Last Friday (10/11), U.S. President Trump and China’s Vice Premier Liu He announced a trade agreement that saw Washington suspend tariff increases while China agreed to purchase some $40-$50 billion of agricultural products, including pork.

Behind this development, the financial markets rallied; the Dow Jones rose some 320 points or 1.21 percent. Trump billed the agreement as “phase one” of a broader trade agreement, but behind the soaring rhetoric belies a key motivation for the deal:

The Chinese need pig imports.  Big time. Here’s why – and why Trump’s timing for making a deal is impeccable.

President Trump has defended his shameful abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, declaring that "I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars" that have left America "bogged down, watching over a quagmire."

Listening to the president, Americans might think that we still have large numbers of U.S. troops fighting on fronts across the Middle East. We do not.  In fact, we now have three times more troops deployed in Spain (3,200) than we do in Syria (1,000).

Trump likes to say he "defeated" the Islamic State. Actually, the bulk of the fighting was done by our Kurdish allies, trained and supported by U.S. Special Operations forces.

We are depending on the Kurds to keep the Islamic State down. But if we allow Turkey to wipe out our Kurdish allies, who will be left on the ground in Syria to fight the Islamic State?  Answer: No one.

Strangest among all the many melodramas of the last two weeks were the blaring headlines that President Trump had dared to talk with the Australian Prime Minister—and referenced the role of foreign governments and in particular Australia in U.S. electoral politics in 2016.

Given the hue and cry of Democrats in the last three years, they should have been delighted that the president was peremptorily warning foreign nations to cease to currying favor with presidential candidates and asking them to hand over what information, if any, they had of past “collusion.”

In fact, they were outraged and once again returned to “collusion” charges, as if Trump were subverting the 2020 election.

I Accuse You of Doing What I Did! Unfortunately, projection is now an encompassing explanation for almost everything the Left alleges.

The important news of the day--far beyond the inevitable tedious impeachment jousting--is that John Durham's investigation of the provenance of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion has expanded, according to several administration officials.

Fox News previously reported that Durham would be reviewing the days leading up to the 2016 election and through the inauguration.

However, based on what he has been finding, Durham has expanded his investigation adding agents and resources, the senior administration officials said. The timeline has grown from the beginning of the probe through the election and now has included a post-election timeline through the spring of 2017, up to when Robert Mueller was named special counsel.

[Note by JW: Word is that Rosenstein, Mueller, Brennan, Clapper, and former President Obama are all in Durham’s gunsights – and that he would not have requested additional staff and resources unless he had found wrongdoing and criminal activity.]

A blueprint for the deindustrialization of the U.S. is being revealed even now in (you guessed it) California.

Beginning early yesterday morning (10/09), a series of total power shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric began in every county of the Bay Area, along with a number of others to the north (the number of counties involved total 34).  The sole exception — as you might have guessed — is San Francisco.

The power cutoffs are complete, with no exceptions for hospitals, emergency services, phone networks, etc., the purpose being to eliminate all power flowing through overhead power lines in the affected areas in a clumsy, ill considered effort to prevent wildfires.

Vast areas of central California will be returned by fiat to the conditions of the 19th century.  Here’s why.

The classic Western film High Noon, released in 1952, offers a compelling analogy to the Trump presidency.

Set in New Mexico territory sometime in the late 1800s, it starred Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane and Grace Kelly as Amy.  Her character is a Quaker.  She had seen her brothers and father die by gunfire, so she is a pacifist.  The two of them marry in the first moments of the film but then learn that a man the marshal had sentenced to hang, but was released by an early version of an Obama-appointed judge, is coming to their town with three henchmen to kill Kane.

But not one of the townsmen will agree to help.  They are all cowards (Republicans) in fear of their lives, or they are friends and admirers of the outlaw Frank Miller and want to welcome him back to the town (Democrats).  Bottom line?

Buried somewhere in recent impeachment reporting was the real news that federal prosecutors are conducting an international dragnet to find the perpetrators of the Russia hoax. Last week, the Justice Department issued a statement:

A team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is separately exploring the extent to which a number of countries, including Ukraine, played a role in the counterintelligence investigation directed at the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

It was later learned that Attorney General Barr was absent from Washington and could not answer questions because he was in Italy, where Josef Mifsud—the Western asset who plays a Russian collaborator in the Mueller Report—lives. Officials in the UK and Australia also have been contacted.

Obviously, the CIA is trying to get out ahead of its impending embarrassment by fabricating a scandal packaged as a whistleblower complaint suggesting, incredibly, that the president of the United States is not permitted to solicit foreign assistance in a criminal investigation.

Aside from the emotional issue that Democrats, NeverTrumpers, and celebrities loathe Donald Trump, recently Representative Al Green (D-Texas) reminded us why the Democrats are trying to impeach the president rather than just defeat him in the 2020 general election.

“To defeat him at the polls would do history a disservice, would do our nation a disservice,” Green said.  “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach the president, he will get re-elected.”

Translated, that means Green accepts either that Trump’s record is too formidable or that the agendas of his own party’s presidential candidates are too frightening for the American people to elect one of them. And that possibility is simply not permissible.

Thus, impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency—on a purely partisan vote to preclude an election, and thus contrary to the outlines of impeachment as set out by the Constitution.

Consider it another way...

The Reliant, an action film coming to select theaters on October 24, is not a typical faith-based film and the secular community is taking notice.

It was made apparent when the Motion Picture Association of America gave it an R rating. Although it had no foul language or sex scenes, and less violence than Disney movies given a PG-13 rating, the screenwriter and producer of the film, Dr. J. P. Johnston, had to appeal to the MPAA to get it changed.

The hate mail the producers have received and the trash articles written by those opposed to the film’s nod to the right-to-keep-and-bear-arms is a hint of the size of the stronghold The Reliant is trying to tackle. The entertainment site, AV Club, wrote a review with the title, Watch Kevin Sorbo Fight Antifa in This Bat@#$% Trailer.

When the mainstream “powers that be” come out in full force against a faith-based film, that’s when you know this movie is going to have real impact.

Hong Kong. Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China from a podium overlooking Tiananmen Square 70 years ago today, October 1, 1949. This year’s celebrations, including in Hong Kong, were meant to pay tribute to Mao’s successor Xi Jinping.

But the people of Hong Kong have stood up. Millions have marched in protest of Beijing’s undemocratic control.  China is not as strong as it pretends. What the Communist Party calls its “socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics” has run its course.

On this 70th anniversary of communism’s ascendance in China, the irony is that the only legitimacy the Party has left comes from a growing economy. If China’s economy implodes, so does the regime’s legitimacy.

The China-U.S. trade war is an epochal event that can push China to the brink of collapse, especially if the U.S. links its values and human rights to its dealings with China.