Category Archives: Politics

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, May 2, 2019: 

Results released by two pollsters confirm what The New American reported on Monday: Most voters don’t want the House to start impeachment hearings, especially the independents. On Monday TNA reported that, based on polling results from Rasmussen Reports and Washington Post/ABC News, “barely a third of registered voters or likely voters favor trying to impeach the president … while nearly 60 percent think it would be both a waste of time and politically dangerous.”

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported the results from PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist and CNN/SRRS polls. They were nearly identical in their findings:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, April 26, 2019: 

It’s odd that Juan Guaido, in calling for “the largest march in the history of Venezuela” to protest and end the Marxist Maduro regime in Venezuela, would pick May 1 for the protest to happen. It’s not only the middle of the week, but the date also has historical references and allusions. It was on May 1, 2011 that Osama Bin Laden was declared dead near Abbottabad in Pakistan. May 1 is the socialist International Workers’ Day. And, perhaps most importantly, on May 1, 1776 the Bavarian Illuminati was formed by Adam Weishaupt.

Guaido could be hoping that lightning might strike twice. After all,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, April 25, 2019: 

After months of offering amnesty to Venezuela’s top military in exchange for their defection, the opposition to Nicolás Maduro’s Marxist dictatorship has largely failed in its efforts. As of Wednesday, barely 1,500 of Maduro’s 280,000-strong military have done so, escaping to Colombia to the west and Brazil to the south. Most of them have come from the lower ranks and the country’s National Guard.

Those few who have successfully escaped told Reuters that rebellion “has been contained by intimidation and threats of reprisals against officers’ families.” Said one escapee, a female National Guard lieutenant who crossed into Brazil on foot, told Reuters, “Most military people that are leaving are from the National Guard. They will continue coming. More want to leave.” But they are constrained by threats of reprisals against their families if they oppose Maduro. Those threats are being carried out by the colectivos — motorcycle gangs with automatic weapons — who terrorize any who might support Guaidó’s opposition to the Maduro dictatorship.

An official who worked on President Trump’s Venezuela policy told the Washington Post:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, April 23, 2019: 

The report issued by the trustees of the Social Security (Old Age and Survivors and Disability Insurance, or OASDI) trust funds on Monday was blunt: “Social Security’s total cost is projected to be … higher that its total income in 2020 and all later years.” It added that its total liability over the next 75 years is $16.8 trillion. With less than $3 trillion in reserves, the program is 83 percent underfunded, worse by far than any other public or private pension plan in the country.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) promised that it would never happen. After signing the bill into law in 1935, Roosevelt famously said: “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politicians can ever scrap my social security program.”

FDR was wrong on all counts but one:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, April 22, 2019: 

The response to Democrat presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren’s demand on Friday that the House “should initiate impeachment proceedings” against President Trump was no doubt disappointing to Warren. Seeking to bolster her position among the 17 other candidates vying for the position as front-runner for the Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 president election, she sent out a series of tweets on Friday:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, April 15, 2019: 

Frustrated that the Mueller report didn’t find anything of substance to hang around the president’s neck, House Democrats are now going after the president’s tax returns. When all is said and done, that request may turn out to be just another witch hunt in which nothing is found to damage the president.

Following the president’s refusal to meet the demand from House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) last week, he made another demand: Have the requested documents for the past six years including returns, appendices attached thereto, and all relevant and related documents in his office no later than 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 23rd.

Or else.

Speculation abounds as to what Neal might do if and when the president fails to meet Neal’s second demand. There could be a subpoena issued to obtain the documents, or there could be a court challenge. The trouble is that the law that Neal is using was drafted in 1924 and has no penalty for noncompliance.

In the meantime the issue makes for entertaining reading. Chairman Neal contends that the 1924 law gives his committee the power to demand Trump’s tax returns, including the four years prior to his becoming president. In his demand letter, Neal said nothing about political retribution but instead couched his language as “consistent with its authority.… The Committee is … conducting oversight related to our federal tax laws [and] the extent to which the IRS audits and enforces the Federal tax laws against a President.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin sees this is a blatant prevarication: “The implications of [Neal’s demands are] way beyond … a congressional oversight issue.… The issue is that … the IRS does not become weaponized like it was under the Nixon administration.”

Trump lawyer William Consovoy saw through Neal’s smokescreen as well. In writing to the General Counsel at the Treasury Department, Consovoy said: