Looking. The Tucker Tweeter Articles here on Looking at today’s world. I’ve decided to post Tucker’s Tweeter articles here. So you will have to play the tweets if you want to know what he has to say.
Tucker isn’t someone that I agree with on some topics, but even where we disagree he does use facts to back up his point of view.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been ever-so-gently reprimanded for politicking from the podium.
The Office of Special Counsel last week ruled that Jean-Pierre’s attack on the “Make America Great Again” wing of the Republican Party — largely associated with former President Donald Trump — violated the Hatch Act, according to NBC News. The Hatch Act seeks to prevent federal employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
Jean-Pierre attacked that group prior to the 2022 midterm elections (and has continued to do so with regularity).
“Unfortunately, we have seen mega MAGA Republican officials who don’t believe in the rule of law,” she said in the Nov. 2 comment that triggered the complaint against her. “They refuse to accept the results of free and fair elections and they fan the flames of political violence through what they praise and what they refuse to condemn. It remains important for the president to state strongly and unequivocally that violence has no place in our democracy.”
The complaint was filed on Nov. 3 by the watchdog organization Protect the Public’s Trust.
In a letter Wednesday to the group’s director, Michael Chamberlain, Ana Galindo‐Marrone, who leads the OSC’s Hatch Act Unit, wrote, “Because Ms. Jean‐Pierre made the statements while acting in her official capacity, she violated the Hatch Act prohibition against using her official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election.”
But despite the finding, Galindo‐Marrone said, “we have decided not to pursue disciplinary action and have instead issued Ms. Jean‐Pierre a warning letter.”
The letter said Jean-Pierre “used the phrase ‘MAGA Republicans’ repeatedly during official press briefings prior to the November 2022 midterm election.”
“Although Ms. Jean‐Pierre never expressly instructed viewers to vote for or against Republican candidates for elected office, OSC concluded that the timing, frequency, and content of Ms. Jean‐Pierre’s references to ‘MAGA Republicans’ established that she made those references to generate opposition to Republican candidates. Accordingly, making the references constituted political activity,” it said.
The letter said that “we have decided to close this matter without further action.”
By way of explanation, the letter said that “the White House Counsel’s Office did not at the time believe that Ms. Jean‐Pierre’s remarks were prohibited by the Hatch Act, and it is unclear whether OSC’s contrary analysis regarding the use of ‘MAGA Republicans’ was ever conveyed to Ms. Jean‐Pierre.”
Getting tough will take place the next time, Galindo‐Marrone said.
“We have advised Ms. Jean‐Pierre that should she again engage in prohibited political activity, OSC would consider it a knowing and willful violation of the law that could result in OSC pursuing disciplinary action,” the letter said.
Chamberlain derided the letter, according to NBC News.
“This episode illustrates exactly what people hate about Washington, DC and why they increasingly distrust the Biden Administration’s promises to be the most ethical in history,” he said in a statement.
“The Hatch Act was a law used to pillory previous administrations but officials now appear content to sweep it under the rug,” Chamberlain said, referring to multiple complaints about Hatch Act violations made during the Trump administration.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement, “As has been made clear throughout the administration, we take the law seriously and uphold the Hatch Act. We are reviewing this opinion.”
Other Hatch Act violations in the Biden administration took place when Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra made a public show of support for Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla of California and when former Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted a political message using his official Twitter account.
Commentary by
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy offered a masterclass in regard to how to deal with hostile reporters on Monday when he obliterated one of them from CNN.
The California Republican’s argument was one that CNN and its partisan coverage of the federal indictment of former President Donald Trump over his handling of classified documents is disingenuous.
CNN anchors, contributors and guests routinely feign outrage at Trump by portraying him as playing loose with national security.
But the network also platforms a classified documents leaker in former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and one who abused his power in 2020 in former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
That wasn’t lost on the speaker in the Capitol on Monday when a CNN reporter asked him about Trump’s indictment.
McCarthy said he was concerned the government was being “weaponized” by the Biden administration for political purposes and that he and other Republicans are working to ensure there is not a two-tiered justice system in the country.
“You’re with CNN, right?” McCarthy asked the CNN reporter during an interview in which she interrupted him repeatedly.
After the reporter confirmed her affiliation, the speaker grinned and pointed out that it was only appropriate to speak about the two CNN contributors.
When he invoked the name McCabe, the reporter cut in and made a perilous attempt to redirect the conversation.
She asked the speaker about topics such as defunding the FBI and defending Trump.
McCarthy ignored every word she said and hit her with his own line of questioning. It took him all but one minute to put her on the defensive.
“Are you prepared to defend your network, CNN?” he asked.
After a number of interruptions, McCarthy then took command of the conversation and lit CNN up.
“You can’t put words in my mouth, even though your network hired Andrew McCabe, who was fired from the FBI for leaking classified documents,” he said.
McCarthy followed up, “Did you remove him from your network? No, you continue to put him on to give judgment against President Trump.”
In spite of multiple interruptions, McCarthy continued his criticism of the beleaguered network:
“So your network hires Clapper, who literally lied to the American public — one of 51 other individuals that had briefings — and used it politically to tell the American public that a laptop was Russian collusion, even though it had all this other information about the Biden administration.”
He then asked, “Are you prepared to get rid of those people from your network?”
After he received no answer to his question, he laid into CNN for weaponizing information in the same manner Clapper and McCabe weaponized their access to intel.
“My concern as a policymaker is that when you weaponize government and now you’re weaponizing networks, that is wrong,” he said.
He concluded, “I have a real problem that your network actually pays people who [used] classified information and then lied to the American public to try to influence a presidential election, and then you put him on your network to try to give an opinion about a president.”
Had McCarthy been holding a microphone, an appropriate measure would have been to drop it and then walk away.
The corporate media has been up in arms about Trump and his relationship to classified information since the FBI raided his home last summer.
The same people have not been concerned by the fact then-Vice President Joe Biden made off with classified documents — none of which he was authorized to declassify — when he left office in 2017.
Clapper’s signature on a letter that falsely portrayed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation also never bothered anyone at CNN.
Nor did the fact McCabe was fired from the FBI in 2018 for leaking classified information to the media.
The answer to the discrepancies here are obvious: the establishment media mostly exists to protect the Democratic Party and its interests and to target people such as McCarthy — the most powerful Republican in the country.
While the speaker is often maligned by people on both sides of the aisle, he can’t be accused of being dull.
Not one person at CNN has the privilege of speaking about Trump’s classified documents case from any position of moral authority.
McCarthy was savvy enough to know that and to turn what could have become a hit job on him into a referendum on the blatant bias in media.
Will I-95 Highway Collapse Be Blamed on ‘Climate Change’?
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I woke up this morning to the news that a section of I-95 in Philadelphia had collapsed Sunday morning. Within a few moments, I saw a tweet saying, in essence, “No, folks, this was not ‘climate change.’” My tweet, in response, was, “Please, for the love of God, tell me that the #I95Collapse hasn’t been blamed on #ClimateChange.”
So far, I have not seen any indication that it has, but would it be such a stretch? How many absurd things are blamed on climate change each week? Each time you hear one, you think, Can people really be this gullible and programmable? And, of course, the answer is a tragic yes.
Perhaps descent into questions over whether there really was a truck underneath the collapsed section will forestall any descent into a climate-change debate. Either way, I can, without even trying especially hard, think of several ways that people can (and may yet still) find a way to drag climate change into this:
Climate change has caused Pennsylvania to be especially dry, which made the fire burn hotter.
Climate change has caused increased precipitation in Pennsylvania in recent years, causing more frost heave, weakening the section of highway.
Climate change has caused an increase in storm activity, which has battered our nation’s roads. It’s a miracle all our highways haven’t collapsed yet!
Not enough money has been spent on study of how climate change impacts freeway infrastructure.
Climate change has caused erratic weather, which has increased tectonic stress, thus causing micro-quakes along fault lines, further stressing overpass pylons.
If we really cared about climate change, we wouldn’t have trucks full of ‘petroleum products’ driving around everywhere!
So much money is being spent to save us from the ravages of climate change that there isn’t enough left over to repair our nation’s infrastructure.
You can play the game at home with your family. Bonus points for the first person who comes up with absurd things like, If only Republicans had not stood in the way of the Green New Deal, we’d all be driving flying solar cars, and would not even need highways at all. (Absurd until you realize that someone out there is actually going to say something just like this. Probably AOC, at some point.)
This is not actually a game, however.
I recall the first time I truly realized just how crazy people were getting—when I heard the 2005 tsunami being blamed on “changes in deep ocean currents caused by global warming.” It does not matter if a “scientist” says something like this, either. Scientists cannot be trusted any more than the average Twitter user can. Especially not at this point, when there is so much funding and mainstream ‘respect’ to be had by saying the ‘correct’ things about climate change.
Back in 2005, I thought it was all quite silly. Now it appears that climate change is going to be the crowbar used to take our money, take our stoves, and concentrate us into 15-minute camps. Which means that every gullible rube, virtue-signaler, and Matrix-addled narrative-repeater out there is pushing us that much further down the road to serfdom every time they robotically repeat this kind of programmatic nonsense.
Here’s a solution for Oregon residents suffering from bad government in their state — just leave. And take much of Oregon with you.
A 13th Oregon county will be voting on a citizens’ resolution to escape Oregon liberalism and join the state of Idaho, KTVZ reported.
Voters in Crook County, Oregon, will participate in advisory balloting next May, joining a dozen other counties in the state which have already approved starting the steps to attach eastern Oregon to Idaho.
It’s part of the Greater Idaho movement, whose website states the current Oregon-Idaho line, set 163 years ago, “is now outdated.”
“It makes no sense in its current location because it doesn’t match the location of the cultural divide in Oregon,” according to the website. “The Oregon/Washington line was updated in 1958. It’s time to move other state lines.”
Ultimately, any new change in the state line would require approval by both Oregon and Idaho legislatures and by Congress.
Wednesday, Crook County voters approved allowing the electorate to conduct an advisory vote in May 2024. The advisory vote would be “to determine voter attitudes of whether your Crook County elected officials should inform state and federal officials that the people of Crook County support continued negotiations regarding a potential relocation of the Oregon-Idaho border to include Crook County,” according to a ballot summary reported by KTVZ.
Also on Wednesday, the Wallowa County Clerk ruled that results on the Greater Idaho question on the ballot in that county were too close to require a recount, so the measure was deemed passed.
Instead of county commissioners, some Oregon counties are overseen by a “county court” which consists of a judge and a pair of county commissioners. Seth Crawford is county judge of Crook County and he said the boundary vote is “100 percent” advisory.
Crawford said he has always wanted “to have people weigh in” on the boundary question.
The Greater Idaho website lists a half dozen reasons to join Idaho, including Oregon’s 1) violation of American values by the state’s western majority; 2) lack of law and order plus infringement on the right to self-defense; 3) high taxes; 4) mismanagement of forests; 5) higher regulation, unemployment, and cost of living, and 6) lack of rural representation.
With eastern Oregon moving to Idaho, it would improve things for western Oregon, the Greater Idaho website says.
The substantial western Oregon income tax revenue would remain without the state having to continue to subsidize the east; legislative gridlock would be reduced; both remaining Oregon and Greater Idaho would have increased self-determination, and, with the change of only one-half electoral vote, the number of seats in the U.S. House and Senate would not change.
It’s a long shot for Greater Idaho. But, as their website points out, border realignment has been done before.
And elsewhere, rural areas of Illinois, New York and Colorado are hosting movements to carve out entirely new states removed from influences of large urban areas, according to The Center Square, a publication aimed at covering state governments.
Given its distance from the state capital of Lansing and southern Michigan urban areas, the idea of the sparsely-populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan dividing into its own state of Superior has long been kicked around.
And if Democrats get greater control of Congress, there is little doubt they will seek to retain that power by granting statehood to the District of Columbia and possibly Puerto Rico.
The week ahead. Stories making the news. Check out the headlines below. If you wish to comment on these or anything else that you feel is headline news.
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A wartime act that the special prosecutor is using against former President Trump.
Date:1917
Annotation: America declarated war with Germany in April 1917. Two months later, the U.S. Congress passed the Espionage Act, which defined espionage during wartime.
The Act was amended in May 1918.
In his war message to Congress, President Wilson had warned that the war would require a redefinition of national loyalty. There were “millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us,” he said. “If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with a firm hand of repression.”
In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The piece of legislation gave postal officials the authority to ban newspapers and magazines from the mails and threatened individuals convicted of obstructing the draft with $10,000 fines and 20 years in jail.
Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, which made it a federal offense to use “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the Constitution, the government, the American uniform, or the flag. The government prosecuted over 2,100 people under these acts.
From Rex Huppke, USA TODAY, also reprinted on MSN.com
[* It is clear from the word choices, UPPER CASE WORDS, and quotation marks that this person’s article is saying the opposite of what he claims to be for or against. He is mocking at least half the country. — TPR]
Now that my favorite president, Donald Trump, is facing a 37-count indictment from the feds, I join with my brothers and sisters in MAGA, and with all sensible Republicans, in saying this: I’m not sure I want to live in a country where a former president can wave around classified documents he’s not supposed to have and say, “This is secret information. Look at this,” and then be held accountable for his actions.
I mean, what kind of country have we become? One in which federal prosecutors can take “evidence” before a “grand jury,” and that grand jury can “vote to indict” a former president for 37 alleged “crimes”? Look at all the other people out there in America, including Democrats like Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden, who HAVEN’T been indicted for crimes on the flimsy excuse that there is no “evidence” they did crimes. THAT’S TOTALLY UNFAIR!
It’s like Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote in a tweet Friday: “These charges are unprecedented and it’s a sad day for our country, especially in light of what clearly appears to be a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not.”
TWO TIERS! One tier in which President Trump keeps getting indicted via both state and federal justice systems and another in which the people I don’t like keep getting not indicted via all the things Fox News tells me they did wrong.
It’s like America has become a banana republic, as long as you do as I’ve done and refuse to look up the definition of “banana republic.”
Sure, they’ll tell you that the indictment came via a special counsel investigation, and that the federal special counsel statute keeps such investigations walled off from political influence.
But that’s complete nonsense, unless we’re talking about special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr while Trump was president and tasked with investigating the NEFARIOUS LEFT-WING CRIMES committed in the Trump-Russia probe. Durham was above reproach, and the fact that The New York Times reported he “charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either” is something I will ignore.
Current special counsel Jack Smith, on the other hand – he’s bad news. I know this because Trump has said repeatedly that Smith’s investigation is a witch hunt, and I’ve never known Trump to lie about anything.
Keep in mind, in 2016, Trump said: “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
So after he said that, you expect me to believe he didn’t protect classified information? Just because, according to the indictment, there’s a recording of him holding a classified document in his office at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and saying to two staff members and an interviewer: “See, as president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
You call that “damning evidence.” I call it, “What about Hunter Biden’s laptop?”
Now I can already hear all the libs out there whining and saying that if it were Biden or Hillary or Hunter getting indicted, I wouldn’t be saying a word about two tiers of justice or the weaponization of the Department of Justice or anything like that.
Well, those whiners would be right, but the difference is I believe Biden and Hillary and Hunter are all guilty and should be locked up for life, whereas with Trump, I believe he is great and innocent and the best president America has ever known.
It’s like this: If Hillary got indicted for murder, I would say, “Yes, she is absolutely a murderer. Lock her up.”
But if in some outrageous scenario President Trump were indicted for murder just because he told a bunch of people that he did a murder, I would say: “HOW DARE YOU CHARGE THIS MAN WITH MURDER WHEN OTHERS IN THE U.S. HAVE NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH MURDER! THERE ARE CLEARLY TWO TIERS OF JUSTICE, ONE IN WHICH MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT, WHO SAID HE MURDERED SOMEONE, IS CHARGED WITH MURDER AND ONE IN WHICH PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T MURDERED ARE NOT CHARGED WITH MURDER!”
And that, my liberal friends, makes perfect sense to me and my MAGA companions. So watch out. The Trump Train’s a comin’.
[* I have not done any editing for grammar errors. This snide, self-important turkey is representative of the amount and level of pandering being done on behalf of the Leftist regime. –TPR]
Denver City Council Member Who Wanted to Tax White Owned Businesses and Give Money to Minority Owned Businesses Loses Reelection in Blowout.
So how did the campaign of this loon turn out? She wanted a special tax on white owned businesses. Then give that money to Minority owned businesses. Well she got beat. And beaten badly.
In her concession speech she claimed her crazy statements helped other candidates. That makes no sense. Somehow her craziness was a help to others but a hinderance to her?
SMH
Climate change didn’t cause Canada’s wildfires. Lightning has been starting forest fires for millennia.
Is the hazy stuff out there smoke billowing down from Québec, or hot air emitted from smoggy-brained politicians and journalists? Chuck Schumer told the Senate on Wednesday that the smoke drifting over the Eastern Seaboard was caused by climate change. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said it showed the urgency of going greener faster. Proof of carbon pollution, lectured the Canadian minister of the environment. A stark reminder of climate change, intoned Biden.
Every news organization and weather app out there suddenly became experts on a new hazard — not smoke or fire, well-known phenomenons that have been extensively documented throughout history — but a new threat, both more nebulous and more ominous: “air quality.” Electronic devices and weather stations began making unsolicited “air quality” reports. The New York Post made melodramatic comparisons with the aftermath of 9/11. Other outlets published analyses of the health risks of smoky air for pets and those in vulnerable states of health. The CBC, Canada’s state broadcaster/doomsayer, assured everyone who would listen that “air quality warnings are likely to become more common with climate change.” Climate change? Or social change — to be imposed via radical environmental policy? And what’s next, “air quality” sirens that urge you to duck for cover when a diesel vehicle rolls by?
The fires in Québec and Ontario are real — especially for those forced to evacuate their homes. So too is the unpleasantness of smoke blowing across eastern Canada and the United States. And just as real, unfortunately, is the propensity of politicians and their media cheerleaders to capitalize on human suffering in order to move society in their preferred direction: in this case, the fool’s gold of net-zero emissions.
But Canadian wildfires aren’t caused by emissions. Wildfires are as normal as thunderstorms. They form part of the natural life cycle of North American forests. While of course some fires are caused by human carelessness or arson, most of the fires currently ravaging Québec and northeastern Ontario are believed to be caused by lightning. Hate to shock the climate zealots, but lightning has been starting forest fires since long before the Romans began using fossil fuels to heat their baths in early Britain.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images