Commentary: Christopher Steele Is a Product of Corrupt FBI

Just as the special counsel’s investigation into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane—the FBI counterintelligence probe launched in the summer of 2016 to sabotage Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—is showing signs of life, one of the central figures in the hoax is attempting to burnish his sullied image.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos has produced a documentary featuring Christopher Steele, the man responsible for the so-called dossier bearing his name. “Out of the Shadows: The Man Behind the Steele Dossier,” streamed on Hulu Monday night; promotional clips hinted that, far from a hard-hitting interview exposing Steele for the charlatan he is, Stephanopoulos gave Steele a chance to spin his story ahead of possible new indictments related to John Durham’s inquiry into the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.

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Commentary: Two Unique, Powerful Forces Will Influence the Midterms

If the 2022 midterm elections had an official soundtrack, it would be the ominous music from the 1975 movie “Jaws.”

Although the election is 13 months away, mounting intensity feels like great white sharks are circling our national boat with a convergence of two powerful, never-before-seen political forces. Both forces are hangovers from the 2020 election with the potential to make the 2022 midterms the most tumultuous in modern American history.

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Senator Marsha Blackburn Warns Companies Against Business with Iran

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and 14 other Republican Senators issued a letter to the international business community warning against resuming business with Iran. 

The opportunity to resume business with Iran comes as President Joe Biden and his administration officials may repeal some sanctions in order to facilitate negotiations to return to a nuclear deal similar to the one implemented by President Obama in 2015. 

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Senators Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar: Trump Shouldn’t Pick the New SCOTUS Justice

Senators Tina Smith (DFL-MN) and Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN) stated that President Trump shouldn’t pick the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) nominee. Instead, Smith and Klobuchar say that the newly-elected president should, and the Senate should wait to vote until then.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died Friday from cancer complications. The SCOTUS vacancy is now the epicenter of political leaders’ attention.

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Report: DNI Grenell Wants to Unmask the Obama Officials Who Unmasked Michael Flynn

Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, visited the Justice Department last week seeking to declassify documents related to Obama administration officials’ unmasking of Michael Flynn in transcripts of phone calls he had with Russia’s ambassador, ABC News is reporting.

Grenell is asking the Justice Department to declassify a list of names of officials involved in the unmasking process, a senior intelligence official told ABC.

Unmasking refers to a process where top U.S. government officials can request information on American citizens picked up during electronic surveillance of foreigners. Flynn was unveiled as taking part in a Dec. 29, 2016 phone with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador.

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Commentary: It’s Patriot Trump Versus Leninist Impeachment Pushers and America’s Future Hangs in the Balance

Should President Obama have been impeached for giving cash and assets worth as much as $150 billion to Iran by executive order? Or for lying about Obamacare? No, because that kind of punishment even for these injustices would have trivialized the grave constitutional purpose of impeachment and conviction. Clearly, it would have fulfilled a legitimate partisan purpose, though one which is more appropriately resolved through elections.

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Presidential Candidate Joe Biden to Visit Nashville on May 20

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the latest 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is about to visit Nashville. Biden, 76, will make an appearance in Nashville on May 20 for his “American Promise” tour, NewsChannel 5 said, adding more details have yet to be announced. On Tuesday’s Tennessee Star Report with Steve Gill and Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Gill and Leahy talked to One America News Networks’ Neil McCabe about Biden’s candidacy for 2020 and how he is not receiving support from his former President, Barack Obama. The issues they identified included Biden’s past problems in managing campaigns and raising money. A transcript and link to an audio file of the interview is available here. Colin Reed also discussed Biden’s challenges for Fox News, despite the candidate having a 10 point lead according to Real Clear Politics. Biden’s prior White House bids went off the rails in dramatic fashion. In 1988, he withdrew amid a withering plagiarism scandal – a mere three and a half months after getting in the race and long before any votes were cast. He didn’t fare much better in 2008,…

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Iran Says Will Withdraw from Obama’s Nuclear Deal, Threatens Resumption of Uranium Enrichment

  Iran’s president said Wednesday the country will stop complying with parts of former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, Fox News said. Hassan Rouhani set a 60-day deadline for new terms before resuming higher uranium enrichment, Fox News said. It has been a year since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from Obama’s 2015 agreement. The breakaway could further escalate tensions between Iran and the United States. ABC News reported that the recent decision to send an aircraft carrier and bombers to the Middle East to deter Iran stemmed in part from intelligence that the nation was possibly transporting missiles on boats in the Persian Gulf. In response to Iran’s announcement, U.S. Rep. Dr. Mark Green (R-TN-07), gave the following statement: “President Trump was absolutely right to back out of the Iran Deal in 2017. Technically, the Obama administration willed the JCPOA into existence. Iran never signed the deal in the first place and it was never a treaty approved by Congress. Now Iran is announcing it is pulling out of that same nuclear deal and sets an ultimatum to renegotiate terms. How do you back out of a deal never acknowledged in the first place? “Clearly, Iran is…

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Commentary: ‘ObamaGate’ Is All High Crimes and No Misdemeanors

President Barack Obama

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka   Do you sometimes feel like you are living in a Tim Burton movie? Or an episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”? All the more so after a private Twitter user, who posted a video of the teary-eyed Rachel Maddow, was suspended by the social media platform. Why? Because she posted the close-up that clearly demonstrated that Maddow was overwrought. Suspended for posting the truth. Or look instead at Anderson Cooper, CNN’s putative doyen, who can’t even garner 0.3 percent of the population as viewers for his “flagship” program, and who recently accused Jared Kushner of “gaslighting” the nation over Russia; in other words of making statements aimed at convincing the listeners that they are insane. This from the network that has so stoked the flames of Russia conspiracy-mongering every day for two years, that they publish outlandish pieces on Robert Mueller’s sealing indictments against the president, and as Cooper’s fellow show host Chris Cuomo qualifies the president’s public statements as those made by a convict already wearing an “orange jumpsuit,” statements that are less gaslighting than full on tinfoil-hattery. And why was Kushner so calumniated? What craziness was he trying to sell to America as fact? His “gaslighting” sin was to state early last week that…

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Nine Years After Obamacare Passed, Agency Finds Numbers Were Wildly Off

by Jarrett Stepman   Democrats defeated Republicans in the Obamacare repeal fight by warning that 22 million Americans would be thrown off their health insurance. They pointed to data leaked from the Congressional Budget Office. Well, it turns out that data was completely wrong. According to a report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office wildly overestimated the number of people who would lose their health insurance with the repeal of the individual mandate penalty. Initial estimates from the Congressional Budget Office said 14 million would drop off their health insurance coverage due to the elimination of the individual mandate. Then, during the height of the 2017 debate over repeal, progressives touted a leaked number from the Congressional Budget Office claiming that 22 million people would “lose” their insurance if Congress repealed the law. [ The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more ] However, as health care analyst Avik Roy pointed out, what made this number so high was the inflated number of people expected to lose their insurance due to repeal of the mandate – about 73 percent to…

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Commentary: Trump Is Right, Congress Needs to Do Its Job

by Rachel Bovard   As the partial government shutdown enters its third week with little hope of an end in sight, President Trump continues to demand funding for a southern border wall. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) flat out refuses to pass any funding at all. In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has washed his hands of the matter, telling Trump to work it out with Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) while he moves the Senate onto other topics. Predictably, both chambers clocked out for the weekend on Thursday afternoon. When senators and House members make the rounds on the upcoming Sunday shows wringing their hands about the shutdown, somebody might ask why they only worked less than three days this week. Apparently, the crisis at the border, and the resulting government shutdown, are an emergency to everyone except the people responsible for addressing it. In the face of congressional intransigence, President Trump has toyed with the idea of declaring a national emergency. On Friday, the president said that option was currently off the table, and with good reason. Although funding the wall through an emergency declaration is likely legal, it would create more problems for the president than it solves, both politically and practically.…

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Commentary: The Legal Gymnastics Behind Obamacare

Obamacare

by Gary Galles   On December 14, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled Obamacare unconstitutional because its individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power,” since the tax that enforced it is now gone. Progressive leaning critics quickly called it bad jurisprudence and assured people that Obamacare remained constitutional. However, Judge O’Connor’s ruling just saw through the hocus pocus by which Obamacare was first found constitutional. Remember how the penalties for not having insurance under the ACA plan arose? It was repeatedly and emphatically asserted to not be a tax, but a regulation (so that its costs would not be counted in ACA’s fiscal scoring). But Chief Justice Roberts’ 5-4 majority decision found the ACA constitutional only because it really was a tax, which Congress has the power to impose, when a regulation mandating that Americans purchase health insurance would have been unconstitutional. Beyond that convenient but mutually inconsistent weasel-wording, two months ago, Democrats showed no concern about violating the Constitution when it suited their policy agenda. President Trump issued an executive order stopping ACA subsidy payments to 6 million people. 18 states quickly sued to reverse the…

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Commentary: James (Comey) and the Giant Impeachment

by Julie Kelly   For those concerned that former FBI Director James Comey is suffering from early dementia, have no fear: His memory returned with a vengeance during a Sunday night interview with MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace. On Friday, under questioning by House Judiciary Committee members, Comey answered, “I don’t know,” “I don’t recall,” or “I don’t remember” nearly 250 times during a six-hour closed-door hearing. His memory lapse included critical details like how the infamous Steele dossier reached his agency; who at the FBI drafted the initiation document to investigate the Trump campaign; who at the FBI had authority to open a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign; and his own comments about the tarmac meeting between his boss, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and former president Bill Clinton. He said he didn’t know what the word “insidious” meant and couldn’t explain the difference between collusion and conspiracy. But perhaps Comey loaded up on ginseng over the weekend because his vague and convenient memory miraculously returned when he was questioned by a fawning Wallace at a 92nd Street Y event just two days later. Tiny details about dates, locations, meeting participants and a funny moment during a briefing with President…

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Obama Executive Order Forced the Government to Hire Unqualified Applicants in Favor of Arbitrary Quotas

President Barack Obama

by Natalia Castro   Employees should be hired based on their ability to complete the tasks they have been assigned and nothing else. Yet under the Obama administration, hiring practices for the federal government were moved away from merit to fulfill goals irrelevant to the positions. Policies intended to simplify the federal government application process had the consequence of increasing politicization in the federal workforce and overburdening human resource offices. In May 2010, former President Barack Obama issued a memorandum on Improving the Federal Recruitment and Hiring Process. This memorandum directed agencies to simplify their application process to “eliminate any requirement that applicants respond to essay-style questions” and allowed individuals to submit resumes and cover letters or complete “simple, plain language” instead. The result was a flood of new applications. According to Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning, the goal was not just to increase hiring in the federal government but to increase political hiring. Manning notes, “The 2010 memorandum was always intended to give Obama supporters an easier path to enter the civil service. By overwhelming human resource departments with applications, it accomplished just that.” This was the first of several presidential orders to reshape the federal workforce. In August…

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The Dangers of Obama-Era ‘Guidance’ on Handling School Discipline

Manipulating the statistics on school discipline issues can mean big bucks for districts once the stats tell the feds the story they want to hear, as a piece in recently noted. Unless Secretary of Education Betsy Devos can roll back the Obama-era guidelines that encouraged this, the politically correct recipe for disaster could pave the way for yet another tragedy like the one that occurred in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine’s Day.

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Former President Barack Obama Tweets Condolences, Skips Funeral of America’s Pastor, Billy Graham

Former President Barack Obama tweeted his condolences Wednesday on the loss of Billy Graham, but the Associated Press later confirmed he and his family would not attend the memorial, visitation, or funeral of the late pastor who dedicated his life to Christian ministry. Billy Graham was a humble servant who prayed for so many – and who, with wisdom and grace, gave hope and guidance to generations of Americans. — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) February 21, 2018 “Former President Barack Obama is not planning to attend memorial services for the late evangelist Rev. Billy Graham this week,” the AP reported simply. Tom Knighton at PJ Media wrote of President Obama’s absence, “None of this is overly surprising, at least for many American Christians. Obama, despite his claims of sharing their faith, routinely acted in a manner that showed disdain for the faithful. He rarely made an effort to reach out to Christians during his presidency, and actively targeted them with his policies and actions: See his stance on Hobby Lobby, and his never-forgotten feelings on rural Americans being simpletons clinging to guns and religion.”  

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Emails Confirm: Obama DOJ Funneled Big Bank Settlement Money To Liberal Groups

Emails written by Obama administration Department of Justice officials confirm reports the agency engaged in a systemic effort to funnel money to liberal advocacy organizations from settlements reached with big banks. The documents, obtained by the House Judiciary Committee as part of an ongoing investigation, reveal the Obama Justice Department effectively skirted Congress’s budgetary authority by…

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Trump Decertifies Iran Nuclear Deal, Announces New Crackdown

President Trump said Friday he’s decertifying the Iranian nuclear deal forged under the Obama administration, but stopped short of ending the international agreement, instead giving Congress 60 days to take a tougher approach toward Tehran’s lawless behavior. In an address from the White House, the president also said he’s directing the Treasury Department to sanction Iran’s…

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Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross: Donald Trump Has Removed, Changed Over 800 Obama-Era Regulations

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Friday that President Trump is “systematically” removing hundreds of regulations put in place by the Obama administration. “The president has already knocked out some 860 rules and regulations from the Obama administration, and every day we’re finding more and more to do. Remember, Obama put in something like 7,000 new rules…

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EPA Begins Phase-Out of President Obama’s ‘Clean Power Plan,’ Reports Move Will Save $33 Billion

The Trump administration on Tuesday formally moved to ax the Clean Power Plan (CPP), beginning a lengthy process to dismantle a key Obama-era climate rule and arguing that the repeal will save $33 billion in compliance costs over the next 13 years. In a statement, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the plan, designed to limit carbon…

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A Brief History of North Korean Diplomatic Name Calling

Tennessee Star

by George Rasley, CHQ Editor   The Leftwing media and the failed DC foreign policy establishment have been having a meltdown over President Trump’s reference to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man,” and have spent the past two days suggesting that giving Kim a demeaning nickname is somehow indicative of a lack of diplomatic acumen, or maybe even mental imbalance, on Trump’s part. Former Secretary of State John Kerry said President Donald Trump’s United Nations speech may have put America in isolation and danger. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show Wednesday, Kerry criticized Trump’s harsh rhetoric against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Kerry said, “You have to ask yourself: Is America safer because of ‘rocket man?” He was referring to Trump’s characterization of Kim. Kerry said that kind of harsh language will make it harder for the United States to engage in diplomacy on North Korea and other international issues. Kerry seems to have forgotten that back in 2014 the North Koreans once referred to him as, “A wolf with a hideous lantern jaw,” and also described Kerry as a “wolf donning the mask of sheep.” The trigger for these insults was then-Secretary of State Kerry’s statement…

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Underreported: What Happened When Government Tried to Fix a Coal Town in Kentucky

Tennessee Star

PAINTSVILLE, Ky.—When Ben Larrabee heard about a new government-funded job training program for the digital age that promised to turn “coal country” into “code country,” he stopped looking for other jobs. “The thing that got 800-plus people to apply and go through the process was that it promised jobs that would run from $30,000 to $40,000…

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Obama’s Top Campaign Ad Firm Got Nearly $60M in Federal Contracts

Former President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign advertising agency received nearly $60 million in federal contracts after he took office, according to an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. The gravy train for the Washington, D.C.-based agency, GMMB, hasn’t slowed since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the analysis found. The liberal Democratic communications powerhouse was…

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Susan Gingrich Commentary: The Country Never Imagined

Tennessee Star

by Susan Gingrich   My husband Jim and I were among the more than one million conservatives who marched to the US Capitol on September 12, 2009. We peacefully gathered in protest of President Obama’s attempts to move our country towards socialism, especially by changing the health care system. It was a wonderful event with great speakers, patriotic music, and many new friendships made that day with people across the country. We left united and determined to act as patriots to preserve the America we loved. I remember a few counter-protesters, but they were peaceful protesters who behaved respectfully. We could never have imagined the harm to our country by one president and complicit leaders, including many republicans in congress. There was not a day that many others and I weren’t sorry Obama was our president, but he was elected twice to be our leader. Obama made political correctness and his authority all powerful, discarding our Constitution, laws, states’ rights, and American values. I believe political correctness has become evil, destructive, and the opposite of commonsense. President Obama was a divisive president who never attempted to unify the country. By championing the rights of minorities and fringe groups, he deprived…

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Why Is Congress Not Investigating Obama’s Unprecedented Political Espionage?

An award-winning national security correspondent for CIRCA News believes Congress needs to launch an investigation into Obama-era unmasking and warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. Sara A. Carter, of the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, has been an overseas war correspondent for the bulk of her professional life and…

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Commentary: Breast Feeding 101 for Educators

teacher

Health professionals and public health officials promote breastfeeding to improve infant health. Breastfeeding also provides long-term preventative effects for the mother, including an earlier return to pre-pregnancy weight and a reduced risk of pre-menopausal breast cancer and osteoporosis. It is important to note that 82% of public school teachers are female in Tennessee. Women are the predominate sex in our profession. More importantly, most of these women are of child bearing age. So this is an important topic for all stakeholders.

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Commentary: A Debate Worth Having

Teacher

Common sense reminds us there is no “one size fits all” approach to public education, but we will hear ideas from politicians that will want to empower state and federal education agencies, rather than permitting those doing the work at the local level in districts to have more flexibility. It is time to for policymakers to deliver for communities the promise of locally-controlled public education for all children.

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