News

Let’s review how Russia colluded with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

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CNN reported on a false allegation for 22 months
CNN reported on a false allegation for 22 months

For the last 22 months, we’ve seen the media keep up a constant drumbeat about how Trump colluded with Russia to sell Russian corporations uranium rights in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. Oh, wait, the media hasn’t said anything about that. So, there was an investigation, and the investigation went on forever, and found nothing.

The Federalist reports:

In a four-page letter provided to Congress on Sunday, Attorney General William Barr officially revealed that Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not find any evidence that President Donald Trump or members of his campaign treasonously colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.

No collusion:

“The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election,” Barr’s letter to Congress noted.

No obstruction of justice:

The investigation headed by Mueller also examined whether Trump obstructed justice at any point related to ongoing investigations of Russian interference. In his letter, Barr stated that Mueller’s investigation was unable to demonstrate that the president broke the law by interfering with law enforcement.

Just to count the cost of the investigation, it was:

  • 19 lawyers
  • 40 FBI agents, intelligence analysts, forensic accountants, and more
  • 2,800+ subpoenas
  • 500 search warrants
  • 500 witnesses
  • over $25 MILLION in taxpayer dollars

Remember, this isn’t the first time that the media reported constantly on a story that fit their radically-leftist narrative, but then was later disproven with evidence. Remember how they breathlessly reported the charge that Brett Kavanaugh ran a secret gang rape cartel? How about when the Covington kids literally assaulted a peaceful native American who literally served overseas in Vietnam? How about the faked Jussie Smollett hate crime? This happens all the time.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presents Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a “reset button”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presents Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov with a “reset button”

Here’s some collusion with Russia

Remember this article from the radically leftist New York Times?

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

Why didn’t that get investigated for 22 months by a Special Consel duting the Obama administration? Why didn’t the mainstream news mendia report on that for 22 months ahead of the 2016 presidential election?

Obama promised Vladimir Putin "more flexibility" after the 2012 election
Obama promised Russian president Dmitri Medvedev “more flexibility” after the 2012 election

Russia colluded with Barack Obama

And speaking of collusion with Russia, how come this was never investigated:

Why didn’t actual collusion with the Russians deserve a 22-month Special Counsel investigation? Why didn’t the media run that clip for 22 months asking why Obama was colluding with the Russians? You don’t have to look very far in his foreign policy to see actual examples where we sided with the Russians against our allies, such as when Obama backed out of giving missile defense to Poland. Or when Obama stood by and did nothing after Russia ran tanks into Georgia in 2008.  Or when Obama refused to sell anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, after Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Obama’s entire foreign policy was pro-Russia! It was right there in the open.

By the way, Trump did sell 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine, to defend themselves from Russia. But did the mainstream news media report on that? How exactly is selling anti-tank missiles to Russia’s enemies “collusion with Russia”?

What about Obama?

What about the Obama administration? Were they ever investigated for their many scandals?

The Obama administration running guns to Mexican drug cartels so they could call for more gun control when those guns were used to kill Border Patrol agents. Or the Obama administration using the IRS as a weapon against conservative get-out-the-vote organizations, just before his re-election campaign. And on and on. The media had nothing to say about those scandals.

News

Can a person believe in both God and Darwinian evolution?

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

The term for a person who believes in fully naturalistic evolution but who also believes in God is “theistic evolutionist”.

Terrell Clemmons takes a look at one organization of theistic evolutionists “Biologos”, and makes a distinction between their public statements and the real implications of their public statements.

Here is the PR / spin definition of theistic evolution:

Evolutionary creation is “the view that all life on earth came about by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent. Evolution is a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes in creation.” This view, also called theistic evolution, has been around since the late nineteenth century, and BioLogos promotes it today in a variety of religious and educational settings.

And here is the no-spin definition of theistic evolution:

As Dr. Stephen Meyer explains it, the central issue dividing Bio-Logos writers from intelligent design theorists is BioLogos’s commitment to methodological naturalism (MN), which is not a scientific theory or empirical finding, but an arbitrary rule excluding non-material causation from the outset. “Unfortunately,” Meyer writes,

methodological naturalism is a demanding doctrine. The rule does not say “try finding a materialistic cause but keep intelligent design in the mix of live possibilities, in light of what the evidence might show.” Rather, MN tells you that you simply must posit a material or physical cause, whatever the evidence.

What this means, according to BioLogos’s own epistemology, is that God is objectively undiscoverable and unknowable—a tenet that sits squarely at odds with Christian orthodoxy, which has for centuries held that God is clearly discernible in the natural world (e.g., Romans 1:20). Obviously, this is theologically problematic, but Meyer also points out that theistic evolution faces problems from a scientific standpoint as well, as the technical literature among evolutionary biologists is moving away from the Darwinian mechanism.

Whenever I talk to theistic evolutionists, I try to stop them from talking about the Bible or their faith, because that’s not what is interesting to me. I don’t really care about their history as a religious person, or where they go to church, or who their pastor is. When I talk about origins and evolution, I only care about the science. What the ordinary process of scientific inquiry tells us about nature? Does nature have the capacity to create all of the varieties of life without any intelligent agency playing a role? Or, are there parts of nature that are similar to computer programs, blog posts, and term papers, where the best explanation of the effect is an intelligent agent choosing how to arrange the parts to achieve functionality?

I don’t accept molecules-to-man unguided evolution. This is not because I start with faith and let faith override the findings of science. It’s because I think that if you look at specific areas of natural history, there is clear evidence of intelligent agency, such as in the origin of life, or the Cambrian explosion. These effects in nature are well-studied and well-understood, and they look much more like the code that a computer scientist (like me) writes than the simplistic “order” created by wind erosion or crystalline patterns or anything the blind forces of nature could produce. Blind forces are observed to make small changes – short or long finch beaks, fruit flies with 4 wings and no balancers, bacterial resistances.

What’s also interesting is how often theistic evolutionists drop the theism but keep the evolution.

Consider this article about Stephen Matheson from Evolution News:

Biologist Stephen Matheson is a longtime critic of the theory of intelligent design. His extensive attacks on Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, for one, ranged from the substantive to the trivial and personal. The tone was frequently…abrasive, and we responded at the time. With Arthur Hunt, Dr. Matheson has debated Dr. Meyer in a forum at Biola University. Formerly a professor at an Evangelical Christian school, Calvin College, Matheson is still listed as a Blog Author at the theistic evolutionary website BioLogos, where it notes that he enjoys “explor[ing] issues of science and Christian faith.”

Well, his theistic evolutionary explorations have now terminated. As he reports on his personal blog page, where he took a hiatus of more than five years along with a break from his teaching, he is “happily” no longer a Christian.

OK. Now that’s just one case, but what about Howard Van Till, also of Calvin College?

Salvo magazine takes a look at what he wrote in a recent book:

In what follows I shall use the term “naturalism,” when unqualified, to represent neither more nor less than the rejection of supernaturalism. Stated positively, naturalism is committed to the belief that all events that occur within this Universe are consistent with and adequately explained by the system of natural causes. This commitment necessarily entails the additional belief that the system of natural causes is fully adequate to account for all events that transpire. Focusing on the issue of the Universe’s formational economy, we can say that naturalism—as here defined -entails the RFEP.

He now gives presentations for atheist groups entitled “From Calvinism to Freethought”. Freethought is a euphemism for atheism.

Now, for the big three Western monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. To deny supernaturalism IS to deny the robust theism present in the world’s big three monotheistic religions. Van Till denies theism as commonly understood now. And again, this isn’t because of the science. His heavy handed naturalistic assumption squashed out any kind of serious inquiry into areas like the origin of the universe, the cosmic fine tuning, the origin or life, the Cambrian explosion, biological convergence, so-called junk DNA, deleterious mutations, and so on. Places where you can see that naturalistic forces cannot do the creating that Van Till has faith that they can.

And for the record, I am an enthusiastic supporter of the standard Big Bang cosmology, and a 4.5 billion year Earth. My problem with evolution is not Bible-based, it’s science-based. If the science shows the need for intelligent causes, and I think it does, then I think that the naturalists need to adjust their assumptions and pre-suppositions to match the evidence. We have blog posts and computer science code, that’s evidence for a programmer. We have DNA and proteins and sudden origin of body plans, that’s evidence for a programmer, too.

News

Mueller’s report ends media’s 22-month #FakeNews campaign against Trump’s re-election

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Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?
Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?

The 22-month-long investigation of Trump-Russia collusion ended yesterday. By now, everyone has heard that there will be no indictments for the Trump campaign for collusion with the Russians. We don’t have the full content of the final report produced by Mueller, but we do know that there will be no additional indictments.

In this post, I want to recall for everyone who paid for the dossier, how the dossier was used to spy on members of the Trump Campaign, and then list out some of the people who pushed the (false) Trump-Russia collusion allegations the most.

Let’s start with this article from Friday night, by the Daily Caller:

CNN political analyst Gloria Borger admitted that the president is “vindicated” by the conclusion of the probe, but did so in a roundabout way, focusing on the political implications for the president’s past critiques of the Mueller team.

“So if, if as Jeffrey is saying, they get great news, the great news is, first of all, there’s no more indictments. But if suddenly the president has to say those angry Democrats who were working with Bob Mueller were actually just part of a Justice Department doing its job after he has criticized the Justice Department, then he’s now vindicated.”

CNN’s admission is important, because they’ve been caught authoring several false reports about the story:

The network, ever desperate to get the biggest scoop on the Russia probe, falsely claimed as far back as June 2016 that Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was under investigation for alleged ties to Russia. In December 2017, CNN inaccurately said that Donald Trump Jr. had special access to Democratic documents stolen by WikiLeaks.

OK, very good. CNN certainly deserves credit for reporting on Mueller’s final report accurately, even though it falsifies their Trump-Russia collusion narrative of the past 22 months. But what about the other groups that pushed the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative? BuzzFeed, the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, etc. And what about the many unhinged Democrat politicians, including Adam Schiff and Ted Lieu. Will they spend the next 22 months undoing the damage they’ve done to the American election process? How else would you see this 22-month charade, except as a deliberate effort by Democrats in the mainstream media to discredit the Republican party before the 2020 elections?

What was the Steele dossier?

So, let’s look at an article from October 2017, published in the radically leftist Washington Post. (One of the sources that pushed the now discredited Trump-Russia dossier the hardest)

It says:

The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.

Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.

After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

Got that? Democrat Clinton and Democrat DNC hire Democrat law firm. Democrat law firm hires Democrat PR firm Fusion GPS.  Democrat PR firm Fusion GPS hires Christopher Steele, who then produces the Steele dossier. The Steele dossier was then used to obtain the FISA warrant that allowed the FBI to spy on members of the Trump campaign.

Last week, Steele himself admitted that he used unverified blog posts from random users posted on a website called iReport.com – which just allowed anyone to post any article they wanted online with no journalism or fact-checking of any kind.

The Washington Examiner explains:

According to deposition transcripts released this week, Steele said last year he used a 2009 report he found on CNN’s iReport website and said he wasn’t aware that submissions to that site are posted by members of the public and are not checked for accuracy.

A web archive from July 29, 2009 shows that CNN described the site in this manner: “iReport.com is a user-generated site.  That means the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked, or screened before they post.”

Steele just Googled for information and put these unchecked user-generated “stories” into the dossier. And then the dossier was used to get the FBI surveillance warrants.

And Steele knew what he was doing:

When asked about his methodology for searching for this information, Steele described it as “what we could call an open source search,” which he defined as “where you go into the Internet and you access material that is available on the Internet that is of relevance or reference to the issue at hand or the person under consideration.”

Steele said his dossier contained “raw intelligence” that he admitted could contain untrue or even “deliberately false information.”

Remember, the Steele dossier was the basis for the FBI’s FISA surveillance warrants against Trump. And that’s what we have been hearing about from Democrat politicians and their allies in the far-left news media for the last 22 months.

This investigation cost a huge amount of taxpayer dollars. It damaged the credibility of the Trump administration enormously. And it smeared all Republican voters, because we supposedly voted for a crooked corrupt President.

When will Hillary Clinton be investigated?

Previously, I blogged about actual collusion between Hillary Clinton and Russia, regarding the sale of uranium rights. We did not have a 22-month investigation of that. Just think how few low-information Democrat voters know about that scandal. We also did not have a 22-month investigation of Clinton’s  unsecure, private e-mail server that was deliberately designed to evade the government’s legal requirements for record-keeping about government business. But the mainstream media didn’t have a thing to say about either of those investigations. Why should we trust them about anything?