-scandal/
Is it already August? That’s usually the Beltway silly season appropriate for such a ridiculous non-scandal as the Great Bill Barr Summary of Findings Outrage of 2019.

As everyone knows, Bill Barr released a brief letter summarizing the top-line conclusions of the Mueller report shortly after he received it. Justice Department lawyers then worked with Mueller staff to make the appropriate redactions, after which the entire 400-page report was publicly released. Strangely enough, this process has become an obsession for Democrats and the press and the focus of endless conspiracy theories.

Now it has emerged that Robert Mueller wrote a letter to Barr complaining about his summary letter and public perceptions in the wake of it, leading to Democratic calls for Barr to resign or even get impeached.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Barr’s position was eminently reasonable. He wanted to get the basic verdict of the Mueller report out as quickly as possible, given the inherent interest in the question of whether the president of the United States had conspired with the Russians. He opposed the subsequent release of the summaries of the report, as suggested in Mueller’s letter, because he thought it better that the public get the entire report at once. Which it did. Democrats and the media are acting as if Barr engaged in some sort of cover-up, when he went further than required under the regulations to release all of the report with minimal redactions.

Even Mueller in a phone conversation with Barr didn’t complain that his summary of findings was inaccurate — Barr was careful to note that Mueller didn’t “exonerate” Trump on obstruction.

Barr is being accused of perjury in prior congressional testimony about his handling of his report. But Barr was typically terse and precise in his answers. In one exchange with Representative Charlie Crist (Fla., Any Party That Will Take Him), Barr said he didn’t know what were the specific complaints of unnamed Mueller staff criticizing his handling of the summary to the press. But he also offered, on his own initiative, that they probably wanted more material from the report made public, and he explained why he didn’t think it was a good idea to release summaries of the report.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/01/its-barrs-baby-now-not-muellers/

For nearly two years, Robert Mueller worked for the U.S. Department of Justice as a special counsel appointed by then-Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Despite the Left’s attempt to deify Robert Mueller as an omnipotent figure somehow unbound by the constraints of the Constitution and law, in reality, he was an employee of the Justice Department. He was a publicly-appointed prosecutor paid with U.S. tax dollars.

On March 22, 2019, Robert Mueller’s job ended when he submitted his long-awaited report to Attorney General William Barr. At that point, according to the federal regulation governing the appointment of a special counsel, Mueller’s task was over: “At the conclusion of the Special Counsel’s work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/01/clinton-projection-syndrome/

Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s massive report. She concluded of the report’s assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump’s words and actions that “any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”

Psychologists might call her claims “projection.” That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one’s own similar, if not often even worse, sins.

After 22 months of investigation and $34 million spent, the Mueller report concluded that there was no Trump-Russia collusion—the main focus of the investigation—even though that unfounded allegation dominated print and televised media’s speculative headlines for the last two years.

While Mueller’s report addressed various allegations of Trump’s other roguery, the special counsel did not recommend that the president be indicted for obstruction of justice in what Mueller had just concluded was not a crime of collusion.

https://www.nysun.com/national/in-barrs-battle-with-congress-hes-in-the-right/90669/

In the battle unfolding in Congress between the Democrats and Attorney General William Barr, I’m on the side of the United States Constitution. That means defending not only Mr. Barr but also President Trump. The two men stand on America’s legal bedrock.

Click Image to Enlarge

Which is why Mr. Barr was able to make short work of his Democratic questioners at Wednesday’s hearing in the Senate. His calm, straightforward testimony made it clear that he isn’t the caricature the Democrats have been drawing of him.

And events aren’t the conspiracy the Democrats are still trying to validate, even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s finding that there was no collusion, actual or attempted, ­between Trump’s camarilla and the Kremlin. Nor any prosecutable obstruction case.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-real-attorney-general-11556752279

Washington pile-ons are never pretty, but this week’s political setup of Attorney General William Barr is disreputable even by Beltway standards. Democrats and the media are turning the AG into a villain for doing his duty and making the hard decisions that special counsel Robert Mueller abdicated.

Mr. Barr’s Wednesday testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was preceded late Tuesday by the leak of a letter Mr. Mueller had sent the AG on March 27. Mr. Mueller griped in the letter that Mr. Barr’s four-page explanation to Congress of the principal conclusions of the Mueller report on March 24 “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the Mueller team’s “work and conclusions.” Only in Washington could this exercise in posterior covering be puffed into a mini-outrage.

Democrats leapt on the letter as proof that Mr. Barr was somehow covering for Donald Trump when he has covered up nothing. Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono, the Democratic answer to Rep. Louie Gohmert, accused Mr. Barr of abusing his office and lying to Congress, and demanded that he resign. The only thing she lacked was evidence.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/8-times-barack-obama-abused-his-power-to-appease-his-base/

Joe Biden, now all in for 2020, has his sights set on Donald Trump. With daily attacks, he’s lobbing any accusation he can against Trump in the hopes that such attacks will get traction. His latest attack is to claim that President Trump has abused his powers. “There’s only one thing that stands in our way. It’s our broken political system that’s deliberately being undermined by our president to continue to abuse the power of the office,” Biden claimed, calling Trump “the only president who has decided not to represent the whole country. He has his base. We need a president who works for all Americans.”

Has Creepy Uncle forgotten that thanks to Trump, African-American unemployment is at an all-time low? So is Hispanic unemployment. Last I checked, African Americans and Hispanic vote overwhelmingly Democrat. Women also vote more Democrat, but are thriving in the Trump economy. Looks to me as though Trump has been working for all Americans—even those not in his base.

But what really got me about Biden’s comments was the part about Trump allegedly abusing power. President Trump has spent much of the past two years trying to undo Obama’s abuses of power—which Obama did, not in the best interests of the whole country, but for the benefit of his base. Has Biden forgotten Obama’s presidency or is he just a bad liar? Many of these abuses should have resulted in Obama’s impeachment. Unfortunately, Republicans in Congress didn’t have the guts to impeach him, but they tried everything could to reign in on his pseudo-dictatorship. Two pieces of legislation were drafted in order to stop his abuses and force him to follow the law. Obama threatened to veto both bills rather than risk any limits on his ever-expanding legislative authority.

Below are 8 examples of Obama doing exactly what Joe Biden just accused Donald Trump of doing.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-economy-trump-gdp-growth-unemployment-20190428-story.html

The U.S. economy is growing at such a fast clip and the unemployment rate is so low that … there must be something terribly wrong. Does that make sense? No, but the healthy state of the country seems to be too much for some economists, talking heads and others in the chattering class. They struggle to find something nice to say about 3.2 percent growth accompanied by 3.8 percent unemployment.

We’re puzzling over the negativism because we’re certain everyone will miss the good times when they inevitably fade. The debate we’d like to see is how to extend this era of prosperity — and delay the next recession — as long as possible. Instead, there’s skepticism in the air, which is potentially damaging because part of what drives economic growth is confidence. If business owners and consumers turn skittish, they’ll invest and spend less. Fear of recession could hasten one.

Here’s what we’re talking about: The Bloomberg consensus estimate for first-quarter annualized GDP growth was just 2.3 percent, meaning the experts had undershot the actual result by nearly a full percentage point. That happens, given that forecasting is an inexact science. But when Friday’s numbers were released, a scramble ensued to downplay the results to justify previous pessimism. That 3.2 percent growth figure? It was illusory, due to a host of one-time factors, such as companies boosting inventories as a precaution against escalating trade friction with China. This fast growth can’t last, said the experts. “The first-quarter number is overstating the strength of the economy,” Ben Herzon of Macroeconomic Advisers told The Washington Post.