Three Things You Need to Know - November 16, 2017

November 16, 2017

WRITER

Even Moore Accusers.

“He didn’t pinch it. He grabbed it.”

That’s a new allegation from another woman accusing the Senate hopeful Roy Moore of sexual misconduct.

In the first accusation that happened after Moore was already married, Tina Johnson claims that Moore grabbed her behind when she was at his office seeking his legal help with child custody in 1991.

Tina Johnson wasn’t the only person to come forward yesterday with new accusations against Moore.

Twenty-two years prior, Gena Richardson recalled a 30-year-old Moore regularly stalking the mall she worked at. Gena recounts that Moore would often come by her section of Sears and talk to her. On more than one occasion her asked the 18-year-old out. She would usually tell him no and that her dad was a pastor and very strict. But according to Gena, Moore wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was in trigonometry class at Gadsden High when she was summoned to the principal’s office over the intercom in her classroom. She had a phone call.

It was Roy Moore and he had called the high school to ask her out on a date again.

She eventually said yes and they went to the movie theatre at the mall where she worked.

It was a normal date until Moore drove Gena to her car after the movie and forcefully kissed her.

After that, she never wanted to see him again.

Moore’s campaign responded to the new allegations with this statement:

“If you are a liberal and hate Judge Moore, apparently he groped you. If you are a conservative and love Judge Moore, you know these allegations are a political farce.”

It is hard to tell what it true and what’s not here. What’s political cannon fodder and what’s real emotional and physical trauma that’s been hidden away for so long? These women should be believed at face value and their accusations should be looked into.

As for Roy Moore, whether these allegations are true or not, he needs to understand that his campaign is in a death spiral and that the best thing for him to do is to get out.

Mnuchin PR Masterpiece

Republicans are now within striking distance of two BIG objectives: tax reform and FINALLY putting a big dent in Obamacare. The GOP is set to approve their tax-reform measure, which includes a repeal of the individual mandate, sometime later today. The margin of error, however, is small. Just yesterday, Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin announced he would be the first Republican to break off and vote NO. Will anyone else follow his lead?

The hours leading up to the vote are crucial. You could almost hear the gears churning over at the White House communications department from all across the country. How could they improve their image, become a little more relatable, and - in the process- improve their chances of scoring a big win on the Senate floor?

The answer was so obvious! Deploy the Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and his smoking hot actress wife for a super hot selfie with a bunch of sheets of cash! The public would never know what hit them. It would be a PR coup the likes of which would make even Mugabe recoil in fear.

So that’s what they did. Mnuchin held up a giant sheet of crisp dollar bills that were the first to bear his signature. His wife, standing next to him, gave a smoldering gaze at the camera. Dressed uncannily like Kylo Ren, she looked ready to explode into a dark side fueled lightsaber frenzy. Hope Kicks must have sat back in her chair, propped up her feet, and enjoyed this masterful work of communications art. The tax-reform and individual mandate vote were as good as won. The administration hadn’t looked this slick since the President launched paper towel packages at a gathering of Hurricane victims.

The only thing that could have made this look better… MAYBE… is if Mnuchin made it rain with those dollar bills while a hard base hitting pop song rocked the house. Anyway, a win’s a win. Let’s give the Communications Department their props. You crushed it. Game, Set, Match.

Kids Are Bad for the Earth?

Kids are messy, right? But messy is only half the story. Your kids are actually destroying the planet.

I wish I was joking, but earth death is no laughing matter. Our gases and factory fumes are bad enough for the atmosphere. Co2 emissions? Child’s play compared to the havoc your toddler is wreaking on the earth. Okay bad choice of words to call it “child’s play.”

NBC News posted a story yesterday, a think piece if you will, titled “Science proves kids are bad for Earth. Morality suggests we stop having them.”

The author says, “We need to stop pretending kids don’t have environmental and ethical consequences.” I agree – you bring a newborn home and it’s going to mess with your environment in a big way. I mean the noise alone, and at night when you’re trying to sleep? Totally wrecks the home environment.

And the ethical consequences… the baby wakes you up in the middle of the night again. Do you pretend to stay asleep and hope your spouse deals with it? Or what about this one – the baby needs a diaper change. Do you pretend not to notice until another family member takes care of it? So many ethical dilemmas with children.

Okay, I don’t think that’s exactly the kind of “environmental and ethical consequences” he’s talking about, but I’m bending over backward to find any common ground here because this is absurd. The author goes on to say that “having a child is a major contributor to climate change” and even better, that “having a child… is one of the worst things you can do for the environment.”

The Left ridicules people on the Right for not taking climate change seriously. Here’s a helpful tip: a lot of times it’s because of ridiculous articles like this one. This author seems very sincere – a research scholar at the Berman Institute of Bioethics. But all over the world, right now, children are starving to death, ravaged by disease, and sold into slavery, yet the premise of his article is that it’s morally wrong to have children because they leave too big of a carbon footprint.

Actually, it’s morally wrong to have children and not take care of them. So until we get that problem solved, you may want to re-think your understanding of “moral responsibility.”

Perspective and priorities – two things the Left really struggles with.

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Biden backs yet another criminal justice policy with disastrous consequences

The number of people serving life sentences now exceeds the entire prison population in 1970, according to newly-released data from the Sentencing Project. The continued growth of life sentences is largely the result of "tough on crime" policies pushed by legislators in the 1990s, including presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Biden has since apologized for backing those types of policies, but it seems he has yet to learn his lesson. Indeed, Biden is backing yet another criminal justice policy with disastrous consequences—mandatory drug treatment for all drug offenders.

Proponents of this policy argue that forced drug treatment will reduce drug usage and recidivism and save lives. But the evidence simply isn't on their side. Mandatory treatment isn't just patently unethical, it's also ineffective—and dangerous.

Many well-meaning people view mandatory treatment as a positive alternative to incarceration. But there's a reason that mandatory treatment is also known as "compulsory confinement." As author Maya Schenwar asks in The Guardian, "If shepherding live human bodies off to prison to isolate and manipulate them without their permission isn't ethical, why is shipping those bodies off to compulsory rehab an acceptable alternative?" Compulsory treatment isn't an alternative to incarceration. It is incarceration.

Compulsory treatment is also arguably a breach of international human rights agreements and ethical standards. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have made it clear that the standards of ethical treatment also apply to the treatment of drug dependence—standards that include the right to autonomy and self-determination. Indeed, according to UNODC, "people who use or are dependent on drugs do not automatically lack the capacity to consent to treatment...consent of the patient should be obtained before any treatment intervention." Forced treatment violates a person's right to be free from non-consensual medical treatment.

It's a useless endeavor, anyway, because studies have shown that it doesn't improve outcomes in reducing drug use and criminal recidivism. A review of nine studies, published in the International Journal of Drug Policy, failed to find sufficient evidence that compulsory drug treatment approaches are effective. The results didn't suggest improved outcomes in reducing drug use among drug-dependent individuals enrolled in compulsory treatment. However, some studies did suggest potential harm.

According to one study, 33% of compulsorily-treated participants were reincarcerated, compared to a mere 5% of the non-treatment sample population. Moreover, rates of post-release illicit drug use were higher among those who received compulsory treatment. Even worse, a 2016 report from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health found that people who received involuntary treatment were more than twice as likely to die of an opioid-related overdose than those with a history of only voluntary treatment.

These findings echo studies published in medical journals like Addiction and BMJ. A study in Addiction found that involuntary drug treatment was a risk factor for a non-fatal drug overdose. Similarly, a study in BMJ found that patients who successfully completed inpatient detoxification were more likely than other patients to die within a year. The high rate of overdose deaths by people previously involuntarily treated is likely because most people who are taken involuntarily aren't ready to stop using drugs, authors of the Addiction study reported. That makes sense. People who aren't ready to get clean will likely use again when they are released. For them, the only post-treatment difference will be lower tolerance, thanks to forced detoxification and abstinence. Indeed, a loss of tolerance, combined with the lack of a desire to stop using drugs, likely puts compulsorily-treated patients at a higher risk of overdose.

The UNODC agrees. In their words, compulsory treatment is "expensive, not cost-effective, and neither benefits the individual nor the community." So, then, why would we even try?

Biden is right to look for ways to combat addiction and drug crime outside of the criminal justice system. But forced drug treatment for all drug offenders is a flawed, unethical policy, with deadly consequences. If the goal is to help people and reduce harm, then there are plenty of ways to get there. Mandatory treatment isn't one of them.

Lindsay Marie is a policy analyst for the Lone Star Policy Institute, an independent think tank that promotes freedom and prosperity for all Texans. You can follow her on Twitter @LindsayMarieLP.

BOMBSHELL: 'It wasn't just Hunter,' Rudy Giuliani says Joe Biden was target of Ukraine corruption investigation — and he has the evidence to prove it

President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani joined Glenn Beck on Tuesday's radio program discuss the Senate's ongoing investigation into former vice president Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and reveal new bombshell documents he's currently releasing.

Giuliani told Glenn he has evidence of "very, very serious crime at the highest levels of government," that the "corrupt media" is doing everything in their power to discredit.

He also dropped some major, previously unreported news: not only was Hunter Biden under investigation in 2016, when then-Vice President Biden "forced" the firing of Ukraine's prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, but so was the vice president himself.

"Shokin can prove he was investigating Biden and his son. And I now have the prosecutorial documents that show, all during that period of time, not only was Hunter Biden under investigation -- Joe Biden was under investigation," Giuliani explained. "It wasn't just Hunter."

Watch this clip to get a rundown of everything Giuliani has uncovered so far.

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Revealing Bernie’s dark side — one 1980s quote at a time

For most Americans, the 1980s was marked by big hair, epic lightsaber battles, and school-skipping Ferris Bueller dancing his way into the hearts of millions.

But for Bernie Sanders — who, by the way, was at that time the oldest-looking 40-year-old in human history — the 1980s was a period of important personal milestones.

Prior to his successful 1980 campaign to become mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders was mostly known around the Green Mountain State as a crazy, wildly idealistic socialist. (Think Karl Marx meets Don Quixote.) But everything started to change for Sanders when he became famous—or, in the eyes of many, notorious—for being "America's socialist mayor."

As mayor, Sanders' radical ideas were finally given the attention he had always craved but couldn't manage to capture. This makes this period of his career particularly interesting to study. Unlike today, the Bernie Sanders of the 1980s wasn't concerned with winning over an entire nation — just the wave of far-left New York City exiles that flooded Vermont in the 1960s and 1970s — and he was much more willing to openly align himself with local and national socialist and communist parties.

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Over the past few weeks, I have been reading news reports of Sanders recorded in the 1980s — because, you know, that's how guys like me spend their Saturday nights — and what I've found is pretty remarkable.

For starters, Sanders had (during the height of the Soviet Union) a very cozy relationship with people who openly advocated for Marxism and communism. He was an elector for the Socialist Workers Party and promoted the party's presidential candidates in 1980 and 1984.

To say the Socialist Workers Party was radical would be a tremendous understatement. It was widely known SWP was a communist organization mostly dedicated to the teachings of Marx and Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution.

Among other radical things I've discovered in interviews Sanders conducted with the SWP's newspaper — appropriately named The Militant (seriously, you can't make this stuff up) — is a statement by Sanders published in June 1981 suggesting that some police departments "are dominated by fascists and Nazis," a comment that is just now being rediscovered for the first time in decades.

In 1980, Sanders lauded the Socialist Workers Party's "continued defense of the Cuban revolution." And later in the 1980s, Sanders reportedly endorsed a collection of speeches by the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, even though there had been widespread media reports of the Sandinistas' many human rights violations prior to Sanders' endorsement, including "restrictions on free movement; torture; denial of due process; lack of freedom of thought, conscience and religion; denial of the right of association and of free labor unions."

Sanders also traveled to Nicaragua and met with socialist President Daniel Ortega. He later called the trip a "profoundly emotional experience."

Comrade Bernie's disturbing Marxist past, which is far more extensive than what can be covered in this short article, shouldn't be treated as a mere historical footnote. It clearly illustrates that Sanders' brand of "democratic socialism" is much more than a $15 minimum wage and calls for single-payer health care. It's full of Marxist philosophy, radical revolutionary thinking, anti-police rhetoric, and even support for authoritarian governments.

Millions of Americans have been tricked into thinking Sanders isn't the radical communist the historical record — and even Sanders' own words — clearly show that he is. But the deeper I have dug into Comrade Bernie's past, the more evident it has become that his thinking is much darker and more dangerous and twisted than many of his followers ever imagined.

Tomorrow night, don't miss Glenn Beck's special exposing the radicals who are running Bernie Sanders' campaign. From top to bottom, his campaign is staffed with hard-left extremists who are eager to burn down the system. The threat to our constitution is very real from Bernie's team, and it's unlike anything we've ever seen before in a U.S. election. Join Glenn on Wednesday, at 9 PM Eastern on BlazeTV's YouTube page, and on BlazeTV.com. And just in case you miss it live, the only way to catch all of Glenn's specials on-demand is by subscribing to Blaze TV.

Justin Haskins (Jhaskins@heartland.org) is editorial director of The Heartland Institute and editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com.

Candace Owens blasts leftist cancel culture: 'Godless', 'societal atom bomb'

Candace Owens, BLEXIT founder and author of the upcoming book, "Blackout," joined Glenn Beck on Friday's GlennTV for an exclusive interview. available only to BlazeTV subscribers.

Candace dropped a few truth-bombs about the progressive movement and what's happening to the Democratic Party. She said people are practically running away from the left due to their incessant push to dig up dirt on anybody who disagrees with their radical ideology. She explained how -- like China and its "social credit score" -- the left is shaping America into its own nightmarish episode of "Black Mirror."

"This game of making sure that everyone is politically correct is a societal atom bomb. There are no survivors. There's no one that is perfect," Candace said. "The idea that humanity can be perfect is Godless. If you accept that there is something greater than us, then you accept that we a flawed. To be human is to be flawed."

Enjoy this clip from the full episode below:

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BlazeTV subscribers can watch the full interview on BlazeTV.com. Use code GLENN to save $10 off one year of your subscription.