When the Wicked Witch meets Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” she demands the ruby red slippers the Kansas farm girl is wearing.  The Good Witch advises Dorothy otherwise. “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” she says.

The Magnitsky Act is something like those ruby red slippers.

Originally passed by Congress in 2012 and named for the Russian accountant found dead in his jail cell after exposing fraud involving Russian officials, it authorized the president to block travel visas and freeze bank accounts of individual Russians deemed guilty of human-rights abuses.

In 2016 it was expanded so it could be applied to other human-rights abusers anywhere in the world. We know its power the same way we know about the power of Dorothy’s red slippers: The bad guys obsess about it.

Like Turkish Dictator Recip Erdogan, who’s feeling the heat of President’s Trump’s Americans First foreign policy of using the Magnitsky Act to force the freeing of Pastor Brunson.

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You return from a great vacation and POW — reality hits like a punch in the nose.

The pain begins when you remember that the hapless Jeff Sessions is still the attorney general of the United States.

It sharpens with the realization that Rod Rosenstein, officially Sessions’ deputy but really the boss of the Justice Department and FBI, continues to get away with the biggest partisan heist of modern times.

Rosenstein is guilty of three main sins.  Here are all three, plus how Trump can trump all three with an ace in the hole.

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Jim Acosta has the sadz.

The untalented little man who rudely shouts unimportant questions at important people while in the employ of the ninth most trusted name in news out of ten, got heckled at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. Sad panda. The hecklers chanted "CNN sucks," which, okay, is true, but they were none too polite about it.

Acosta didn't like it. He reported, "Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore."

But, like virtually everything Acosta reports, this is just a reflection of his small-minded biases. The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don't happen to be a coastal elite.

It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman's magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.

Every day. From every outlet. All the time. And now people are angry. Wonder why.

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Having thrown in its lot with #TheResistance, the media now faces its inevitable, if not actually imminent demise.

Jobs in the newspaper industry continue to disappear, as physical publishing becomes an increasingly unprofitable occupation and advertisers bail for greener pastures.

On television, ratings for the cellar-dwelling CNN—once the premier brand in the cable-news racket—are abysmal. Yet the network stubbornly persists with an outmoded formula designed to keep its dwindling audience in a state of perpetual dudgeon, with zero appeal to anyone not already converted to its Manichean worldview.

Once upon a time, a gig in the Washington bureau was the ne plus ultra of the reporting vocation, inhabited by middle-aged wise men, who spoke soberly and dressed the part, knowing that the brass ring of Dean of the Washington Press Corps could be theirs someday.

Today, a collection of small children, the legacy sons of other network personalities, and supermodels graces the sets and standups at the news networks, chirping away in mouthfuls of clichés and infantile pronouncements about the President.

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There is a scene in the 1996 movie Independence Day where the character (US President Whitmore played by Bill Pullman) mind-melds with the alien, and receives a sudden understanding of the peril the Earth is in.

“I saw... its thoughts. I saw what they're planning to do. They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet... their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on... and we're next.”

For some time now, I’ve thought this applies to the Left.  Certainly, entire fields of endeavor, entire expanses of human knowledge, science, and interest, seem to collapse in the wake of an infestation by the Left.

I used to think this happened because of the Left’s charming habit of hiring only on political conformity, and not on talent, intellectual ability or even interest in the field.

No, Leftists really are like locusts.  They can’t help destroying.

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The socialists are having a moment. At least if you believe the media

But if the socialists were really having a moment, their big show wouldn’t be a 28-year-old birdbrain whose big achievement was beating a boring white guy in a Hispanic district he didn’t even live in.

The Democrats are adopting socialist ideas wholesale. After all, socialism polls brilliantly with the four core Dem bases of angry government workers, angry college students, angry welfare recipients, and San Francisco eco-billionaires who keep all their money in Caribbean banks.

But that’s because the Democrats have no ideas except hating Trump and Republicans.  The socialists think they’re winning. But they’re just the guys shouting things at a crazy mob. And the mob is not really for anything, it’s just enraged. It doesn’t want to build, it wants to tear down.

In other word. the Democrats have hit ‘Peak Outrage’.

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Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . are they leading us toward an 1861?  How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?

Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.

Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.

We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife.

What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?

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“The United States and the European Union together count for more than 830 million citizens and more than 50 percent of the global GDP.  In other words, together, we’re more than 50 percent of trade.  If we team up, we can make our planet a better, more secure, and more prosperous place.

 

Already today, the United States and the European Union have a $1 trillion bilateral trade relationship — the largest economic relationship anywhere in the world.  We want to further strengthen this trade relationship to the benefit of all American and European citizens.

 

This is why we agreed today (7/25), first of all, to work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods.” –President Trump with EU President Juncker, White House, July 25

They must be burning whatever gallons of midnight oil they have left at MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. -- all the propaganda organs of the Democrat Party.

They’re desperately trying to figure out how to downplay the agreement Donald Trump just made with European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker, but it's not going to be easy.

This is the beginning of a massive free trade deal between Europe and the U.S. with zero tariffs outside the auto industry.  If even half of it comes true, there will be a (okay, why not?) YUUUGE growth in trade benefitting both sides of the Atlantic.  What a nightmare for the Democrats.

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