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Dem Congressman: Bulldoze ‘Every Inch’ of Existing Border Barriers

Posted by William M. Finley on October 7, 2017 at 7:56am

Dem Congressman: Bulldoze ‘Every Inch’ of Existing Border Barriers

( The greats Domestic to the AMERICAN PEOPLE IS THE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATIC PARTY! NOV. 8TH 2018 IS OUR NEXT ELECTIONS  )

Homeland Security Committee member exposes how liberals really feel about nation's security

by Brendan Kirby | Updated 04 Oct 2017 at 2:16 PM

Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee lined up Wednesday to oppose a bill to beef up border security and build a wall on the Mexican border, but a representative from Texas took it a step further.

During a committee meeting to discuss the Border Security for America Act of 2017, Rep. Filemon Vela (D-Texas) expressed his dissatisfaction with the existing fencing that separates the United States and Mexico along parts of the nearly 2,000-mile border.

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“I strongly oppose Trump’s wall,” he said. “In fact, I would take a bulldozer to every inch of existing structure on the U.S.-Mexican border.”

Vela, first elected in 2012 to represent a heavily Latino district that touches the Mexican border, spoke in favor of an amendment to the bill to define the wall. His sarcastic list snatched lines from President Donald Trump’s campaign speeches, including “big and beautiful,” “see through,” “not a fence,” and “has openings.”

The definition also included that it be solar, made of rebar and steel, and paid for by the Mexican government.

Vela said he would vote against his own amendment, offered as an attack on the proposed wall.

“I offer this amendment to provide the members of this committee the clearest picture to date of the conflicting and absurd vision that the president has for his wall,” he said. “A vote for this amendment is a vote for Donald Trump’s vision. A ‘yes’ vote on this amendment is a vote for his big, beautiful wall.”

senate-daca-dreamers-hearing1-360x210.jpgDemocrats Paranoid Trump Will Use DACA Info for RoundupsAdministration officials repeatedly testify at hearing that information-sharing policy has not changed

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the committee, indicated that Vela's stunt would not stop the bill from advancing.

"Let me just say that I appreciate the gentleman's creativity in his amendment and his sense of humor, but I will oppose this amendment," he said.

The bill calls for additional customs agents and U.S. Border Patrol officers, improved technology, and new physical barriers. It also would upgrade the land ports of entry.

Read more…

Saturday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 7, 2017 at 7:35am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
by Mark Steyn
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Molon Labe, Michael Moore
YTJttVrhjDVMTIJuUSoGRYlWzgwe4KIykKOtEbueFulqsksA5yqvOUJzmO4OF4of_s3wCB8S_dazo_DtbO1409_w-9HVavLoJ2Src7w6tILE6ZpfgDPXiYaMDCFJOQY=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2015-12-07-749f5422_large.jpg" width="454" height="227" />
by Nate Jackson:  Until leftists are willing to admit that they want to repeal the Second Amendment, there’s little point to their yammering about gun control after the massacre in Las Vegas. So in a way it’s refreshing to see documentarian Michael Moore’s pathetic attempt at relevance in his call for a 28th Amendment to heavily regulate gun ownership and “repeal the ancient and outdated 2nd Amendment.” At least he’s being honest about his intentions. (To be fair, so is The New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens.)

          His proposed amendment reads: “A well regulated State National Guard, being helpful to the safety and security of a State in times of need, along with the strictly regulated right of the people to keep and bear a limited number of non-automatic Arms for sport and hunting, with respect to the primary right of all people to be free from gun violence, this shall not be infringed.” That just spells out more clearly how leftists already misinterpret the Second Amendment.
          Moore’s further ideas include banning all automatic and semiautomatic guns, limiting magazine capacity to six, forcing men to obtain waivers from the significant woman (or man) in their lives in order to purchase guns, requiring “smart” guns that fire only for the registered owner and mandating storage of the few remaining guns in a “licensed gun club or government-regulated storage facility.”
          We’d be outraged if Moore’s proposal wasn’t such a sad joke. Let’s say just for the sake of argument he succeeded in passing his amendment — what then? Confiscation. Otherwise, his new amendment is a dead letter. Why is it that deporting a few million illegal aliens is impossible but confiscating 300 million guns is just within reach? More pointedly, is he proposing to send armed government agents to confiscate all 300 million firearms in America? If so, they would collect the ammo first, if you know what we mean. Is “doing something” to stop the next murder worth a civil war?
          It’s quite ironic that Moore has described President Donald Trump as an “authoritarian” and a “fascist” and yet is apparently calling for Trump’s government to have the power to take away the God-given and constitutional right of the people to defend themselves against tyranny.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51672

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Sarah Sanders Body-Slams Acosta 
On Congress Investigating Media Bias
{rickwells.us} ~ Sarah Huckabee Sanders body-slammed CNN’s Jim Acosta as he attempted to go into one of his twisted rants during the White House press briefing... Acosta asked, “Why did the President tweet this morning that he’d like to see the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate news outlets, in I guess this quest to go after fake news?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” Sanders replied, “Absolutely, the President is an incredible advocate of the First Amendment, with those freedoms, also come responsibilities and you have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be accurate.”... https://rickwells.us/sarah-sanders-acosta-media/
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Mueller’s Investigators Have Met 
With Dossier Author Christopher Steele
by CHUCK ROSS
{dailycaller.com} ~ Investigators in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller met this summer with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous and uncorroborated Trump dossier... The report, from CNN, indicates that Mueller’s team of investigators are fully vetting the dossier, which Steele compiled after being hired last June by an opposition research firm hired by an ally of liar-Hillary Clinton’s.  According to CNN, the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, took Steele’s dossier more seriously than has been acknowledged in public...Steele wasn't talking to Intelligence but willing to talk to Mueller, why?  http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/05/report-muellers-investigators-have-met-with-dossier-author-christopher-steele/?utm_medium=email
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Trump administration scales back   
liar-nObamacare birth control mandate, 
claims end to 'attacks on religious liberty'
by Kimberly Leonard
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Trump administration announced Friday that it will exempt employers from providing insurance coverage for contraception if it conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs... scaling back a rule created under the liar-nObama administration. The interim final rule was an outgrowth of liar-nObamacare, which is written to give discretion to the Department of Health and Human Services to issue rules about what constitutes women's preventive care, meaning that different administrations can reverse or change the rules. The new rules allow any employer to be exempt from the mandate "based on its sincerely held religious beliefs" or on "moral convictions." Employers who decide not to provide coverage do not need to inform the federal government but would need to tell their employees about their decision...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-administration-to-scale-back-obamacares-birth-control-mandate/article/2636733?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/06/17&utm_medium=email
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In Gaza, Hamas levels an ancient 
Canaanite archaeological treasure
by FARES AKRAM
{timesofisrael.com} ~ Palestinian and French archaeologists began excavating Gaza’s earliest archaeological site nearly 20 years ago, unearthing what they believe is a rare 4,500-year-old Bronze Age settlement... But over protests that grew recently, Gaza’s Hamas rulers have systematically destroyed the work since seizing power a decade ago, allowing the flattening of this hill on the southern tip of Gaza City to make way for construction projects, and later military bases. In its newest project, Hamas-supported bulldozers are flattening the last remnants of excavation. “There is a clear destruction of a very important archaeological site,” said Palestinian archaeology and history professor Mouin Sadeq, who led three excavations at the site along with French archaeologist Pierre de Miroschedji after its accidental discovery in 1998. “I don’t know why the destruction of the site was approved.”...  https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-gaza-hamas-levels-an-ancient-archaeological-treasure/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=65c7ccfffe-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-65c7ccfffe-54638825
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Anti-Pulosi Revolt Building Again In House Dem Caucus
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Secret Mega-Donors To Anti-Trump Resistance Group
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Football Meets ‘Game of Thrones’ in This Ancient Italian Sport
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Even The NRA: Momentum Building Toward Banning Bump Stocks
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The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
by Mark Steyn
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Nine decades ago this week, the talkies were born: On October 6th 1927, at their marquee picture palace in New York, the Warner Brothers premiered their new film The Jazz Singer. Not a single Warner brother was present. Sam Warner, the most enthusiastic proponent of the new "Vitaphone" sound technology, had died the day before, and his three siblings were en route back to Hollywood to bury him. The four brothers Warner had not been having a good time of it in 1927: They were variously selling stock, ceasing to draw salaries, moving into more modest accommodations and pawning the missus's jewelry. The Jazz Singer would make them into a major studio. So it was, within the space of 24 hours, both a death and a re-birth - as it was for their industry, although very few of its employees foresaw that.

It was an odd movie to gamble an art form on: I doubt you'd get it past the first pitch at a Hollywood studio today. It was born a decade earlier, when a University of Illinois student found himself planning a night on the town:

It became very necessary that I should impress a certain young lady. I had a date with her for a certain evening. I wanted to show her the best time to be had in the town of Champaign, Illinois. I borrowed ten dollars and bought two tickets for the one-night performance of Al Jolson in Robinson Crusoe Jr.

The young swain was a chap called Samson Raphaelson. As to how the date went, he liked the girl, but he loved Jolson. The Broadway headliner was "the World's Greatest Entertainer", according to himself, and Raphaelson was minded to agree:

I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson-his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from a tremendous absorption in his song. I still remember the song, 'Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow...' That figure in blackface, kneeling at the end of a runway which projected him into the heart of his audience, flinging out his white-gloved hands, was embracing that audience with a prayer-an evangelical moan-a tortured, imperious call that hurtled through the house...

Samson Raphaelson had grown up on New York's Lower East Side, and he was surely unique that night in Champaign in seeing beyond the white gloves and blackface to recognize in Jolson, who'd spent his boyhood in a shtetl in what's now Lithuania, something from his own early days at the Pike Street synagogue. At the end of "Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow", he turned to the girl and supposedly exclaimed:

My G0D, this isn't a jazz singer. This is a cantor!

I very much doubt he ever said that - as "jazz" was not a word in general currency in 1917, especially not in front of the ladies, and insofar as it was applied to music it was still spelled "jass". But, however expressed, the thought must have occurred - because five years later he wrote a short story for Everybody's Magazine called "The Day of Atonement", about a thinly fictionalized Jolson. Like the real-life singer, "Jack Robin" is a cantor's son who becomes a Broadway star, etc. What transformed it from just the usual roman à  clef stuff was the theme in which Raphaelson framed the drama: the conflict between a young Jew's traditions and the seductions of modernity. The author was by now a successful advertising executive, and his secretary suggested he turn his short story into a play. She sold him on the idea by showing him a script, pointing out how few words there were on each page, and offering to take dictation all weekend. The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway with George Jessel in September 1925, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights nine months later.

George Jessel was signed to star in the movie. But the Warners were having a tough time of it. Their investment in "Vitaphone" sound-on-disc technology was primarily a cost-cutting move: They intended to use it to pre-record the orchestral scores, so that they could dispense with the live musicians who accompanied silent pictures at movie theaters across the land. That would be a huge saving. To be sure, the technology had other potential - for example, the occasional sound effect: it would be pretty spectacular to have, say, a shipwreck or a train smash, and to hear all the noise. But talking? The thought never occurred to the Warner Brothers. Talking was for plays. Nobody went to the pictures to hear talk.

In the fall of 1926, the first two Vitaphone features with orchestra plus sound effects - Don Juan and The Better 'Ole - were hits, and the brothers decided to make The Jazz Singer into a sound-on-disc production. Jessel decided that the new technology demanded a new contract and overplayed his hand, insisting on a significant bonus and failing to appreciate that the brothers were mainly turning to Vitaphone because they were bust. Negotiations with Jessel broke down; they offered the part to Eddie Cantor, who declined; and finally they came to the man who'd inspired the original short story. And it was the participation of Al Jolson that ensured that the most decisive contributions of The Jazz Singer to the course of motion pictures would be neither the symphonic score nor the sound effects, but the singing and talking. That's what killed non-singing, non-talking pictures.

Neither the producer, Daryl Zanuck, nor the director, Alan Crosland, seemed to realize that's what they were doing. The Jazz Singer begins with a markedly somber overture, freighted with tragedy, six minutes of foreboding. Then a card appears:

In every living soul, a spirit cries for expression - perhaps this plaintive, wailing song of Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer.

The camera shows scenes of busy urban streets and the orchestra segues into a symphonic arrangement of "Sidewalks of New York" - so the audience knows which particular urban streets they're looking at. This is all the language of what our age calls "silent pictures", a designation that defines an art form only by the element it's missing: no one calls ballet "silent plays".

In the teeming Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side, Papa Rabinowitz wants his boy to follow in the family tradition and become a cantor. But Mama knows the 13-year-old lad has other ideas. The scenario plays out silently, with dialogue cards, and then we cut to a beer garden, where the kid, billed as "Ragtime Jakie", is taking the stage. In this scene, you sense how little the film-makers understood their own revolution: Ragtime Jakie is singing a song, but it's nothing so scandalous as ragtime - merely "My Gal Sal", the last sentimental hit of Paul Dresser, an Indiana man who wrote the second most successful American pop song of the 19th century "On The Banks of the Wabash Far Away", now the state anthem, if you're minded to take a knee. And, in fact, Ragtime Jakie isn't really "singing" it: Bobby Gordon, who plays the kid, has his singing voice dubbed. So the first sound scene in the first "talkie" is actually a lip-synching scene, and not a terribly good one, although no worse than many today. Still, how odd to inaugurate the "talkie" with a "lippie" or a "dubbie".

By whom was young Master Gordon dubbed? Nobody knows. That's how unimportant it was. The very first voice heard in the first talkie is lost to posterity. Because the scene was meant to be just a freaky novelty: A silent film bursts into song for one goofy rendition of an ancient number by a guy who died bankrupt in 1906. What kind of wave of the future is that?

And immediately afterwards we lapse back into silence. A friend of the cantor witnesses the song, and races home to tell the old man. Dialogue card:

In a saloon, who do you think I saw singing raggy time songs?

The enraged father races over to the beer hall and arrives in the midst of Ragtime Jakie's second number, lip-synched to the same no-name dubber. This time it's "Waiting for the Robert E Lee". Ever since all this statue-toppling business began earlier in the summer, I find I can't stop bursting into "Waiting For The Robert E Lee". Does anyone else have that problem? I can't recall even thinking of it for a couple of decades, but you may have noticed I broke into "Way down on the levee/In old Alabammy" on Tucker Carlson last last week, and on Rush the week before. Don't ask me why - although, as a general proposition, whenever the cultural totalitarians attempt to torch even the most minor artifact, it generally behooves us to put it into heavy rotation (see, e.g., my frequent performances of "Kung Fu Fighting" since the Isle of Wight coppers designated performances thereof as a hate crime). So, even without the ninetieth anniversary of The Jazz Singer, I'd probably be looking for a movie featuring the song The Jolson Story probably, or Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway.

Alas, in the midst of his lip-synching, Ragtime Jakie is yanked off stage by his pa. And we're back to the dialogue cards:

I'll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him... First he will get a whipping.

After the whipping, the boy runs away from home, and Cantor Rabinowitz goes to the synagogue. And so "Kol Nidre", the traditional declaration in Aramaic that commences the evening service on Yom Kippur, becomes the third song to be sung on the big screen, first with the cantor in shot and then over scenes of the sobbing mother in her empty flat, and of Jakie sneaking back to retrieve a treasured photo of his mother. So, in a certain sense, this is the first musical cutaway - cutting away from the performance to use the song to heighten emotionally the drama taking place elsewhere.

At which point, after 18 minutes, we flash forward and finally see Al Jolson, as the grown-up Jakie. How many years have passed? Well, Jolie was forty when he made The Jazz Singer, and the guy playing his dad, Warner Oland, was a mere eight years older. But you'd have to be missing the point entirely if that's what you take away from this scene. We're in San Francisco, thousands of miles from New York's Lower East Side, and at a modest cabaret "Jack Robin" (as Jakie Rabinowitz now styles himself) is called up from his table and invited to do a song.

He then launches into "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" - and what follows is on an entirely different level, technically speaking, from "My Gal Sal" or "Kol Nidre". Jolson was always a very idiosyncratic performer: he was the first major singer to use the second chorus of a song not as a straight reprise of the first, but as an opportunity for ad-libs and embellishments (as Crosby and Sinatra later would). So here he does what he always does, and somehow the Vitaphone manages to keep up with him through all the sobs, chuckles, talk-singy lines, through every "Awwwwww!" The synchronicity of it all must have thrilled audiences in 1927 as much as any CGI superhero battle scene today.

And then finally, 20 minutes in, "the first talkie" actually lets someone talk. Jolie finishes the number and tells the audience, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell you. You ain't heard nothin'..." This was his catchphrase, of course - ever since the night, a decade earlier, when he'd had to follow Caruso on stage and, with the ovation for the great tenor still ringing through the rafters, quietened the crowd and cockily assured them, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." Could there be a better first line of heard dialogue for the birth of talking pictures?

That's Jolson. Just Jolson being Jolson. He goes into "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", an exhilaratingly physical performance, complete with spoken interjections - "Ow! Ow!" He whistles the second chorus, and so the first talkie is also the first whistling picture. Georgie Jessel wouldn't have done that. Heading into the final stretch, he instructs the band, "Get hot!" And they almost do, because it's hard to go wrong with "Toot, Toot, Tootsie".

And then the sound of applause, and the customers enthusiastically banging cutlery on plates. It's the equivalent of the moment when the drab dustbowl monochrome of Kansas flames into the rainbow colors of Oz: in just five minutes, Joley's wild, abandoned "jazz" singing has turned "silent pictures" into the raucous cacophony of "talkies".

The dialogue cards and silence return - but just for a bit. Jack Robin gets his big break on Broadway and goes home to see his Mama, with a gift of jewelry:

Diamonds! With stones in it! You didn't do any wrong, did you, Jakie?

His head rears back laughing. Dialogue card:

Mama, you ain't heard nothing yet!

But the line doesn't work as well typed out in white on black. In a mere half-hour of screen time, something has changed, and can't be changed back.

Jolson sits down at the piano and we're back to sound, as he plays and sings Irving Berlin's then new "Blue Skies". As the band was ordered back in San Francisco, he "gets hot", and so does Mama, grooving along and getting into it. And at the end, not minded to return to dialogue cards quite yet, Jolson asks her out loud, "You like that, mama? I'm glad of it. I'd rather please you than anybody I know of."

And so Eugenie Besserer, a career silent-film actress who'd been acting mother roles for two decades, found herself playing straight-man in talking pictures' first two-person dialogue scene. No writer came up with it - neither the scenarist (Alfred Cohn) nor the writer of the caption cards (Jack Jarmuth) penned a word of it. Jolson was famous on Broadway for ignoring the scripts of his shows and going his own way, and he had no plans to change his working methods for Hollywood. So he just ad-libbed his way through the scene, and a slightly befuddled Eugenie Besserer does her best to keep her end up with the occasional mumbled assent.

"We're gonna move up into the Bronx," Joley tells her. "Lot of nice green grass up there, and a whole lot of people you know - the Ginsbergs, the Gutenbergs, the Goldbergs, a whole lot of bergs, I don't know them all." At that world premiere in New York, on October 6th 1927, this scene electrified the crowd above all others. At a stroke, Jolson's patter shattered the formality of silent-screen dialogue, and turned Jack Jarmuth and the other writers of "intertitles" into the equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers. While the audience understood what was happening at that moment, only one critic did. Robert E Sherwood, later the author of Waterloo Bridge, Rebecca, The Best Years of Our Lives and much more, brooded on this scene in Life:

There is one moment in The Jazz Singer that is fraught with tremendous significance. Al Jolson, appearing as a Jewish youth, returns to his old home after years of wandering around the Pantages circuit. His strictly orthodox father has disowned him because he chose to sing mammy songs in music halls rather than chants in the synagogue; his mother, however, welcomes the prodigal with open arms. Al sits down at the piano and sings 'Blue Sky' [sic] for his mother. Thanks to the Vitaphone attachment, his marvelous voice rings out from the screen, the sound agreeing perfectly with the movements of his mobile lips, the wriggling of his shoulders, the nervous tapping of his feet. After the song, there is a brief bit of spoken dialogue, and then Al bursts into 'Blue Sky' again. When he is halfway through the chorus, his father enters the room, realizes that his house is being profaned with jazz, and shouts 'Stop!'

At this point the Vitaphone withdraws and The Jazz Singer returns to a routine of pantomime punctuated with sub-titles... I for one suddenly realized that the end of silent drama is in sight.

The Vitaphone did not withdraw for long, and the end of silent drama came very quickly. A quarter-century later, Singin' in the Rain played it for laughs, with Donald O'Connor proposing to turn the unwanted silent flick The Dueling Cavalier into The Dueling Mammy. Yet it was a tragic time for many, as one skill-set - expressive faces - yielded to another - the ability to rattle off rat-a-tat dialogue. Jolie's girl here, May McAvoy, married the treasurer of United Artists and retired. Otto Lederer, playing the family friend who spots Ragtime Jakie in the saloon, made a couple more talkies and then retired. Other than Jolson, only Warner Oland was still on the big screen a decade later: He was a Swede who played a Jew and then parlayed it into a lifetime of Chinese roles, as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Indeed, the screen in Jolson's dressing room here is a curiously Fu Manchu-esque bit of chinoiserie.


After Oland's single word "Stop!" silences "Blue Skies", the unseen orchestra picks up the score with, of all things, Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet - because this is a feud between two houses, the Songs of Israel and the Songs of Jazz. In the words of the cantor: "Leave my house! I never want to see you again - you jazz singer!" Even if it weren't the first talkie, The Jazz Singer would be significant as the protean plot for virtually every biotuner in the years since, in which some rebellious punk insists he has to play his music his way even though the squares don't dig it at all. What raises Raphaelson's script above the run-of-the-mill is his framing it as an immigrant family's struggle between ancient faith and the din of the new. On the one hand:

Would you be the first Rabinowitz in five generations to fail your God?

On the other:

We in the show business have our religion, too - on every day, the show must go on!

In choosing the latter, Jolson's character understands that something is being lost - just as Robert E Sherwood understood that the bright dawn of a new art form was also the end of another. The film's ambivalence about both itself and its story is caught in the dressing-room scene in which Jolson applies his blackface make-up. Blackface lingered in the movies for another couple of decades, but mostly just as visual accessorizing of period numbers from the minstrel days (Judy Garland got up like a high yaller in the above-mentioned Babes on Broadway, for example). But this is about the only blackface moment I can think of where the act of blacking up is the point of the drama. Years earlier, the star had been one half of a vaudevillian double-act called "The Hebrew and the Coon": The Hebrew was the genuine article, the Coon was Al. Nineteenth-century minstrelsy was the dominant race condescending to its subordinate. Jolson makes it something subtler here - a metaphor, a code, a refuge: the confusion of a man caught between two worlds, expressing one race's pain through the form of another, and exchanging one complex duality for an ostensibly simpler one. Telling his girl about "the call of the ages - the cry of my race", the would-be Broadway star resumes making up: He sees his blackface in the glass above the sink, and (in a visual effect) the mirror dissolves to his father in the synagogue.

The Jazz Singer is a serious and sincere film, and certainly not the property you'd greenlight if you wanted merely to show off the new technology and make a gazillion bucks. It has its moments of hack work - "Mother of Mine" is basically "Sonny Boy" sideways - but it also has its integrity: hence, Jolson in cantor's garb singing at the synagogue. The opening date was chosen to capitalize on Yom Kippur, because the Warner Brothers thought it would appeal to New York Jews. That's it. They didn't realize they were blowing up the entire trajectory of Hollywood.

But that's what they did nine decades ago, when Al Jolson ad-libbing and hip-wiggling opened every small-town audience's eyes to all the "velocity", "fluidity" and sheer vitality Samson Raphaelson had seen on stage in Champaign, Illinois a decade earlier. The exit music for the film was "Mammy" - in contrast to all the orchestral brooding in the overture. Those two pieces of music symbolize the journey the film and the industry had taken during the intervening ninety minutes. By contrast, ninety years after Vitaphone, Hollywood seems exhausted, bereft of Vita and just phoning it in.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1017/steyn100417.php3
Read more…

Saturday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 7, 2017 at 7:30am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
by Mark Steyn
AGHnzvDgAIc_dkrUO59jF21LrUmiQ79dA3RIshU-YlAdfSFPOhc54BmJs1OTRtvnrEX-cCbeiMVXdurlydL03p7YzXsWg_6cAavWTIOYU1PogQU4ftAjtXM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
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Molon Labe, Michael Moore
YTJttVrhjDVMTIJuUSoGRYlWzgwe4KIykKOtEbueFulqsksA5yqvOUJzmO4OF4of_s3wCB8S_dazo_DtbO1409_w-9HVavLoJ2Src7w6tILE6ZpfgDPXiYaMDCFJOQY=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Nate Jackson:  Until leftists are willing to admit that they want to repeal the Second Amendment, there’s little point to their yammering about gun control after the massacre in Las Vegas. So in a way it’s refreshing to see documentarian Michael Moore’s pathetic attempt at relevance in his call for a 28th Amendment to heavily regulate gun ownership and “repeal the ancient and outdated 2nd Amendment.” At least he’s being honest about his intentions. (To be fair, so is The New York Times’ token “conservative,” Bret Stephens.)

          His proposed amendment reads: “A well regulated State National Guard, being helpful to the safety and security of a State in times of need, along with the strictly regulated right of the people to keep and bear a limited number of non-automatic Arms for sport and hunting, with respect to the primary right of all people to be free from gun violence, this shall not be infringed.” That just spells out more clearly how leftists already misinterpret the Second Amendment.
          Moore’s further ideas include banning all automatic and semiautomatic guns, limiting magazine capacity to six, forcing men to obtain waivers from the significant woman (or man) in their lives in order to purchase guns, requiring “smart” guns that fire only for the registered owner and mandating storage of the few remaining guns in a “licensed gun club or government-regulated storage facility.”
          We’d be outraged if Moore’s proposal wasn’t such a sad joke. Let’s say just for the sake of argument he succeeded in passing his amendment — what then? Confiscation. Otherwise, his new amendment is a dead letter. Why is it that deporting a few million illegal aliens is impossible but confiscating 300 million guns is just within reach? More pointedly, is he proposing to send armed government agents to confiscate all 300 million firearms in America? If so, they would collect the ammo first, if you know what we mean. Is “doing something” to stop the next murder worth a civil war?
          It’s quite ironic that Moore has described President Donald Trump as an “authoritarian” and a “fascist” and yet is apparently calling for Trump’s government to have the power to take away the God-given and constitutional right of the people to defend themselves against tyranny.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51672

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Sarah Sanders Body-Slams Acosta 
On Congress Investigating Media Bias
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{rickwells.us} ~ Sarah Huckabee Sanders body-slammed CNN’s Jim Acosta as he attempted to go into one of his twisted rants during the White House press briefing... Acosta asked, “Why did the President tweet this morning that he’d like to see the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate news outlets, in I guess this quest to go after fake news?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” In getting to the mandatory snarky, condescending attack portion of his question, Acosta asks, “Does he value the First Amendment as much as he values the Second Amendment?” Sanders replied, “Absolutely, the President is an incredible advocate of the First Amendment, with those freedoms, also come responsibilities and you have a responsibility to tell the truth, to be accurate.”... https://rickwells.us/sarah-sanders-acosta-media/
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Mueller’s Investigators Have Met 
With Dossier Author Christopher Steele
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by CHUCK ROSS
{dailycaller.com} ~ Investigators in the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller met this summer with former British spy Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous and uncorroborated Trump dossier... The report, from CNN, indicates that Mueller’s team of investigators are fully vetting the dossier, which Steele compiled after being hired last June by an opposition research firm hired by an ally of liar-Hillary Clinton’s.  According to CNN, the U.S. intelligence community, including the FBI, took Steele’s dossier more seriously than has been acknowledged in public...Steele wasn't talking to Intelligence but willing to talk to Mueller, why?   http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/05/report-muellers-investigators-have-met-with-dossier-author-christopher-steele/?utm_medium=email
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Trump administration scales back   
liar-nObamacare birth control mandate, 
claims end to 'attacks on religious liberty'
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by Kimberly Leonard
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Trump administration announced Friday that it will exempt employers from providing insurance coverage for contraception if it conflicts with their religious or moral beliefs... scaling back a rule created under the liar-nObama administration. The interim final rule was an outgrowth of liar-nObamacare, which is written to give discretion to the Department of Health and Human Services to issue rules about what constitutes women's preventive care, meaning that different administrations can reverse or change the rules. The new rules allow any employer to be exempt from the mandate "based on its sincerely held religious beliefs" or on "moral convictions." Employers who decide not to provide coverage do not need to inform the federal government but would need to tell their employees about their decision...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/trump-administration-to-scale-back-obamacares-birth-control-mandate/article/2636733?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/06/17&utm_medium=email
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In Gaza, Hamas levels an ancient 
Canaanite archaeological treasure
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by FARES AKRAM
{timesofisrael.com} ~ Palestinian and French archaeologists began excavating Gaza’s earliest archaeological site nearly 20 years ago, unearthing what they believe is a rare 4,500-year-old Bronze Age settlement... But over protests that grew recently, Gaza’s Hamas rulers have systematically destroyed the work since seizing power a decade ago, allowing the flattening of this hill on the southern tip of Gaza City to make way for construction projects, and later military bases. In its newest project, Hamas-supported bulldozers are flattening the last remnants of excavation. “There is a clear destruction of a very important archaeological site,” said Palestinian archaeology and history professor Mouin Sadeq, who led three excavations at the site along with French archaeologist Pierre de Miroschedji after its accidental discovery in 1998. “I don’t know why the destruction of the site was approved.”...  https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-gaza-hamas-levels-an-ancient-archaeological-treasure/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=65c7ccfffe-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_06&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-65c7ccfffe-54638825
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bJ-uMonNklIUba3k-3uA9RWVGM01Rlht442p3fze5pmye8SJeIEN0i22r2FsU1mkpjZti1Q7RrgcCwwxDA0pV5fKRMfDSqiEGLCf7yI4uDJa_9YT53XSJ4MpZ3GcrE5S_2qW1CJjcMhQHkzdqkRrLKUhwDRjL8ItGxrEPc8=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href= VIDEOS
 
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Even The NRA: Momentum Building Toward Banning Bump Stocks
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The Jazz Singer: 
Ninety years of talking pictures
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by Mark Steyn
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Nine decades ago this week, the talkies were born: On October 6th 1927, at their marquee picture palace in New York, the Warner Brothers premiered their new film The Jazz Singer. Not a single Warner brother was present. Sam Warner, the most enthusiastic proponent of the new "Vitaphone" sound technology, had died the day before, and his three siblings were en route back to Hollywood to bury him. The four brothers Warner had not been having a good time of it in 1927: They were variously selling stock, ceasing to draw salaries, moving into more modest accommodations and pawning the missus's jewelry. The Jazz Singer would make them into a major studio. So it was, within the space of 24 hours, both a death and a re-birth - as it was for their industry, although very few of its employees foresaw that.

It was an odd movie to gamble an art form on: I doubt you'd get it past the first pitch at a Hollywood studio today. It was born a decade earlier, when a University of Illinois student found himself planning a night on the town:

It became very necessary that I should impress a certain young lady. I had a date with her for a certain evening. I wanted to show her the best time to be had in the town of Champaign, Illinois. I borrowed ten dollars and bought two tickets for the one-night performance of Al Jolson in Robinson Crusoe Jr.

The young swain was a chap called Samson Raphaelson. As to how the date went, he liked the girl, but he loved Jolson. The Broadway headliner was "the World's Greatest Entertainer", according to himself, and Raphaelson was minded to agree:

I shall never forget the first five minutes of Jolson-his velocity, the amazing fluidity with which he shifted from a tremendous absorption in his song. I still remember the song, 'Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow...' That figure in blackface, kneeling at the end of a runway which projected him into the heart of his audience, flinging out his white-gloved hands, was embracing that audience with a prayer-an evangelical moan-a tortured, imperious call that hurtled through the house...

Samson Raphaelson had grown up on New York's Lower East Side, and he was surely unique that night in Champaign in seeing beyond the white gloves and blackface to recognize in Jolson, who'd spent his boyhood in a shtetl in what's now Lithuania, something from his own early days at the Pike Street synagogue. At the end of "Where the Black-Eyed Susans Grow", he turned to the girl and supposedly exclaimed:

My G0D, this isn't a jazz singer. This is a cantor!

I very much doubt he ever said that - as "jazz" was not a word in general currency in 1917, especially not in front of the ladies, and insofar as it was applied to music it was still spelled "jass". But, however expressed, the thought must have occurred - because five years later he wrote a short story for Everybody's Magazine called "The Day of Atonement", about a thinly fictionalized Jolson. Like the real-life singer, "Jack Robin" is a cantor's son who becomes a Broadway star, etc. What transformed it from just the usual roman à  clef stuff was the theme in which Raphaelson framed the drama: the conflict between a young Jew's traditions and the seductions of modernity. The author was by now a successful advertising executive, and his secretary suggested he turn his short story into a play. She sold him on the idea by showing him a script, pointing out how few words there were on each page, and offering to take dictation all weekend. The Jazz Singer opened on Broadway with George Jessel in September 1925, and Warner Brothers bought the film rights nine months later.

George Jessel was signed to star in the movie. But the Warners were having a tough time of it. Their investment in "Vitaphone" sound-on-disc technology was primarily a cost-cutting move: They intended to use it to pre-record the orchestral scores, so that they could dispense with the live musicians who accompanied silent pictures at movie theaters across the land. That would be a huge saving. To be sure, the technology had other potential - for example, the occasional sound effect: it would be pretty spectacular to have, say, a shipwreck or a train smash, and to hear all the noise. But talking? The thought never occurred to the Warner Brothers. Talking was for plays. Nobody went to the pictures to hear talk.

In the fall of 1926, the first two Vitaphone features with orchestra plus sound effects - Don Juan and The Better 'Ole - were hits, and the brothers decided to make The Jazz Singer into a sound-on-disc production. Jessel decided that the new technology demanded a new contract and overplayed his hand, insisting on a significant bonus and failing to appreciate that the brothers were mainly turning to Vitaphone because they were bust. Negotiations with Jessel broke down; they offered the part to Eddie Cantor, who declined; and finally they came to the man who'd inspired the original short story. And it was the participation of Al Jolson that ensured that the most decisive contributions of The Jazz Singer to the course of motion pictures would be neither the symphonic score nor the sound effects, but the singing and talking. That's what killed non-singing, non-talking pictures.

Neither the producer, Daryl Zanuck, nor the director, Alan Crosland, seemed to realize that's what they were doing. The Jazz Singer begins with a markedly somber overture, freighted with tragedy, six minutes of foreboding. Then a card appears:

In every living soul, a spirit cries for expression - perhaps this plaintive, wailing song of Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer.

The camera shows scenes of busy urban streets and the orchestra segues into a symphonic arrangement of "Sidewalks of New York" - so the audience knows which particular urban streets they're looking at. This is all the language of what our age calls "silent pictures", a designation that defines an art form only by the element it's missing: no one calls ballet "silent plays".

In the teeming Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side, Papa Rabinowitz wants his boy to follow in the family tradition and become a cantor. But Mama knows the 13-year-old lad has other ideas. The scenario plays out silently, with dialogue cards, and then we cut to a beer garden, where the kid, billed as "Ragtime Jakie", is taking the stage. In this scene, you sense how little the film-makers understood their own revolution: Ragtime Jakie is singing a song, but it's nothing so scandalous as ragtime - merely "My Gal Sal", the last sentimental hit of Paul Dresser, an Indiana man who wrote the second most successful American pop song of the 19th century "On The Banks of the Wabash Far Away", now the state anthem, if you're minded to take a knee. And, in fact, Ragtime Jakie isn't really "singing" it: Bobby Gordon, who plays the kid, has his singing voice dubbed. So the first sound scene in the first "talkie" is actually a lip-synching scene, and not a terribly good one, although no worse than many today. Still, how odd to inaugurate the "talkie" with a "lippie" or a "dubbie".

By whom was young Master Gordon dubbed? Nobody knows. That's how unimportant it was. The very first voice heard in the first talkie is lost to posterity. Because the scene was meant to be just a freaky novelty: A silent film bursts into song for one goofy rendition of an ancient number by a guy who died bankrupt in 1906. What kind of wave of the future is that?

And immediately afterwards we lapse back into silence. A friend of the cantor witnesses the song, and races home to tell the old man. Dialogue card:

In a saloon, who do you think I saw singing raggy time songs?

The enraged father races over to the beer hall and arrives in the midst of Ragtime Jakie's second number, lip-synched to the same no-name dubber. This time it's "Waiting for the Robert E Lee". Ever since all this statue-toppling business began earlier in the summer, I find I can't stop bursting into "Waiting For The Robert E Lee". Does anyone else have that problem? I can't recall even thinking of it for a couple of decades, but you may have noticed I broke into "Way down on the levee/In old Alabammy" on Tucker Carlson last last week, and on Rush the week before. Don't ask me why - although, as a general proposition, whenever the cultural totalitarians attempt to torch even the most minor artifact, it generally behooves us to put it into heavy rotation (see, e.g., my frequent performances of "Kung Fu Fighting" since the Isle of Wight coppers designated performances thereof as a hate crime). So, even without the ninetieth anniversary of The Jazz Singer, I'd probably be looking for a movie featuring the song The Jolson Story probably, or Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway.

Alas, in the midst of his lip-synching, Ragtime Jakie is yanked off stage by his pa. And we're back to the dialogue cards:

I'll teach him better than to debase the voice God gave him... First he will get a whipping.

After the whipping, the boy runs away from home, and Cantor Rabinowitz goes to the synagogue. And so "Kol Nidre", the traditional declaration in Aramaic that commences the evening service on Yom Kippur, becomes the third song to be sung on the big screen, first with the cantor in shot and then over scenes of the sobbing mother in her empty flat, and of Jakie sneaking back to retrieve a treasured photo of his mother. So, in a certain sense, this is the first musical cutaway - cutting away from the performance to use the song to heighten emotionally the drama taking place elsewhere.

At which point, after 18 minutes, we flash forward and finally see Al Jolson, as the grown-up Jakie. How many years have passed? Well, Jolie was forty when he made The Jazz Singer, and the guy playing his dad, Warner Oland, was a mere eight years older. But you'd have to be missing the point entirely if that's what you take away from this scene. We're in San Francisco, thousands of miles from New York's Lower East Side, and at a modest cabaret "Jack Robin" (as Jakie Rabinowitz now styles himself) is called up from his table and invited to do a song.

He then launches into "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face" - and what follows is on an entirely different level, technically speaking, from "My Gal Sal" or "Kol Nidre". Jolson was always a very idiosyncratic performer: he was the first major singer to use the second chorus of a song not as a straight reprise of the first, but as an opportunity for ad-libs and embellishments (as Crosby and Sinatra later would). So here he does what he always does, and somehow the Vitaphone manages to keep up with him through all the sobs, chuckles, talk-singy lines, through every "Awwwwww!" The synchronicity of it all must have thrilled audiences in 1927 as much as any CGI superhero battle scene today.

And then finally, 20 minutes in, "the first talkie" actually lets someone talk. Jolie finishes the number and tells the audience, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet. Wait a minute, I tell you. You ain't heard nothin'..." This was his catchphrase, of course - ever since the night, a decade earlier, when he'd had to follow Caruso on stage and, with the ovation for the great tenor still ringing through the rafters, quietened the crowd and cockily assured them, "You ain't heard nothin' yet." Could there be a better first line of heard dialogue for the birth of talking pictures?

That's Jolson. Just Jolson being Jolson. He goes into "Toot, Toot, Tootsie", an exhilaratingly physical performance, complete with spoken interjections - "Ow! Ow!" He whistles the second chorus, and so the first talkie is also the first whistling picture. Georgie Jessel wouldn't have done that. Heading into the final stretch, he instructs the band, "Get hot!" And they almost do, because it's hard to go wrong with "Toot, Toot, Tootsie".

And then the sound of applause, and the customers enthusiastically banging cutlery on plates. It's the equivalent of the moment when the drab dustbowl monochrome of Kansas flames into the rainbow colors of Oz: in just five minutes, Joley's wild, abandoned "jazz" singing has turned "silent pictures" into the raucous cacophony of "talkies".

The dialogue cards and silence return - but just for a bit. Jack Robin gets his big break on Broadway and goes home to see his Mama, with a gift of jewelry:

Diamonds! With stones in it! You didn't do any wrong, did you, Jakie?

His head rears back laughing. Dialogue card:

Mama, you ain't heard nothing yet!

But the line doesn't work as well typed out in white on black. In a mere half-hour of screen time, something has changed, and can't be changed back.

Jolson sits down at the piano and we're back to sound, as he plays and sings Irving Berlin's then new "Blue Skies". As the band was ordered back in San Francisco, he "gets hot", and so does Mama, grooving along and getting into it. And at the end, not minded to return to dialogue cards quite yet, Jolson asks her out loud, "You like that, mama? I'm glad of it. I'd rather please you than anybody I know of."

And so Eugenie Besserer, a career silent-film actress who'd been acting mother roles for two decades, found herself playing straight-man in talking pictures' first two-person dialogue scene. No writer came up with it - neither the scenarist (Alfred Cohn) nor the writer of the caption cards (Jack Jarmuth) penned a word of it. Jolson was famous on Broadway for ignoring the scripts of his shows and going his own way, and he had no plans to change his working methods for Hollywood. So he just ad-libbed his way through the scene, and a slightly befuddled Eugenie Besserer does her best to keep her end up with the occasional mumbled assent.

"We're gonna move up into the Bronx," Joley tells her. "Lot of nice green grass up there, and a whole lot of people you know - the Ginsbergs, the Gutenbergs, the Goldbergs, a whole lot of bergs, I don't know them all." At that world premiere in New York, on October 6th 1927, this scene electrified the crowd above all others. At a stroke, Jolson's patter shattered the formality of silent-screen dialogue, and turned Jack Jarmuth and the other writers of "intertitles" into the equivalent of buggy-whip manufacturers. While the audience understood what was happening at that moment, only one critic did. Robert E Sherwood, later the author of Waterloo Bridge, Rebecca, The Best Years of Our Lives and much more, brooded on this scene in Life:

There is one moment in The Jazz Singer that is fraught with tremendous significance. Al Jolson, appearing as a Jewish youth, returns to his old home after years of wandering around the Pantages circuit. His strictly orthodox father has disowned him because he chose to sing mammy songs in music halls rather than chants in the synagogue; his mother, however, welcomes the prodigal with open arms. Al sits down at the piano and sings 'Blue Sky' [sic] for his mother. Thanks to the Vitaphone attachment, his marvelous voice rings out from the screen, the sound agreeing perfectly with the movements of his mobile lips, the wriggling of his shoulders, the nervous tapping of his feet. After the song, there is a brief bit of spoken dialogue, and then Al bursts into 'Blue Sky' again. When he is halfway through the chorus, his father enters the room, realizes that his house is being profaned with jazz, and shouts 'Stop!'

At this point the Vitaphone withdraws and The Jazz Singer returns to a routine of pantomime punctuated with sub-titles... I for one suddenly realized that the end of silent drama is in sight.

The Vitaphone did not withdraw for long, and the end of silent drama came very quickly. A quarter-century later, Singin' in the Rain played it for laughs, with Donald O'Connor proposing to turn the unwanted silent flick The Dueling Cavalier into The Dueling Mammy. Yet it was a tragic time for many, as one skill-set - expressive faces - yielded to another - the ability to rattle off rat-a-tat dialogue. Jolie's girl here, May McAvoy, married the treasurer of United Artists and retired. Otto Lederer, playing the family friend who spots Ragtime Jakie in the saloon, made a couple more talkies and then retired. Other than Jolson, only Warner Oland was still on the big screen a decade later: He was a Swede who played a Jew and then parlayed it into a lifetime of Chinese roles, as Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan. Indeed, the screen in Jolson's dressing room here is a curiously Fu Manchu-esque bit of chinoiserie.


After Oland's single word "Stop!" silences "Blue Skies", the unseen orchestra picks up the score with, of all things, Tchaikovsky's Romeo & Juliet - because this is a feud between two houses, the Songs of Israel and the Songs of Jazz. In the words of the cantor: "Leave my house! I never want to see you again - you jazz singer!" Even if it weren't the first talkie, The Jazz Singer would be significant as the protean plot for virtually every biotuner in the years since, in which some rebellious punk insists he has to play his music his way even though the squares don't dig it at all. What raises Raphaelson's script above the run-of-the-mill is his framing it as an immigrant family's struggle between ancient faith and the din of the new. On the one hand:

Would you be the first Rabinowitz in five generations to fail your God?

On the other:

We in the show business have our religion, too - on every day, the show must go on!

In choosing the latter, Jolson's character understands that something is being lost - just as Robert E Sherwood understood that the bright dawn of a new art form was also the end of another. The film's ambivalence about both itself and its story is caught in the dressing-room scene in which Jolson applies his blackface make-up. Blackface lingered in the movies for another couple of decades, but mostly just as visual accessorizing of period numbers from the minstrel days (Judy Garland got up like a high yaller in the above-mentioned Babes on Broadway, for example). But this is about the only blackface moment I can think of where the act of blacking up is the point of the drama. Years earlier, the star had been one half of a vaudevillian double-act called "The Hebrew and the Coon": The Hebrew was the genuine article, the Coon was Al. Nineteenth-century minstrelsy was the dominant race condescending to its subordinate. Jolson makes it something subtler here - a metaphor, a code, a refuge: the confusion of a man caught between two worlds, expressing one race's pain through the form of another, and exchanging one complex duality for an ostensibly simpler one. Telling his girl about "the call of the ages - the cry of my race", the would-be Broadway star resumes making up: He sees his blackface in the glass above the sink, and (in a visual effect) the mirror dissolves to his father in the synagogue.

The Jazz Singer is a serious and sincere film, and certainly not the property you'd greenlight if you wanted merely to show off the new technology and make a gazillion bucks. It has its moments of hack work - "Mother of Mine" is basically "Sonny Boy" sideways - but it also has its integrity: hence, Jolson in cantor's garb singing at the synagogue. The opening date was chosen to capitalize on Yom Kippur, because the Warner Brothers thought it would appeal to New York Jews. That's it. They didn't realize they were blowing up the entire trajectory of Hollywood.

But that's what they did nine decades ago, when Al Jolson ad-libbing and hip-wiggling opened every small-town audience's eyes to all the "velocity", "fluidity" and sheer vitality Samson Raphaelson had seen on stage in Champaign, Illinois a decade earlier. The exit music for the film was "Mammy" - in contrast to all the orchestral brooding in the overture. Those two pieces of music symbolize the journey the film and the industry had taken during the intervening ninety minutes. By contrast, ninety years after Vitaphone, Hollywood seems exhausted, bereft of Vita and just phoning it in.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1017/steyn100417.php3
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Friday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 5:30pm
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
We Need Fallacy Control Now!
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by Michelle Malkin 
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Violent Crime Rising — The 'Ferguson Effect'
z1jVWv0x9AlgVgXN92Oh10-AdfnPThlgQACf9VmpyLBZ973F8NzJ71bQ1WcS90z6A3SAfccTVDgfJa1Z519895CNPOo2EMvpMbkYPDtQGVbrrKcCyRiNg9BvyXZS34o=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Mark Alexander:  According to Pew Research crime data, the rate of violent crime dropped almost 50% in the decade up to 2015. At the same time, the rate of firearm sales and ownership has steadily increased. Thus, as research by former Yale professor John Lott concludes, “More Guns, Less Crime.”

          Notably, however, the latest FBI crime stats indicate that violent crime in 2015 and 2016 is trending upward, due in large measure to the “Ferguson Effect,” a correlation noted by crime researcher Heather Mac Donald, who authored “Are Cops Racist?”
          After the justified shooting of a Ferguson, Missouri, thug, national and local Demo politicians joined Barack liar-nObama’s war on cops, condemning police for “racial profiling.”
          Mac Donald explains, “Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by.”
          After the Baltimore riots in 2015, Mac Donald wrote about rising crime: “The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest — including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month — have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.”
          She continued, “liar-nObama and Attorney General Eric Holder … embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force. … Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound.”
          Of course, now NFL celebrity athletes are taking a knee to protest and promote this fake injustice — a protest started by former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who recently donated funds to honor a cop-killer.
          Professor Walter Williams observes that the issue should be intra-racial homicide — black-on-black murders. But as I have noted previously, that doesn’t fit the Democrats’ race-bait political agenda constituent narrative.
          Attorney General Jeff Sessions previously voiced his concern that the 2015 increase was “the beginning of a trend,” noting, “That is the thing that has concerned me the most.” His concerns are now reality.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51669

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LV Sheriff Finally Admits It… This Changes Everything
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by BENJAMIN ARIE
{conservativetribune.com} ~ As America struggles to understand this week’s massacre in Las Vegas, there are still more questions than answers... Early on, officials seemed eager to assure people that  Stephen Paddock was a “lone wolf” and there was no further danger to the public. Now, doubt is being cast on that initial story. During a news conference on Wednesday that included the FBI, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff Joseph Lombardo admitted something that many have suspected all along: The shooter probably didn’t act alone...  https://conservativetribune.com/vegas-sheriff-finally-admits/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=CTBreaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=2017-10-05
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Good riddance! Pentagon 
banishes left's 'hate' attack dog
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{wnd.com} ~ The Pentagon has officially disassociated itself from one of the left’s most vicious attack organizations, which is known for unleashing damaging and unsubstantiated claims about conservative organizations... as a standard business practice for years. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, routinely attacks conservatives, such as its labeling the staunchly American values-based Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Counsel, and the family promoting Family Research Council as “hate” groups because of their religious beliefs. The organization has been linked to domestic terrorism and attempted mass murder.  For years, the Department of Defense used SPLC materials for its training on extremism. Specifically, the DOD’s Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, or DEOMI, conducted training on “hate groups” with SPLC materials, according to Liberty Counsel...  http://www.wnd
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The NFL Players Association Caught 
Funneling Money to George Soros
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by Onan Coca
{constitution.com} ~ This shouldn’t be all that surprising but some interesting informaiton has been uncovered by several media outlets today... the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), the Ford Foundation, the Kellog Foundation, the Services Employees International Union (SEIU), and various other organizations have been discovered funneling money to George Soros and other far-left fundraisers. While the information shouldn’t be shocking as many of these groups have already been known to lean left, it does paint a picture of corporate America hell-bent on seeing our Republic transformed into a socialist oligarchy, run by massively wealthy oligarchs like Soros...Can the FBI or AG do somthing about this? Shut them down.   https://constitution.com/breaking-nfl-players-association-caught-funneling-money-george-soros/
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Palestinian "Reconciliation": Hamas 
Free to Fight but Now Abbas Accountable
BRbTVHS7P08L4VCMMSxidxRTVzwyzHXMIc7tUzhsVU7b3ycZy6CDjRbSQHn41VikJk9l5IiLimgerJh92PV_S_jPgapZ3A=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500
by Bassam Tawil
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority (PA) government is on its way back to managing civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip... Hamas, meanwhile, says it will remain in control of security and will not lay down its weapons or dismantle its security forces and militias. Abbas's new partnership with Hamas -- the product of Egyptian mediation efforts between the two parties -- means that from this moment on, the Palestinian Authority president should now be held responsible for everything that takes place inside the Gaza Strip. Abbas and his PA government should now be held accountable, among other things, for the fate of two Israeli civilians and the remains of IDF soldiers being held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas. Abbas should also now be held responsible for any rockets that are fired from the Gaza Strip at Israel. Abbas cannot have it both ways. He cannot use the new partnership with Hamas to project himself as the legitimate president of all Palestinians, including those living in the Gaza Strip, but at the same time argue that he does not have "control on the ground." He cannot have his prime minister and government managing the day-to-day affairs of the Gaza Strip while at the same time claim that he cannot do anything about Hamas's security forces and militia...  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11116/palestinian-reconciliation-hamas-free-to-fight
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Undercover video shows Mainstream Media 
and Colleges Ignoring Violence by Antifa
f8rjJm2j9iKIDyh0AtENqz51UlDBk7KMYsfte4oBdyqXDgGANQZbFzipfYdwsk5y6ZEsDXmOyCgB-Qdooj-io-65QygaM2DP5frZQzzb4oFKwrV99_nbNfeSMrVbKR5dxLpPqCBokjQOpunJ8RphXVq-OUkeN-pDQEiEAtDki6PlB1PuqGzlAL0=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
{patrioticviralnews.com} ~ Is “Antifa” a terrorist organization? That’s the charge that conservative comedian and podcaster Steven Crowder makes in this explosive undercover video shot by both Crowder and his producer Jared... a brave associate, as they infiltrate a Utah chapter of the Leftist anti-fascist group commanded by a transgender leader. In the video, these Antifa members are gearing up for a violent protest against well-known conservative speaker and author Ben Shapiro at the University of Utah. As Crowder shows revealingly, the disconcertingly forward leader of the group casually remarks that he or she? has brought weapons to their meeting and has associates with “AKs” — meaning AK-47 rifles — on the way. Furthermore, he/she puts a knife into Jared’s hands and tells him to keep it on him in case he has to “do what you gotta do!” When Crowder tried to present this secretly-taped footage to the mainstream media, he’s essentially laughed at and turned away! Is this proof that the MSM is irretrievably biased, or what?...  http://patrioticviralnews.com/articles/undercover-video-shows-mainstream-media-and-colleges-ignoring-violence-by-antifa/
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We Need Fallacy Control Now!
L7mGJyncfprm6QbA4F8M7utR_AkjXSErEKnR25fElw1iNNMW7J-zNXlg681ta-vurld6V5dUyBDxVEGNE_LbgBEHLrAXRv1YkPaccOQf2UAVHtsCBVlmmJu2HI2-mLPkHeAt-JvS-6SEnv0RVOPOTfa0KacNAdYjFUFkHnGl4ugVN1tYPSQd9-ukefG2s8L8rTfxpAO1vSigp7fdVLkASis=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=125
by Michelle Malkin 
 
{truthrevolt.org} ~ Enough is enough. It's epidemic. It's dangerous. And the time has come to demand its end.

In the aftermath of the horrific massacre in Las Vegas, America needs fallacy control. Yes, we must declare war on fallaciousness. Now more than ever, the nation is suffering from an outbreak of illogical thinking. In response to senseless violence, clearheaded citizens deserve a safe space from the 24/7 barrage of rhetorical nonsense. Let's break down the collective cognitive breakdown.

Argumentum ad celebritum. Empty talking points don't become persuasive arguments when uttered by Hollywood stars. But in the bizarre land of the celebrity cult, late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel has been suddenly anointed "America's conscience" and "voice of reason."

Kimmel railed "intensely" on TV Monday night against politicians doing "nothing" to stop mass gun violence. Sobbing and emotional, he insisted, "there's a lot of things we can do about it." Yet, Kimmel acknowledged that Mandalay Bay gunman Stephen Paddock had passed multiple, mandated background checks and had no criminal history. Moreover, Paddock bought his guns legally from Nevada and Utah gun shops subject to a thicket of local, state and federal rules -- and reportedly carried 23 of his weapons into a casino/hotel that already operates as a gun-free zone.

Federal studies show that a measly 1 to 3 percent of all guns are purchased at gun shows, but that didn't stop Kimmel from tossing around non sequiturs attacking the "gun show loophole." It's a mythical exemption in federal law for private weapons sales at gun shows or online intended to drum up hysteria about unregulated gun sales. In reality, firearms purchased through federally licensed firearms dealers at gun shops, shows, garage sales or anywhere else are subject to all the usual checks and restrictions. Only a narrow category of same-state transactions between private individuals not engaged in the commercial business of selling firearms family members or collectors, for example are unaffected by those regulations.

There is zero empirical evidence that banning these types of transactions would do anything to prevent gun crimes or mass shootings. But who needs evidence when Jimmy Kimmel is bawling on stage "intensely"? The tears of a clown outweigh the sobriety of facts.

Argumentum ad populum and argumentum ad hashtag. Actor Billy Baldwin unloaded a fallacy two-fer with his assertion that "the overwhelming majority of Dems, Reps & NRA members endorse #GunSafety," so "how can we let the #NRA hold us hostage like this? #NRATerrorists." Claiming that an "overwhelming majority" of people agree with you doesn't make your argument sound. Nor does citing polls showing support for "gun show loopholes" that those surveyed don't fully understand. Nor does attacking the character of your political opponents and hashtag-smearing them as "NRATerrorists" for holding political viewpoints different than your own.

Straw men and red herrings. Grossly oversimplifying support of ineffective or superfluous gun control measures as "#GunSafety" allows celebrities, politicians and activists to prop up their favorite hollow debating tactic: asserting that gun owners, NRA members, and Republicans don't care about gun safety and want more innocent people to die.

Democrat Rep. Ted Lieu illustrated a similar diversionary tactic by waving the red herring of a "gun silencer bill" and demanding that GOP "COWARDS" vote against deregulating such suppressors. liar-Hillary Clinton also demagogued the issue, ghoulishly tweeting: "Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get." Her running mate and Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine parroted the propaganda, claiming that Paddock "was only stopped because he didn't have a silencer on his firearm, and the sound drew people to the place where he was ultimately stopped."  Why liar-Hillary’s Tweet About Silencers/ Las Vegas Shooter Was Stupid
Police, however, took 72 minutes to locate Paddock; it was the sound of hotel fire alarms set off by all the gun smoke that led them to the shooter. But let's not let pesky facts in the way.

Think of the children. Invoking kids to support one's public policy preferences is not an argument. It's a timeworn appeal to emotion. Without it, however, gun control advocates are all out of ammunition.

"We as a society owe it to our children" to pass "common sense" gun control, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton pleaded.

"Thoughts & prayers are NOT enough. Not when more moms & dads will bury kids this week, & more sons & daughters will grow up without parents," Senator Elizabeth dinky-Warren, D-Mass., fumed on Twitter.

And actor Boris Kodjoe tweeted: "My 10 year old asked me how the shooter was able to get his machine gun. I told him that pretty much anyone in the US can. 'But why daddy'?"

Too bad Kodjoe's kid will never know that daddy didn't tell him the truth about fully automatic firearms (aka "machine guns"), which have been effectively banned from private civilian ownership in the U.S. as a result of federal gun legislation dating back to 1934. Nor will the children of the "Think about the children!" brigade be taught the truth about defensive gun use or Second Amendment history and jurisprudence.

We owe our children critical thinking skills and evidence-based public policy, not knee-jerk slogans and tear-jerking treacle.
Read more…

Fri/Med PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 3:07pm
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
No, Speaker Ryan Didn't Shelve 
a Bill on Silencers Because of Las Vegas
by Katie Pavlich
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Why Congress Isn't Working and What You Can Do About ItvGZUIV7CX_dgiBio6ZjvK6zXmsxhbwWy49312-NwiJmcX6K23IujonUGwke8pAFGI37Hadm6Sy2NyrY0ocicdLeo8ZxhU86JgFlqgNG8jSD3rF1wOBqGsIi10dwcx8I=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2017-10-05-67c73581_large.jpg" width="454" height="227" />
by Caroline Camden Lewis:  Even a casual observer can notice that something is deeply wrong in Congress. For eight years we trudged through vetoes and blocks by Barack liar-nObama and his administration. Then things changed. Big time. Republicans won the House, the Senate and the presidency, a miracle so unbelievable that the opposition is still trying to figure out “what happened.”

          This was the GOP’s moment. Conservatives were going to take the hill … literally. But while liar-Hillary Clinton is still issuing blame for “what happened” in her campaign failure, conservatives are also asking “what happened” to our campaign victory. We wonder why Republicans can’t get health care done, and why tax policy is such a struggle. Why everything is such a struggle.
          First, some assumed that an “R” by a person’s name meant “conservative.” That assumption has proven to be wrong. The big reveal this year has been the depth of the fault lines within the GOP, not the “deep divisions” between red states and blue states. On the Republican side of the aisle, there’s a blend of types spanning from the principled conservatives to the establishment types to the libertarian-leaning sort to the Trumpian populists.
          On the other side of the aisle, the Democrats vote as a block and as a team, mainly because they tend to be more focused on the endgame: winning.
          Republicans could learn something from this method. Conservatives vote for their principles while establishment types cling to their power. This fault line within the GOP has proven to be the greatest barrier to winning. So how do Republicans win when a minority establishment group continues to block the good things the rest of Congress supports? Is it too much to ask that all Republicans be conservative, or at least try to work together?
          To begin our audit, we need to evaluate the team as a whole. Evoking a sports analogy, there are some players on the team who refuse to catch a pass. The ball is thrown and they stand around with their hands in their pockets. Or they dodge the ball entirely. In a real football game, the coach would pull them off the field and put them on the bench. Republicans can’t win the game with players who refuse to play … or even worse, play so that the other team wins. Rather than snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, these players manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The GOP has some really great players, and a president who will support them, but a handful of do-nothings continue to sabotage the ability to win.
          Another issue within Congress is the incentive structure. Regular business incentivizes people to take risks so that they can make a profit. In business the goal is the endgame: selling your product. The congressional system motivates elected officials to play it safe. One wrong move and the media slam them with labels, followed by their election loss. One high-risk move can (or should) mean “out of a job” to a politician. Thus, the system motivates some members of Congress to do just enough to tell the constituents they did something, but not enough to really make any major changes. To return to the football analogy, success for some members of Congress means returning home with a clean uniform. “Look,” they brag, “I didn’t even get a scratch!” This is unacceptable. We sent them there to play the game, not to come home with a clean uniform.
          In real life, we have no problem letting hotel managers know when the service they promised and failed to deliver was unacceptable. And we don’t wait two years to say something, hoping that the management will change.
          We should have the same resolve to change unacceptable service from Congress. If this is a government by the people and for the people, then the people need to say something. Remember the old saying about crime? See something, say something. This should be the same way we deal with Congress. If we see something — something that inadequately represents our interests — then we should say something. The trick is that we need to be watching what is going on in order to “see something” so that we can “say something.”
          There’s a caveat, here. People do say something, quite loudly and often. But voters rarely do anything. The congressional re-election rate is typically above 90%, despite lawmakers’ low approval. “Throw [the other guys’] bums out,” we suppose.
          The final issue with Congress is how they are shielded from the laws they make. Case in point: liar-nObamaCare. If members of Congress actually saw their health care options change from a reasonable price with reasonable care to ridiculously expensive and covering nothing, then maybe they would be more motivated to pass something.
          In the end, “We the People” can pull the players off the field who just stand around and deliberately miss a pass. It’s called elections. And in the meantime, we need to call their offices and let them know when we see a poor performance, and encourage them when they do something right.
          To find the contact information of your elected officials, click here.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51690

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Sickening Anti-American Pulosi Thanks 
Illegals For Bringing Their Kids Into US
{rickwells.us} ~ In a town hall to push their open borders and other liberal garbage, Nancy Pulosi takes a comment and question from a DACA illegal... When he identifies himself as being an illegal she says “bless you.” Bless you for being in our country illegally? But it gets worse. He says he’s “terrified that a deal with Trump,” that’s President Trump, you rude, ungrateful squatter, “even if it protects me and my sisters, who also have DACA, would enable Trump’s mass deportation agents to go after my family.” That’s the family that is supposed to be in Mexico, who violated and continue to violate our laws daily, who brought him here on the hope that Democrats would let them stay. He said, “We need a solution and we need it soon.” The solutions operate every day, squatter boy. Do you prefer a bus or airline?... https://rickwells.us/anti-american-pelosi-thanks-illegals/
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Islamic Sunset on Germany
by Guy Millière
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ Germany's federal elections were supposed to lead to the triumph of Angela Merkel. Their results were rather different from what was anticipated... Merkel's "victory" looks like a disaster: the Christian Democratic Alliance (CDU-CSU) won 33% of the vote -- 9% less than four years ago, its worst result since 1949. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governed the country with Merkel during the last four years, lost more than 5%, and fell from 25.7 % to 20% of the vote -- the worst result in its history. Alternative for Germany (AfD), a conservative nationalist party born in 2013, obtained 12.6%, and will enter in the Bundestag for the first time. Die Linke, the Marxist left, received 9%. As neither the SPD nor Die Linke will participate in the next government, and as AfD is radically opposed to the policies pursued by Merkel, she has only two possible partners: the libertarian Free Democratic Party and The Greens: both of whose positions on most subjects seem incompatible...  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11100/germany-islamic-sunset
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Levin Challenges Left to Propose Amendment to Eliminate Second Amendment: ‘It Will Die’
by Michael Morris
{cnsnews.com} ~ On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Tuesday, host Mark Levin challenged the left to propose an amendment to eliminate the Second Amendment suggesting that if they do “It will die.”...  “I have an idea,” said Mark Levin. “If the overwhelming majority of the American people and the overwhelming majority of the states agree with Mr. Blumenthal, then go ahead and propose an amendment to eliminate the Second Amendment.” The talk show host’s comments came after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and others on the left called for greater gun control measures, Sen. Blumenthal specifically vowing to introduce legislation to “close the loophole that lets a buyer walk away with a gun if the background check is not complete in 72 hrs.”... https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-morris/levin-challenges-left-propose-amendment-eliminate-second-amendment-it-will-die?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1dFNU5qVXdOMkl5WXpZeCIsInQiOiJuQmpPQzg0R1wvNFdUQmMwRnlMaXJwbVwvT1JiQUtYMHBpZVFTd1ptWEY3YXBSV1RzOFk3ZE9cL01PQkluSnF6Y3hmSXpiMTBRN0FQanhkellTbFwvWGZVQlVNMWVCbzRxZWZyRWl5UUFyQjdjeVdZWjBWN1wvU1wvekd2OTljYmVzeWJmTSJ9
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Rep John Lewis – Grabbing Guns 
Has Nothing To Do With The Constitution
{rickwells.us} ~ Congressman John Lewis, a supposed civil rights legend, spoke to CNN’s Don Lemon about the terrorism in Las Vegas... He’s big on the civil rights issues when they are a means to advance people who look like him or other non-whites, but the right to bear arms, not so much. Despite being second in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution and it stating in its text that it shall not be infringed isn’t important to him. Trashing the Constitution is “the right thing to do.” After all, armed Americans can’t be forced to work on the globalist Democrat Party’s plantation, and that’s really what this is all about. After first priming the audience with a video of the horrific carnage the Mandalay Bay shooter inflicted, Lemon asks for Lewis’ reaction to the video. Lewis replies, “Well, to see this video make [sic] me really, really sad, that we are living in a country where our fellow citizens, where human beings are being slaughtered in a major American city in the streets.”...  https://rickwells.us/lewis-grabbing-guns-constitution/
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Scrutinizing Public Unions' Contributions to Democrats
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by Lewis Morris:  A pivotal case will be heard before the Supreme Court this term that could have major ramifications for public-sector labor unions in the United States. Janus v. AFSCME focuses on whether Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee, should have to pay union dues to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

          The larger issue at play is whether employees should be forced to pay into a union that uses its members’ money to support political stances they oppose. And let’s face it, if you are in a public-sector union in this country, then you better be prepared to support Democrats.
          In theory, unions collect dues from members in order to bargain collectively on their behalf, provide financial support to members during work stoppages or strikes, and administer to the broader organization that seeks to improve the lot of union members.
          In practice, particularly with public-sector unions, dues that are collected feed the bloated bureaucracy of the union administration and support politicians, namely Democrats, who in turn lobby for better wages and benefits for government employees, which in the end are paid for by taxpayers.
          In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that government workers could be forced to pay their share of costs for traditional union activities, but not for political actions. This led to the creation of the agency fee, a rate lower than union dues that was charged to employees who worked under the umbrella of a union but were not members of that union.
          Over time in many states, the agency fee became just another tool for public-sector unions to squeeze money out of employees to do what they do best, which is lobby politicians and help fund the Democrat Party. In 2014, the Supreme Court stopped unions from expanding their reach in Harris v. Quinn, which protected home health care aids hired with Medicaid subsidies from having to pay public-sector union dues. In 2016, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association came close to ending the agency fee, but the case was stalled 4-4 after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. Janus is considered to be a worthy successor to that case, and with Neil Gorsuch on the bench, the odds swing in favor of breaking this First Amendment choke hold public-sector unions have over employees.
          Naturally, the unions want to paint this as another attack on the working man. Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, said, “The Janus case is a blatantly political and well-funded plot to use the highest court in the land to further rig the economic rules against everyday working people.”
          There is nothing “everyday” about public-sector employees. Thanks to the power grip public-sector unions hold over the federal workforce, public-sector employees are paid, on average, 17% higher than their private-sector counterparts. They receive better benefits, and it is nearly impossible to fire a federal employee, even if they are caught red-handed in blatantly dishonest or illegal activities.
          This should be a concern to all Americans. Taxpayers foot the bill for all of this. People continuously voice their displeasure over the poor quality of service they receive from government agencies and how that quality of service seemingly deteriorates every year. Like any worker, federal employees should be held accountable for their performance.
          Public-sector unions have shielded federal workers from accountability by growing immensely powerful. One of the ways they have done this is to grow their membership through coercion. This case before the Supreme Court might help bring an end to that practice and bring these all-powerful unions back down to Earth. And that will be better for everyone.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51657

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No, Speaker Ryan Didn't Shelve 
a Bill on Silencers Because of Las Vegas
by Katie Pavlich
{townhall.com} ~ A number of news reports out this afternoon claim Speaker of the House Paul Ryan shelved a vote on legislation which includes the deregulation of firearm suppressors in response to the attack in Las Vegas Sunday night. The reports also imply Ryan pulled the bill in response to criticisms from liar-Hillary Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Chuck clown-Schumer. 

Those reports are false. The bill in question, the SHARE Act, was never scheduled for a vote this week. Ryan said this during a press conference earlier today. 

"That bill is not scheduled now," Ryan said. "I don't know when it's going to be scheduled."

The floor schedule for this week went out from Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's office on Friday and hasn't changed. 

"No, there was no intention to have the SHARE Act on the House floor this week. Any news report saying that is false. Below is the schedule for the week. This was released Friday and has not changed," a leadership aide tells Townhall.

Read more…

Fri/Med PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 3:00pm
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
No, Speaker Ryan Didn't Shelve 
a Bill on Silencers Because of Las Vegas
by Katie Pavlich
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Why Congress Isn't Working and What You Can Do About ItvGZUIV7CX_dgiBio6ZjvK6zXmsxhbwWy49312-NwiJmcX6K23IujonUGwke8pAFGI37Hadm6Sy2NyrY0ocicdLeo8ZxhU86JgFlqgNG8jSD3rF1wOBqGsIi10dwcx8I=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500
by Caroline Camden Lewis:  Even a casual observer can notice that something is deeply wrong in Congress. For eight years we trudged through vetoes and blocks by Barack liar-nObama and his administration. Then things changed. Big time. Republicans won the House, the Senate and the presidency, a miracle so unbelievable that the opposition is still trying to figure out “what happened.”

          This was the GOP’s moment. Conservatives were going to take the hill … literally. But while liar-Hillary Clinton is still issuing blame for “what happened” in her campaign failure, conservatives are also asking “what happened” to our campaign victory. We wonder why Republicans can’t get health care done, and why tax policy is such a struggle. Why everything is such a struggle.
          First, some assumed that an “R” by a person’s name meant “conservative.” That assumption has proven to be wrong. The big reveal this year has been the depth of the fault lines within the GOP, not the “deep divisions” between red states and blue states. On the Republican side of the aisle, there’s a blend of types spanning from the principled conservatives to the establishment types to the libertarian-leaning sort to the Trumpian populists.
          On the other side of the aisle, the Democrats vote as a block and as a team, mainly because they tend to be more focused on the endgame: winning.
          Republicans could learn something from this method. Conservatives vote for their principles while establishment types cling to their power. This fault line within the GOP has proven to be the greatest barrier to winning. So how do Republicans win when a minority establishment group continues to block the good things the rest of Congress supports? Is it too much to ask that all Republicans be conservative, or at least try to work together?
          To begin our audit, we need to evaluate the team as a whole. Evoking a sports analogy, there are some players on the team who refuse to catch a pass. The ball is thrown and they stand around with their hands in their pockets. Or they dodge the ball entirely. In a real football game, the coach would pull them off the field and put them on the bench. Republicans can’t win the game with players who refuse to play … or even worse, play so that the other team wins. Rather than snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, these players manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The GOP has some really great players, and a president who will support them, but a handful of do-nothings continue to sabotage the ability to win.
          Another issue within Congress is the incentive structure. Regular business incentivizes people to take risks so that they can make a profit. In business the goal is the endgame: selling your product. The congressional system motivates elected officials to play it safe. One wrong move and the media slam them with labels, followed by their election loss. One high-risk move can (or should) mean “out of a job” to a politician. Thus, the system motivates some members of Congress to do just enough to tell the constituents they did something, but not enough to really make any major changes. To return to the football analogy, success for some members of Congress means returning home with a clean uniform. “Look,” they brag, “I didn’t even get a scratch!” This is unacceptable. We sent them there to play the game, not to come home with a clean uniform.
          In real life, we have no problem letting hotel managers know when the service they promised and failed to deliver was unacceptable. And we don’t wait two years to say something, hoping that the management will change.
          We should have the same resolve to change unacceptable service from Congress. If this is a government by the people and for the people, then the people need to say something. Remember the old saying about crime? See something, say something. This should be the same way we deal with Congress. If we see something — something that inadequately represents our interests — then we should say something. The trick is that we need to be watching what is going on in order to “see something” so that we can “say something.”
          There’s a caveat, here. People do say something, quite loudly and often. But voters rarely do anything. The congressional re-election rate is typically above 90%, despite lawmakers’ low approval. “Throw [the other guys’] bums out,” we suppose.
          The final issue with Congress is how they are shielded from the laws they make. Case in point: liar-nObamaCare. If members of Congress actually saw their health care options change from a reasonable price with reasonable care to ridiculously expensive and covering nothing, then maybe they would be more motivated to pass something.
          In the end, “We the People” can pull the players off the field who just stand around and deliberately miss a pass. It’s called elections. And in the meantime, we need to call their offices and let them know when we see a poor performance, and encourage them when they do something right.
          To find the contact information of your elected officials, click here.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51690

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Sickening Anti-American Pulosi Thanks 
Illegals For Bringing Their Kids Into US
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{rickwells.us} ~ In a town hall to push their open borders and other liberal garbage, Nancy Pulosi takes a comment and question from a DACA illegal... When he identifies himself as being an illegal she says “bless you.” Bless you for being in our country illegally? But it gets worse. He says he’s “terrified that a deal with Trump,” that’s President Trump, you rude, ungrateful squatter, “even if it protects me and my sisters, who also have DACA, would enable Trump’s mass deportation agents to go after my family.” That’s the family that is supposed to be in Mexico, who violated and continue to violate our laws daily, who brought him here on the hope that Democrats would let them stay. He said, “We need a solution and we need it soon.” The solutions operate every day, squatter boy. Do you prefer a bus or airline?...  https://rickwells.us/anti-american-pelosi-thanks-illegals/
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Islamic Sunset on Germany
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by Guy Millière
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ Germany's federal elections were supposed to lead to the triumph of Angela Merkel. Their results were rather different from what was anticipated... Merkel's "victory" looks like a disaster: the Christian Democratic Alliance (CDU-CSU) won 33% of the vote -- 9% less than four years ago, its worst result since 1949. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which governed the country with Merkel during the last four years, lost more than 5%, and fell from 25.7 % to 20% of the vote -- the worst result in its history. Alternative for Germany (AfD), a conservative nationalist party born in 2013, obtained 12.6%, and will enter in the Bundestag for the first time. Die Linke, the Marxist left, received 9%. As neither the SPD nor Die Linke will participate in the next government, and as AfD is radically opposed to the policies pursued by Merkel, she has only two possible partners: the libertarian Free Democratic Party and The Greens: both of whose positions on most subjects seem incompatible...  https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/11100/germany-islamic-sunset
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Levin Challenges Left to Propose Amendment
to Eliminate Second Amendment: ‘It Will Die’
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by Michael Morris
{cnsnews.com} ~ On his nationally syndicated radio talk show Tuesday, host Mark Levin challenged the left to propose an amendment to eliminate the Second Amendment suggesting that if they do “It will die.”...  “I have an idea,” said Mark Levin. “If the overwhelming majority of the American people and the overwhelming majority of the states agree with Mr. Blumenthal, then go ahead and propose an amendment to eliminate the Second Amendment.” The talk show host’s comments came after Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and others on the left called for greater gun control measures, Sen. Blumenthal specifically vowing to introduce legislation to “close the loophole that lets a buyer walk away with a gun if the background check is not complete in 72 hrs.”...  https://www.cnsnews.com/blog/michael-morris/levin-challenges-left-propose-amendment-eliminate-second-amendment-it-will-die?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1dFNU5qVXdOMkl5WXpZeCIsInQiOiJuQmpPQzg0R1wvNFdUQmMwRnlMaXJwbVwvT1JiQUtYMHBpZVFTd1ptWEY3YXBSV1RzOFk3ZE9cL01PQkluSnF6Y3hmSXpiMTBRN0FQanhkellTbFwvWGZVQlVNMWVCbzRxZWZyRWl5UUFyQjdjeVdZWjBWN1wvU1wvekd2OTljYmVzeWJmTSJ9
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Rep John Lewis – Grabbing Guns 
Has Nothing To Do With The Constitution
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{rickwells.us} ~ Congressman John Lewis, a supposed civil rights legend, spoke to CNN’s Don Lemon about the terrorism in Las Vegas... He’s big on the civil rights issues when they are a means to advance people who look like him or other non-whites, but the right to bear arms, not so much. Despite being second in the Bill of Rights in our Constitution and it stating in its text that it shall not be infringed isn’t important to him. Trashing the Constitution is “the right thing to do.” After all, armed Americans can’t be forced to work on the globalist Democrat Party’s plantation, and that’s really what this is all about. After first priming the audience with a video of the horrific carnage the Mandalay Bay shooter inflicted, Lemon asks for Lewis’ reaction to the video. Lewis replies, “Well, to see this video make [sic] me really, really sad, that we are living in a country where our fellow citizens, where human beings are being slaughtered in a major American city in the streets.”...  https://rickwells.us/lewis-grabbing-guns-constitution/
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Scrutinizing Public Unions' Contributions to Democrats
WS874s_uXxwa-OUzII2zyXxzluMzKZ3m9dR3TYslH5upjftq2GrQ51Sle7tbSC6SuxPj_1EIH3cF5bjJ2_7qZGO5VyWHMaVMRYoV4eHYkhpIYSO9EMAiu_RCuSpo3rI=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Lewis Morris:  A pivotal case will be heard before the Supreme Court this term that could have major ramifications for public-sector labor unions in the United States. Janus v. AFSCME focuses on whether Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee, should have to pay union dues to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

          The larger issue at play is whether employees should be forced to pay into a union that uses its members’ money to support political stances they oppose. And let’s face it, if you are in a public-sector union in this country, then you better be prepared to support Democrats.
          In theory, unions collect dues from members in order to bargain collectively on their behalf, provide financial support to members during work stoppages or strikes, and administer to the broader organization that seeks to improve the lot of union members.
          In practice, particularly with public-sector unions, dues that are collected feed the bloated bureaucracy of the union administration and support politicians, namely Democrats, who in turn lobby for better wages and benefits for government employees, which in the end are paid for by taxpayers.
          In 1977, the Supreme Court ruled in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that government workers could be forced to pay their share of costs for traditional union activities, but not for political actions. This led to the creation of the agency fee, a rate lower than union dues that was charged to employees who worked under the umbrella of a union but were not members of that union.
          Over time in many states, the agency fee became just another tool for public-sector unions to squeeze money out of employees to do what they do best, which is lobby politicians and help fund the Democrat Party. In 2014, the Supreme Court stopped unions from expanding their reach in Harris v. Quinn, which protected home health care aids hired with Medicaid subsidies from having to pay public-sector union dues. In 2016, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association came close to ending the agency fee, but the case was stalled 4-4 after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. Janus is considered to be a worthy successor to that case, and with Neil Gorsuch on the bench, the odds swing in favor of breaking this First Amendment choke hold public-sector unions have over employees.
          Naturally, the unions want to paint this as another attack on the working man. Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, said, “The Janus case is a blatantly political and well-funded plot to use the highest court in the land to further rig the economic rules against everyday working people.”
          There is nothing “everyday” about public-sector employees. Thanks to the power grip public-sector unions hold over the federal workforce, public-sector employees are paid, on average, 17% higher than their private-sector counterparts. They receive better benefits, and it is nearly impossible to fire a federal employee, even if they are caught red-handed in blatantly dishonest or illegal activities.
          This should be a concern to all Americans. Taxpayers foot the bill for all of this. People continuously voice their displeasure over the poor quality of service they receive from government agencies and how that quality of service seemingly deteriorates every year. Like any worker, federal employees should be held accountable for their performance.
          Public-sector unions have shielded federal workers from accountability by growing immensely powerful. One of the ways they have done this is to grow their membership through coercion. This case before the Supreme Court might help bring an end to that practice and bring these all-powerful unions back down to Earth. And that will be better for everyone.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51657


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No, Speaker Ryan Didn't Shelve 
a Bill on Silencers Because of Las Vegas
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by Katie Pavlich
{townhall.com} ~ A number of news reports out this afternoon claim Speaker of the House Paul Ryan shelved a vote on legislation which includes the deregulation of firearm suppressors in response to the attack in Las Vegas Sunday night. The reports also imply Ryan pulled the bill in response to criticisms from liar-Hillary Clinton and Senate Minority Leader Chuck clown-Schumer. 

Those reports are false. The bill in question, the SHARE Act, was never scheduled for a vote this week. Ryan said this during a press conference earlier today. 

"That bill is not scheduled now," Ryan said. "I don't know when it's going to be scheduled."

The floor schedule for this week went out from Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's office on Friday and hasn't changed. 

"No, there was no intention to have the SHARE Act on the House floor this week. Any news report saying that is false. Below is the schedule for the week. This was released Friday and has not changed," a leadership aide tells Townhall.
Read more…

Friday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 11:51am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
In This Round of Reconciliation 
Talks, Hamas is the Great Victor
by Caroline Glick 
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Friday Top Headlines
Contending with hurricanes, U.S. lost 33,000 jobs in September, vs. 90,000 jobs increase expected (CNBC)
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DC decides not to appeal decision striking down restrictive gun-carry law provision (The Washington Free Beacon)
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Communist West Point grad was reported in 2015 — pre-graduation — for anti-American posts (The Daily Caller)
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IRS targeted pro-border security groups for illegal scrutiny (The Washington Times)
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GOP lawmaker Tim Murphy to resign after sordid affair and abortion hypocrisy (The Hill)
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Russian hackers stole NSA data on U.S. cyber defense (The Wall Street Journal)
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The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (The Washington Post)
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NFL players’ union teamed up with George Soros to fund leftist advocacy groups (The Washington Times)
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Trump to declare Iran noncompliant with nuclear deal obligations (CNS News)
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Serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein has donated nearly $600,000 to Democrats (The Washington Free Beacon)
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Pollaganda: ABC, WaPo pushed hurricane/climate change link, now find Americans believe it (NewsBusters)
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Policy: The Second Amendment and the inalienable right to self-defense (The Heritage Foundation)
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Policy: America’s regulation burden in five charts (American Enterprise Institute)  ~The Patriot Post
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Condescending Cuomo Meets His Match 
With Mulvaney – Twenty Words Later He’s Toast
{rickwells.us} ~ If you’re one of the millions of Americans who have ever wanted to just reach out and knock the snot out of CNN’s Chris Cuomo... you’ll appreciate this clip of him losing his always tenuous grip on his composure and getting out of line and disrespectful with OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.  His obvious intention for what is little more than a pretend interview that provided the pretext was to get Mulvaney in front of a national audience and berate him. He must have envisioned himself defending the integrity of that bastion of journalistic excellence, CNN, from wrongful attacks for reporting fake news. Predictably, none of that happened. In what is exceptionally condescending, even for the always caustic Cuomo, he chastises President Trump through his guest, saying, “That’s what you do in a situation like this, you report the reality. And it’s not being done to you Mick, to the President to embarrass you, it’s just being able to reinforce the need.”... https://rickwells.us/condescending-cuomo-match-mulvaney/
VIDEO: at the site
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House passes $1.1 trillion 
budget to advance tax reform
by Susan Ferrechio
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Republican-led House passed a $1.1 trillion 2018 budget plan on Thursday that will pave the way for tax reform... the party's top legislative goal. The GOP budget, dubbed the "Building a Better America Plan," passed in a 219-206 vote Thursday after hours of debate over alternative budgets proposed by Democrats, conservatives, progressives, and other factions. Eighteen Republicans voted against it, along with every voting Democrat. The GOP plan proposes spending nearly $622 billion on defense and $511 billion for domestic, non-entitlement spending. The plan allocates an additional $87 billion for the global war on terrorism...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-passes-11-trillion-budget-to-advance-tax-reform/article/2636622?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/05/17&utm_medium=email
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Failure to Adequately Fund 
Our Military Puts America at Risk
by Dakota Wood
{dailysignal.com} ~ Arguably the federal government’s first obligation to Americans is to keep us safe from foreign attack and to defend our vital national interests wherever they are threatened... Alarmingly, our government is on the verge of failing in this core responsibility. Our military is minimally ready, rapidly aging, and has so shrunk in size that even senior military leaders question its ability to adequately meet its national security obligations. This is a disservice to Americans in general and, most especially, to those who are tasked with carrying out the duty of protecting our nation... http://dailysignal.com/2017/10/04/failure-adequately-fund-military-puts-america-risk/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWm1GaU1UYzJZamhsWW1VMCIsInQiOiJYRTVvblp4cm9hM05MS0twaTBmaEpaYWtLMFArQ0owTUVXdG5tcmpGZjNKRU9UZkllZDFNckxac05LT3QyTDlEWWU5dmxadVRwT1c3OVliOStaWHlVZndicTMxYVpUWUJkNzMrcXRQQ3A0QzNQXC9mVXJpTU9jc3AyU2hZeU9LSUMifQ%3D%3D
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Americans Absolutely Furious 
After RINO-McCain Takes a Knee
by MARTIN WALSH
{conservativetribune.com} ~ Arizona Republican Sen. RINO-John McCain has long been an opponent of President Donald Trump and his agenda... so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s slow-walking major measures being pushed by the Trump administration. RINO-McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, announced on Tuesday that he will suspend confirmation hearings for Pentagon nominees until the Trump administration gives him additional information surrounding its war strategy for Afghanistan. According to The Daily Caller, RINO-McCain told Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford that he will prevent the Trump administration from appointing needed officials at the Pentagon until he has more questions answered. Differences over health care aside, RINO-McCain could have used his influential Senate position to carry the ball for Trump when it comes to matters involving the armed forces, instead he has figuratively taken a knee...  https://conservativetribune.com/americans-furious-mccain-takes-knee/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=minutemennews&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance
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TUCKER: An Arab-American writer argues that there's always a hesitation to call white men "terrorists" in massacres

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5598306095001

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Nancy Pulosi Thanks "Dreamer's" Parents For Bringing Family to United States Illegally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsHkJr0Kpps

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TUCKER: Hits Back at Mediaite Blogger for Calling Him a "White Nationalist"

http://video.insider.foxnews.com/v/5597263713001

.

Geraldo Rivera's exclusive interview with President Trump in Puerto Rico

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5597287526001

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Gun Grab Debate: National Review’s French Tries to Talk Down NBC's Chuck Todd

https://www.mrctv.org/videos/gun-grab-debate-french-tries-talk-down-hysterical-todd

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.
.
In This Round of Reconciliation 
Talks, Hamas is the Great Victor
by Caroline Glick 
{truthrevolt.org} ~ On Tuesday, a delegation of 400 Fatah officials from Ramallah, led by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, arrived in Gaza to officially surrender to Hamas.

No, the ceremony isn’t being portrayed as a Fatah surrender to Hamas. But it is. It’s also an Egyptian surrender to Hamas.

How is this the case? Ten years ago this past June, after a very brief and deadly assault by Hamas terrorists against US-trained Fatah forces in Gaza, the Fatah forces cut and ran to Israel for protection. Fatah politicians also headed for the border and then scurried into Fatah-controlled and Israeli protected Ramallah. Ever since, Hamas has served as the official authority on the ground in Gaza. Its personnel have been responsible for internal security and for Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel.

Despite their humiliating defeat and removal from Gaza, Fatah and its PA government in Ramallah continued to fund Hamas-controlled Gaza. They paid Gaza’s bills, including the salaries of all the PA security forces that were either no longer working or working double shifts as stay at home Fatah gunmen and up and coming Hamas terrorist forces.

The PA paid Hamas’s electricity bills to Israel and it paid Israeli hospitals which continued to serve Gaza.

Internationally, the PA defended Hamas and its constant wars against Israel. The PA and Fatah, led by President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, continued to use Israel’s defensive operations against Hamas as a means to ratchet up their political war against Israel. The latest victory in that war came last week with Interpol’s decision to permit the PA to join the organization despite its open support for and finance of terrorism.

For most of the past decade, the PA-Fatah has allocated more than half of its EU- and US-underwritten budget to Hamas-controlled Gaza. It has defended its actions to successive delegations of US lawmakers and three US administrations. It has defended its actions to EU watchdog groups. No amount of congressional pressure or statements from presidential envoys ever made a dent on Abbas’s strident devotion to paying the salaries of Hamas terrorists and functionaries.

But then, in April, Abbas cut them off.

Ostensibly he cut them off because he was under pressure from the US Congress, which is now in the end stages of passing the Taylor Force Act. Once passed, the law will make it a bit more difficult for the State Department to continue funding the terror- financing PA.

While the Taylor Force Act is the ostensible reason for Abbas’s move, Palestinian sources openly acknowledge that congressional pressure had nothing to do with his decision.

Abbas abruptly ended PA financing of Hamas in retaliation for Hamas’s decision to open relations with Abbas’s archrival in Fatah, Muhammad Dahlan.

From 1994, when the PA was established, until 2007, when Hamas ousted his US-trained forces from Gaza, Dahlan was the Gaza strongman.

Once one of Abbas’s closest cronies, since 2011 Dahlan has been his archenemy. Abbas, now in the twelfth year of his four-year term in office, views Dahlan as the primary threat to his continued reign.

As a consequence, he ousted Dahlan from Fatah and forced him to decamp with his sizable retinue to the UAE. There Dahlan enjoys exceedingly close ties with the Nahyan regime.

The UAE is allied with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. Both view Hamas’s mother organization the Muslim Brotherhood as their mortal foe. As a result, Sisi and the UAE as well as Saudi Arabia sided with Israel in its 2014 war with Hamas.

Since May, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been in open conflict with Qatar. Qatar, which sponsors the Muslim Brotherhood, has long sponsored Hamas as well.

Since the start of the year, the UAE has been interested in prying Hamas away from Qatar. And so with the blessing of his UAE hosts, Dahlan began building ties with Hamas.

Recognizing Dahlan’s close ties to the UAE and through it, with Sisi, Hamas, which has been stricken by Sisi’s war against it, and particularly Sisi’s enforcement of the closure of Gaza’s border with Egypt’s Sinai, was quick to seize on Dahlan’s initiative.

The talks between Dahlan and Sisi on the one hand and Hamas on the other were ratcheted up in April after Abbas cut his funding to Gaza.

In May, Hamas formally cut its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In exchange, Sisi permitted the Rafah border crossing with Gaza to open for longer hours and permitted Gazans to transit Egypt en route to their religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, among other things.

To build its leverage against Abbas, beginning in the spring, Hamas began describing Dahlan as a viable alternative to Abbas. The UAE agreed to begin financing Hamas’s budget and to help pay for electricity.

Against this backdrop, it is self-evident that Abbas didn’t send his own representatives to Cairo to negotiate a surrender deal with Hamas because his aid cut-off brought Hamas to its knees. Abbas sent his people to Cairo because Hamas’s double dealing with Dahlan brought Abbas to his knees.

As for Sisi, Hamas has also played him – and the UAE.

Over the past few months, Hamas has been rebuilding its client relationship with Iran. A senior Hamas delegation visited Tehran last month for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s swearing-in ceremony.

They met there with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and with senior Revolutionary Guards commanders.

A month earlier, senior Hamas terrorist Salah Arouri, who lives under Hezbollah protection in Beirut, paved the way for the reconciliation in a meeting under Hezbollah sponsorship with senior Revolutionary Guards commander Amir Abdollahian.

Following the meeting in Tehran, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar extolled Hamas’s relations with Iran as “fantastic.” Sinwar also said that Iran is “the largest backer financially and militarily” of Hamas’s terrorism apparatus.

Concerned about Tehran’s growing influence in Gaza, and through it, the Sinai, where Sisi continues to fight against an Islamic State-backed insurgency, Sisi has an interest in tempering Hamas’s client-ties to Tehran.

So just as Abbas has decided to restore financing to Hamas to keep Dahlan at bay, so Sisi has decided to embrace Hamas to keep Iran at bay.

In all cases, of course, Hamas wins.

The fact that Hamas has just won is obvious when we consider the unity deal it just concluded with Fatah.

Hamas made one concession. It agreed to break up its civil governing authority – a body it formed in response to Abbas’s decision to cut off funding in April. In exchange for agreeing to disband a body it only formed because Abbas cut off its funding, Hamas receives a full restoration of PA funding. The PA will fund all civil service operations in Gaza. It will pay the salaries of all civil servants and security personnel in Gaza. It will pay salaries to all Hamas terrorists Israel freed from its jails.

In other words, the PA will now be responsible for keeping the lights on and picking up the garbage.

And Hamas will be free to concentrate on preparing for and initiating its next terror war against Israel. It can dig tunnels. It can build missiles. It can expand its operational ties with Hezbollah, Islamic State, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Fatah.

In the wake of Hamas’s leadership’s meetings in Tehran, Sinwar told reporters that Hamas is now moving full speed ahead toward doing all of these things. Sinwar said that Hamas is “developing our military strength in order to liberate Palestine.” He added, “Every day we build missiles and continue military training.”

Thousands of people, he said, are working “day and night” to prepare Hamas’s next terror war against Israel. And indeed, two weeks ago, two Hamas terrorists were killed when the tunnels they were digging collapsed on them.

Tuesday’s surrender ceremonies tell us two things.

First, the notion that Fatah is even remotely interested in defeating Hamas is complete nonsense. For 10 years since its forces were humiliated and routed in Gaza, Fatah has faithfully funded and defended Hamas. Abbas’s only concern is staying in charge of his Israeli-protected fiefdom in Ramallah. To this end, he will finance – with US and EU taxpayer monies – and defend another 10 Hamas wars with Israel.

The second lesson we learn from Hamas’s victory is that we need to curb our enthusiasm for Sisi and his regime in Egypt, and for his backers in the UAE. Sisi’s decision to facilitate and mediate Hamas’s newest victory over Fatah shows that his alliance with Israel is tactical and limited in scope. His decision to side with Israel against Hamas during Operation Protective Edge three years ago may not repeat itself in the next war.
Read more…

Friday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 11:30am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
In This Round of Reconciliation 
Talks, Hamas is the Great Victor
by Caroline Glick 
.
Friday Top Headlines
Contending with hurricanes, U.S. lost 33,000 jobs in September, vs. 90,000 jobs increase expected (CNBC)
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DC decides not to appeal decision striking down restrictive gun-carry law provision (The Washington Free Beacon)
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Communist West Point grad was reported in 2015 — pre-graduation — for anti-American posts (The Daily Caller)
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IRS targeted pro-border security groups for illegal scrutiny (The Washington Times)
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GOP lawmaker Tim Murphy to resign after sordid affair and abortion hypocrisy (The Hill)
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Russian hackers stole NSA data on U.S. cyber defense (The Wall Street Journal)
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The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (The Washington Post)
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NFL players’ union teamed up with George Soros to fund leftist advocacy groups (The Washington Times)
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Trump to declare Iran noncompliant with nuclear deal obligations (CNS News)
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Serial sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein has donated nearly $600,000 to Democrats (The Washington Free Beacon)
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Pollaganda: ABC, WaPo pushed hurricane/climate change link, now find Americans believe it (NewsBusters)
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Policy: The Second Amendment and the inalienable right to self-defense (The Heritage Foundation)
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Policy: America’s regulation burden in five charts (American Enterprise Institute)  ~The Patriot Post
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Condescending Cuomo Meets His Match 
With Mulvaney – Twenty Words Later He’s Toast
{rickwells.us} ~ If you’re one of the millions of Americans who have ever wanted to just reach out and knock the snot out of CNN’s Chris Cuomo... you’ll appreciate this clip of him losing his always tenuous grip on his composure and getting out of line and disrespectful with OMB Director Mick Mulvaney.  His obvious intention for what is little more than a pretend interview that provided the pretext was to get Mulvaney in front of a national audience and berate him. He must have envisioned himself defending the integrity of that bastion of journalistic excellence, CNN, from wrongful attacks for reporting fake news. Predictably, none of that happened. In what is exceptionally condescending, even for the always caustic Cuomo, he chastises President Trump through his guest, saying, “That’s what you do in a situation like this, you report the reality. And it’s not being done to you Mick, to the President to embarrass you, it’s just being able to reinforce the need.”... https://rickwells.us/condescending-cuomo-match-mulvaney/
VIDEO: at the site
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House passes $1.1 trillion budget to advance tax reform
by Susan Ferrechio
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The Republican-led House passed a $1.1 trillion 2018 budget plan on Thursday that will pave the way for tax reform... the party's top legislative goal. The GOP budget, dubbed the "Building a Better America Plan," passed in a 219-206 vote Thursday after hours of debate over alternative budgets proposed by Democrats, conservatives, progressives, and other factions. Eighteen Republicans voted against it, along with every voting Democrat. The GOP plan proposes spending nearly $622 billion on defense and $511 billion for domestic, non-entitlement spending. The plan allocates an additional $87 billion for the global war on terrorism...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-passes-11-trillion-budget-to-advance-tax-reform/article/2636622?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/05/17&utm_medium=email
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Failure to Adequately Fund 
Our Military Puts America at Risk
by Dakota Wood
{dailysignal.com} ~ Arguably the federal government’s first obligation to Americans is to keep us safe from foreign attack and to defend our vital national interests wherever they are threatened... Alarmingly, our government is on the verge of failing in this core responsibility. Our military is minimally ready, rapidly aging, and has so shrunk in size that even senior military leaders question its ability to adequately meet its national security obligations. This is a disservice to Americans in general and, most especially, to those who are tasked with carrying out the duty of protecting our nation...  http://dailysignal.com/2017/10/04/failure-adequately-fund-military-puts-america-risk/?utm_source=TDS_Email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningBell&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWm1GaU1UYzJZamhsWW1VMCIsInQiOiJYRTVvblp4cm9hM05MS0twaTBmaEpaYWtLMFArQ0owTUVXdG5tcmpGZjNKRU9UZkllZDFNckxac05LT3QyTDlEWWU5dmxadVRwT1c3OVliOStaWHlVZndicTMxYVpUWUJkNzMrcXRQQ3A0QzNQXC9mVXJpTU9jc3AyU2hZeU9LSUMifQ%3D%3D
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Americans Absolutely Furious 
After RINO-McCain Takes a Knee
by MARTIN WALSH
{conservativetribune.com} ~ Arizona Republican Sen. RINO-John McCain has long been an opponent of President Donald Trump and his agenda... so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that he’s slow-walking major measures being pushed by the Trump administration. RINO-McCain, chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, announced on Tuesday that he will suspend confirmation hearings for Pentagon nominees until the Trump administration gives him additional information surrounding its war strategy for Afghanistan. According to The Daily Caller, RINO-McCain told Defense Secretary James Mattis and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman and Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford that he will prevent the Trump administration from appointing needed officials at the Pentagon until he has more questions answered. Differences over health care aside, RINO-McCain could have used his influential Senate position to carry the ball for Trump when it comes to matters involving the armed forces, instead he has figuratively taken a knee...  https://conservativetribune.com/americans-furious-mccain-takes-knee/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=minutemennews&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance
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TUCKER: An Arab-American writer argues that there's always a hesitation to call white men "terrorists" in massacres

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5598306095001

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Nancy Pulosi Thanks "Dreamer's" Parents For Bringing Family to United States Illegally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsHkJr0Kpps

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TUCKER: Hits Back at Mediaite Blogger for Calling Him a "White Nationalist"

http://video.insider.foxnews.com/v/5597263713001

.

Geraldo Rivera's exclusive interview with President Trump in Puerto Rico

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5597287526001

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Gun Grab Debate: National Review’s French Tries to Talk Down NBC's Chuck Todd

https://www.mrctv.org/videos/gun-grab-debate-french-tries-talk-down-hysterical-todd

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In This Round of Reconciliation 
Talks, Hamas is the Great Victor
by Caroline Glick 
{truthrevolt.org} ~ On Tuesday, a delegation of 400 Fatah officials from Ramallah, led by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, arrived in Gaza to officially surrender to Hamas.

No, the ceremony isn’t being portrayed as a Fatah surrender to Hamas. But it is. It’s also an Egyptian surrender to Hamas.

How is this the case? Ten years ago this past June, after a very brief and deadly assault by Hamas terrorists against US-trained Fatah forces in Gaza, the Fatah forces cut and ran to Israel for protection. Fatah politicians also headed for the border and then scurried into Fatah-controlled and Israeli protected Ramallah. Ever since, Hamas has served as the official authority on the ground in Gaza. Its personnel have been responsible for internal security and for Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel.

Despite their humiliating defeat and removal from Gaza, Fatah and its PA government in Ramallah continued to fund Hamas-controlled Gaza. They paid Gaza’s bills, including the salaries of all the PA security forces that were either no longer working or working double shifts as stay at home Fatah gunmen and up and coming Hamas terrorist forces.

The PA paid Hamas’s electricity bills to Israel and it paid Israeli hospitals which continued to serve Gaza.

Internationally, the PA defended Hamas and its constant wars against Israel. The PA and Fatah, led by President-for-life Mahmoud Abbas, continued to use Israel’s defensive operations against Hamas as a means to ratchet up their political war against Israel. The latest victory in that war came last week with Interpol’s decision to permit the PA to join the organization despite its open support for and finance of terrorism.

For most of the past decade, the PA-Fatah has allocated more than half of its EU- and US-underwritten budget to Hamas-controlled Gaza. It has defended its actions to successive delegations of US lawmakers and three US administrations. It has defended its actions to EU watchdog groups. No amount of congressional pressure or statements from presidential envoys ever made a dent on Abbas’s strident devotion to paying the salaries of Hamas terrorists and functionaries.

But then, in April, Abbas cut them off.

Ostensibly he cut them off because he was under pressure from the US Congress, which is now in the end stages of passing the Taylor Force Act. Once passed, the law will make it a bit more difficult for the State Department to continue funding the terror- financing PA.

While the Taylor Force Act is the ostensible reason for Abbas’s move, Palestinian sources openly acknowledge that congressional pressure had nothing to do with his decision.

Abbas abruptly ended PA financing of Hamas in retaliation for Hamas’s decision to open relations with Abbas’s archrival in Fatah, Muhammad Dahlan.

From 1994, when the PA was established, until 2007, when Hamas ousted his US-trained forces from Gaza, Dahlan was the Gaza strongman.

Once one of Abbas’s closest cronies, since 2011 Dahlan has been his archenemy. Abbas, now in the twelfth year of his four-year term in office, views Dahlan as the primary threat to his continued reign.

As a consequence, he ousted Dahlan from Fatah and forced him to decamp with his sizable retinue to the UAE. There Dahlan enjoys exceedingly close ties with the Nahyan regime.

The UAE is allied with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi. Both view Hamas’s mother organization the Muslim Brotherhood as their mortal foe. As a result, Sisi and the UAE as well as Saudi Arabia sided with Israel in its 2014 war with Hamas.

Since May, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been in open conflict with Qatar. Qatar, which sponsors the Muslim Brotherhood, has long sponsored Hamas as well.

Since the start of the year, the UAE has been interested in prying Hamas away from Qatar. And so with the blessing of his UAE hosts, Dahlan began building ties with Hamas.

Recognizing Dahlan’s close ties to the UAE and through it, with Sisi, Hamas, which has been stricken by Sisi’s war against it, and particularly Sisi’s enforcement of the closure of Gaza’s border with Egypt’s Sinai, was quick to seize on Dahlan’s initiative.

The talks between Dahlan and Sisi on the one hand and Hamas on the other were ratcheted up in April after Abbas cut his funding to Gaza.

In May, Hamas formally cut its ties with the Muslim Brotherhood.

In exchange, Sisi permitted the Rafah border crossing with Gaza to open for longer hours and permitted Gazans to transit Egypt en route to their religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, among other things.

To build its leverage against Abbas, beginning in the spring, Hamas began describing Dahlan as a viable alternative to Abbas. The UAE agreed to begin financing Hamas’s budget and to help pay for electricity.

Against this backdrop, it is self-evident that Abbas didn’t send his own representatives to Cairo to negotiate a surrender deal with Hamas because his aid cut-off brought Hamas to its knees. Abbas sent his people to Cairo because Hamas’s double dealing with Dahlan brought Abbas to his knees.

As for Sisi, Hamas has also played him – and the UAE.

Over the past few months, Hamas has been rebuilding its client relationship with Iran. A senior Hamas delegation visited Tehran last month for Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s swearing-in ceremony.

They met there with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and with senior Revolutionary Guards commanders.

A month earlier, senior Hamas terrorist Salah Arouri, who lives under Hezbollah protection in Beirut, paved the way for the reconciliation in a meeting under Hezbollah sponsorship with senior Revolutionary Guards commander Amir Abdollahian.

Following the meeting in Tehran, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar extolled Hamas’s relations with Iran as “fantastic.” Sinwar also said that Iran is “the largest backer financially and militarily” of Hamas’s terrorism apparatus.

Concerned about Tehran’s growing influence in Gaza, and through it, the Sinai, where Sisi continues to fight against an Islamic State-backed insurgency, Sisi has an interest in tempering Hamas’s client-ties to Tehran.

So just as Abbas has decided to restore financing to Hamas to keep Dahlan at bay, so Sisi has decided to embrace Hamas to keep Iran at bay.

In all cases, of course, Hamas wins.

The fact that Hamas has just won is obvious when we consider the unity deal it just concluded with Fatah.

Hamas made one concession. It agreed to break up its civil governing authority – a body it formed in response to Abbas’s decision to cut off funding in April. In exchange for agreeing to disband a body it only formed because Abbas cut off its funding, Hamas receives a full restoration of PA funding. The PA will fund all civil service operations in Gaza. It will pay the salaries of all civil servants and security personnel in Gaza. It will pay salaries to all Hamas terrorists Israel freed from its jails.

In other words, the PA will now be responsible for keeping the lights on and picking up the garbage.

And Hamas will be free to concentrate on preparing for and initiating its next terror war against Israel. It can dig tunnels. It can build missiles. It can expand its operational ties with Hezbollah, Islamic State, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Fatah.

In the wake of Hamas’s leadership’s meetings in Tehran, Sinwar told reporters that Hamas is now moving full speed ahead toward doing all of these things. Sinwar said that Hamas is “developing our military strength in order to liberate Palestine.” He added, “Every day we build missiles and continue military training.”

Thousands of people, he said, are working “day and night” to prepare Hamas’s next terror war against Israel. And indeed, two weeks ago, two Hamas terrorists were killed when the tunnels they were digging collapsed on them.

Tuesday’s surrender ceremonies tell us two things.

First, the notion that Fatah is even remotely interested in defeating Hamas is complete nonsense. For 10 years since its forces were humiliated and routed in Gaza, Fatah has faithfully funded and defended Hamas. Abbas’s only concern is staying in charge of his Israeli-protected fiefdom in Ramallah. To this end, he will finance – with US and EU taxpayer monies – and defend another 10 Hamas wars with Israel.

The second lesson we learn from Hamas’s victory is that we need to curb our enthusiasm for Sisi and his regime in Egypt, and for his backers in the UAE. Sisi’s decision to facilitate and mediate Hamas’s newest victory over Fatah shows that his alliance with Israel is tactical and limited in scope. His decision to side with Israel against Hamas during Operation Protective Edge three years ago may not repeat itself in the next war.
Read more…

‘Liberalism is white supremacy!’: Black Lives Matter shuts down ACLU free speech event

Posted by William M. Finley on October 6, 2017 at 9:14am

‘Liberalism is white supremacy!’: Black Lives Matter shuts down ACLU free speech event

By Pamela Geller - on October 5, 2017
Free Speech
51

This reminds me of Martin Niemöller’s famous quotation:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The ACLU has aided and abetted these fascists for years. But oppression and subjugation is a slippery slope – they will come for anyone and everyone they decide is untouchable.

‘Liberalism is white supremacy!’: Black Lives Matter actually shuts down ACLU free speech event

Ocotber 4, 2017, By Doug Urbanski, The Blaze:

One might assume Black Lives Matter and liberals are best of friends. But that doesn’t appear to be the case after what transpired at the College of William & Mary last week.

What happened?

  • Black Lives Matter protesters stood in front of a stage and began chanting five minutes into a freedom of speech event co-sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union at the Williamsburg, Virginia, school, Flat Hat News — the college’s student paper — reported.

What did the sign-toting protesters chant?

  • “Liberalism is white supremacy!”
  • “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too!”
  • “No justice, no peace — Nazis don’t deserve free speech!”
  • “Your free speech hides beneath white sheets!”
  • “Blood on your hands!”
  • “Shame!”
  • “The revolution will not uphold the Constitution!”
Image source: Facebook video screenshotImage source: Facebook video screenshot

How did the speaker respond to the protesters?

  • As protesters marched to the front of the stage, speaker Claire Guthrie Gastañaga — executive director of the Virginia ACLU — said, “Good, I like this. This is good. I’m going to talk to you a bit about knowing your rights and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well …”

What did a Black Lives Matter member say after an event organizer handed her a microphone?

  • “When is the free speech of the oppressed protected?” the BLM member asked, Flat Hat News said. “We know from personal experience that rights granted to wealthy, white, cis, male, straight bodies do not trickle down to marginalized groups. We face greater barriers and consequences for speaking.”
Image source: Facebook video screenshotImage source: Facebook video screenshot

Did the free speech event resume?

  • The event titled, “Students and the First Amendment,” was shut down and did not resume, Flat Hat News reported.

What happened when the event ended?

  • Some students who attended the event to actually hear what Gastañaga had to say circled around her in the hopes of asking questions and dialoguing, the student paper said.
  • But no dice. The Black Lives Matter protesters gathered around them and drowned out Gastañaga with more chanting.
  • The remaining students then dispersed, Flat Hat News said.
Image source: Facebook video screenshotImage source: Facebook video screenshot

Here’s video of the protest:

What did Black Lives Matter say afterward?

  • William & Mary’s BLM chapter said on its Facebook page that it “shut down” the event, the student paper said: “In contrast to the ACLU, we want to reaffirm our position of zero tolerance for white supremacy no matter what form it decides to masquerade in.”

How did the school respond?

  • “Silencing certain voices in order to advance the cause of others is not acceptable in our community,” William & Mary President Taylor Reveley said in a statement, Flat Hat News said. “This stifles debate and prevents those who’ve come to hear a speaker, our students in particular, from asking questions, often hard questions, and from engaging in debate where the strength of ideas, not the power of shouting, is the currency.”
Image source: Facebook video screenshotImage source: Facebook video screenshot

How did students respond?

  • “I do not believe that preventing discussion from happening is a viable pathway to get what you want,” Tyler Senio told the student paper. “I believe it is important for people to express themselves and stand up for the issues they believe in. However, once these expressions start to negatively affect others and prevent progress in the area they are protesting, that’s when the justification becomes questionable.”
  • “We are proud of be a part of a politically active community that voices their concerns and fights for their rights,” student and event organizer Miguel Dayan told Flat Hat News. “However, we hoped for a two-sided dialogue so our students could learn about their rights and [have] the chance to question, critique and engage in conversation with the director herself.”

This writer’s perspective

Even though a Black Lives Matter member was given a chance to speak to the audience on a microphone at an event BLM was not connected to — and even though BLM managed to shut down the event — the protesters weren’t content.

They didn’t even give audience members and the speaker the opportunity to huddle and chat informally afterward, simply drowning out their discussion with more chanting.

That’s disturbing.

The free speech event organizers put their money where their mouths were and gave protesters a chance to be heard when they didn’t have to. And the protesters returned the favor by spitting on that.

Some day the protesters who shut down free speech at William & Mary could find their own speech endangered or shut down — and who then will come to their defense after the judgment they’ve passed on others’ speech?

Americans can’t abandon the crucial idea that even those with ideas we despise have the right to speak. We may not like it, but it’s a temporary and much lesser downside to a greater good. A gift that lets us freely express ourselves as opposed to hiding in the shadows in fear of what may happen to us if we say what’s on our minds.

Read more…

The Daily Jot - Soft tyranny and today's society

Posted by William M. Finley on October 6, 2017 at 8:49am
The Daily Jot
Daily reporting and analysis of current events from a biblical and prophetic perspective
 
S.gif
Bill Wilson
Soft tyranny and today's society

NOTE:  When writing about God and Jesus, The Daily Jot means YHVH as God and Yeshua Ha Mashiach as Jesus--the actual original names and the true nature and character of them.
  
Friday, October 6, 2017
In today's society, do you ever feel that you should not speak your mind because you will be labeled something you are not? Do you ever feel like you have an opinion and yet uneasy about expressing it? Do you think that as a Christian, it is better to not express your views on morality in public forums? Have you felt any kind of reservation about what you do and say could be listened to by the government, so you watch your words? Are there just certain issues that you don't talk about much anymore because the response is so visceral and examples have been made of those who say something?  Do you feel your free speech is OK so long as you keep it to yourself? It's selective free speech. It's soft tyranny.
 
Alexis de Tocqueville defines soft tyranny in his book Democracy in America, Volume II (1840): "It [the government] covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence: it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."
 
If you are afraid to speak your mind because of the consequences of perhaps losing your job, your livelihood, or that it may invite some government investigation or ruination, you are experiencing soft tyranny.  Galatians 5:1 says, "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage." A free people can only exist by adhering to the precepts of God. Bondage is bondage, whether it is sin or tyranny. We live in a society where a very vocal minority is bullying your Constitutional rights. Moreover, eternally these people face great peril. Isaiah 5:20 says, "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness..."
 
We must speak boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel. Even though many respond with hatred and accuse you based on the very intents of their own hearts, they will not know the truth unless someone tells them. We would not know sin had we not known the laws of God. Don't be a victim of soft tyranny. Right is greater than might. As Ephesians 6:12-13 says, "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against power, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand." Soft tyranny is evil. Stand against it.
Have a Blessed and Powerful Day!
Bill Wilson

PS. Please use the "Share This Email" link below to pass this on to as many people as you can!    
Read more…

Jimmy Kimmel Lies about Trump, Guns, and the Mentally Ill

Posted by William M. Finley on October 6, 2017 at 8:38am
October 6, 2017

Jimmy Kimmel Lies about Trump, Guns, and the Mentally Ill

By Daniel John Sobieski

There is a delicious sense of irony in gun-control advocate Jimmy Kimmel beefing up his armed security after falsely claiming on his late-night talk show after the Las Vegas massacre that President Trump had made it easier for the mentally ill to get guns. Guns are okay to protect the liberal elites, but not for the rest of us, who can’t be trusted or don’t know any better.   

The same double standard exists for Democratic members of Congress who demand their constituents be disarmed even as they welcome back Rep. Steve Scalise, the victim of a shooting where a bad guy with a gun was stopped by a good guy with a gun. Many members of Congress are alive today only because Scalise, being a member of the House leadership, had his armed security detail with him

Dr. Kimmel has no way of knowing even now that the Las Vegas shooter was mentally unstable. Certainly the meticulous planning and preparation by the shooter over a long period of time would seem to indicate that while the shooter was evil, he was perfectly competent and sane. Certainly Kimmel’s charge against Trump is not true:

Noting that President Trump had offered prayers for the victims’ families, and that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, had said that this wasn’t the time for political debate, he went on: “We have fifty-nine innocent people dead. It wasn’t their time, either. So I think now is the time for political debate.” He reminded his audience that, in February, Trump had signed a bill that made it easier for people with mental illness to buy guns. “The Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, a number of other lawmakers who won’t do anything about this because the N.R.A. has their balls in a money clip, also sent their thoughts and their prayers today. Which is good. They should be praying. They should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country.”

Steve Scalise owes his life to the Second Amendment, which was written not to shoot deer, but to shoot tyrants. The Second Amendment was written to protect the other nine in the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, which gives Jimmy Kimmel the right to sound like the blooming idiot he is.

What President Trump signed was a bill overturning an executive order that would tar the innocent with the broad brush of mental illness, people which included the elderly and veterans, in order to pursue the Obama administration’s gun control agenda:

Here's what happened earlier this year: Congress voted to overturn a last-minute Obama-era regulation that would give the Social Security Administration the power to revoke a person's Second Amendment rights based on whether he receives disability for a mental impairment that keeps him from working, or if he "[uses] a representative payee to help manage their benefits."

As my Washington Examiner colleague David Freddoso explained at the time, the repeal of the Obama-era regulation, "doesn't allow people to buy guns who have been properly adjudicated by a court of law as mentally ill or unstable."

The Obama-era rule was designed to take away people's rights without due process of law. It would have flagged the names of people who, for example, have an anxiety disorder or depression which keeps them from working, and who, as the SSA puts it, ‘need help in managing [their] personal money affairs,'" he added. "As the many non-political mental health and autism advocacy groups that supported the House action noted, there is no link between these factors and a propensity for violence."

The Obama administration repeatedly tried to use mental health as a means, not to make us safer, but to deny us our gun rights under the Second Amendment. Consider Obama’s pick of Dr. Vivek Murthy to be our Surgeon General, someone who firmly believes gun control is a health issue, something that can and should be used to gut out Second Amendment Rights. As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized during his confirmation process:

Murthy's approach to attacking the Second Amendment has been to say private ownership of firearms is a public health issue. The 37-year-old Murthy is president and co-founder of the anti-gun group Doctors for America, which advocates ObamaCare and gun control laws. His group, which has been dubbed Docs vs. Glocks, has pushed Congress to ban "assault" weapons and "high capacity" magazines.

Doctors for America has promoted the invasion of privacy by doctors by advocating they ask patients if they have guns at home, including asking children if their parents own guns. He would have doctors counsel their patients against exercising their Second Amendment rights. One wonders how private that information would remain if entered into the medical records the government would be privy to under ObamaCare.

Back in 2013, a piece of legislation called Toomey-Manchin proposed that doctors be allowed to unilaterally place a patient’s name in the background check system in a way that violated patient doctor confidentially under HIPAA as well as our Second Amendment Rights:

The Toomey-Manchin proposal contains a provision that lets a doctor add a patient to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) without ever telling the patient he or she has been added.

This would seem to violate doctor-patient confidentiality, due process and the presumption of innocence in one fell swoop.

As the Heritage Foundation reports, this "gun control legislation eliminates any (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) privacy protection for mental health records in connection with the NICS system, leaving only what privacy protection the attorney general cares to provide."

The Obama administrations idea of keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill is based on a bizarre and discriminatory definition of who might be mentally unstable. Back in 2013 it was reported that the Veterans Administration was sending letters to vets warning them that they might be declared mentally incompetent and have their Second Amendment rights stripped unless they could prove otherwise:

The contempt by the Obama administration for our Constitution and our rights has reached a new low with news the Veterans Administration has begun sending letters to veterans telling them they will be declared mentally incompetent and stripped of the Second Amendment rights unless they can prove to unnamed bureaucrats to the contrary….

"A determination of incompetency will prohibit you from purchasing, possessing, receiving, or transporting a firearm or ammunition. If you knowingly violate any of these prohibitions, you may be fined, imprisoned, or both pursuant to the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, Pub.L.No. 103-159, as implemented at 18, United States Code 924(a)(2)," the letter reads….

While mental health is a factor in the current gun control debate and recent mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., and elsewhere have in common the questionable mental state of the shooters, to single out returning vets from Iraq and Afghanistan this way is unconscionable and unconstitutional.

As the Los Angeles Times has reported, the Obama administration would like to make our Social Security records part of the background check system. The move would strip some four million Americans who receive payments though a “representative payee” of their gun rights. It would be the largest gun grab in U.S. history.

A potentially large group within Social Security are people who, in the language of federal gun laws, are unable to manage their own affairs due to "marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease."

There is no simple way to identify that group, but a strategy used by the Department of Veterans Affairs since the creation of the background check system is reporting anyone who has been declared incompetent to manage pension or disability payments and assigned a fiduciary.

Keeping guns out of the hands of the truly mentally unstable is a worthy goal, but it should not be used as a cause for disarming veterans who carried a weapon in defense of their country or senior systems who might need some assistance in paying their bills.

They deserve the presumption of innocence and sanity. Stripping away their Second Amendment rights in the name of mental health would be a gross injustice that would not make us safer, but would merely create millions of unarmed victims for the next shooter with an agenda.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.         

Read more…

NFL Players Working With Soros To Help Fund Anti-Trump Resistance

Posted by William M. Finley on October 6, 2017 at 8:31am

NFL Players Working With Soros To Help Fund Anti-Trump Resistance

by Jeff Dunetz | Oct 6, 2017 | Politics

NFL Players Working With Soros To Help Fund Anti-Trump Resistance

Long before President Trump’s public scolding of NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) was donating some of their dues to organizations also backed by George Soros. These groups support liberal causes and are part of the “resist” President Trump movement.

2nd Vote, a conservative organization that tracks corporations and organizations funding of liberal causes, is reporting that the NFLPA has donated to many leftist groups including a prominent anti-Trump resistance group called the Center for Community Change Action (CCC). A recent Washington Free Beacon scoop explains the Center for Community Change Action has “been involved in direct action against President Donald Trump and Republicans before and after the November elections.”

Per the latest available CCC Annual Report (2015)  which is embedded below NFL Players Association and George Soros’s Foundation for Open Society donates to help support of the center’s work. One example of that work was a 2016 election effort targeting voters in swing states who might object to the President’s policy on illegal immigrants:

In 2016, The Center for Community Change Action and the Immigrant Voters Win PAC targeted over 700,000 low-propensity Latino and Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters in Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Our multilayered, metrics driven program operated 15 canvass offices, completed more than 1.7 million door knocks, sent 1.2 million pieces of mail, made 638,566 phone calls and sent more than 1.9 million SMS alerts.

Presently they are working to defeat Ed Gillespie in the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race

CCC is not the only liberal/ anti-Trump cause supported by the NFL Players,

NFLPA financially supported at least two more left-wing, anti-Trump activist groups. Two of the union’s last three tax filings (2013, 2015) show donations to Working America, a Steyer-supported organization that used Craigslist in Cleveland, Ohio to apparently recruit paid activists to protest the 2016 GOP convention. The NFLPA’s 2014 tax filing shows a donation to Jobs With Justice, another organization backed by Soros that actively opposes the president’s tax cuts.

The NFL players’ support of liberal, anti-Trump causes aligned with progressive sugar daddy George Soros gives context to the protest started by Colin Kaepernick and the reaction to President Trump’s criticism. In his book, The Age of Fallibility: The Consequences of the War on Terror, Soros said:

 “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States. This is a harsh — indeed, for me, painful — thing to say, but unfortunately I am convinced it is true.”

When one looks at the causes they support and who they align with,  it seems quite natural for the players to dishonor a country that despite its imperfections, is still the greatest and freest Nation the history of mankind.

Read more…

Anti-American, Raiders RB Marshawn Lynch, wears "Everybody vs Trump" T-shirt to game.

Posted by William M. Finley on October 6, 2017 at 8:18am

Anti-American, Raiders RB Marshawn Lynch, wears "Everybody vs Trump" T-shirt to game.

( How many of you are still support this miss by going to games, watching on TV buying their products?  )

Principles for a FREE SOCIETY

Video https://www.facebook.com/groups/WeThePeopleForDonaldTrump2016/?notif_t=group_r2j_approved&notif_id=1497557249462586

Anti-American, Raiders RB Marshawn Lynch, wears "Everybody vs Trump" T-shirt to game.

22289067_1777021662596930_5191553667639017472_n.jpg?oh=bc4254a8badbdf0a753713c62db918ac&oe=5A7B54C5
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Raiders RB Marshawn Lynch wears "Everybody vs Trump" T-shirt to game - (Video via ESPN) show your support for our President GET YOUR FREE TRUMP MAGA HAT HERE==>http://coalitionfortrumpsuperstore.com/special-limited-off…/ just pay S+H Worldwide Shipping allow 4 weeks for delivery

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Friday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 7:06am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
TRUST, BUT VERIFY
by Burt Prelutsky
AGHnzvDgAIc_dkrUO59jF21LrUmiQ79dA3RIshU-YlAdfSFPOhc54BmJs1OTRtvnrEX-cCbeiMVXdurlydL03p7YzXsWg_6cAavWTIOYU1PogQU4ftAjtXM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
.
Political Correctness Is the Enemy of Truth
by Thomas Gallatin:  Honesty is always the best policy, whether it be in the university or workplace. But as everyone who has ever lived can attest to, honesty does not always come easily. Especially when a favored political or social policy is at stake. During the cultural revolution of the 1960s, many traditions and social mores were questioned — some rightly and some wrongly. One of those cultural mores was the West’s understanding of proper sexual boundaries. In America, prior to the upheaval of the 1960s, the vast majority of Americans held to views on sex (both sexuality and gender) that have essentially been turned on their head today.

          Much of the nation views premarital sex as the norm. Abortion, while remaining a contentious issue, has been the law of the land since 1973. Homosexuality gradually became an accepted practice by much of the mainstream culture leading eventually to the Supreme Court redefining marriage. There’s also pornography and its continuing impact upon Americans. And now Americans are witnessing the steady march of the transgender crusade. The Left views all of this as progress, a maturing of the nation’s culture as it were. What they conveniently seek to ignore are the devastating consequences these culture changes have created. And if they can’t ignore them, they seek to suppress their significance or deny their root cause.
          A recent example of this suppression of truth was experienced by James Caspian, a psychotherapist from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom. Caspian specializes in working with transgender people, and he is by no means “anti-trans.” Since 2001 he has worked with transgender people and has been a trustee of a charity that is “dedicated to education about and support of transgendered, transsexual and cross-dressing individuals.” So, it came as a surprise when Bath Spa University rejected his proposal to research the growing numbers of transgender people who were seeking reassignment reversal surgeries. The university believed the subject to be “potentially politically incorrect.”
          If any scientific research were to produce evidence that brought into question the ethics of normalizing and promoting transgenderism, then it must be prevented. If the research were to show that gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment did little to alleviate the psychological condition of gender dysphoria, and if in fact research were to show that these “treatments” actually proved to exacerbate the problem, then it could derail all the “progress” made by the transgender crusaders.
          This is the result of being more concerned with falling in line with political correctness than seeking after the truth. In a climate such as this it is both individuals and society at large that loses.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51671

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Terror, Chaos, Thuggery – Leftists Foundations, Soros, Wage War On America, World
{rickwells.us} ~ Big money “Foundations,” the word that in today’s world is often defined as a false front and legal mechanism for anti-Americanism and its financial support... are documented as contributing millions of dollars to agitators seeking to destroy this nation. They maintain they are anti-Trump, but President Trump is merely a man representing the values of Americans and our Constitution. If they are anti-Trump, they are anti-American. That is the reality which their actions reinforce. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundation, all prominent leftist agitation and activism “non-profits,” have transferred millions of dollars to a notorious anti-Trump “resistance” group... https://rickwells.us/terror-thuggery-leftists-war-america/
.
Tim Murphy to retire amid scandal 
over asking mistress to get abortion
by Diana Stancy Correll
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., announced he will retire and not seek re-election in 2018... following a report that the publicly pro-life congressman asked his mistress to have an abortion. "After discussions with my family and staff, I have come to the decision that I will not seek reelection to Congress at the end of my current term," Murphy said in a statement to KDKA-Pittsburgh Wednesday. "I plan to spend my remaining months in office continuing my work as the national leader on mental health care reform, as well as issues affecting working families in southwestern Pennsylvania," he added... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-murphy-to-retire-amid-scandal-over-asking-mistress-to-get-abortion/article/2636577?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/04/17&utm_medium=email
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ANTIFA'S NEXT TARGET? AMERICA'S POLICE
{wnd.com} ~ The left-wing extremist group known as antifa is gearing up for insurrection. And the primary target may be America’s already beleaguered police force... A special report from WND reveals a number of antifa groups have begun explicitly targeting police departments on the grounds the thin blue line is composed of “oppressors.”  Among the most militant is the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, or RAM, a new group whose activities have been widely covered by the antifa information hub It’s Going Down...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/antifas-next-target-americas-police/
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DOJ wants records of 
Seth Rich murder released
by ALICIA POWE
{wnd.com} ~ The Department of Justice is demanding the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington, D.C., release records relating to the murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich... On Sept. 1, Texas attorney Ty Clevenger submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request with the DOJ and FBI requesting all records and correspondence pertaining to Rich. “This request includes, but is not limited to, any records or correspondence resulting from any investigation of his murder,” Clevenger wrote in his letter to the government agencies...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/doj-wants-records-of-seth-rich-murder-released/
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President Trump In Las Vegas Paying Tribute To First Responders
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Mr. Monopoly’s Epic Troll Of Congressional Equifax Hearing
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The Walls Of Justice Closing In On Senator Menendez
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Ex-Federal Investigators Discuss What The FBI Is Asking Vegas Killer’s Girlfriend
.
Israeli Counterterrorism School Trains Civilians to Save Lives
.
Why liar-Hillary’s Tweet About Silencers/ Las Vegas Shooter Was Stupid
.
Democrats Introduce Bump Stock Ban Bill
.
In Honor of His Birthday Some of Buster Keaton’s Most Amazing Stunts
.
TRUST, BUT VERIFY
by Burt Prelutsky


I recently lied in an article. I didn’t know I was lying, but I did, and several people rightly called me on it. I praised Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, for having backed President Trump in his admonishment of the NFL’s players, owners and Commissioner Goodell, for expressing their collective contempt for the flag and the National Anthem.

My mistake was in relying on someone who, in the past, had never steered me wrong. I’m sure he believed it was true when he passed the story along. For my part, I knew nothing about Mr. Hunt, aside from the fact that he is the son of the late Lamar Hunt. I simply assumed that there had to be at least one team owner who understood, if not as a patriot, at least as a businessman, that it‘s a very bad idea to insult the majority of your fan base. It also made sense to me that if there were one such team owner, the team would very likely be situated in the middle of what has come to be known as flyover country.

This doesn’t mean I will never again make the mistake of passing along fake news. It merely means that, unlike the other news and commentary outlets, if I discover that I blew it, I’ll let you know about it as soon as I can. I wouldn't want to be the reason any of my readers lost a bet.

● On the other hand, my brain doesn’t always cooperate with my eyes. Or vice versa. For instance, I recently typed “prostate” when I meant “prostrate,” and didn’t spot the mistake until after I had posted the article.

Then, the other day, I was typing up the names of the liar-nObama team I wanted the Justice Department to indict. When I read the paragraph over, instead of seeing liar-Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Lois Lerner, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, I saw liar-Clinton, Abedin, Lerner, Rhodes, Samantha Egger and Rice.

Samantha Egger?! Where the heck had that come from? She was a mediocre English actress I probably hadn’t seen in a movie in over 40 years and here she popped up in place of our former ambassador to the U.N. So, not only do I have to deal with my failing eyesight and my inadequate typing skills, but a subconscious I can’t help thinking is out to sabotage me.

● I confess I don’t know why those connected with professional football have allowed themselves to act as stooges on behalf of the rats who spend their every waking hour trying to drive a wedge between various groups of Americans, based on race, religion, gender, class and even geography. But, then, even before this recent brouhaha, there were those who referred to the NFL as the National Felons League.

Although there are exceptions to the rule, the reason that so many guys pulling down millions of dollars for playing a game are so resentful of the cops isn’t because they or their male relatives have been stopped so often for DWB (driving while black), as they invariably insist, but because so many of them have been charged with possession of drugs and/or illegal weapons, sexual assault and domestic violence.

That still doesn’t explain why the owners of the teams seem to have decided it makes sense to stand united with their employees, while expressing contempt for the nation, the President and most of the fans.

The only theory I’ve come up with that makes the slightest bit of sense is that the owners feared the players would no longer invite them to the sex orgies with nubile young groupies.

● I thought President Trump made a big mistake when he traveled to Alabama to campaign on behalf of Luther Strange. It’s not because I favored Roy Moore. I didn’t. I don’t really care who the senator from Alabama happens to be. All I ask of any senator at this point is that he help Trump pass tax reform and tax cuts, that he back the building of the Wall, that he support Trump’s travel bans, the build-up of the military and the repeal of liar-nObamaCare.

All of those things, Strange promised to do. Senator Moore will very likely be more of a loose cannon, and in McConnell, Ryan, RINO-McCain, RINO-Flake, Paul, RINO-Murkowski, RINO-Collins and Cruz, Trump already has more of those than he needs.

But my main reason for thinking Trump should have stayed home is because by favoring Mitch McConnell’s choice, who out-spent Moore by a seven-to-one margin, Trump not only aligned himself with the so-called establishment, but let people like Rand Paul, RINO-Lisa Murkowski, RINO-John McCain, RINO-Jeff Flake, Paul Ryan and RINO-Susan Collins, know they can continue to oppose Trump’s agenda without risking political suicide.

● Sen. Bob Menendez and Secretary Tom Price exemplify political bi-partisanship; two corrupt hacks, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, who decided along the way that the rules don’t apply to them.

I suppose if you become accustomed to having your face on TV, being interviewed by the media and pandered to by your underlings, you come to regard private jets, luxurious hotels and even cash bribes, as perfectly legitimate perks of the job.

When I consider what a sacred privilege it should be to hold public office in the United States and I see guys like Menendez and Price behaving like a couple of unrepentant sleazebuckets, it makes me long for the old days when the Roman punishment for such political malfeasance was being sewn up in a burlap bag with a wild cat and tossed in the river.

● Although I have been a baseball fan for nearly 70 years, I am still puzzled by certain idiosyncrasies of the game. I have no idea when these particular things began or even why. I welcome any and all theories.

Why do teams celebrate World Series victories by congregating at the pitcher’s mound and piling on top of each other? I am always surprised when the pile is eventually untangled and those on the bottom don’t emerge with broken limbs and career-ending injuries.

Why, when a batter hits a home run, does he point skyward as he crosses home plate? If he’s thanking God, wouldn’t that suggest that God has money on the game and therefore has a rooting interest in seeing the other team lose?

Why, when in the bottom of the 9th inning, someone scores the winning run for the home team and the entire squad greets him as he crosses the plate, do they all hop up and down like little girls at the sighting of a teenage heartthrob?

And, finally, why is there so much spitting in baseball? They spit at the plate, when on base and even in the dugout. Why is it that no other group of athletes engage in such a nasty habit? Even professional football players, as we’ve seen, make certain they only spit in the direction of the flag.

● With all the big talk about draining the swamp, has it occurred to anyone else that in opening the door to the likes of Mike Flynn, Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort and Tom Price, Trump has added to the mosquito population?

● I don’t read the NY Times because, as I confessed, I prefer making up my own fake news. But Penny Alfonso alerted me to the fact that in a recent piece about Trump’s tax cut plan, Binyamin Applebaum wrote the following sentence: “The plan would not benefit lower-income households that do not pay federal income taxes.”

That being the case, nobody should be too surprised when in the coming debate, Chuck clown-Schumer and Nancy Pulosi voice their moral outrage over poor people who pay no income taxes not receiving the same tax cuts as the very rich, who pick up the tab for roughly 70% of the money Internal Revenue collects.

● Speaking of collecting, at times I have been as relentless as the IRS. Back in my 20s, I received an assignment from the Sunday supplement of the Chicago Tribune. They wanted me to do a piece about the coming TV season. The big news was that the networks were going to cut down on dramas and sit coms, turning over the time slots to two-hour TV movies.

The editor was quite specific. He told me that he wanted to hear from producers how the change would affect them; I wasn’t to delve into the specific economics. It was enough that some TV producers, those with experience turning out hour-long dramas, would naturally profit, while those who specialized in half-hour shows would take a hit.

I didn’t think it was a terribly fascinating story, but I thought I got some interesting quotes from producers, actors and studio executives, and mailed in the article, knowing I had done what was expected, and perhaps even a little bit more than expected.

You can imagine my shock when the editor let me know he was disappointed.  The shock turned to anger when he said he had no intention of paying me because I hadn’t even mentioned the economics.

It was his turn to become infuriated when I pointed out I had been following his orders to avoid what he had referred to as the “dry as dust” financial details.

No sooner had he hung up then I addressed my complaint to his boss, the managing editor of the Tribune. He said he made it his rule not to override the decisions of his editors. He believed in granting them complete autonomy, especially, I gathered, when it came to bilking freelance writers.

By now, it was no longer just the money, it was the principle. They felt they had the right to lie and cheat simply because they could get away with it, and they weren’t even politicians!

I came up with an idea. Because both the editor of the Sunday supplement and his superior had unusual last names, I wrote to a cousin who still lived in Chicago. I asked him to check out the local phone books and let me know if he could find home addresses for the two schmucks.

He got back to me a day or two later with two addresses. I then sat down and wrote letters, not to the editors, but to their wives. I spelled out the events exactly as I shared them with you. Only at the end of the letter, I pointed out that at some time in the future, if they pursued writing careers, their own sons might be dealing with editors 2,000 miles away, and how would they, as mothers, feel about it if they were treated as shabbily as I’d been.

I never heard back from the wives or the editors, but a week later, I received a check from the Chicago Tribune for the entire amount I was owed.

● Richard Ryan is the lucky winner of the September book drawing. A copy of “Angels on Tap” is on its way to Lamar, MO.
If you want to Comment directly to Burt Prelutsky, please mention my name Rudy. BurtPrelutsky@aol.com
Read more…

Friday AM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 6, 2017 at 7:00am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
TRUST, BUT VERIFY
by Burt Prelutsky
AGHnzvDgAIc_dkrUO59jF21LrUmiQ79dA3RIshU-YlAdfSFPOhc54BmJs1OTRtvnrEX-cCbeiMVXdurlydL03p7YzXsWg_6cAavWTIOYU1PogQU4ftAjtXM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
.
Political Correctness Is the Enemy of Truth
xifhaUgRQjSw0G_VZkZbF9jiauPOcEukVVpN3G29cY3ST8hkTJKYVKfhUrgyEqsrJGCZbOWkbQlBGb6G-2J2RM6aKoQDXKRybB6kKnuHL_uJ5OIZ1CxkXTxNqDmNeCI=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Thomas Gallatin:  Honesty is always the best policy, whether it be in the university or workplace. But as everyone who has ever lived can attest to, honesty does not always come easily. Especially when a favored political or social policy is at stake. During the cultural revolution of the 1960s, many traditions and social mores were questioned — some rightly and some wrongly. One of those cultural mores was the West’s understanding of proper sexual boundaries. In America, prior to the upheaval of the 1960s, the vast majority of Americans held to views on sex (both sexuality and gender) that have essentially been turned on their head today.

          Much of the nation views premarital sex as the norm. Abortion, while remaining a contentious issue, has been the law of the land since 1973. Homosexuality gradually became an accepted practice by much of the mainstream culture leading eventually to the Supreme Court redefining marriage. There’s also pornography and its continuing impact upon Americans. And now Americans are witnessing the steady march of the transgender crusade. The Left views all of this as progress, a maturing of the nation’s culture as it were. What they conveniently seek to ignore are the devastating consequences these culture changes have created. And if they can’t ignore them, they seek to suppress their significance or deny their root cause.
          A recent example of this suppression of truth was experienced by James Caspian, a psychotherapist from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom. Caspian specializes in working with transgender people, and he is by no means “anti-trans.” Since 2001 he has worked with transgender people and has been a trustee of a charity that is “dedicated to education about and support of transgendered, transsexual and cross-dressing individuals.” So, it came as a surprise when Bath Spa University rejected his proposal to research the growing numbers of transgender people who were seeking reassignment reversal surgeries. The university believed the subject to be “potentially politically incorrect.”
          If any scientific research were to produce evidence that brought into question the ethics of normalizing and promoting transgenderism, then it must be prevented. If the research were to show that gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment did little to alleviate the psychological condition of gender dysphoria, and if in fact research were to show that these “treatments” actually proved to exacerbate the problem, then it could derail all the “progress” made by the transgender crusaders.
          This is the result of being more concerned with falling in line with political correctness than seeking after the truth. In a climate such as this it is both individuals and society at large that loses.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51671

Z2QRfV-ZlUsiCqxFNrK88DFr-3gXYqhxFChU6DV5Sgda5cuqX1V_uWMt_Ysa2-MyhbWQ_eP-jlBDFesmqH6W0fNvK1N-dmuwdVsXzsPM_OPqQgVvXh3xoCIrH8OYyYKO=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
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Terror, Chaos, Thuggery – Leftists Foundations,
Soros, Wage War On America, World
_etZ-G3ZP1674LOjBgb25eWqNj4wro_WOKncrCx2JZwTDdvPhxBysEC8pVbL5nzLltR2tyM-m5NsJfBPzN3YGgaSL9Xtat8J9CsM0APBB7ThT-nR6ZTkRm71uoigNuaBKaXRqko1i9c=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500
{rickwells.us} ~ Big money “Foundations,” the word that in today’s world is often defined as a false front and legal mechanism for anti-Americanism and its financial support... are documented as contributing millions of dollars to agitators seeking to destroy this nation. They maintain they are anti-Trump, but President Trump is merely a man representing the values of Americans and our Constitution. If they are anti-Trump, they are anti-American. That is the reality which their actions reinforce. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Ford Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Foundation, all prominent leftist agitation and activism “non-profits,” have transferred millions of dollars to a notorious anti-Trump “resistance” group... https://rickwells.us/terror-thuggery-leftists-war-america/
.
Tim Murphy to retire amid scandal 
over asking mistress to get abortion
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by Diana Stancy Correll
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., announced he will retire and not seek re-election in 2018... following a report that the publicly pro-life congressman asked his mistress to have an abortion. "After discussions with my family and staff, I have come to the decision that I will not seek reelection to Congress at the end of my current term," Murphy said in a statement to KDKA-Pittsburgh Wednesday. "I plan to spend my remaining months in office continuing my work as the national leader on mental health care reform, as well as issues affecting working families in southwestern Pennsylvania," he added... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/tim-murphy-to-retire-amid-scandal-over-asking-mistress-to-get-abortion/article/2636577?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/04/17&utm_medium=email
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ANTIFA'S NEXT TARGET? AMERICA'S POLICE
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{wnd.com} ~ The left-wing extremist group known as antifa is gearing up for insurrection. And the primary target may be America’s already beleaguered police force... A special report from WND reveals a number of antifa groups have begun explicitly targeting police departments on the grounds the thin blue line is composed of “oppressors.”  Among the most militant is the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, or RAM, a new group whose activities have been widely covered by the antifa information hub It’s Going Down...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/antifas-next-target-americas-police/
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DOJ wants records of Seth Rich murder released
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by ALICIA POWE
{wnd.com} ~ The Department of Justice is demanding the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington, D.C., release records relating to the murder of Democratic National Committee employee Seth Rich... On Sept. 1, Texas attorney Ty Clevenger submitted a Freedom of Information Act Request with the DOJ and FBI requesting all records and correspondence pertaining to Rich. “This request includes, but is not limited to, any records or correspondence resulting from any investigation of his murder,” Clevenger wrote in his letter to the government agencies...  http://www.wnd.com/2017/10/doj-wants-records-of-seth-rich-murder-released/
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bJ-uMonNklIUba3k-3uA9RWVGM01Rlht442p3fze5pmye8SJeIEN0i22r2FsU1mkpjZti1Q7RrgcCwwxDA0pV5fKRMfDSqiEGLCf7yI4uDJa_9YT53XSJ4MpZ3GcrE5S_2qW1CJjcMhQHkzdqkRrLKUhwDRjL8ItGxrEPc8=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href= VIDEOS
 
President Trump In Las Vegas Paying Tribute To First Responders
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Mr. Monopoly’s Epic Troll Of Congressional Equifax Hearing
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The Walls Of Justice Closing In On Senator Menendez
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Ex-Federal Investigators Discuss What The FBI Is Asking Vegas Killer’s Girlfriend
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Israeli Counterterrorism School Trains Civilians to Save Lives
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Why liar-Hillary’s Tweet About Silencers/ Las Vegas Shooter Was Stupid
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Democrats Introduce Bump Stock Ban Bill
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In Honor of His Birthday Some of Buster Keaton’s Most Amazing Stunts
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TRUST, BUT VERIFY
by Burt Prelutsky


I recently lied in an article. I didn’t know I was lying, but I did, and several people rightly called me on it. I praised Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, for having backed President Trump in his admonishment of the NFL’s players, owners and Commissioner Goodell, for expressing their collective contempt for the flag and the National Anthem.

My mistake was in relying on someone who, in the past, had never steered me wrong. I’m sure he believed it was true when he passed the story along. For my part, I knew nothing about Mr. Hunt, aside from the fact that he is the son of the late Lamar Hunt. I simply assumed that there had to be at least one team owner who understood, if not as a patriot, at least as a businessman, that it‘s a very bad idea to insult the majority of your fan base. It also made sense to me that if there were one such team owner, the team would very likely be situated in the middle of what has come to be known as flyover country.

This doesn’t mean I will never again make the mistake of passing along fake news. It merely means that, unlike the other news and commentary outlets, if I discover that I blew it, I’ll let you know about it as soon as I can. I wouldn't want to be the reason any of my readers lost a bet.

● On the other hand, my brain doesn’t always cooperate with my eyes. Or vice versa. For instance, I recently typed “prostate” when I meant “prostrate,” and didn’t spot the mistake until after I had posted the article.

Then, the other day, I was typing up the names of the liar-nObama team I wanted the Justice Department to indict. When I read the paragraph over, instead of seeing liar-Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, Lois Lerner, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, I saw liar-Clinton, Abedin, Lerner, Rhodes, Samantha Egger and Rice.

Samantha Egger?! Where the heck had that come from? She was a mediocre English actress I probably hadn’t seen in a movie in over 40 years and here she popped up in place of our former ambassador to the U.N. So, not only do I have to deal with my failing eyesight and my inadequate typing skills, but a subconscious I can’t help thinking is out to sabotage me.

● I confess I don’t know why those connected with professional football have allowed themselves to act as stooges on behalf of the rats who spend their every waking hour trying to drive a wedge between various groups of Americans, based on race, religion, gender, class and even geography. But, then, even before this recent brouhaha, there were those who referred to the NFL as the National Felons League.

Although there are exceptions to the rule, the reason that so many guys pulling down millions of dollars for playing a game are so resentful of the cops isn’t because they or their male relatives have been stopped so often for DWB (driving while black), as they invariably insist, but because so many of them have been charged with possession of drugs and/or illegal weapons, sexual assault and domestic violence.

That still doesn’t explain why the owners of the teams seem to have decided it makes sense to stand united with their employees, while expressing contempt for the nation, the President and most of the fans.

The only theory I’ve come up with that makes the slightest bit of sense is that the owners feared the players would no longer invite them to the sex orgies with nubile young groupies.

● I thought President Trump made a big mistake when he traveled to Alabama to campaign on behalf of Luther Strange. It’s not because I favored Roy Moore. I didn’t. I don’t really care who the senator from Alabama happens to be. All I ask of any senator at this point is that he help Trump pass tax reform and tax cuts, that he back the building of the Wall, that he support Trump’s travel bans, the build-up of the military and the repeal of liar-nObamaCare.

All of those things, Strange promised to do. Senator Moore will very likely be more of a loose cannon, and in McConnell, Ryan, RINO-McCain, RINO-Flake, Paul, RINO-Murkowski, RINO-Collins and Cruz, Trump already has more of those than he needs.

But my main reason for thinking Trump should have stayed home is because by favoring Mitch McConnell’s choice, who out-spent Moore by a seven-to-one margin, Trump not only aligned himself with the so-called establishment, but let people like Rand Paul, RINO-Lisa Murkowski, RINO-John McCain, RINO-Jeff Flake, Paul Ryan and RINO-Susan Collins, know they can continue to oppose Trump’s agenda without risking political suicide.

● Sen. Bob Menendez and Secretary Tom Price exemplify political bi-partisanship; two corrupt hacks, one a Democrat, the other a Republican, who decided along the way that the rules don’t apply to them.

I suppose if you become accustomed to having your face on TV, being interviewed by the media and pandered to by your underlings, you come to regard private jets, luxurious hotels and even cash bribes, as perfectly legitimate perks of the job.

When I consider what a sacred privilege it should be to hold public office in the United States and I see guys like Menendez and Price behaving like a couple of unrepentant sleazebuckets, it makes me long for the old days when the Roman punishment for such political malfeasance was being sewn up in a burlap bag with a wild cat and tossed in the river.

● Although I have been a baseball fan for nearly 70 years, I am still puzzled by certain idiosyncrasies of the game. I have no idea when these particular things began or even why. I welcome any and all theories.

Why do teams celebrate World Series victories by congregating at the pitcher’s mound and piling on top of each other? I am always surprised when the pile is eventually untangled and those on the bottom don’t emerge with broken limbs and career-ending injuries.

Why, when a batter hits a home run, does he point skyward as he crosses home plate? If he’s thanking God, wouldn’t that suggest that God has money on the game and therefore has a rooting interest in seeing the other team lose?

Why, when in the bottom of the 9th inning, someone scores the winning run for the home team and the entire squad greets him as he crosses the plate, do they all hop up and down like little girls at the sighting of a teenage heartthrob?

And, finally, why is there so much spitting in baseball? They spit at the plate, when on base and even in the dugout. Why is it that no other group of athletes engage in such a nasty habit? Even professional football players, as we’ve seen, make certain they only spit in the direction of the flag.

● With all the big talk about draining the swamp, has it occurred to anyone else that in opening the door to the likes of Mike Flynn, Sean Spicer, Anthony Scaramucci, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort and Tom Price, Trump has added to the mosquito population?

● I don’t read the NY Times because, as I confessed, I prefer making up my own fake news. But Penny Alfonso alerted me to the fact that in a recent piece about Trump’s tax cut plan, Binyamin Applebaum wrote the following sentence: “The plan would not benefit lower-income households that do not pay federal income taxes.”

That being the case, nobody should be too surprised when in the coming debate, Chuck clown-Schumer and Nancy Pulosi voice their moral outrage over poor people who pay no income taxes not receiving the same tax cuts as the very rich, who pick up the tab for roughly 70% of the money Internal Revenue collects.

● Speaking of collecting, at times I have been as relentless as the IRS. Back in my 20s, I received an assignment from the Sunday supplement of the Chicago Tribune. They wanted me to do a piece about the coming TV season. The big news was that the networks were going to cut down on dramas and sit coms, turning over the time slots to two-hour TV movies.

The editor was quite specific. He told me that he wanted to hear from producers how the change would affect them; I wasn’t to delve into the specific economics. It was enough that some TV producers, those with experience turning out hour-long dramas, would naturally profit, while those who specialized in half-hour shows would take a hit.

I didn’t think it was a terribly fascinating story, but I thought I got some interesting quotes from producers, actors and studio executives, and mailed in the article, knowing I had done what was expected, and perhaps even a little bit more than expected.

You can imagine my shock when the editor let me know he was disappointed.  The shock turned to anger when he said he had no intention of paying me because I hadn’t even mentioned the economics.

It was his turn to become infuriated when I pointed out I had been following his orders to avoid what he had referred to as the “dry as dust” financial details.

No sooner had he hung up then I addressed my complaint to his boss, the managing editor of the Tribune. He said he made it his rule not to override the decisions of his editors. He believed in granting them complete autonomy, especially, I gathered, when it came to bilking freelance writers.

By now, it was no longer just the money, it was the principle. They felt they had the right to lie and cheat simply because they could get away with it, and they weren’t even politicians!

I came up with an idea. Because both the editor of the Sunday supplement and his superior had unusual last names, I wrote to a cousin who still lived in Chicago. I asked him to check out the local phone books and let me know if he could find home addresses for the two schmucks.

He got back to me a day or two later with two addresses. I then sat down and wrote letters, not to the editors, but to their wives. I spelled out the events exactly as I shared them with you. Only at the end of the letter, I pointed out that at some time in the future, if they pursued writing careers, their own sons might be dealing with editors 2,000 miles away, and how would they, as mothers, feel about it if they were treated as shabbily as I’d been.

I never heard back from the wives or the editors, but a week later, I received a check from the Chicago Tribune for the entire amount I was owed.

● Richard Ryan is the lucky winner of the September book drawing. A copy of “Angels on Tap” is on its way to Lamar, MO.
If you want to Comment directly to Burt Prelutsky, please mention my name Rudy. BurtPrelutsky@aol.com
Read more…

Loons of a Feather

Posted by Craig Andresen on October 6, 2017 at 5:30am

By Craig Andresen – Right Side Patriots on American Political Radio

Whenever something, like what happened last Sunday night in Las Vegas happens, two lo-1.jpg?width=227very predictable things immediately follow, and both of those things involve lunatics.

First…the conspiracy lunatics come crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches when the lights go out spreading the wildest, most hair-brained notions of how such an event could have taken place.

Let me provide an example that I saw on social media just a couple of days ago…

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE!!!

Read more…

Thursday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 5, 2017 at 4:32pm
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
by Pat Buchanan
AGHnzvDgAIc_dkrUO59jF21LrUmiQ79dA3RIshU-YlAdfSFPOhc54BmJs1OTRtvnrEX-cCbeiMVXdurlydL03p7YzXsWg_6cAavWTIOYU1PogQU4ftAjtXM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
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Beware Inflated Mass Shooting Stats
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by Political Editors:  Mass murders are shocking, leaving many people stunned and looking for answers and possible solutions. The New York Times, with its anti-gun agenda, would like people to believe that these mass shootings are not relatively rare events but are rather occurring at a frequency that borders on epidemic levels. Monday the editorial board of the Times ran a bare-numbers article entitled “477 Days. 521 Mass Shootings. Zero Action From Congress.” Here is yet another example of the Times playing fast and loose with both definitions and statistics in order to push an agenda rather than honestly present the facts.

          In order to come up with these dubious numbers the Times played a schematics game. Using the anti-Second Amendment Gun Violence Archive’s politicized definition of “mass shooting” rather than the FBI’s official definition, the Times was able to massively inflate the number of “mass shootings.” For the Times, a mass shooting is defined as involving “four or more people injured or killed in a single event at the same time and location” [emphasis added]. The FBI’s definition is three or more people killed in a single event.
          Second, the Times piece does not further delineate the numbers to include the FBI’s definition of “active shooter,” which is an “individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” As a result, the FBI numbers on mass shootings differ significantly from those reported by the Times. From 2014-2015 the FBI recorded 40 active shooter situations that lead to 92 deaths. Over that same period of time the Gun Violence Archive claimed that there were 607 “mass shootings.” Are mass shootings at epidemic levels in America? According to the facts, the answer is no. But when has the Times ever let the facts get in the way of its leftist agenda?
          Finally, speaking of this bias, in its reports this morning, the Times still includes the assailant among its count of the victims, noting the assault was “one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States, which left 59 people dead — including the gunman.” To include the assailant in the count with the people he murdered is unconscionable and is profoundly offensive to the families of his victims. But the Times’ editors are in such a vacuum that they are unable to discern why this is not acceptable. The same goes for other Leftmedia outlets that will continue to use the wrong death toll in the coming days.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51663

Mass Murderer Paddock’s Girlfriend 
Danley Back In US To “Clear Her Name”
{rickwells.us} ~ Marilou Danley, 62, the girlfriend of Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock is back on US soil... apparently of her own free will, and engaged in what she calls an effort to clear her name. Danley had the perfect alibi, with her passport as proof that she was out of the country when Paddock engaged in his terrorist act, raining death down on innocent Americans attending a country music concert. She had already spoken with investigators via phone a few hours after the shooting, with Paddock having left her casino card next to where he apparently shot himself. Her name and photo had been circulated as a “person of interest.”...  https://rickwells.us/paddocks-girlfriend-danley-back-us/
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3,800 Gang Members Charged 
in Transnational Gangbusting Operation
by Charles Fain Lehman
{freebeacon.com} ~ The Department of Justice announced Friday the arrest of some 3,800 gang members across four countries, dealing a serious blow to the MS-13 transnational drug gang... Operation "Regional Shield" involved coordination between law enforcement in the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The majority of the charges came in El Salvador: 3,477 criminal charges, resulting in 1,400 arrests. Some 70 people were charged in the United States in six different states: California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Virginia. In Guatemala, 284 were charged, and 12 in Honduras. Additionally, six firearms, 14 businesses, and 11 luxury vehicles were seized. "Today, we are announcing that our partnership with law enforcement in Central America has yielded charges against more than 3,800 gang members just in the last six months," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. "MS-13 coordinates across our borders to kill, rape, and traffic drugs and underage girls; we've got to coordinate across our borders to stop them. That's exactly what our courageous and professional DOJ agents and attorneys are doing. We will continue to maintain this steadfast policy and dismantle this gang."... http://freebeacon.com/issues/3800-gang-members-charged-in-transnational-gangbusting-operation/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=0f4e28c8b1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-0f4e28c8b1-45611665
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US Cleric: “Goal of Jihad Is to Implement Sharia – Non Muslims Should Convert to Gain Rights”

{themuslimissue.wordpress.com} ~ Sheikh Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa, head of the Islamic Jurisprudence Center in Clarksburg, Maryland, gave a lecture in Toronto, Canada in 2010... in which he said that Muslims could only live in the land of the infidels under certain circumstances, one of which was to do da’wa. “When the caliphate is established, you need to pack your bags and go home,” he said. In the lecture on the jurisprudence of interaction with non-Muslims, which was delivered at the Abu Huraira Center in Toronto and posted on YouTube in August 2010, Bengharsa stressed that historically, Islam had been spread by the sword and said that the purpose of Jihad is to establish the law of Allah and that while you can’t force a person to believe in Allah, “you can force him to live by the shari’a.”  https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2017/10/04/us-cleric-goal-of-jihad-is-to-implement-sharia-non-muslims-should-convert-to-gain-rights/
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Israel Prepares for War in Syria against Iran
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by Jonathan Spyer
{meforum.org} ~ Israeli officials believe that Iran is winning its bid for dominance in the Middle East, and they are mobilizing to counter the regional realignment that threatens to follow... The focus of Israel's military and diplomatic campaign is Syria. Israeli jets have struck Hezbollah and Syrian regime facilities and convoys dozens of times during Syria's civil war, with the goal of preventing the transfer of weapons systems from Iran to Hezbollah. In an apparent broadening of the scope of this air campaign, on Sept. 7 Israeli jets struck a Syrian weapons facility near Masyaf responsible for the production of chemical weapons and the storing of surface-to-surface missiles. The strike came after a round of diplomacy in which Israeli officials concluded that their concerns regarding the developing situation in Syria were not being addressed with sufficient seriousness in either the United States or Russia...  http://www.meforum.org/6946/israel-prepares-for-war-in-syria-against-iran?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=ae7ffe69c2-spyer_jonathan_2017_10_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-ae7ffe69c2-33703665&goal=0_086cfd423c-ae7ffe69c2-33703665
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Soros, Kellogg, Ford Foundations Gave 
Millions To Anti-Trump Resistance Group
by PETER HASSON
{dailycaller.com} ~ Major left-wing foundations have given millions of dollars to a leading anti-Trump “resistance” group, a new report reveals... The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation have channeled millions of dollars to the Center for Community Change, according to 2015 tax documents obtained by The Washington Free Beacon. The documents provide a rare glimpse into the relationship between big progressive donors and the left-wing activists who have mobilized against President Trump and other Republican lawmakers. As a 501(c)3 organization, the center isn’t required to publicly disclose the source and nature of its donations...  http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/04/soros-kellogg-ford-gave-millions-to-anti-trump-resistance-group/?utm_medium=email
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Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
by Pat Buchanan
{townhall.com} ~ "An act of pure evil," said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: "Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit."

"Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence," Trump went on in his most presidential moment, "and though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is love that defines us today and always will. Forever."
 
Uplifting words. But are they true?

Or will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers by Dylan Roof -- uniting us briefly in "sadness, shock and grief" only to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.

"In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff," said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure salaries "taking a knee" in disrespect of that flag.

Also on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of "people of color" in Puerto Rico.

And we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers, been desecrated and dragged down.
 
Only the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil discord.

To understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the disintegration appears more advanced.

Sunday, 4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.

Televised pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of Europe.

This is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in 1921.

The second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.

The English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of the presidential vote in 2017.

Beyond the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe at the austerity imposed by the North.
 
The German elections underlined a new threat to European unity. The ruling coalition of Angela Merkel's CDU and SPD suffered major losses. The Bavarian-based sister party of the CDU, the CSU, was itself shaken.

Angela Merkel as the new "leader of the West" in the time of Trump is an idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.

Some 13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.

What produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland: migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.

Europeans, like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the Third World.

Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.

Race, tribe, borders, culture, history -- issues of identity -- are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
 
We Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes.
 
Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT -- all core constituencies of the Democratic Party -- seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American life.

In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, "If you're runnin' down my country, man, You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."

A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics -- our cherished diversity itself -- appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
Read more…

Thursday PM ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 5, 2017 at 4:30pm
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
by Pat Buchanan
AGHnzvDgAIc_dkrUO59jF21LrUmiQ79dA3RIshU-YlAdfSFPOhc54BmJs1OTRtvnrEX-cCbeiMVXdurlydL03p7YzXsWg_6cAavWTIOYU1PogQU4ftAjtXM=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=
.
Beware Inflated Mass Shooting Stats
AWAydIiQ4ltRgwi8ACPmPBEd0C-_foQZ6iqfFMNXY6OdPms2stNQ-CJtTLQOjd__eRwfSlFRjUXoaEDubl9pnw0kURGpHtyMAsd9CsIvSxelk-aizANt2kMGa_97gws=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=?width=500by Political Editors:  Mass murders are shocking, leaving many people stunned and looking for answers and possible solutions. The New York Times, with its anti-gun agenda, would like people to believe that these mass shootings are not relatively rare events but are rather occurring at a frequency that borders on epidemic levels. Monday the editorial board of the Times ran a bare-numbers article entitled “477 Days. 521 Mass Shootings. Zero Action From Congress.” Here is yet another example of the Times playing fast and loose with both definitions and statistics in order to push an agenda rather than honestly present the facts.

          In order to come up with these dubious numbers the Times played a schematics game. Using the anti-Second Amendment Gun Violence Archive’s politicized definition of “mass shooting” rather than the FBI’s official definition, the Times was able to massively inflate the number of “mass shootings.” For the Times, a mass shooting is defined as involving “four or more people injured or killed in a single event at the same time and location” [emphasis added]. The FBI’s definition is three or more people killed in a single event.
          Second, the Times piece does not further delineate the numbers to include the FBI’s definition of “active shooter,” which is an “individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” As a result, the FBI numbers on mass shootings differ significantly from those reported by the Times. From 2014-2015 the FBI recorded 40 active shooter situations that lead to 92 deaths. Over that same period of time the Gun Violence Archive claimed that there were 607 “mass shootings.” Are mass shootings at epidemic levels in America? According to the facts, the answer is no. But when has the Times ever let the facts get in the way of its leftist agenda?
          Finally, speaking of this bias, in its reports this morning, the Times still includes the assailant among its count of the victims, noting the assault was “one of the deadliest mass shootings in the United States, which left 59 people dead — including the gunman.” To include the assailant in the count with the people he murdered is unconscionable and is profoundly offensive to the families of his victims. But the Times’ editors are in such a vacuum that they are unable to discern why this is not acceptable. The same goes for other Leftmedia outlets that will continue to use the wrong death toll in the coming days.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51663


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Mass Murderer Paddock’s Girlfriend 
Danley Back In US To “Clear Her Name”
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{rickwells.us} ~ Marilou Danley, 62, the girlfriend of Las Vegas mass murderer Stephen Paddock is back on US soil... apparently of her own free will, and engaged in what she calls an effort to clear her name. Danley had the perfect alibi, with her passport as proof that she was out of the country when Paddock engaged in his terrorist act, raining death down on innocent Americans attending a country music concert. She had already spoken with investigators via phone a few hours after the shooting, with Paddock having left her casino card next to where he apparently shot himself. Her name and photo had been circulated as a “person of interest.”...  https://rickwells.us/paddocks-girlfriend-danley-back-us/
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3,800 Gang Members Charged 
in Transnational Gangbusting Operation
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by Charles Fain Lehman
{freebeacon.com} ~ The Department of Justice announced Friday the arrest of some 3,800 gang members across four countries, dealing a serious blow to the MS-13 transnational drug gang... Operation "Regional Shield" involved coordination between law enforcement in the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The majority of the charges came in El Salvador: 3,477 criminal charges, resulting in 1,400 arrests. Some 70 people were charged in the United States in six different states: California, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Virginia. In Guatemala, 284 were charged, and 12 in Honduras. Additionally, six firearms, 14 businesses, and 11 luxury vehicles were seized. "Today, we are announcing that our partnership with law enforcement in Central America has yielded charges against more than 3,800 gang members just in the last six months," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said. "MS-13 coordinates across our borders to kill, rape, and traffic drugs and underage girls; we've got to coordinate across our borders to stop them. That's exactly what our courageous and professional DOJ agents and attorneys are doing. We will continue to maintain this steadfast policy and dismantle this gang."...  http://freebeacon.com/issues/3800-gang-members-charged-in-transnational-gangbusting-operation/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&utm_campaign=0f4e28c8b1-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-0f4e28c8b1-45611665
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US Cleric: “Goal of Jihad Is to Implement Sharia –
Non Muslims Should Convert to Gain Rights”

{themuslimissue.wordpress.com} ~ Sheikh Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa, head of the Islamic Jurisprudence Center in Clarksburg, Maryland, gave a lecture in Toronto, Canada in 2010... in which he said that Muslims could only live in the land of the infidels under certain circumstances, one of which was to do da’wa. “When the caliphate is established, you need to pack your bags and go home,” he said. In the lecture on the jurisprudence of interaction with non-Muslims, which was delivered at the Abu Huraira Center in Toronto and posted on YouTube in August 2010, Bengharsa stressed that historically, Islam had been spread by the sword and said that the purpose of Jihad is to establish the law of Allah and that while you can’t force a person to believe in Allah, “you can force him to live by the shari’a.”  https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2017/10/04/us-cleric-goal-of-jihad-is-to-implement-sharia-non-muslims-should-convert-to-gain-rights/
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Israel Prepares for War in Syria against Iran
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by Jonathan Spyer
{meforum.org} ~ Israeli officials believe that Iran is winning its bid for dominance in the Middle East, and they are mobilizing to counter the regional realignment that threatens to follow... The focus of Israel's military and diplomatic campaign is Syria. Israeli jets have struck Hezbollah and Syrian regime facilities and convoys dozens of times during Syria's civil war, with the goal of preventing the transfer of weapons systems from Iran to Hezbollah. In an apparent broadening of the scope of this air campaign, on Sept. 7 Israeli jets struck a Syrian weapons facility near Masyaf responsible for the production of chemical weapons and the storing of surface-to-surface missiles. The strike came after a round of diplomacy in which Israeli officials concluded that their concerns regarding the developing situation in Syria were not being addressed with sufficient seriousness in either the United States or Russia...  http://www.meforum.org/6946/israel-prepares-for-war-in-syria-against-iran?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=ae7ffe69c2-spyer_jonathan_2017_10_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-ae7ffe69c2-33703665&goal=0_086cfd423c-ae7ffe69c2-33703665
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Soros, Kellogg, Ford Foundations Gave 
Millions To Anti-Trump Resistance Group
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by PETER HASSON
{dailycaller.com} ~ Major left-wing foundations have given millions of dollars to a leading anti-Trump “resistance” group, a new report reveals... The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, The Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation have channeled millions of dollars to the Center for Community Change, according to 2015 tax documents obtained by The Washington Free Beacon. The documents provide a rare glimpse into the relationship between big progressive donors and the left-wing activists who have mobilized against President Trump and other Republican lawmakers. As a 501(c)3 organization, the center isn’t required to publicly disclose the source and nature of its donations...  http://dailycaller.com/2017/10/04/soros-kellogg-ford-gave-millions-to-anti-trump-resistance-group/?utm_medium=email
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Moment of Unity in a Disintegrating World
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by Pat Buchanan
{townhall.com} ~ "An act of pure evil," said President Trump of the atrocity in Las Vegas, invoking our ancient faith: "Scripture teaches us the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit."

"Our unity cannot be shattered by evil. Our bonds cannot be broken by violence," Trump went on in his most presidential moment, "and though we feel such great anger at the senseless murder of our fellow citizens, it is love that defines us today and always will. Forever."
 
Uplifting words. But are they true?

Or will this massacre be like the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut, or Charleston massacre of black churchgoers by Dylan Roof -- uniting us briefly in "sadness, shock and grief" only to divide us again and, more deeply, in our endless war over guns.

"In memory of the fallen, I have directed that our great flag be flown at half-staff," said the president. As he spoke, the mind went back to yesterday afternoon where the NFL was roiled anew by athletes earning seven-figure salaries "taking a knee" in disrespect of that flag.

Also on Sunday, cable TV was given over to charges that Trump, attending a golf tournament in New Jersey, cared nothing about the suffering of "people of color" in Puerto Rico.

And we just closed out a summer where monuments honoring the explorers and missionaries who discovered the New World and the men who made the America we have been blessed to inherit have, along with those of Confederate soldiers, been desecrated and dragged down.
 
Only the 1960s, with Vietnam and the great cultural revolution, and the War Between the States from 1861-1865, rival this as a time of national disunity and civil discord.

To understand what is happening to us, we should look to Europe, where the disintegration appears more advanced.

Sunday, 4,000 national police, sent by Madrid, used violence to break up a referendum called by the regional government of Catalonia on secession. Nine in 10 of those able to cast a ballot voted to secede from Spain.

Televised pictures from Barcelona of police clubbing and dragging voters away from the polls, injuring hundreds, may make this a Selma moment in the history of Europe.

This is the first of the specters haunting Europe: the desire of ethnic minorities like Catalans in Spain and Scots in Britain to break free of the mother country and create new nations, as the Norwegians did in 1905 and the Irish did in 1921.

The second is the desire of growing millions of Europeans to overthrow the transnational regime that has been raised above them, the EU.

The English succeeded with Brexit in 2016. Today, almost every country in Europe has an anti-EU party like the National Front in France, which won 35 percent of the presidential vote in 2017.

Beyond the tribal call of ethnic solidarity is a growing resentment in Northern Europe at having to bail out the chronic deficits of the South, and in Southern Europe at the austerity imposed by the North.
 
The German elections underlined a new threat to European unity. The ruling coalition of Angela Merkel's CDU and SPD suffered major losses. The Bavarian-based sister party of the CDU, the CSU, was itself shaken.

Angela Merkel as the new "leader of the West" in the time of Trump is an idea that has come and gone. She is a diminished figure.

Some 13 percent of the votes went to Alternative for Germany, a far-right party that, for the first time, will enter the Bundestag. In states of the former East Germany, the AfD ran second or even first.

What produced this right turn in Germany is what produced it in Hungary and Poland: migration from Africa and the Middle East that is creating socially and culturally indigestible enclaves in and around the great cities of Europe.

Europeans, like Trumpians, want their borders secured and closed to the masses of the Third World.

Germans are weary of 70 years of wearing sackcloth and ashes.

Race, tribe, borders, culture, history -- issues of identity -- are tearing at the seams of the EU and pulling apart nations.
 
We Americans may celebrate our multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural diversity as our greatest attribute. But the acrimony and the divisions among us seem greater than ever before in our lifetimes.
 
Blacks, Hispanics, feminists, Native Americans, LGBT -- all core constituencies of the Democratic Party -- seem endlessly aggrieved with their stations in American life.

In the Republican Party, there is now a vast cohort of populist and nationalists who agree with Merle Haggard, "If you're runnin' down my country, man, You're walkin' on the fightin' side of me."

A massacre of Americans like that in Las Vegas may bring us together briefly. But what holds us together when issues of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, history and politics -- our cherished diversity itself -- appear to be pulling us ever further apart?
Read more…

Thursday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 5, 2017 at 11:59am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Consequences of Media Weaponized Hatred
by Alicia Colon
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Thursday Top Headlines
jJ6VU7YlEJFB3TvrFJJDUe73ln3HVJQKwIZqOeryqFmGPCcDTB1eewQBQKGkMMX0QTtOZmdWXYRQV-M8sNUeMXQemzHto4wWdx_iWCexIylawi0zD8mJO_27mDPWARU=s0-d-e1-ft#%3Ca%20rel%3Dnofollow%20href=https://cached-assets.patriotpost.us/images/2017-10-05-67383309_large.jpg" width="454" height="227" />Trump meets with Las Vegas shooting survivors: “We’re going to pay our respects” (USA Today)
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Democrats propose banning “bump stocks” like the ones used in Las Vegas shooting (Washington Examiner)
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San Juan mayor feuding with Trump turned her back when asked to swear to uphold the Constitution (The Daily Signal)
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Three Green Berets killed, two wounded in Niger ambush (Fox News)
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DOD drops Southern Poverty Law Center from extremism training materials (The Daily Caller)
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Burn. NYC mayor not invited to Columbus Day parade (Hot Air)
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Black Lives Matter students shut down the ACLU’s campus free speech event because “liberalism is white supremacy” (Reason)
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House committee approves $10 billion initial payment for U.S.-Mexico border wall (The Washington Times)
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DACA amnesty to increase illegal population to 14 million, cost billions (Washington Examiner)
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Federal debt increases for 60th straight fiscal year (CNS News)
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IRS awards $7.25M fraud-prevention contract to Equifax despite failure to secure consumers’ data (Consumerist)
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Policy: What the Founders really thought about guns (The Daily Signal)
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Policy: Should Trump re-certify the Iran Deal? (Washington Examiner)  ~The Patriot Post
House committee approves 
$10 billion to fund border wall
by Anna Giaritelli
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The House Homeland Security Committee passed legislation Wednesday that would provide $10 billion toward President Trump's wall on the U.S.-Mexico border... a step toward possible consideration on the House floor. The committee passed Wednesday afternoon in a party-line vote, after dismissing all Democratic amendments. The committee vote is a significant step toward implementing President Trump's goal of building a border wall, which otherwise has been stalled. Trump himself agreed to delay money for the wall last month in order to quickly resolve a fight over raising the debt ceiling and extending federal spending for the first few months of the new fiscal year...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-committee-approves-10-billion-to-fund-border-wall/article/2636551?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/04/17&utm_medium=email
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Robert Mueller Takes Over 
Full Control of “Steele Dossier” Inquiry
{theconservativetreehouse.com} ~ If the FBI was attempting to reassert a reason for public confidence in their investigative agency... and/or if the FBI was trying to deconstruct their recent history of politicization and weaponization against American citizens; they would be taking specific action toward that end goal.  They’re not. Exactly the opposite is true. The current leadership of the FBI and DOJ are factually taking specific action to remove any investigative or public scrutiny of their scurrilous activities and corrupt agency involvement in recent events.  If they didn’t need to do this – they wouldn’t be doing this. As such, the transparency of their motive to bury their own agencies involvement in the creation of, and payments toward, the ridiculous Steele Dossier is now abundantly clear...  https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/10/04/robert-mueller-takes-over-full-control-of-steele-dossier-inquiry/
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Mark Salling pleads guilty to child porn charges
by Bryan Hood
{pagesix.com} ~ Former “Glee” star Mark Salling pled guilty to possession of child pornography involving prepubescent minors on Tuesday. He will serve between four and seven years in prison... As part of the plea, the actor will have to register as a sex offender, enter a treatment program, have no unsupervised contact with anyone under the age of 18 and stay away from schoolyards, parks, swimming pools, playgrounds and video arcades, according to court documents obtained by The Blast. Salling, 35, was also ordered to pay $50,000 in restitution to each victim of the child pornography who has requested it...  http://pagesix.com/2017/10/04/mark-salling-pleads-guilty-to-possession-of-child-porn-faces-4-7-years-in-prison/?_ga=2.139974515.1590659497.1506958305-201352632.1505845681
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The SUCCEED Act: Merit-Based Legislation 
To Address The Legal Uncertainty 
of Undocumented Children
U.S. Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC)
{tillis.senate.gov} ~ U.S. Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), James Lankford (R-OK), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced... the Solution for Undocumented Children through Careers Employment Education and Defending our nation (SUCCEED) Act, a solution to address the legal uncertainty facing undocumented children and young undocumented adults who were brought to the United States as children. The SUCCEED Act provides a fair but rigorous track for undocumented children to qualify for conditional permanent resident (CPR) status, requiring them to follow one or a combination of three specific pathways to earn and maintain their status once they become adults: being gainfully employed, pursing postsecondary or vocational education, or serving in the U.S. military. Click HERE below for a summary of the bill. https://www.tillis.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/021d6dfd-f083-4350-8ab4-b233bc512f05/the-succeed-act-two-pager.pdf
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The SAT Casts a Shadow on American Education
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by Jordan Candler:  One metric colleges use (to a formerly greater extent) to determine a student’s academic ability is the SAT test. These scores not only help determine acceptance letters, they also provide a snapshot of trends in academic testing. In this regard, the trend is not good. Scores have been stagnant at best and lower overall.

          This isn’t entirely surprising when considering other statistics. As economist Walter Williams has reported, “According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math. For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace. Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.”
          It’s almost hard — if not impossible — to imagine SAT scores getting any better with such paltry literacy rates, like the ones above, absent significant overhauls. These would not include the overhauls made recently to the SAT, which appear to be creating unfounded optimism. According to The Washington Post’s Nick Anderson, “Last year, the College Board eliminated the notorious guessing penalty on the SAT, jettisoned some tricky vocabulary and took other steps, hoping to make the test a more straightforward measure of achievement. The board also returned the top score to the iconic number parents and grandparents remember: 1600. What resulted were apparently higher marks. But that doesn’t necessarily mean students are smarter.”
          Unfortunately, this new method — which shows seemingly “improving” scores, though probably erroneously — is only part of a broader problem. Even if test scores rose dramatically in 2017, a comparison of past and present exam questions suggests that today’s students aren’t nearly as literate as previous generations. Researcher Annie Holmquist shows that while today’s SAT may provide a range of basic multiple choice questions, students in years past were compelled to be far more articulate.
          “Consider the 1912 history exam from the College Board, the precursor to the modern SAT,” writes Holmquist. “It not only seeks written, essay-like answers, it also expects students to come prepared to draw on knowledge that they have learned beyond a textbook.” Holmquist opines, “It’s not hard to guess the type of outcry which would be raised if today’s students were expected to pass a test such as the above, which not only features difficult questions, but appears to give extra consideration to students who demonstrate ability to connect the dots of learning without being spoon-fed pre-formed answers.”
          It’s not just scores that have changed, but the nature of testing as well. Both are demonstrable proof that our education system needs a significant revamping. And it’s as easy as getting back to our roots.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51642

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The Consequences of Media Weaponized Hatred
by Alicia Colon
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ As police try to find answers to why Stephen Paddock allegedly shot and killed 59 people and wounded over 500 at a country music concert in Las Vegas, the liberal media amps up its tired mantra against guns.

Democrats immediately called for more gun laws while the latest Reuters report claims that ISIS is claiming shooter was a recent Islam convert.

Meanwhile all opinion pundits are pontificating on why this happened.

I'll wait until all the facts are in but I will say this; gun laws would NOT have prevented the Las Vegas carnage and the liberal response to the tragic murders is simply reprehensible.

What is it about social media venues like Facebook and Twitter that make people express vile, despicable comments?

A top legal executive at CBS, Hayley Geftman-Gold, has no sympathy for those murdered by the Las Vegas madman because she wrote, "bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters."

Infamous British atheist, Richard Dawkins tweeted this gem, "Durn tootin', great shootin'. Cool dude sertin' he's 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah!"

Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. Seth Moulton would not participate in a moment of silence for the innocent victims and tweeted, "Now is not a moment for silence; it's a time for action."

Before the murdered country western concert victims have even been identified, Democrats were trotting out former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of gun violence by a lunatic, as a prop for their anti-gun, anti-NRA campaign. I seem to recall after Giffords was shot with several other innocent victims by Jared Lee Lougher, conservatives reacted with sympathy and compassion. Not the left which never lets a crisis go to waste when they can demonize the right.

That's right, folks. The answer to all mass murders is more gun control laws.

The fact that criminals who perform these acts don't pay attention to these laws or they are never enforced makes no difference to politicians eager to pretend that they know what they are doing.

Although not much is known right now about the alleged suspect Mr. Paddock's motivation, it may help to ponder whether the choice of victims is a clue.

Yes, it is true that many CW fans lean right, probably vote Republican, probably believe in the second amendment and may own guns, as is their right.

They are also loathed by most Hollywood celebrities and are mocked nightly by late show hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.

This antipathy has flooded the airwaves since last November when Donald Trump was elected president.

The venom is unprecedented and like many conservatives I have felt its wrath personally in my own family.

The inability by many Democrats to accept what 63 million Americans voted for last year has divided this country as painfully as during the Civil War.

The mainstream media agree with failed candidate Hillary Clinton when she described those who supported Donald trump: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic --- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up."

Just in case people didn't know who likes country music, CNN's Jeff Zeleny said, "keep in mind" that there is significant crossover between Trump supporters and country music fans."

I'm an Hispanic Trump supporter who doesn't particularly care for modern CW music and I'll bet that not all the people who were slaughtered in Vegas voted for Trump but then when has the media not stooped to generalities in lieu of accurate reportage?

It could be that the alleged suspect did not target Republican Trump supporters but let's not forget that James T. Hodgkinson who shot and nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise specifically targeted the Republicans practicing for a charity baseball game.

As you may notice I have used the word alleged when referring to Mr. Paddock who does not fit any of the profiles of a mass murderer. No one has actually seen Mr. Paddock shoot anybody and the police found him dead of an apparent suicide. I wish that reporters would wait until all the facts have been thoroughly investigated as to how the guns were brought into the hotel room without the housekeeping staff seeing all the weapons found there.

Would it hurt the media to wait until casino cameras are checked to see how so many guns were brought into the Mandalay?

I'm not suggesting that the suspect did not do the murders but the rush to be first with the news is destroying the fourth estate. It has become beyond irresponsible by repeatedly stating that this shooting sets a record as the worst in U.S. history.

Somewhere out there is a maniac wanting to break that record.

G0D have mercy on us.
Read more…

Thursday Noon ~ TheFrontPageCover

Posted by Rudy Tirre on October 5, 2017 at 11:30am
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Consequences of Media Weaponized Hatred
by Alicia Colon
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Thursday Top Headlines
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Democrats propose banning “bump stocks” like the ones used in Las Vegas shooting (Washington Examiner)
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San Juan mayor feuding with Trump turned her back when asked to swear to uphold the Constitution (The Daily Signal)
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Three Green Berets killed, two wounded in Niger ambush (Fox News)
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DOD drops Southern Poverty Law Center from extremism training materials (The Daily Caller)
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Burn. NYC mayor not invited to Columbus Day parade (Hot Air)
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Black Lives Matter students shut down the ACLU’s campus free speech event because “liberalism is white supremacy” (Reason)
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House committee approves $10 billion initial payment for U.S.-Mexico border wall (The Washington Times)
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DACA amnesty to increase illegal population to 14 million, cost billions (Washington Examiner)
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Federal debt increases for 60th straight fiscal year (CNS News)
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IRS awards $7.25M fraud-prevention contract to Equifax despite failure to secure consumers’ data (Consumerist)
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Policy: What the Founders really thought about guns (The Daily Signal)
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Policy: Should Trump re-certify the Iran Deal? (Washington Examiner)  ~The Patriot Post
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House committee approves 
$10 billion to fund border wall
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by Anna Giaritelli
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ The House Homeland Security Committee passed legislation Wednesday that would provide $10 billion toward President Trump's wall on the U.S.-Mexico border... a step toward possible consideration on the House floor. The committee passed Wednesday afternoon in a party-line vote, after dismissing all Democratic amendments. The committee vote is a significant step toward implementing President Trump's goal of building a border wall, which otherwise has been stalled. Trump himself agreed to delay money for the wall last month in order to quickly resolve a fight over raising the debt ceiling and extending federal spending for the first few months of the new fiscal year...  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/house-committee-approves-10-billion-to-fund-border-wall/article/2636551?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20News%20Alert%20-%2010/04/17&utm_medium=email
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Robert Mueller Takes Over 
Full Control of “Steele Dossier” Inquiry
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{theconservativetreehouse.com} ~ If the FBI was attempting to reassert a reason for public confidence in their investigative agency... and/or if the FBI was trying to deconstruct their recent history of politicization and weaponization against American citizens; they would be taking specific action toward that end goal.  They’re not. Exactly the opposite is true. The current leadership of the FBI and DOJ are factually taking specific action to remove any investigative or public scrutiny of their scurrilous activities and corrupt agency involvement in recent events.  If they didn’t need to do this – they wouldn’t be doing this. As such, the transparency of their motive to bury their own agencies involvement in the creation of, and payments toward, the ridiculous Steele Dossier is now abundantly clear...  https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2017/10/04/robert-mueller-takes-over-full-control-of-steele-dossier-inquiry/
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Mark Salling pleads guilty to child porn charges
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Mark Salling
by Bryan Hood
{pagesix.com} ~ Former “Glee” star Mark Salling pled guilty to possession of child pornography involving prepubescent minors on Tuesday. He will serve between four and seven years in prison... As part of the plea, the actor will have to register as a sex offender, enter a treatment program, have no unsupervised contact with anyone under the age of 18 and stay away from schoolyards, parks, swimming pools, playgrounds and video arcades, according to court documents obtained by The Blast. Salling, 35, was also ordered to pay $50,000 in restitution to each victim of the child pornography who has requested it...  http://pagesix.com/2017/10/04/mark-salling-pleads-guilty-to-possession-of-child-porn-faces-4-7-years-in-prison/?_ga=2.139974515.1590659497.1506958305-201352632.1505845681
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The SUCCEED Act: Merit-Based Legislation To Address
The Legal Uncertainty of Undocumented Children
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U.S. Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC)
{tillis.senate.gov} ~ U.S. Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), James Lankford (R-OK), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced... the Solution for Undocumented Children through Careers Employment Education and Defending our nation (SUCCEED) Act, a solution to address the legal uncertainty facing undocumented children and young undocumented adults who were brought to the United States as children. The SUCCEED Act provides a fair but rigorous track for undocumented children to qualify for conditional permanent resident (CPR) status, requiring them to follow one or a combination of three specific pathways to earn and maintain their status once they become adults: being gainfully employed, pursing postsecondary or vocational education, or serving in the U.S. military. Click HERE below for a summary of the bill.  https://www.tillis.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/021d6dfd-f083-4350-8ab4-b233bc512f05/the-succeed-act-two-pager.pdf
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The SAT Casts a Shadow on American Education
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          This isn’t entirely surprising when considering other statistics. As economist Walter Williams has reported, “According to The Nation’s Report Card, only 37 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in reading in 2015, and just 25 percent were proficient in math. For black students, achievement levels were a disgrace. Nationally, 17 percent of black students scored proficient in reading, and 7 percent scored proficient in math. In some cities, such as Detroit, black academic proficiency is worse; among eighth-graders, only 4 percent were proficient in math, and only 7 percent were proficient in reading.”
          It’s almost hard — if not impossible — to imagine SAT scores getting any better with such paltry literacy rates, like the ones above, absent significant overhauls. These would not include the overhauls made recently to the SAT, which appear to be creating unfounded optimism. According to The Washington Post’s Nick Anderson, “Last year, the College Board eliminated the notorious guessing penalty on the SAT, jettisoned some tricky vocabulary and took other steps, hoping to make the test a more straightforward measure of achievement. The board also returned the top score to the iconic number parents and grandparents remember: 1600. What resulted were apparently higher marks. But that doesn’t necessarily mean students are smarter.”
          Unfortunately, this new method — which shows seemingly “improving” scores, though probably erroneously — is only part of a broader problem. Even if test scores rose dramatically in 2017, a comparison of past and present exam questions suggests that today’s students aren’t nearly as literate as previous generations. Researcher Annie Holmquist shows that while today’s SAT may provide a range of basic multiple choice questions, students in years past were compelled to be far more articulate.
          “Consider the 1912 history exam from the College Board, the precursor to the modern SAT,” writes Holmquist. “It not only seeks written, essay-like answers, it also expects students to come prepared to draw on knowledge that they have learned beyond a textbook.” Holmquist opines, “It’s not hard to guess the type of outcry which would be raised if today’s students were expected to pass a test such as the above, which not only features difficult questions, but appears to give extra consideration to students who demonstrate ability to connect the dots of learning without being spoon-fed pre-formed answers.”
          It’s not just scores that have changed, but the nature of testing as well. Both are demonstrable proof that our education system needs a significant revamping. And it’s as easy as getting back to our roots.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/51642


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The Consequences of Media Weaponized Hatred
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by Alicia Colon
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ As police try to find answers to why Stephen Paddock allegedly shot and killed 59 people and wounded over 500 at a country music concert in Las Vegas, the liberal media amps up its tired mantra against guns.

Democrats immediately called for more gun laws while the latest Reuters report claims that ISIS is claiming shooter was a recent Islam convert.

Meanwhile all opinion pundits are pontificating on why this happened.

I'll wait until all the facts are in but I will say this; gun laws would NOT have prevented the Las Vegas carnage and the liberal response to the tragic murders is simply reprehensible.

What is it about social media venues like Facebook and Twitter that make people express vile, despicable comments?

A top legal executive at CBS, Hayley Geftman-Gold, has no sympathy for those murdered by the Las Vegas madman because she wrote, "bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters."

Infamous British atheist, Richard Dawkins tweeted this gem, "Durn tootin', great shootin'. Cool dude sertin' he's 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah!"

Massachusetts Democrat, Rep. Seth Moulton would not participate in a moment of silence for the innocent victims and tweeted, "Now is not a moment for silence; it's a time for action."

Before the murdered country western concert victims have even been identified, Democrats were trotting out former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, survivor of gun violence by a lunatic, as a prop for their anti-gun, anti-NRA campaign. I seem to recall after Giffords was shot with several other innocent victims by Jared Lee Lougher, conservatives reacted with sympathy and compassion. Not the left which never lets a crisis go to waste when they can demonize the right.

That's right, folks. The answer to all mass murders is more gun control laws.

The fact that criminals who perform these acts don't pay attention to these laws or they are never enforced makes no difference to politicians eager to pretend that they know what they are doing.

Although not much is known right now about the alleged suspect Mr. Paddock's motivation, it may help to ponder whether the choice of victims is a clue.

Yes, it is true that many CW fans lean right, probably vote Republican, probably believe in the second amendment and may own guns, as is their right.

They are also loathed by most Hollywood celebrities and are mocked nightly by late show hosts like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.

This antipathy has flooded the airwaves since last November when Donald Trump was elected president.

The venom is unprecedented and like many conservatives I have felt its wrath personally in my own family.

The inability by many Democrats to accept what 63 million Americans voted for last year has divided this country as painfully as during the Civil War.

The mainstream media agree with failed candidate Hillary Clinton when she described those who supported Donald trump: "You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic --- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up."

Just in case people didn't know who likes country music, CNN's Jeff Zeleny said, "keep in mind" that there is significant crossover between Trump supporters and country music fans."

I'm an Hispanic Trump supporter who doesn't particularly care for modern CW music and I'll bet that not all the people who were slaughtered in Vegas voted for Trump but then when has the media not stooped to generalities in lieu of accurate reportage?

It could be that the alleged suspect did not target Republican Trump supporters but let's not forget that James T. Hodgkinson who shot and nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise specifically targeted the Republicans practicing for a charity baseball game.

As you may notice I have used the word alleged when referring to Mr. Paddock who does not fit any of the profiles of a mass murderer. No one has actually seen Mr. Paddock shoot anybody and the police found him dead of an apparent suicide. I wish that reporters would wait until all the facts have been thoroughly investigated as to how the guns were brought into the hotel room without the housekeeping staff seeing all the weapons found there.

Would it hurt the media to wait until casino cameras are checked to see how so many guns were brought into the Mandalay?

I'm not suggesting that the suspect did not do the murders but the rush to be first with the news is destroying the fourth estate. It has become beyond irresponsible by repeatedly stating that this shooting sets a record as the worst in U.S. history.

Somewhere out there is a maniac wanting to break that record.

G0D have mercy on us.
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