Donald Trump says “trade wars are good and easy to win” if your foes depend on your market and you can break them under pressure.

You see, he knows that China’s majestic and elegantly-stable GDP figures are best seen as an instrument of political combat.  Which is why he proclaimed victory when the Shanghai equity index went into a swoon over the winter. This is classic Trumpian gamesmanship.

It is in China’s urgent interest to puncture such claims as trade talks come to a head. Xi Jinping had to beat expectations with a crowd-pleaser in the first quarter. The number was duly produced: 6.4%. Let us all sing the March of the Volunteers.

“Could it really be true?” asked Beijing-based Caixin magazine. This was a brave question in Uncle Xi’s evermore totalitarian regime.

Of course it is not true.

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The most inadvertently honest reaction to Attorney General William Barr’s congressional testimony this week came from former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Mr. Barr had bluntly called out the Federal Bureau of Investigation for “spying” on the Trump campaign in 2016. Mr. Clapper said that was both “stunning and scary.”

Indeed. Here's what Trump’s foes have to be scared about.

No doubt a lot of former Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign officials, opposition guns for hire, and media members are stunned and scared that the Justice Department finally has a leader willing to address the FBI’s behavior in 2016

They all worked very hard to make sure such an accounting never happened. Only in that context can we understand the frantic new Democrat-media campaign to tar the attorney general.

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Though they were excruciatingly obnoxious to William Barr at Tuesday's (4/09) House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Democrats would be well-advised to lay off the attorney general, maybe even treat him with kid gloves, because he holds a good deal of the future of their party in his hands.

In fact, he is positioned to make that party bleed as perhaps no one in history. And it only makes it worse that he is clearly such a straight shooter.

The big story from Barr's testimony then before the subcommittee was not that the AG plans to release a redacted version of the Mueller report within a week or even that those redactions will be color-coded four ways and annotated to explain the reasons for the edits.

Here's the real big story, and it’s really big.

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[Note by JW – Professor Hanson provides a masterful compendium of all twelve of the ways the pathologically fascist Democrats and media tried and failed to destroy the Trump Presidency, and then asks the crucial question at the end.]

Right after the 2016 election, Green Party candidate Jill Stein—cheered on by Hillary Clinton dead-enders—sued in three states to recount votes and thereby overturn Donald Trump’s victory in the Electoral College.

Before the quixotic effort imploded, Stein was praised as an iconic progressive social justice warrior who might stop the hated Trump from even entering the White House.

When that did not work….

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It has been a long time since a person as young as Candace Owens appeared on the political scene who is as brilliant, grounded, and quick-thinking as she is.  She is 29 years old –  the same age as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.  Let that sink in a minute.

Owens has at least a hundred IQ points on the supremely ignorant Ocasio-Cortez.  Owens's grace and class are the antithesis of Ocasio-Cortez's empty-headed, ditzy meanderings.

Owens's videos are all worth watching, and her performance yesterday (4/09) in front of the House Oversight Committee was spectacular as you can see above.  She put the Democrats on that committee to shame, especially Jerrold Nadler and Ted Lieu.

Both of them tried their best to humiliate her, to use her as a prop in their latest narrative that Trump is responsible for a make-believe rise of white nationalism and white supremacy.  Yet it was she who humiliated them.

She indeed spoke truth to the Democrats in front of her, when she told them in her opening statement:

"The hearing today is not about white nationalism or hate-crimes, it’s about fear-mongering, power and control."

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[Note by JW – Damon Linker is on the Left, but has the integrity to report real news even if it disappoints him]

Don't be fooled by misleading stories about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's disappointing showing in Tuesday's (4/09) election in Israel.

Even if the centrist Blue and White alliance of former military chief Benny Gantz had eked out a very narrow victory over Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party, the story of this election is not at all about the retreat of the right. (Gantz conceded yesterday 4/10.)

On the contrary, the most far-reaching consequence of the 2019 Israeli election may well be that it verified, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is functionally no Left left in Israel. It has become a country with a center, a right, and a far right, but no electorally viable Left to speak of.

An astonishing example.  The Labor Party – viewed as the equivalent of the US Democrat Party – performed so badly it may be on te verge of extinction.

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Like lots of millennials who have catapulted to fame, May Golan got her start on the internet, blogging about life in her South Tel Aviv neighborhood. From there she gained a platform as a social activist, with 25,000 followers on Facebook and 16,300 on Twitter.

On Tuesday (4/09), hours before she won a seat in Israel’s Knesset, she reached out to voters in one last Facebook video, wearing a T-shirt with the words “Netanyahu. Right-wing. Strong. Successful.” emblazoned in blue and white block letters.  She is 32.

In other words, Golan is staunchly right wing. She’s also a lot like many Israeli Jews of her generation.

While American millennials have a reputation for liberal politics, young Israeli Jews have gone the opposite direction over time. For at least the past 10 years, these voters have identified as right wing at much higher levels than their parents.

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On Sunday (4/07), the New York Times reported: “US Military Pulls Out of Libyan Capital As Rival Militias Battle.”

Here’s the background, and what the Times doesn’t understand: that this is an ambush of Putin’s Russia on NATO and the US.

The meeting of 29 foreign ministers from member countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in Washington, DC, last week (April 3–4), marking the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Alliance, was not a joyful occasion for Russia.

During the celebration, Russia was duly identified as the main disruptor of regional security. The allies asserted unity in deterring Moscow’s provocative behavior and confirmed their resolve to increase defense expenditures accordingly.

Moscow’s urge to spoil the “hostile” celebrations of NATO’s lasting success was irresistible, but the readiness to directly challenge the security of the Alliance’s frontline states or even partners was clearly absent.  So Putin found a near-perfect place for an ambush in Libya.

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