Thank you, Mr. President,” says survivor of 2013 chemical attack in Syria
Listen to this Syrian man own the CNN host when she asks him what he thinks about Trump’s temporary ban on Syrian refugees.
Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3uaf1NFxXc
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New Jersey: Muslim group harassing and intimidating private citizens for opposing mosque
(Muslim do not assimilate, they infiltrate )
The Justice Department should put a stop to this. But it’s anybody’s guess which side the Trump Justice Department is on at this point.
“Outrageous Unconstitutional Intimidation of Private Citizens Who Opposed Mosque Project; Thomas More Law Center Steps In,” Thomas More Law Center, March 28, 2017:
ANN ARBOR, MI – If you speak out against building a mosque in your community, you may be slapped with a subpoena demanding all your personal documents, including emails, voicemails, text messages, and social media posts concerning Muslims, Islam, mosques, the Quran, Muslim worship or prayer services, wudu, imams, burkas, hijabs, Sharia, jihad, or anything else associated with or related to Muslims or Islam.
This was part of the harassment and intimidation experienced by scores of private citizens of the small New Jersey town, Bernards Township (also known as Basking Ridge), who spoke out at public hearings against a plan to build a disproportionately-sized mosque on a small piece of residential property. The mosque project, sponsored by the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge (“ISBR”) and its president, Mohammad Ali Chaudry, was denied by Township officials for not complying with local building ordinances.
On March 10, 2016, ISBR and Mohammad Ali Chaudry sued Bernards Township in federal court, claiming various violations of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. Shortly after, ISBR had coercive subpoenas served on private citizens whose only involvement was voicing concerns at public planning board meetings about whether the proposed mosque complied with local building ordinances.
The United States District Court for the District of New Jersey recently granted the Thomas More Law Center, a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, permission to represent, without charge, several of these citizens who desired to quash the coercive and abusive subpoenas. Westfield, New Jersey attorney Michael P. Hrycak is assisting the Law Center.
Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, commented: “ISBR is setting a dangerous unconstitutional precedent by abusing a court process to chill and trample on the First Amendment Rights of private citizens whose only involvement was to speak out against the mosque at public hearings. Because the U.S. Supreme Court has held that speech at a public place on a matter of public concern is entitled to special protection, we will ask the Federal District Court to quash the subpoenas served on our clients as a misuse and abuse of the Court’s process.”
Lori Caratzola, described in the ISBR Complaint as a fervent and frequent objector to the mosque, was a prime target for ISBR’s personal attacks. She was personally mentioned over a dozen times in their Complaint. Yet she has remained steadfast in her opposition. Ms. Caratzola commented:
“Being served with a Federal Court Subpoena to turn over all my personal communications including voicemails, social media, emails, notes wherein I make any mention of anything having to do with Islam is an absolute violation of my First Amendment rights. I was a citizen exercising my right to attend public planning board meetings about a land use application that affected my community.”
She continued:
“Dr. Chaudry’s clear intent was to embarrass, strike fear, silence and cause financial harm to any citizen who dared oppose his nonconforming project. And if these subpoenas are allowed to stand, it will set a chilling precedent for all citizens who wish to exercise their Constitutionally protected right to free speech and to petition their government.
“I was named numerous times in the Complaint, yet as a non-party, I had no standing to challenge the lies and half-truths told about me. After the Complaint was filed, mainstream media picked up and repeated these lies and half-truths.”
Caratzola concluded:
“I have lost days, probably weeks, devoting time to trying to find counsel – only to find most attorneys are afraid of challenging an Islamic group in today’s political climate.”…
Cody Smith, another subpoenaed resident who opposed the Mosque, stated:
“The planning board did exactly what it should have done—set emotions aside and judge ISBR’s application solely on its merits and whether it complied with our local regulations. It’s unfortunate that Dr. Chaudry, the Township’s former mayor, has resorted to an all-out smear campaign and retaliation against residents who exercised their fundamental Constitutional rights of Free Speech in a public forum.”
Soon after ISBR’s lawsuit, DOJ investigators opened another coercive front by attempting to interview the private citizens who opposed the mosque. Eight months later, the DOJ filed its own lawsuit against the Township.
Astonishingly, the DOJ was dismissive of an apparent conflict of interest between Mohammad Ali Chaudry and the DOJ’s chief investigator, Caroline Sadlowski, both of whom were serving together on the Center for Religious and Cultural Conflicts board at Drew University.
So now it begins! Violence against Americans to get their wayit never changes time to stand up to them before it get worst just look at what is going on in Europe it tells it all!!!!The watchman on the wall sounding the ALARM
Claremont University Students Shut Down Conservative Speaker
Protesters at the Claremont Colleges successfully prevented conservative commentator Heather Mac Donald from speaking on their campus.
Students at the Claremont Colleges, a consortium of undergraduate and graduate liberal arts colleges in Claremont, California, blocked entrances to the building that Mac Donald was scheduled to speak in.
Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, was giving a speech titled “The War on Police,” a reference to her 2016 book about how political rhetoric against police makes America less safe.
Mac Donald was forced to livestream her speech after protesters blocked students and professors from entering the building.
According to the school’s newspaper, The Forum, 250 students watched Mac Donald speak. Students had to submit questions via email.
“Among other chants, protesters yelled ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘How do you spell fascism? CMC!’ while banging on windows of the [Athenaeum],” according to The Forum.
Mac Donald was a guest of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government, a research institute on the campus of Claremont McKenna College, a member of the Claremont Consortium.
Peter Uvin, vice president of academic affairs for Claremont McKenna College, said in an email to students after the incident: “I fully understand that people have strong opinions and different—often painful—experiences with the issues Heather Mac Donald discusses. I also understand that words can hurt.”
Uvin went on to condemn the students’ behavior, saying, “What we face here is not an attempt to demonstrate, or to ask tough questions of our speaker, all of which are both protected and cherished on this campus, but rather to make it impossible for her to speak, for you to listen, and for all of us to debate. This we could not accept.”
Many conservative speakers have been protested on college campuses in recent months.
In March, students protested Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, while he was giving a speech at Middlebury College. Milo Yiannopoulos, a former editor at Breitbart, was also violently protested when he attempted to speak at Berkeley this past February.
Murray was able to give his speech, talking over screaming demonstrators, while Yiannopoulos was forced to cancel his speech and leave campus, thanks to a police escort.
Mary Clare Reim, an education policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, cited a pattern, telling The Daily Signal in an email:
We can now add Heather Mac Donald to the long list of experts whose voices have been shut down on college campuses. From Middlebury to Berkeley, college students and administrators continue to treat conservative viewpoints with hostility and sometimes violence.
Reim went on to encourage institutions to re-evaluate their purpose, writing, “Universities have an obligation to protect First Amendment rights on campus. Unfortunately, recent events suggest that many universities no longer take that obligation seriously.” (For more from the author of “Claremont University Students Shut Down Conservative Speaker” please click HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/04/claremont-university-students-shut-conservative-speaker/
After Missile Attack, the Challenges Facing Trump in Syria
After President Donald Trump was mostly cheered by the international community for his missile strikes targeted at the Syrian government, he must now grapple with how to pair his first use of decisive military force with a strategy to contest a six-year-old war that has challenged the world.
U.S. officials described Trump’s sudden decision to launch 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against a Syrian air base as a targeted retaliation on the source of a suspected deadly attack on civilians that occurred two days before—and a symbolic show of American power.
But foreign policy experts say that Trump, by inserting himself squarely into a complex battlefield, will have to deal with the aftermath, and decide how he wants to handle the dual challenges of fighting ISIS, and responding to Syria’s dictator leader Bashar al-Assad, whose brutality many blame for inflaming terrorism in the region.
“Last night’s strikes were an act of war. We need to be clear about that,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a scholar in Middle Eastern studies and vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “The intent here and messaging has been, this was a contained, commensurate response and that’s where this ends.”
“But the question is whether the Russians, Iranians, and Syrians continue to test America’s patience,” he added. “I don’t put it past that axis to continue the atrocities in Syria. The Syrian war certainly has now grabbed the attention of the president, so I wouldn’t rule out future strikes.”
‘Mobilize a Common Strategy’
During the campaign, Trump emphasized his focus in Syria would be on defeating ISIS, the terrorist group that maintains its base in that country, and in the early weeks of his administration, the White House articulated that facilitating the removal of Assad from power was not a priority.
Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAYZMBS0yH0
This week, Trump’s calculus seemed to change when the president said the chemical weapons attack had “crossed a lot of lines for me” and that his attitude toward “Syria and Assad has changed very much.”
H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, said Thursday night that he hoped the U.S. strikes on the Syrian government’s infrastructure would “shift Assad’s calculus,” because this was the first time America had taken direct military action against the dictator’s regime.
President Barack Obama had feared being dragged deeper into a civil war that has killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced half the country. He refused to strike Assad’s government after a similar chemical weapons attack in 2013 despite issuing a “red line” that created expectations for military force.
Trump’s action, some experts say, could provide leverage against Assad that the previous administration never had.
“The cruise missile strike sends a strong signal that Assad cannot act with impunity and use chemical weapons,” said Jim Phillips, a Middle East expert at The Heritage Foundation. “It undermines his perceived power and is a powerful warning shot that will constrain his future options. It is crucial to follow up the strike with aggressive and focused diplomacy to mobilize allies behind a common strategy in Syria.”
Yet the the situation on the ground in Syria has changed dramatically since 2013, with Russian troops intermingled among Syrian forces as part of Moscow’s push to keep Assad in power.
“This strike comes four years from when we should have taken another strike in a similar way,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow for national security at the Center for American Progress, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Now, there is more uncertainty and instability. You don’t want to escalate things and inadvertently kill Russian troops. The chances of retaliation or blowback today are much greater.”
Dealing With Russia
Next week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who, along with Iran and Hezbollah, the U.S.-declared Shia terrorist group, has propped up Assad’s government and provided military support to it.
“We have not really seen the affect of U.S. power on the Russian calculus for the last six years or longer,” Schanzer said. “The previous administration was very circumspect with applying power. The Russians took that as a green light to engage in destabilizing activities in Syria and Ukraine. Whether Trump’s new action has a deterrent effect will be interesting to see.”
Russia’s immediate reaction to Trump’s decision has been to not back down. Dmitry Peskov, a Putin spokesman, told reporters the Russian president “considers the American strikes against Syria an aggression against a sovereign government in violations of the norms of international law, and under a far-fetched pretext.”
The Russian government said it was pulling out of an agreement to minimize the risk of in-flight incidents between U.S. and Russian aircraft operating in Syria.
U.S. military officials later insisted Russia was continuing to comply with the agreement.
Russia’s early rhetoric concerns experts about the possibility of a direct military confrontation with Moscow, which has air defense systems in Syria that can shoot down U.S. aircraft. This could complicate the fight against ISIS, since the U.S.-led coalition until now has been conducting airstrikes mostly without interference from Russia and the Assad government.
“Trump’s decision to strike in Syria only improves the U.S. leverage against Assad and Russia to a limited extent,” said Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Russia will call our bluff. If we really want them to believe we will dramatically increase our military role in Syria, they know we aren’t serious. I don’t think that’s something Trump wants to do, and I wouldn’t advise it either. As much as I want the war to end, I am not sure I want to risk a U.S.-Russia conflict to do it.”
But James Jeffrey, a deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, predicts Russia will increasingly feel isolated because of Trump’s action. Peskov, the Putin spokesman, recently said Moscow’s support for Assad “is not unconditional” and Jeffrey says the international condemnation of the chemical attack could frustrate Russia enough to change its calculus.
“We amassed support from around world for these strikes,” Jeffrey told The Daily Signal in an interview. “That’s something the Russians have to consider. They want to isolate the U.S. and Western world, and that’s not something Russia has now. Putin is outgunned against the U.S. coalition, and isolated internationally. If Trump gives him some way out of Syria through a diplomatic process, why wouldn’t Putin take that?”
‘Has to Stop’
Still, the experts say the Trump administration should proceed cautiously in how aggressively it presses Assad, who remains determined and capable.
Phillips notes that Trump’s strikes only targeted one airfield, not Syria’s air force or chemical weapons capabilities, and he warns there is little the U.S. can do to stop Assad’s security forces from continuing the war, short of taking more military action.
“It would be a mistake to expand the military effort to include the goal of removing Assad,” Phillips said. “That would be a costly and risky mission creep that would entail military clashes with Russia and Iran. And it would bog down the U.S. military in an open-ended effort to stand up and stabilize a post-Assad government. Pressing Assad to step down as part of a political settlement should be a long-term diplomatic goal pursued through sanctions, but ISIS and al-Qaeda should remain the chief targets for U.S. military action in Syria.”
Max Abrahms, a terrorism expert at Northeastern University, is concerned that pushing for the removal of Assad could leave a power gap and make the country even more of a haven for Islamic extremists.
“I worry by weakening the Syrian government’s position, this will help to breathe new life into the al-Qaeda-allied rebels,” Abrahms told The Daily Signal in an interview. “I don’t think Trump wants to get involved into the domestic politics of this country. It will absolutely consume his presidency.”
Even if the Trump administration keeps its word about the limited intent of its missile attack, the experts agree the president has sent a political message that the U.S. can use to its advantage by demonstrating the use of force is on the table.
“This is not George W. Bush going to Iraq in 2003,” Jeffrey said. “There is no doubt in my mind Trump won’t use force to drive Assad out. But he can use military force as part of a diplomatic strategy to get an agreement between Assad and the Sunni majority of his population who he is trying to bomb out of existence. That has to stop and it started stopping yesterday.” (For more from thhttp://joemiller.us/2017/04/missile-attack-challenges-facing-trump-syria/e author of “After Missile Attack, the Challenges Facing Trump in Syria” please click HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/04/missile-attack-challenges-facing-trump-syria/
The US Missile Strike Against Syria: What You Need to Know
For the past five years, Syrian dictator Bashar Assad has been given a free pass to murder hundreds of thousands of his own people with impunity. During his tenure, former President Obama used strong language, even implementing a supposed “red-line,” to try and deter the genocidal Syrian leader from further action, but it didn’t work. Assad has continued to push the boundaries of the free world, utilizing weapons of mass destruction to continue his reign of terror over much of Syria. His massive chemical weapons bombardment on innocent women and children this week appears to be the straw that broke the camel’s back for President Trump.
In launching some 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian regime air base Thursday night, President Trump made clear that the use of chemical weapons as an instrument of warfare would not be tolerated. Allowing for such a precedent to be established, one in which tyrants are allowed to use WMDs without consequences, threatens both the security of the American people and the global community.
The Tomahawks were launched from the USS Porter and USS Ross, which were situated in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the assault. The Pentagon made clear the missile raid was a “proportional response,” and not part of a larger engagement. The U.S. launch targeted Shayrat Airfield, which was reportedly used as a base for Syrian fighter jets and chemical weapons.
A Pentagon statement said that the strikes have “severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and support infrastructure and equipment, adding that the Tomahawks reduced Assad’s “ability to deliver chemical weapons.”
Moreover, the launch sent a signal to the Syrian dictator’s enablers — the Iranian regime and Russia under autocrat Vladimir Putin — that America would no longer “lead from behind” or take a back seat on global security issues.
President Trump’s strike against Assad was praised by American allies in Israel, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others.
“Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the air base in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched,” President Trump said from his Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida Thursday night. “It is in this vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson slammed Russia for failing “in its responsibility” to move chemical weapons out of the nation. “Either Russia has been complicit or Russia has been simply incompetent in its ability to deliver on its end,” Tillerson said of Russia’s failures.
Syrian state-media is claiming that the U.S. attack killed nine civilians, but provided no proof for its claims. “The United States of America committed a blatant act of aggression targeting one of the Syrian air bases in the Central Region with a number of missiles, leaving 6 people martyred and a number of others injured and causing huge material damage,” Syria’s government-run SANA news agency commented. (For more from the author of “The US Missile Strike Against Syria: What You Need to Know” please click HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/04/us-missile-strike-syria-need-know/
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Why Is Kim Jong Un Our Problem?
by Patrick Buchanan
.
. Top Headlines
Senate is expected to vote to end Supreme Court filibuster Thursday. (The Wall Street Journal)
House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes recuses himself from Russia probe. (The Washington Post)
There was more than one unmasker, and Susan Rice didn't unmask Mike Flynn. (Washington Examiner)
On Susan Rice, the issue is abuse of power, not criminality. (National Review)
GOP health care talks stall. (The Hill)
Repeal of liar-nObamaCare could lead to $1.07 trillion in net deficit reduction. (The Washington Free Beacon)
Seventh Circuit rules that civil rights laws protect LGBT employees from workplace bias. (USA Today)
LGBTQ advocates demand that Donald Trump compiles a registry of all gay Americans. (The Federalist)
Trump removes Bannon from National Security Council. (CNS News)
IRS seized millions from legal businesses because of how they made deposits (Hot Air)
Policy: Can Trump clean up liar-nObama's mess in Syria? (Investor's Business Daily)
.
.
Gorsuch confirmed to Supreme Court
by Judson Berger
{foxnews.com} ~ The Senate confirmed Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on Friday, filling the critical ninth seat that has been vacant for over a year and capping a tumultuous debate that saw Republicans overhaul the way the chamber operates... in order to overcome what they described as an unprecedented Democratic filibuster. The 54-45 vote, in which three Democrats crossed party lines to support the appeals court justice, is expected to restore a 5-4 conservative tilt on the bench. Once sworn in, Gorsuch will join the court and begin to hear cases, in the seat once held by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February 2016. “He’s going to make the American people proud,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said. Republicans lauded Gorsuch as an eminently qualified jurist and a fitting successor to Scalia...
Left Will Claim It Was To Prove Trump’s
Not liar-nObama, Not Putin’s Boy...
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ President Trump and we Americans in general had better hope that the diplomatically dicey cruise missile strikes against Syria he ordered are supported by evidence from the upcoming multinational UN investigations... Those are investigations that we were apparently too anxious to wait for the results of. If it turns out that the chemical attack actually was the false flag many suspect it to have been, then the administration has greatly escalated tensions unnecessarily. Early Friday morning Syrian time, the United States fired cruise missiles into Syria in retaliation for the Tuesday chemical weapons “attack” that killed 85 civilians, many of them children. Although candidate Trump vowed during the campaign not to allow America to be pulled into the Syrian civil war, here we are, less than three months into his administration, having inserted ourselves in a most decisive manner. Approximately 60 U.S. Tomahawk missiles were fired from US warships in the Mediterranean, targeting a Syrian air base reportedly used in the Assad domestic chemical attack... http://rickwells.us/left-claim-prove-trump-not-obama-not-putin-boy-us-now-middle-syria-mess/
.Smoking-Gun Documents Prove liar-nObama
IRS Targeting Worse Than We Thought
by James Barrett
{dailywire.com} ~ Reports that the liar-nObama administration "weaponized" federal agencies against political opponents keep coming. In new "smoking-gun" documents obtained via a FOIA lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)... Judicial Watch has uncovered evidence that the targeting of conservative groups by the liar-nObama IRS was even more expansive than we knew. On Tuesday, Judicial Watch released 695 pages of new documents showing IRS officials admitted the agency used "inappropriate political labels" to screen conservative organizations, as well as evidence that the IRS offered "expedited consideration" to 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organizations if they agreed "to restrict their alleged political activities" — a tactic Katie Pavlich aptly describes as "bribery" that served to silence the administration's opponents. Judicial Watch filed the FOIA lawsuit after the IRS revealed it had located thousands of documents that potentially related to audits of Tea Party and other 501(c)(4) organizations. Hundreds of these documents, Judicial Watch says, were previously "withheld" by the liar-nObama administration from congressional review:...
.Elizabeth dinky-Warren’s Latest Hypocrisy...
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Sense and reality have no place in Senator Elizabeth dinky-Warren’s world. The fact that this woman was able to get elected speaks to the mental and moral deficiencies of the people in Massachusetts’ Democrat Party... She embarks on a tirade about Judge Gorsuch that is so ridiculous and convoluted it almost requires explanation because of a complete absence of logic. dinky-Warren states that because there is a courtesy investigation into the hoax of Russia – Trump collusion during the campaign, the cover story for both liar-Clinton reckless inattention to security and her loss, the prospect that Judge Gorsuch might have to rule on an appeal of a conviction to some unnamed, imaginary and completely fabricated charges somehow means he has to be rejected as a Supreme Court nominee. Fortunately Judge Jeanine Pirro provides a reasoned explanation of the unreasonable. She says, “It rises to the level of outrage because there are no facts to support it...
.
Sentenced to Death for "Insulting Islam"
Sina Dehghan, 21, has been sentenced to death in Iran for "insulting Islam".
Sina Dehghan, 21, has been sentenced to death in Iran for "insulting Islam".
by Majid Rafizadeh
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ To radical Islamist groups, Islam is not a religion which all are free to pursue; it is a weapon. It is the most powerful tool that can be wielded with manipulative skill to control entire populations... Beneath their fierce rule, every aspect of daily life is dictated. What is worn, what is eaten, what you say and what you write are all scrutinized; violations of these stringent laws are met with extreme punishments. Can you imagine making a joke and facing death as a result? Can you imagine the constant fear of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, when you have seen people beaten, stoned, or killed in the street for nothing more than a mild transgression? Freedom of speech and press are the Islamists' top enemies. They are targeted on a regular basis, making it difficult or impossible for the truth to be revealed to the world. While others may take their privacy for granted, the people living under this kind of tyranny must think about everything they say and do. Sometimes even the bravest of souls turn away in the face of such intimidation. Can it really be as restrictive as described? Yes, and far worse than you can imagine...
..
by Patrick Buchanan
{freedomsback.com} ~ “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”
So President Donald Trump warns, amid reports North Korea, in its zeal to build an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit our West Coast, may test another atom bomb.
China shares a border with North Korea. We do not.
Why then is this our problem to “solve”? And why is North Korea building a rocket that can cross the Pacific and strike Seattle or Los Angeles?
Is Kim Jong Un mad?
No. He is targeting us because we have 28,500 troops on his border. If U.S. air, naval, missile and ground forces were not in and around Korea, and if we were not treaty-bound to fight alongside South Korea, there would be no reason for Kim to build rockets to threaten a distant superpower that could reduce his hermit kingdom to ashes.
While immensely beneficial to Seoul, is this U.S. guarantee to fight Korean War II, 64 years after the first wise? Russia, China and Japan retain the freedom to decide whether and how to react, should war break out. Why do we not?
Would it not be better for us if we, too, retained full freedom of action to decide how to respond, should the North attack?
During the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, despite John McCain’s channeling Patrick Henry — “We are all Georgians now!” — George W. Bush decided to take a pass on war. When a mob in Kiev overthrew the pro-Russian government, Vladimir Putin secured his Sebastopol naval base by annexing Crimea.
Had Georgia and Ukraine been in NATO, we would have been, in both cases, eyeball to eyeball with a nuclear-armed Russia.
Which brings us to the point:
The United States is in rising danger of being dragged into wars in half a dozen places, because we have committed ourselves to fight for scores of nations with little or no link to vital U.S. interests.
While our first president said in his Farewell Address that we might “trust to temporary alliances” in extraordinary emergencies, he added, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
Alliances, Washington believed, were transmission belts of war. Yet no nation in history has handed out so many war guarantees to so many “allies” on so many continents, as has the United States.
To honor commitments to the Baltic States, we have moved U.S. troops to the Russian border. To prevent China from annexing disputed rocks and reefs in the South and East China Seas, our Navy is prepared to go to war — to back the territorial claims of Tokyo and Manila.
Yet, our richest allies all spend less on defense than we, and all run trade surpluses at America’s expense.
Consider Germany. Last year, Berlin ran a $270 billion trade surplus and spent 1.2 percent of GDP on defense. The United States ran a $700 billion merchandise trade deficit and spent 3.6 percent of GDP on defense.
Angela Merkel puts Germany first. Let the Americans finance our defense, face down the Russians, and fight faraway wars, she is saying; Germany will capture the world’s markets, and America’s as well.
Japan and South Korea are of like mind. Neither spends nearly as much of GDP on defense as the USA. Yet, we defend both, and both run endless trade surpluses at our expense.
President Trump may hector and threaten our allies that we will not forever put up with this. But we will, because America’s elites live for the great game of global empire.
What would a true “America First” foreign policy look like?
It would restore to the United States the freedom it enjoyed for the 150 years before NATO, to decide when, where and whether we go to war. U.S. allies would be put on notice that, while we are not walking away from the world, we are dissolving all treaty commitments that require us to go to war as soon as the shooting starts.
This would concentrate the minds of our allies wonderfully. We could cease badgering them about paying more for their defense. They could decide for themselves — and live with their decisions.
In the Carter era, we dissolved our defense pact with Taiwan. Taiwan has survived and done wonderfully well. If Germany, Japan and South Korea are no longer assured we will go to war on their behalf, all three would take a long hard look at their defenses. The result would likely be a strengthening of those defenses.
But if we do not begin to rescind these war guarantees we have handed out since the 1940s, the odds are high that one of them will one day drag us into a great war, after which, if we survive, all these alliances will be dissolved in disillusionment.
What John Foster Dulles called for, over half a century ago, an “agonizing reappraisal” of America’s alliances, is long, long overdue.
Why Is Kim Jong Un Our Problem?
{freedomsback.com} ~ “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.”
So President Donald Trump warns, amid reports North Korea, in its zeal to build an intercontinental ballistic missile to hit our West Coast, may test another atom bomb.
China shares a border with North Korea. We do not.
Why then is this our problem to “solve”? And why is North Korea building a rocket that can cross the Pacific and strike Seattle or Los Angeles?
Is Kim Jong Un mad?
No. He is targeting us because we have 28,500 troops on his border. If U.S. air, naval, missile and ground forces were not in and around Korea, and if we were not treaty-bound to fight alongside South Korea, there would be no reason for Kim to build rockets to threaten a distant superpower that could reduce his hermit kingdom to ashes.
While immensely beneficial to Seoul, is this U.S. guarantee to fight Korean War II, 64 years after the first wise? Russia, China and Japan retain the freedom to decide whether and how to react, should war break out. Why do we not?
Would it not be better for us if we, too, retained full freedom of action to decide how to respond, should the North attack?
During the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, despite John McCain’s channeling Patrick Henry — “We are all Georgians now!” — George W. Bush decided to take a pass on war. When a mob in Kiev overthrew the pro-Russian government, Vladimir Putin secured his Sebastopol naval base by annexing Crimea.
Had Georgia and Ukraine been in NATO, we would have been, in both cases, eyeball to eyeball with a nuclear-armed Russia.
Which brings us to the point:
The United States is in rising danger of being dragged into wars in half a dozen places, because we have committed ourselves to fight for scores of nations with little or no link to vital U.S. interests.
While our first president said in his Farewell Address that we might “trust to temporary alliances” in extraordinary emergencies, he added, “It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.”
Alliances, Washington believed, were transmission belts of war. Yet no nation in history has handed out so many war guarantees to so many “allies” on so many continents, as has the United States.
To honor commitments to the Baltic States, we have moved U.S. troops to the Russian border. To prevent China from annexing disputed rocks and reefs in the South and East China Seas, our Navy is prepared to go to war — to back the territorial claims of Tokyo and Manila.
Yet, our richest allies all spend less on defense than we, and all run trade surpluses at America’s expense.
Consider Germany. Last year, Berlin ran a $270 billion trade surplus and spent 1.2 percent of GDP on defense. The United States ran a $700 billion merchandise trade deficit and spent 3.6 percent of GDP on defense.
Angela Merkel puts Germany first. Let the Americans finance our defense, face down the Russians, and fight faraway wars, she is saying; Germany will capture the world’s markets, and America’s as well.
Japan and South Korea are of like mind. Neither spends nearly as much of GDP on defense as the USA. Yet, we defend both, and both run endless trade surpluses at our expense.
President Trump may hector and threaten our allies that we will not forever put up with this. But we will, because America’s elites live for the great game of global empire.
What would a true “America First” foreign policy look like?
It would restore to the United States the freedom it enjoyed for the 150 years before NATO, to decide when, where and whether we go to war. U.S. allies would be put on notice that, while we are not walking away from the world, we are dissolving all treaty commitments that require us to go to war as soon as the shooting starts.
This would concentrate the minds of our allies wonderfully. We could cease badgering them about paying more for their defense. They could decide for themselves — and live with their decisions.
In the Carter era, we dissolved our defense pact with Taiwan. Taiwan has survived and done wonderfully well. If Germany, Japan and South Korea are no longer assured we will go to war on their behalf, all three would take a long hard look at their defenses. The result would likely be a strengthening of those defenses.
But if we do not begin to rescind these war guarantees we have handed out since the 1940s, the odds are high that one of them will one day drag us into a great war, after which, if we survive, all these alliances will be dissolved in disillusionment.
What John Foster Dulles called for, over half a century ago, an “agonizing reappraisal” of America’s alliances, is long, long overdue.
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The crazy fat kid with nuclear weapons
by Wesley Pruden
by Wesley Pruden
.
Top Headlines
Senate begins debate on Gorsuch; McConnell says he has majority vote if needed. (The Washington Times)
Border apprehensions hit 17-year low in March. (Washington Examiner)
Illegal immigration down 67% under Trump. (The Washington Times)
California pulls the trigger on "sanctuary state" status. (Hot Air)
Yeah, Chicago's this bad: Bullet-proof vests suggested for children on South, West Sides. (CBS Chicago)
Russian subway bomber ID'd as ... radical Islamist. (Reuters)
Assad uses chemical weapons on civilians. Again. (The Daily Beast)
Young Americans are killing marriage. (Bloomberg)
Poll: Fewer Democrats than ever say they're proud to be an American. (Washington Examiner)
Hump Day Humor: liar-nObama was definitely better than Trump ... as a gun salesman. (Hot Air)
Policy: Have worker wages really gone nowhere for 40 years? (American Enterprise Institute)
Policy: Here's how Congress can use its opportunity to restore the military. (The Daily Signal) ~The Patriot Post
.
.
Rice On Multitude Of Felonies,
liar-nObama Likely Involved
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Judge Jeanine Pirro compliments Sean Hannity on the way he laid out the case against Susan Rice, but notes that he left out one consideration that she would have included... She says, “Whenever any witness takes the stand, and that witness has a history of being a liar, as Susan Rice has been with respect to Benghazi, with respect to Bowe Bergdahl serving with honor and distinction, then a jury is entitled to take anything she says with less than a grain of salt.” She says the questions that we have to ask are, “Who put her up to it, why did she do it, did liar-nObama know about it, who did she share it with, is she the one who gave it to the Washington Post? And this woman has to be put under oath. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this, because if they can do it to the President or a president-elect, they’re doing it to us all the time.” Jeh Sekulow calls Susan Rice the liar-in-chief, saying she’s told so many stories she could pass a lie detector test simply because she can’t tell one from another... http://rickwells.us/sekulow-judge-jeanine-rice-multitude-felonies-obama-likely-involved/
.
Republicans go ‘nuclear,’ bust through
Democratic filibuster on Gorsuch
by Judson Berger
{foxnews.com} ~ Senate Republicans deployed the so-called “nuclear option” Thursday in their drive to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, dramatically changing the way the Senate does business in order to overcome a Democratic filibuster... In a fast-paced chain of events that clears the way for Gorsuch to be confirmed by Friday evening, majority Republicans changed Senate precedent so that a high court nominee can advance to a final vote with a simple majority of 51 senators, as opposed to 60. By Senate standards, this was ground-shaking. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., declared he did so to “restore norms” and get past what he called an “unprecedented” Democratic filibuster...
.
“How many more children have
to die before Russia cares?”
by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
{noisyroom.net} ~ Nikki Haley surprised the heck out of me when she called Russia on the carpet at the United Nations over a monstrous chemical weapons attack allegedly carried out by Assad in Syria... “How many more children have to die before Russia cares?” Haley asked, her eyes locked on the Russian ambassador. And that is the rub of the matter. Of course, Russia claims it was the rebels fault… that they stockpiled the weapons and when Assad blew up their warehouse, they were dispersed. You can’t trust anything the Russians say and I believe that is a monstrous lie. We are very, very close to war now on multiple fronts. I actually think that we either need to have a trained Black Ops team take out that troll in North Korea, or we need to preemptively strike the Hermit Kingdom. We are now out of options. As for Syria, if we decide to go to war there, realize that we will not just be at war with Assad. We will be at war with Russia, China and Iran as well. Hello World War III. I have warned about this for years and we have finally arrived at the Eve of Destruction...
.
Countering North Korea’s nukes
by Retired Adm. James A. Lyons
{aim.org} ~ There is no question about North Korea’s drive to achieve intercontinental ballistic missile capability. The objective is clear: to be capable of launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack against the United States... Of course, with Pyongyang’s multiple ballistic missile launches into the Sea of Japan, it was not only a signal to Japan but to the United States as well. Clearly, such actions are destabilizing. However, what is more destabilizing is our failure over the past two decades to address this threat in any concrete manner. Further, we should never forget that North Korea is the “off-site laboratory” for Iran’s nuclear weapons program. For more than 25 years, we have tried to negotiate with one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism and our reward is a nuclear missile-armed North Korea. Economic sanctions have been a complete failure primarily due to the support provided North Korea by China, Russia and Iran...
.
'Vital national security interest':
Trump orders attack on Syrian airfield
by Sarah Westwood & Travis J. Tritten
by Sarah Westwood & Travis J. Tritten
{washingtonexaminer.com} ~ President Trump ordered the first major military action of his young presidency Thursday evening, authorizing the bombing of a Syria airfield where the government of President Bashar Assad launched a chemical attack on civilians this week... "It is in this vital national security interest of the U.S. to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemical weapons," Trump said. "There can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons violated its obligation under the chemical weapons convention and ignored the urging of the United Nations Security Council." "Years of previous attempts at changing Assad's behavior have all failed and failed very dramatically," Trump said. "As a result the refugee crisis continues to deepen and the region continues to destabilize."... http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/us-navy-reportedly-fires-50-missiles-into-syria/article/2619610?utm_campaign=Washington%20Examiner:%20Breaking%20News&utm_source=Washington%20Examiner:%20Breaking%20News%20-%2004/06/17&utm_medium=email
VIDEO: http://launch.newsinc.com/embed.html?trackingGroup=91212&siteSection=91212_pp&videoId=32233167
..
The crazy fat kid with nuclear weapons
by Wesley Pruden
{jewishworldreview.com} ~ Kim Jong-un may be "a crazy fat kid" with a goofy haircut, but he is doing what his father and his grandfather never could. With nuclear weapons to play with, he frightens the West enough to make it start thinking about doing something about the most dangerous crazy fat kid on earth.
By some reliable intelligence estimates North Korea now has eight nuclear weapons, but no way to deliver them farther than the Sea of Japan, but they're working on it. They have to get the size of the bomb down to manageable weight and girth before an intercontinental missile could reach the California coast with it.
What seemed absurd only a few years ago is thought to be soon in the crazy fat kid's box of toys. The failure of the early missiles was easy to mock, like the purple prose of the propaganda artists in Pyongyang. But Kim and his scientists, believed to be working with the help of Iran and the nuclear-weapons program saved by Barack liar-nObama, are moving steadily to full membership in the club of nations with "the bomb."
Kim has the family DNA and the brutal Marxist ambitions of his father and grandfather, but little of their appreciation of the rational. A recent defector from North Korea, Thae Young Ho, the deputy North Korean ambassador to London, says "Kim Jong-un is a man who will do anything beyond the normal imagination." He ordered an uncle and his half-brother "terminated with extreme prejudice" - as in, dead - because he reckoned them threats to his own life. He knows that when the regime goes, he goes with it. That's the way it works in a satrap like North Korea. Terror is the constant companion to the dictator who lives by the whip and the gun.
Kim lives a life of sumptuous ease in Pyongyang, surrounded by sycophants and the pleasures of the table, adding to his girth with a rich diet of imported groceries while millions of his countrymen live close to starvation. He is particularly vain for a fat man, and Sen. John McCain's recent description of him as "a crazy fat kid" stirred him to rage.
Mr. McCain had told an interviewer at MSNBC, the cable-TV channel, that "the crazy fat kid running North Korea is far worse than some of history's worst dictators. He's not rational. We're not dealing with someone like Joseph Stalin, who had a certain rationality to his barbarity." The Korean Central News Agency, the mouthpiece of the Kim regime, accused Mr. McCain of "hurting the dignity of the country and the supreme leadership of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," i.e., North Korea. When Sen. Ted Cruz joined other conservatives to file legislation to put North Korea on the list of state sponsors of terrorism again, he was denounced as a dignity-damager, too, and promised all manner of punishment.
The senators, said the news agency, "will have to bitterly experience the disastrous consequences to be entailed by their reckless tongue-lashing and then any regret for it will come too late. The revolutionary forces of North Korea with its nuclear force as its pivot will fulfill its sacred mission of devotedly defending its supreme leadership representing the destiny and life of its people by dealing with merciless sledgehammer blows at those daring to hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership."
All that merciless work with a sledgehammer seems a little wasteful of resources to punish two mere senators, worthy as those gents may be but the example of sledgehammer rhetoric might be instructive to the pundits in the West who have done their darnedest to take down Donald Trump and still haven't managed to put their rhetoric in the killer shade of purple.
Nevertheless, a genuine threat lies beneath the entertaining bluster and braggadocio. Adm. Scott Swift, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, tells NBC News that American officials are particularly wary of Kim Jong-un's latest threats to hit an American city with a nuclear bomb.
"They have the nuclear capability," the admiral says. "They've demonstrated that. Where they're going with the miniaturization of that, whether they can actually weaponize a missile, that's what's driving the current concern."
President Trump told London's Financial Times on Monday that "something has to be done about North Korea." Secretary of Defense James Mattis, once called "Mad Dog Mattis," says North Korea "has got to be stopped." Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says a military response is "on the table."
President Trump entertains Chinese President Xi Jinping this week at Mar-A-Lago, and he'll have a lot to tell him. But if President Xi can't make Kim behave, somebody else will have to do it, and soon. Scary to think about. It's even scarier to think about not doing anything.
By some reliable intelligence estimates North Korea now has eight nuclear weapons, but no way to deliver them farther than the Sea of Japan, but they're working on it. They have to get the size of the bomb down to manageable weight and girth before an intercontinental missile could reach the California coast with it.
What seemed absurd only a few years ago is thought to be soon in the crazy fat kid's box of toys. The failure of the early missiles was easy to mock, like the purple prose of the propaganda artists in Pyongyang. But Kim and his scientists, believed to be working with the help of Iran and the nuclear-weapons program saved by Barack liar-nObama, are moving steadily to full membership in the club of nations with "the bomb."
Kim has the family DNA and the brutal Marxist ambitions of his father and grandfather, but little of their appreciation of the rational. A recent defector from North Korea, Thae Young Ho, the deputy North Korean ambassador to London, says "Kim Jong-un is a man who will do anything beyond the normal imagination." He ordered an uncle and his half-brother "terminated with extreme prejudice" - as in, dead - because he reckoned them threats to his own life. He knows that when the regime goes, he goes with it. That's the way it works in a satrap like North Korea. Terror is the constant companion to the dictator who lives by the whip and the gun.
Kim lives a life of sumptuous ease in Pyongyang, surrounded by sycophants and the pleasures of the table, adding to his girth with a rich diet of imported groceries while millions of his countrymen live close to starvation. He is particularly vain for a fat man, and Sen. John McCain's recent description of him as "a crazy fat kid" stirred him to rage.
Mr. McCain had told an interviewer at MSNBC, the cable-TV channel, that "the crazy fat kid running North Korea is far worse than some of history's worst dictators. He's not rational. We're not dealing with someone like Joseph Stalin, who had a certain rationality to his barbarity." The Korean Central News Agency, the mouthpiece of the Kim regime, accused Mr. McCain of "hurting the dignity of the country and the supreme leadership of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," i.e., North Korea. When Sen. Ted Cruz joined other conservatives to file legislation to put North Korea on the list of state sponsors of terrorism again, he was denounced as a dignity-damager, too, and promised all manner of punishment.
The senators, said the news agency, "will have to bitterly experience the disastrous consequences to be entailed by their reckless tongue-lashing and then any regret for it will come too late. The revolutionary forces of North Korea with its nuclear force as its pivot will fulfill its sacred mission of devotedly defending its supreme leadership representing the destiny and life of its people by dealing with merciless sledgehammer blows at those daring to hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership."
All that merciless work with a sledgehammer seems a little wasteful of resources to punish two mere senators, worthy as those gents may be but the example of sledgehammer rhetoric might be instructive to the pundits in the West who have done their darnedest to take down Donald Trump and still haven't managed to put their rhetoric in the killer shade of purple.
Nevertheless, a genuine threat lies beneath the entertaining bluster and braggadocio. Adm. Scott Swift, the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, tells NBC News that American officials are particularly wary of Kim Jong-un's latest threats to hit an American city with a nuclear bomb.
"They have the nuclear capability," the admiral says. "They've demonstrated that. Where they're going with the miniaturization of that, whether they can actually weaponize a missile, that's what's driving the current concern."
President Trump told London's Financial Times on Monday that "something has to be done about North Korea." Secretary of Defense James Mattis, once called "Mad Dog Mattis," says North Korea "has got to be stopped." Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says a military response is "on the table."
President Trump entertains Chinese President Xi Jinping this week at Mar-A-Lago, and he'll have a lot to tell him. But if President Xi can't make Kim behave, somebody else will have to do it, and soon. Scary to think about. It's even scarier to think about not doing anything.
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Leaving the Big Tent
by Caroline Glick
.
Rice Committed Felonies Unmasking
And Sharing If Personal In Nature
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Judge Andrew Napolitano joins Lou Dobbs for a discussion of the probable criminal actions of former liar-nObama National Security Adviser Susan Rice... Dobbs notes in the introduction that Judge Napolitano has stated to him that Rice was entitled to ask for the unmasking of names of Trump officials under the proper circumstances, “but to do so for purposes other than national security could be considered espionage.” Napolitano explains that the revelation of names protected as top secret, which those caught in surveillance efforts are, by law, “the failure to maintain state secrets, and that’s espionage.” He points out, “This is the same crime that liar-Hillary Clinton probably committed when she put state secrets on a non-secure server in the basement of her and her husband’s home.” Napolitano says, “Susan Rice, as the ‘president’s’ national security adviser, can ask for any unmasking she wants. But she’s only entitled to unmask a name under the code of federal regulations that carefully regulate this, if ‘it is necessary to comprehend the conversation that he person was participating in.'”... http://rickwells.us/dobbs-napolitano-rice-committed-felonies-unmasking-sharing-personal-nature/
Majority of Californians want
Feinstein to call it quits
by Tré Goins-Phillips
{theblaze.com} ~ More than half of California voters say it would be a “bad thing” for Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to run for a sixth term in Congress next year, when she’s up for re-election... A new poll conducted by the Institute of Governmental Politics at the University of California, Berkeley, found that 52 percent of registered voters said Feinstein should call it quits while 48 percent said it would be a “good thing” for the California lawmaker to run again. When respondents were reminded that Feinstein will be 84 years old next year, the share of voters who said it would be a “bad thing” for the senator to seek re-election jumped to 62 percent...
.Europe's Out-of-Control Censorship
by Judith Bergman
.
FAIR To IRS: Remove Southern Poverty Law
Center’s (SPLC) Tax Exempt Status
by Jeff Dunetz
{lidblog.com} ~ The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is over-the-line liberal loony-toons organization posing as a civil rights charity who exists by the motto “If you are a conservative you are a racist or some other type of bigot... One target of the SPLC has had enough. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, known as FAIR, has filed a formal legal complaint with the IRS claiming that the SPLC was engaging in political activity as opposed to the educational activity allowed per the 501(C)(3) tax exemption rules. According to the complaint, the SPLC violated its non-profit tax status nearly 50 times during the 2016 presidential election cycle. As a 501(C) (3) the SPLC is allowed to advocate for particular issue, but advocating for or against particular candidates is not allowed. The advocacy has to be more than, “that position on an issue is screwed up” an organization has to educate about the issue...
Marine Le Pen Destroys Merkel With The Truth
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ The woman who may very well become the next president of France, and the first representative of the nation instead of the globalist leeches in quite some time, Marine Le Pen... shows why she is the fresh air of freedom that the French people have been longing to breathe. During the course of the BBC interview, Le Pen is asked if she would go to visit either German Chancellor Angela Merkel or British Prime Minister, Theresa May, a question that might well have been labeled as sexist in the US. She replied, “Why should I go see Mrs. Merkel or Theresa May? Well, we may have some things to talk about with Theresa May, but with Mrs. Merkel, with Mrs. Merkel things are very clear. We are in total opposition; I am the anti-Merkel. I’m opposed to her on economic policy, to her on monetary policy, I’m opposed to her migrant policy.”... http://rickwells.us/marine-le-pen-destroys-merkel-truth-europe/
.
.
Leaving the Big Tent
by Caroline Glick
{truthrevolt.org} ~ The divide between Israelis and American Jews seems to be growing. Indications of the widening gap came last week with reports of a confrontation between an American Jewish activist and four members of Knesset, from across the political spectrum, at a synagogue near Boston.
As reported at The Algemeiner, at the end of a forum at Brookline’s Congregation Kehillath Israel, an audience member named Shifrah told the four Israeli lawmakers, “You are losing me and you are losing many, many people in the Jewish community... I cannot look the other way when three Israeli teenagers are brutally murdered and the response is to kill 2,300 Palestinians in Operation Protective Edge in 2014. I want to know what you are doing to make peace with the Palestinians. I want to know what the government is doing to make peace.”
Despite the general fractiousness of Israeli politics, the lawmakers, who spanned the Right-Left spectrum, rejected the woman’s claims. Not one of them was willing to accept her view that Israel was morally impaired for defending itself from Hamas’s terror war against it. Each in his or her own way pointed out that the woman’s question exposed a callous indifference and utter ignorance to the actual situation in Israel.
Speaking last, Likud MK Amir Ohana noted that Israel didn’t enter into its war with Hamas three years ago because of the execution and abduction of the three youths by Palestinian terrorists. Israel went to war against Hamas in Operation Protective Edge because the terrorist regime in Gaza began pummeling Israel with tens of thousands of mortars, rockets and missiles.
And as Ohana noted, “Each and every one of them was targeted to kill us.”
Ohana concluded, “If I will have to choose between losing more lives of Israelis, whether they are civilians or soldiers, or losing you, I will sadly, sorrowfully, rather lose you.”
To a degree, the Brookline exchange was a watershed event. This is true for two reasons.
First, there was the unanimity of the responses. And second, the lawmakers were willing to walk away from the increasingly vocal anti-Israel faction of the American Jewish community.
Shifrah’s statement was a moral and criminal indictment of Israel. It was also an egregious slander of the entire country.
Shifrah stood before a crowd of American Jews at a synagogue and alleged libelously that in retribution for the murder of three boys, Israel maliciously killed 2,300 innocent Gazans.
And the Knesset members told her not to let the flap slam her on her way out of the pro-Israel tent.
This action was long in the making and long overdue. For more than a decade, American Jews led by radical rabbis and thought leaders have been threatening Israel.
You are making us embarrassed, Peter Beinart and his supporters have said. We won’t be able to keep supporting Israel if you don’t succumb to all the demands that the PLO and Hamas are making. Their terrorism – that is, their “resistance to occupation” – is understandable.
Israel, they harangue, is losing American Jewry. We are progressives. We stand up for the oppressed against the oppressors. Israelis, you are oppressors and we won’t be able to stand with you and as Jews, we will stand against you.
We will seek common ground with anti-Semites like Roger Waters and Alice Walker and invite them to our most prestigious forums to speak. We will make common cause with terrorist supporters like Linda Sarsour and terrorists like Rasmea Odeh. We will show that we don’t hate Israelis by hosting EU-funded anti-Israel groups like Breaking the Silence at our synagogues and campuses. And we will insist we are pro-Israel and pro-peace and send our checks to J Street, a group that has never sided with Israel on anything.
Over and over again Israel has heard these voices, which are often well-paid and always well-covered by the media. Over and over we have listened to their threats of abandonment.
Rather than criticize them for their hostility and reject their threats, Israeli spokesmen, particularly from the Left, have tried to make these Jewish Israel bashers feel better about Israel.
True, we are “occupiers,” voices like Haaretz’s former columnist Ari Shavit told his American audiences. But we feel really bad about it so please don’t hate us.
We love you so, please love us back. We are one.
The time has long since passed for Israel to begin a frank exchange with these people.
There are lines you cannot cross and still expect us to care what you think.
Sometimes those lines are crystal clear.
For instance, last week, the anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic Jewish Voices for Peace BDS pressure group held its annual conference in Chicago.
More than a thousand people showed up. JVP decided to use its annual event to honor a Palestinian terrorist murderer.
Rasmea Odeh, who was imprisoned in Israel for her role in the terrorist bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 that murdered two Israelis, was honored by JVP for her fight against Israel.
Odeh is about to be deported to Jordan after being found guilty of immigration fraud for failing to mention that she is a convicted terrorist murderer on her immigration forms when she moved to the US in 1994.
Odeh took advantage of the microphone JVP provided her to pledge to continue fighting for the eradication of Israel for the rest of her life, and urging her audience to do so as well.
In her words, “Zionists aren’t going to stop their land grab in Palestine. The Palestinians there and the Palestinians and our supporters here have to stop them with our resistance and our organizing.”
JVP is certainly a Jewish group. Odeh was introduced by Rabbi Alissa Wise. But everyone associated with JVP is an enemy of Israel, Jewish or not. And Israel has begun to treat it as an enemy. Just this week, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan rightly castigated the group as antisemitic.
If JVP is the easy case, the situation quickly becomes complicated.
Can we draw a line when seemingly mainstream leaders join the ranks of Shifrah and JVP in libeling Israel? Can we walk away from prominent American Jews who indicate that as far as they are concerned, Israel is a moral burden that they are having a hard time carrying because they believe – and propagate – slanders of Israeli society and of the IDF? Consider the case of Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. Cosgrove is the rabbi of the toney Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue in New York.
Last week Cosgrove joined the radical chorus of voices advancing the Israel is Apartheid slander.
In an event at his synagogue following the AIPAC conference, Cosgrove spoke of his daughter’s uneasiness at the sound of speaker after speaker rejecting the false allegation that Israel is an apartheid state.
Cosgrove said that his daughter pointed to the fact that the Palestinians do not vote for the Knesset as proof that Israel is in fact apartheid.
As Yisrael Medad noted on his website, Cosgrove’s daughter’s statement was utter nonsense.
Why would Palestinians vote for the Knesset when they have the right to vote in the Palestinian elections? The Palestinian Authority, not Israel, is their governing body.
It isn’t Israel’s fault that PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas has failed to hold an election since 2006.
The fact that Rabbi Cosgrove was unwilling to point this obvious truth out to his daughter, and indeed, the fact he thought her ignorant slur was worth repeating publicly and supportively to his congregants speaks volumes about his own anti-Israel prejudices.
Medad also noted that in an article in The Jerusalem Post last year, Cosgrove threatened Israel with a withdrawal of American Jewish communal support.
Cosgrove wrote, “American Jewry isn’t able to reconcile the dream of Israel as a liberal democracy and the death of the two-state solution; it is unable or unwilling to defend Israeli actions in the court of world or campus opinion.”
There is a straight line between Shifrah’s false claim that Israel needlessly and maliciously killed 2,300 Palestinians in Gaza in the 2014 war with Hamas and Cosgrove’s insinuations that Israel and its military actions are to blame for the absence of peace with the Palestinians.
Both are slanderous attacks against Israel. Their goal is not to cultivate a dialogue but to justify condemnations and opposition to Israel.
Telling the Shifrahs and JVPs of the world that they are beyond the pale is important, but insufficient. Israel needs to make clear that blaming Israel for the crimes of its enemies and ignoring objective reality is not acceptable. If the Cosgroves of the American Jewish community cannot tell the difference between Israelis and our enemies, then it is they that require a moral reckoning.
We, with sorrow, will have to make do without their phony support.
As reported at The Algemeiner, at the end of a forum at Brookline’s Congregation Kehillath Israel, an audience member named Shifrah told the four Israeli lawmakers, “You are losing me and you are losing many, many people in the Jewish community... I cannot look the other way when three Israeli teenagers are brutally murdered and the response is to kill 2,300 Palestinians in Operation Protective Edge in 2014. I want to know what you are doing to make peace with the Palestinians. I want to know what the government is doing to make peace.”
Despite the general fractiousness of Israeli politics, the lawmakers, who spanned the Right-Left spectrum, rejected the woman’s claims. Not one of them was willing to accept her view that Israel was morally impaired for defending itself from Hamas’s terror war against it. Each in his or her own way pointed out that the woman’s question exposed a callous indifference and utter ignorance to the actual situation in Israel.
Speaking last, Likud MK Amir Ohana noted that Israel didn’t enter into its war with Hamas three years ago because of the execution and abduction of the three youths by Palestinian terrorists. Israel went to war against Hamas in Operation Protective Edge because the terrorist regime in Gaza began pummeling Israel with tens of thousands of mortars, rockets and missiles.
And as Ohana noted, “Each and every one of them was targeted to kill us.”
Ohana concluded, “If I will have to choose between losing more lives of Israelis, whether they are civilians or soldiers, or losing you, I will sadly, sorrowfully, rather lose you.”
To a degree, the Brookline exchange was a watershed event. This is true for two reasons.
First, there was the unanimity of the responses. And second, the lawmakers were willing to walk away from the increasingly vocal anti-Israel faction of the American Jewish community.
Shifrah’s statement was a moral and criminal indictment of Israel. It was also an egregious slander of the entire country.
Shifrah stood before a crowd of American Jews at a synagogue and alleged libelously that in retribution for the murder of three boys, Israel maliciously killed 2,300 innocent Gazans.
And the Knesset members told her not to let the flap slam her on her way out of the pro-Israel tent.
This action was long in the making and long overdue. For more than a decade, American Jews led by radical rabbis and thought leaders have been threatening Israel.
You are making us embarrassed, Peter Beinart and his supporters have said. We won’t be able to keep supporting Israel if you don’t succumb to all the demands that the PLO and Hamas are making. Their terrorism – that is, their “resistance to occupation” – is understandable.
Israel, they harangue, is losing American Jewry. We are progressives. We stand up for the oppressed against the oppressors. Israelis, you are oppressors and we won’t be able to stand with you and as Jews, we will stand against you.
We will seek common ground with anti-Semites like Roger Waters and Alice Walker and invite them to our most prestigious forums to speak. We will make common cause with terrorist supporters like Linda Sarsour and terrorists like Rasmea Odeh. We will show that we don’t hate Israelis by hosting EU-funded anti-Israel groups like Breaking the Silence at our synagogues and campuses. And we will insist we are pro-Israel and pro-peace and send our checks to J Street, a group that has never sided with Israel on anything.
Over and over again Israel has heard these voices, which are often well-paid and always well-covered by the media. Over and over we have listened to their threats of abandonment.
Rather than criticize them for their hostility and reject their threats, Israeli spokesmen, particularly from the Left, have tried to make these Jewish Israel bashers feel better about Israel.
True, we are “occupiers,” voices like Haaretz’s former columnist Ari Shavit told his American audiences. But we feel really bad about it so please don’t hate us.
We love you so, please love us back. We are one.
The time has long since passed for Israel to begin a frank exchange with these people.
There are lines you cannot cross and still expect us to care what you think.
Sometimes those lines are crystal clear.
For instance, last week, the anti-Israel and increasingly antisemitic Jewish Voices for Peace BDS pressure group held its annual conference in Chicago.
More than a thousand people showed up. JVP decided to use its annual event to honor a Palestinian terrorist murderer.
Rasmea Odeh, who was imprisoned in Israel for her role in the terrorist bombing of a Jerusalem supermarket in 1969 that murdered two Israelis, was honored by JVP for her fight against Israel.
Odeh is about to be deported to Jordan after being found guilty of immigration fraud for failing to mention that she is a convicted terrorist murderer on her immigration forms when she moved to the US in 1994.
Odeh took advantage of the microphone JVP provided her to pledge to continue fighting for the eradication of Israel for the rest of her life, and urging her audience to do so as well.
In her words, “Zionists aren’t going to stop their land grab in Palestine. The Palestinians there and the Palestinians and our supporters here have to stop them with our resistance and our organizing.”
JVP is certainly a Jewish group. Odeh was introduced by Rabbi Alissa Wise. But everyone associated with JVP is an enemy of Israel, Jewish or not. And Israel has begun to treat it as an enemy. Just this week, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan rightly castigated the group as antisemitic.
If JVP is the easy case, the situation quickly becomes complicated.
Can we draw a line when seemingly mainstream leaders join the ranks of Shifrah and JVP in libeling Israel? Can we walk away from prominent American Jews who indicate that as far as they are concerned, Israel is a moral burden that they are having a hard time carrying because they believe – and propagate – slanders of Israeli society and of the IDF? Consider the case of Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove. Cosgrove is the rabbi of the toney Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue in New York.
Last week Cosgrove joined the radical chorus of voices advancing the Israel is Apartheid slander.
In an event at his synagogue following the AIPAC conference, Cosgrove spoke of his daughter’s uneasiness at the sound of speaker after speaker rejecting the false allegation that Israel is an apartheid state.
Cosgrove said that his daughter pointed to the fact that the Palestinians do not vote for the Knesset as proof that Israel is in fact apartheid.
As Yisrael Medad noted on his website, Cosgrove’s daughter’s statement was utter nonsense.
Why would Palestinians vote for the Knesset when they have the right to vote in the Palestinian elections? The Palestinian Authority, not Israel, is their governing body.
It isn’t Israel’s fault that PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas has failed to hold an election since 2006.
The fact that Rabbi Cosgrove was unwilling to point this obvious truth out to his daughter, and indeed, the fact he thought her ignorant slur was worth repeating publicly and supportively to his congregants speaks volumes about his own anti-Israel prejudices.
Medad also noted that in an article in The Jerusalem Post last year, Cosgrove threatened Israel with a withdrawal of American Jewish communal support.
Cosgrove wrote, “American Jewry isn’t able to reconcile the dream of Israel as a liberal democracy and the death of the two-state solution; it is unable or unwilling to defend Israeli actions in the court of world or campus opinion.”
There is a straight line between Shifrah’s false claim that Israel needlessly and maliciously killed 2,300 Palestinians in Gaza in the 2014 war with Hamas and Cosgrove’s insinuations that Israel and its military actions are to blame for the absence of peace with the Palestinians.
Both are slanderous attacks against Israel. Their goal is not to cultivate a dialogue but to justify condemnations and opposition to Israel.
Telling the Shifrahs and JVPs of the world that they are beyond the pale is important, but insufficient. Israel needs to make clear that blaming Israel for the crimes of its enemies and ignoring objective reality is not acceptable. If the Cosgroves of the American Jewish community cannot tell the difference between Israelis and our enemies, then it is they that require a moral reckoning.
We, with sorrow, will have to make do without their phony support.
SUSAN RICE LIED ABOUT SYRIA CHEMICAL WEAPONS
By
Daniel John Sobieski
The chemical weapon attack by the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad on the rebel-held town Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib Province on April 4 once again underscores what a foreign policy failure President Obama was and what a serial liar Susan Rice is.
On January 16, 2017, Rice, who served as U.N. Ambassador during Obama’s first term and was rewarded for her Benghazi lies with the post of National Security Advisor, where she could be compelled to testify before Congress,
Gave what amounted to an exit interview with NPR. During the interview she crowed about the Obama administration’s success in eliminating the threat of Syrian chemical weapons:
We were able to find a solution that didn't necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished. Our aim in contemplating the use of force following the use of chemical weapons in August of 2013 was not to intervene in the civil war, not to become involved in the combat between Assad and the opposition, but to deal with the threat of chemical weapons by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia and with the Security Council. We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile.
Tell that, Ms. Rice, to the children of Khan Sheikoun who succumbed to the horrible effects of the sarin gas dropped on them by Syrian forces with the support of their Russian allies. You and your boss colluded with the Russians to keep Assad in power and give Russia a free hand in Syria. Your claim of having removed the threat of Syrian chemical weapons was a lie, as phony as the statement President Onama made after the tragedy of Aleppo. As CNBC reported the statement President Obama made as he washed his hands of all guilt and responsibility:
"With respect to Syria of what I have consistently done is taken the best course that I can to end the civil war and having also taken into account of the long-term national security interest of the United States," he said….
"Unless we were all in and willing to take over Syria, we were going to have problems," Obama said in the news conference, noting that it would have required "putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, uninvited, without any international law mandate."…
"Responsibility for this brutality lies in one place alone: with the Assad regime and its allies Russia and Iran. And this blood and these atrocities are on their hands," Obama said.
No, sir the responsibility for this horror lies with you, and the blood of Aleppo and Khan Sheikoun is on your and Susan Rice’s hands. It is you who drew the red lines in Syria and there would be consequences if they were crossed. It is you who said Assad must go. There were no consequences and Assad, protected by Russia, is still there.
As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized on Obama’s disappearing red lines in Syria:
Syria's chemical weapons are on the move, their precursor chemicals having been mixed, a crossing of a line drawn by President Obama Aug. 20 when he said "a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized." So our resolute president decides to draw another line — that if Syria's Bashar al-Assad makes use of those weapons, presumably against his own people or neighbors, he will face "consequences." …Obama's appeasement has come home to roost. Assad remembers how Clinton, appearing on CBS' "Face The Nation," dismissed the idea of U.S. military action or regime change in Syria, claiming that unlike Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, Assad was considered to be a "reformer" by "many of the members of Congress."
Yep, your Secretary of State and defeated presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called Assad a reformer:
Apparently neither Mrs. Clinton nor Defense Secretary Robert Gates sees Syria as an outlaw nation. Both said Sunday that Syria was different from Libya and that we would not be lobbing cruise missiles into Damascus in another "humanitarian" effort.
"Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he's a reformer," Clinton said without disputing the assessment. She also drew a distinction between Libya's use of tanks and aircraft against its protesters and "police actions, which, frankly, have exceeded the use of force that any of us would want to see."
Obama and Clinton intervened in Libta to prevent the slaughter of civilians, turning Libya into a failed state and an incubator of terrorism. Yet both did nothing to prevent the slaughter in Syria when they could have easily. We sacrificed four brave Americans at Benghazi in pursuance of this failed policy.
Why did we do nothing in Syria? Perhaps for the same reason we did nothing to prevent Russia’s invasion of Ukraine - the Iran deal. Obama, who once promised Russian President Medvedev more “flexibility” after Obama’s reelection, didn’t want to offend Putin. He needed Russia’s help in securing the Iran deal. Taking out Assad would have offended Tehran. So Obama and Clinton sacrificed both Ukraine and Syria to get the Iran deal and put $150 billion in the hands of Iran, a state ponsor of terror and a mass murderer of U.S. troops in both Lebanon and Iraq.
This reformer moved his chemical weapons and you did nothing. He used his chemical weapons and you did nothing. Seeing no resistance Russia moved in to protect Assad and safeguard its access to the Syrian port of Tarus on th Mediterranean.
You could have done a lot, and it did not involve ground troops. You could have parked an aircraft carrier, 90,000 tons of American diplomacy, off the Syrian coast. You could have ordered aur strikes and destroyed the Syrian air force in 24 hours. Then you could have established a no-fly zone protecting a safe haven in Syria. You could have prevented the slaughter in Aleppo, as well as the flood of refugees into Europe. But you didn’t.
The rise of ISIS, which Obama calls ISIL so he can omit the “S” that stands for Syria, is a direct result of the vacuum he created In Iraq by his precipitous withdrawal after victory had been won.
President Bush left a stable Iraq, one where Shiite and Sunnis had learned to coexist and resist a common al-Qaida enemy. There were free and fair elections and we all remember the pictures of Iraqi women holding up their purple fingers indicating they had proudly voted in those elections. Now we have the mass graves of ISIS, beheadings and what can only be called the ethnic cleansing of Christians.
It is a myth, as the White House now claims, that President Obama inherited an Iraqi mess from President Bush and had no choice but to withdraw U.S. troops in the absence of a status of forces agreement. The problem was not that Iraq and Prime Minister Maliki wanted the U.S. to leave, but that the force Obama wanted to leave was just too small. As Patrick Brennan has written in National Review:
These claims don’t jibe with what we know about how the negotiations with Iraq went. It’s the White House itself that decided just 2–3,000 troops made sense, when the Defense Department and others were proposing more. Maliki was willing to accept a deal with U.S. forces if it was worth it to him — the problem was that the Obama administration wanted a small force so that it could say it had ended the war. Having a very small American force wasn’t worth the domestic political price Maliki would have to pay for supporting their presence. In other words, it’s not correct that “the al-Maliki government wanted American troops to leave.
Obama destroyed Libya for no god reason, and sacrificed Syria so that he could pursue the dangerous and flawed Iran deal. He created the vacuum ISIS filled in Iraq and Syria. The blood of Aleppo is on nobody’s hands but his, Hillaty Clinton’s and yours, Susan Rice.
Daniel John Sobieski is a free lance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Road to Single-Payer Health Care
by Charles Krauthammer
.
So, Susan Rice Was the One 'Unmasking'
Bloomberg's Eli Lake has a critical update on the kerfuffle involving Barack liar-nObama, Donald Trump, Devin Nunes, U.S. intelligence and Russia.
White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."
The relevant intelligence reports pertained largely to conversations between foreign leaders regarding the Trump administration's transition, though some of those conversations involved members of Trump's team. And, as Lake notes, Rice's behavior highlights the issue so many Americans have with the wide net of government surveillance — trusting those who are doing the surveilling. It doesn't help that back in March she insisted, "I know nothing about this."
Meanwhile, Rep. Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and the one leading the congressional investigation into the whole affair, has been embattled by controversy because of a visit to the White House to review relevant material. Unfortunately, he's come off looking more like a Trump surrogate than an independent investigator. But Lake explains why that visit wasn't what it seems:
The news about Rice also sheds light on the strange behavior of Nunes in the last two weeks. It emerged last week that he traveled to the White House last month, the night before he made an explosive allegation about Trump transition officials caught up in incidental surveillance. At the time he said he needed to go to the White House because the reports were only on a database for the executive branch. It now appears that he needed to view computer systems within the National Security Council that would include the logs of Rice's requests to unmask U.S. persons.
Knowing what we know about the liar-nObama administration, political considerations trumped all other concerns. So while Rice may have acted within the law, a legal battle may also ensue to determine where she was acting in the interest of national security or liar-nObama's political objectives. The overarching thing to remember is that Democrats are heavily invested in the "Russia hacked the election" narrative so as to delegitimize Donald Trump. Whatever Rice did was almost surely motivated in part by that objective. Readers will recall how adept Rice is at shaping narratives — she was the first to trot out the "YouTube video" excuse for Benghazi... ~The Patriot Post
.
.
Steve Bannon removed from
National Security Council
by foxnews
{foxnews.com} ~ President Trump’s controversial chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, was removed from the National Security Council on Wednesday, Fox News confirmed... Bannon was put on the NSC’s “Principals Committee” as a check on former National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn to make sure Flynn carried through with a directive to depoliticize the NSC, a senior administration official told Fox News. "liar-nObama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice operationalized the NSC during the last administration," Bannon said in a statement. "I was put on to ensure that it was de-operationalized. National Security Adviser General [H.R.] McMaster has returned the NSC to its proper function."... http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/05/steve-bannon-removed-from-national-security-council.html
.
The Joys of ¼ Black Privilege
by Daniel Greenfield
{frontpagemag.com} ~ Black privilege can be a wonderful thing even in its diluted ¼ form. You might not think that being ¼ black gets you much privilege, but this just might change your mind... Hannah Black is angry. The ¾ white British-German artist who has a Jamaican grandparent somewhere in the mix is outraged over a painting of Emmett Till at the Whitney Biennial because the artist is white. At least whiter than Black. Black, who moved from the UK to Germany, rants that the painting must be “destroyed”. Why? "Because it is not acceptable for a white person to transmute Black suffering into profit and fun". Except if that white person can find a black ancestor somewhere... http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266316/joys-%C2%BC-black-privilege-daniel-greenfield
.Proof! Evidence of liar-nObama
Administration Targeting Trump...
by Jay Guy
{ipatriot.com} ~ In the first independently corroborated evidence reported by a major news organization, multiple news outlets have now reported President Donald Trump’s assertion, in his now infamous Tweet... that he was surveilled by the liar-nObama administration prior to his election as President is in fact true. “Rice had requested that at least one Trump transition team member be “unmasked,” Bloomberg View reported Monday, leading to claims that the liar-nObama White House had intended to use that intelligence to damage Trump’s transition. While Rice did not deny making any such requests — declining to comment on specific reports — she denied that her actions went outside the scope of her job. Two anonymous U.S. officials told Bloomberg’s Eli Lake that the former liar-nObama national security adviser was the one who requested unmasking Trump administration officials in raw intelligence files since viewed by Reps. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the heads of the House Intel Committee.”... http://ipatriot.com/proof-evidence-obama-administration-targeting-trump-trump-supporters-including-sean-hannity/
.All Sitting Supreme Court Justices Have Been
Involved With Federalist Society, Labeled
a ‘Front’ Group by Democrats
by Rachel del Guidice
{dailysignal.com} ~ Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court choice, came under fire from Democrats Monday because of his involvement with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization... “I don’t know what Donald Trump’s judicial philosophy is as president, but we sure do know the judicial philosophy of the Federalist Society, which was given the responsibility of coming up with a list of nominees to fill the Antonin Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Monday before Gorsuch’s Senate Judiciary Committee vote. A new report, however, released Monday by the conservative nonprofit America Rising Squared, or AR2, shows that all current U.S Supreme Court justices, appointed by both Democrats and Republicans, and not just Gorsuch, have been involved with the Federalist Society...
.
Rice Isn’t FBI, She Was Acting Politically,
What Was liar-nObama Role?
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ The customary stalling, obfuscation, half truths and lies that the Democrats like liar-Hillary Clinton, Hussein liar-nObama, Jihadi Jeh Johnson and even Susan Rice have, in the past... used so effectively to avoid accountability for their actions may have lost some of their magic. If Senator Rand Paul has his way, Rice will have to answer some key questions regarding her likely criminal espionage activities. In an interview with Brian Kilmeade, Paul points out in no uncertain terms, “I don’t think she answered the question, did she unmask people in the Trump administration. She says, ‘Well, maybe I did but I didn’t do it for political reasons.'” “I think it’s incumbent upon her to try to prove to the American people why it wouldn’t have been a political reason,” says Paul. “If someone were investigating the Trump administration, it would be the FBI, not political people in the White House. She’s a political appointee that reports directly to the ‘president.'”... http://rickwells.us/sen-paul-rice-fbi-acting-politically-obama-role/
..
by Charles Krauthammer
{freedomsback.com} ~ Repeal-and-replace for liar-nObamacare is not quite dead. It has been declared so, but what that means is that, for now, the president has apparently washed his hands of it and the House Republicans appear unable to reconcile their differences.
Neither condition need be permanent. There are ideological differences among the various GOP factions, but what’s overlooked is the role that procedure played in producing the deadlock. And procedure can easily be changed.
House leadership crafted a bill that would meet the delicate requirements of “reconciliation” in order to create a more achievable threshold of 51 rather than 60 votes in the Senate. But this meant that some of the more attractive, market-oriented reforms had to be left out, relegated to a future measure a so-called phase-three bill that might never actually arrive.
Yet the more stripped-down proposal died anyway. So why not go for the gold next time? Pass a bill that incorporates phase-three reforms and send it on to the Senate.
September might be the time for resurrecting repeal-and-replace. That’s when insurers recalibrate premiums for the coming year, precipitating our annual bout of liar-nObamacare sticker shock. By then, even more insurers will be dropping out of the exchanges, further reducing choice and service. These should help dissipate the preemptive nostalgia for liar-nObamacare that emerged during the current debate.
At which point, House leadership should present a repeal-and-replace that includes such phase-three provisions as tort reform and permitting the buying of insurance across state lines, both of which would significantly lower costs.
Even more significant would be stripping out the heavy-handed liar-nObamacare coverage mandate that dictates what specific medical benefits must be included in every insurance policy in the country, regardless of the purchaser’s desires or needs.
Best to mandate nothing. Let the customer decide. A 60-year-old couple doesn’t need maternity coverage. Why should they be forced to pay for it? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need lactation services.
This would satisfy the House Freedom Caucus’ correct insistence on dismantling liar-nObamacare’s stifling regulatory straitjacket — without scaring off moderates who should understand that no one is being denied “essential health benefits.” Rather, no one is being required to buy what the Jonathan Grubers of the world have decided everyone must have.
It is true that even if this revised repeal-and-replace passes the House, it might die by filibuster in the Senate. In which case, let the Senate Democrats explain themselves and suffer the consequences. Perhaps, however, such a bill might engender debate and revision — and come back to the House for an old-fashioned House-Senate conference and a possible compromise. This in and of itself would constitute major progress.
That’s procedure. It’s fixable. But there is an ideological consideration that could ultimately determine the fate of any liar-nObamacare replacement. liar-nObamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage.
Acceptance of its major premise — that no one be denied health care — is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that “our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care,” making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any liar-nObamacare repeal.
A broad national consensus is developing that health care is indeed a right. This is historically new. And it carries immense implications for the future. It suggests that we may be heading inexorably to a government-run, single-payer system. It’s what Barack liar-nObama once admitted he would have preferred but didn’t think the country was ready for. It may be ready now.
As liar-nObamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all. Republicans will have one last chance to try to persuade the country to remain with a market-based system, preferably one encompassing all the provisions that, for procedural reasons, had been left out of their latest proposal.
Don’t be surprised, however, if, in the end, single-payer wins out. Indeed, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Donald Trump, reading the zeitgeist, pulls the greatest 180 since Disraeli “dished the Whigs” in 1867 by radically expanding the franchise and joins the single-payer side.
Talk about disruption? About kicking over the furniture? That would be an American Krakatoa.
The Road to Single-Payer Health Care
{freedomsback.com} ~ Repeal-and-replace for liar-nObamacare is not quite dead. It has been declared so, but what that means is that, for now, the president has apparently washed his hands of it and the House Republicans appear unable to reconcile their differences.
Neither condition need be permanent. There are ideological differences among the various GOP factions, but what’s overlooked is the role that procedure played in producing the deadlock. And procedure can easily be changed.
House leadership crafted a bill that would meet the delicate requirements of “reconciliation” in order to create a more achievable threshold of 51 rather than 60 votes in the Senate. But this meant that some of the more attractive, market-oriented reforms had to be left out, relegated to a future measure a so-called phase-three bill that might never actually arrive.
Yet the more stripped-down proposal died anyway. So why not go for the gold next time? Pass a bill that incorporates phase-three reforms and send it on to the Senate.
September might be the time for resurrecting repeal-and-replace. That’s when insurers recalibrate premiums for the coming year, precipitating our annual bout of liar-nObamacare sticker shock. By then, even more insurers will be dropping out of the exchanges, further reducing choice and service. These should help dissipate the preemptive nostalgia for liar-nObamacare that emerged during the current debate.
At which point, House leadership should present a repeal-and-replace that includes such phase-three provisions as tort reform and permitting the buying of insurance across state lines, both of which would significantly lower costs.
Even more significant would be stripping out the heavy-handed liar-nObamacare coverage mandate that dictates what specific medical benefits must be included in every insurance policy in the country, regardless of the purchaser’s desires or needs.
Best to mandate nothing. Let the customer decide. A 60-year-old couple doesn’t need maternity coverage. Why should they be forced to pay for it? And I don’t know about you, but I don’t need lactation services.
This would satisfy the House Freedom Caucus’ correct insistence on dismantling liar-nObamacare’s stifling regulatory straitjacket — without scaring off moderates who should understand that no one is being denied “essential health benefits.” Rather, no one is being required to buy what the Jonathan Grubers of the world have decided everyone must have.
It is true that even if this revised repeal-and-replace passes the House, it might die by filibuster in the Senate. In which case, let the Senate Democrats explain themselves and suffer the consequences. Perhaps, however, such a bill might engender debate and revision — and come back to the House for an old-fashioned House-Senate conference and a possible compromise. This in and of itself would constitute major progress.
That’s procedure. It’s fixable. But there is an ideological consideration that could ultimately determine the fate of any liar-nObamacare replacement. liar-nObamacare may turn out to be unworkable, indeed doomed, but it is having a profound effect on the zeitgeist: It is universalizing the idea of universal coverage.
Acceptance of its major premise — that no one be denied health care — is more widespread than ever. Even House Speaker Paul Ryan avers that “our goal is to give every American access to quality, affordable health care,” making universality an essential premise of his own reform. And look at how sensitive and defensive Republicans have been about the possibility of people losing coverage in any liar-nObamacare repeal.
A broad national consensus is developing that health care is indeed a right. This is historically new. And it carries immense implications for the future. It suggests that we may be heading inexorably to a government-run, single-payer system. It’s what Barack liar-nObama once admitted he would have preferred but didn’t think the country was ready for. It may be ready now.
As liar-nObamacare continues to unravel, it won’t take much for Democrats to abandon that Rube Goldberg wreckage and go for the simplicity and the universality of Medicare-for-all. Republicans will have one last chance to try to persuade the country to remain with a market-based system, preferably one encompassing all the provisions that, for procedural reasons, had been left out of their latest proposal.
Don’t be surprised, however, if, in the end, single-payer wins out. Indeed, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if Donald Trump, reading the zeitgeist, pulls the greatest 180 since Disraeli “dished the Whigs” in 1867 by radically expanding the franchise and joins the single-payer side.
Talk about disruption? About kicking over the furniture? That would be an American Krakatoa.
San Diego public school district will create ‘safe spaces’ for Muslims while forcing non-Muslim students to learn about Islam
( Muslims do not assimilate, they infiltrate! )
In the San Diego Unified School District, public schools now will have to offer ‘safe spaces’ for Muslim snowflakes and indoctrinate all students with whitewashed (violence and hatred-free) lessons on Islam, provided by designated terrorist group CAIR.
Oh, lookie! CAIR has even gotten some liberal useful idiots to stand with “diversity” signs behind Muslims on the ground praying…oblivious to the fact that women and non-muslims are always relegated to the back when muslims are lifting their asses to allah
San Diego Union Tribune CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) and the San Diego Unified School District collaborated on a “holistic” approach to anti-Muslim bullying that will likely be implemented this fall.
Administrators and teachers will have calendars showing Islamic holidays, students will learn more about the religion in social studies classes and safe spaces will be created on campuses for Muslim students as part of a multi-tiered approach to combat so-called “Islamophobia.”
Trustees on Tuesday voted 4-0, with board member Michael McQuary absent, to approve a plan to confront Islamophobia and bullying against Muslim students.
One of the first steps in the plan will be to distribute letters to staff members and parents addressing Islamophobia and identifying resources to learn about the religion and fight discrimination.
District calendars will be reviewed to ensure Islam holidays are recognized, which Anjan said is important so schools will schedule campus events that also can be attended by Muslim families.
Schools also will review and vet materials related to Muslim culture and history in media centers and provide resources and material for teachers. Anjan said social studies lessons may include more information on prominent Muslims and their impact on history and other steps to promote a more ‘positive’ image of Islam.
You mean images like this?
Last July, the board directed the district staff to work with CAIR in developing a plan to address the issue.
Looking back to November 2015, Superintendent Cindy Marten said Tuesday that the issue of Islamophobia is even more important today. The district doesn’t have data on how many students are Muslim, but Anjan’s report to the board Tuesday included a breakdown of incidents of bullying for various reasons from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2016.
Counselors and teachers in schools and colleges throughout the county have said Muslim students are feeling anxious these days, but Anjan said he’s also seen more students wanting to work to create more peaceful campuses.
Trustee John Lee Evans said the issue of Islamophobia and bullying against Muslim is greater today than when the board first called for a plan to address the issue. “Now we have on a national stage where people openly discuss hatred and discrimination against various groups,” he said. We really need to redouble our efforts at a time like this.”
Tuesday’s meeting was attended by about 150 members of San Diego’s Muslim community, including Hanif Mohebia, executive director of the San Diego office of CAIR, who called the Tuesday night vote an important first step.
“If we do this right, San Diego Unified School District would be the leading school district in the nation to come up with a robust and beautiful anti-bully and anti-Islamophobic program,” he said. “I’m really happy we’re going toward the right direction. I am excited, but also careful and cautious because the work ahead is something we will all be responsible for.”
Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UBfpphaT3Y
Bear Naked Islam
To read more http://www.barenakedislam.com/
The watchman on the wall sounding the ALARM
Michigan: MSA alum launches campaign to be first Muslim governor in U.S.
( Muslims do not assimilate, they infiltrate! )
Cities in Michigan are coming under Muslim control, is the state-level next?
Abdul El-Sayed (left) with Congressman John Conyers. (El-Sayed’s Facebook)
Source: Q&A: The man running to be US’ first Muslim governor | USA | Al Jazeera
Egyptian American doctor Abdul El-Sayed could become the first-ever Muslim governor in the United States in 2018.
El-Sayed, 32, was appointed as the chief of the health department of Michigan’s city of Detroit in 2015, and – after making a serious turn to politics – is now running to be the next governor of the state.
El-Sayed talked to Al Jazeera about what inspired him to run and why he believes he is the right candidate for the job.
Al Jazeera: How has being an Arab and Muslim played into the election?
El-Sayed: It is something that comes up. For me, religion isn’t about how or if one prays, but rather what they pray for and what they hope for. And for me, personally, I pray for my family. And I pray for my state and my country.
And I believe in the fundamental decency of people who can come together across traditional boundaries, as we have in the past. We need to reject this notion that we’re different and can’t see across a religious or ethnic divide.
I know this is possible, because I have seen it every single day at my family’s dinner table. My family is extremely diverse, and includes Christians, Muslims, and atheists. And they come from all over the world.
I’ve seen them come together because they believe in their shared future: their children. And I know we, across all corners of Michigan, can do the same.
Al Jazeera: How has your level of support been?
El-Sayed: People are really excited about this. Letters, phone calls, and shows of support have come from all over the state. It’s overwhelming and humbling…
I want to provide Michiganders with an opportunity to support a candidate who both has real government experience and whose skill sets are really focused on bringing communities together. Someone who can bring exciting and innovative ideas to state government.
I have gotten really heartwarming messages from all over the state – even from some folks who have never voted for a Democrat. Some of my supporters have said they have never voted for a liberal, but would vote for me because they value authenticity and a focus on people and their well-being. That is what matters to them as Michiganders.
Will a liberal Democrat bring Michiganders together or bring Muslims into further control of Michigan? More via Leo Hohmann at WND:
Dick Manasseri, spokesman for Secure Michigan, a group that educates Michiganders about the threat of Shariah law, predicts that Sayed will at least win the Democratic nomination for governor.
“It is the exact same thing as Barack Obama in Chicago in the early 2000s,” said Manasseri. “He’s young, attractive, he does not give out a lot of information, he speaks in platitudes about celebrating inclusiveness and diversity.”
Sayed is known as a warrior for environmental justice. He talks about “standing up to corporate polluters,” and how, in his family, he was taught that having “love and compassion” for the vulnerable are “more important than where you’re from.”
“How could any good progressive Democrat vote against that in good conscience?” asks Manasseri.
Sayed is highly educated, a Rhodes scholar who attended Oxford University in 2009 and became a practicing epidemiologist.
“He’s very well packaged,” Manasseri said. “He’s far more accomplished than Barack Obama. Obama was not this accomplished, they connected him to certain foundations and his candidacy took off.”
Sayed is the recipient of several research awards, including being named one of the Carnegie Council’s Policy Innovators. He created and taught the Mailman School’s first-ever course on systems science and population health. He co-edited a textbook on the topic published in 2017 by Oxford University Press entitled “Systems Science and Population Health.”
Sayed said his “diverse if highly unlikely family” taught him that “what you believe and stand for is more important than where you come from, to have compassion and care and respect for those more vulnerable.” He said he was taught that “real leaders are those that can stand firm against the powerful, stand strong with the weak, and stand humbly before God.”
At the Thanksgiving dinner table, “which is a very diverse dinner table,” hosted by he and his wife Sarah, he said his family includes a Presbyterian deacon from Flint, an imam from Egypt and an atheist-Polish uncle who is a professor at Michigan.
“And they share hard conversations about life in American and they don’t always agree, but they respect and love each other…they share a common future that brings them together. And as Michiganders, so do we.”
Manaserri says the Muslim Brotherhood would never support a candidate that didn’t have tons of money behind him and that they did not believe “has a real chance of winning.”
“Any Republican would be afraid to confront him on his Muslim Brotherhood connections or his views on Shariah,” Manasseri said. “He is a devout Shariah-compliant guy, and I would predict that he will be endorsed by the Catholic Church, which is very powerful in Michigan.”
Manasseri points out that a bill supporting American Law for American Courts, widely regarded as an anti-Shariah law, was defeated in the Michigan Legislature when two powerful lobbies – the Michigan Catholic Conference and the Council on American-Islamic Relations or CAIR – teamed up to kill it. He expects the same coalition to form behind a candidate who would make history as America’s first Muslim governor.
“So if this guy rises in the polls, I would predict the Catholic Church will support his candidacy,” he said. “Just like with Obama, because we gotta make history.”
“It’s Obama II,” Manasseri said. “Elizabeth Warren will be coming to campaign for him, the Democrats in other states will be raising money for him. The DNC number-two man [Keith Ellison] will be raising money for him. Of course this guy is going to be on the Sunday morning talk shows. He’ll be everywhere. A candidate for governor who is Muslim Brotherhood …if that doesn’t tell you there’s a Shariah swamp in Michigan I don’t know what does.”
About those Muslim Brotherhood connections that no one will dare ask him about, via U-M dual MD/PhD student named Rhodes Scholar
As an undergraduate, El-Sayed played on Michigan Men’s Lacrosse team and was an active member of the Muslim Students’ Association.
The MSA is a Muslim Brotherhood-founded organization with a growing list of terrorist alumni.
Please Share & Help Wake America Up
Creeping Sharia
To read more https://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/
The watchman on the wall sounding the ALARM
Truman State University student calls for violence ahead of Robert Spencer lecture
( Muslims do not assimilate, they infiltrate! )
Whoever said that fascism would come to America in the guise of anti-fascism got it right. This violence and brutalization of political opponents is a new phenomenon in American politics, but it is becoming increasingly common, and it has a historical antecedent: the Nazi Brownshirts. In The Coming of the Third Reich, historian Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, Stormtroopers (Brownshirts) “organized campaigns against unwanted professors in the local newspapers [and] staged mass disruptions of their lectures.”
To express dissent from Nazi positions became a matter of taking one’s life into one’s hands. The idea of people of opposing viewpoints airing their disagreements in a civil and mutually respectful manner was gone. One was a Nazi, or one was silent (and fearful).
That is just the kind of public arena that the Left has been trying to bring to the United States for years — particularly on college campuses. But I’ll be at Truman State University next week anyway, facing down the fascists.
“Truman State University Student Threatens Violence Ahead of Robert Spencer Lecture,” by Andres Taborda, The New Guard, April 6, 2017:
Robert Spencer, conservative speaker and director of Jihad Watch, received threats of physical violence from a student at Truman State University where he is slated to speak next week as part of Young America’s Foundation’s best-in-the-movement campus lecture program.
In a slew of tweets, “Bella Waddle,” started off with the following:
This was followed up by a suspenseful tweet:
And if “Bella Waddle’s” retweet of the following tweet is any sort of endorsement, then we have a serious threat of violence towards Robert Spencer:
Hmm…not sure it’s a good idea to share with the world that you want punch Robert Spencer’s face.
Yet again, we see attempts by campus leftists to intimidate conservative speakers. If leftists really stood for tolerance, having a different point of view on campus would fulfill their mission. As we see here, though, leftists’ knee-jerk reaction to differing opinions is physical violence.
It’s amazing that groups who warn of violence on campuses are the ones who advocate for it the most.
So while “Bella Waddle” develops a sure-to-fail protest plot, just know one thing: We will be at Truman State University with Robert Spencer next week to discuss the dangers of Radical Islam.
Deal with it.
Jihad Watch
To read morehttps://www.jihadwatch.org/
The watchman on the wall sounding the ALARM
Geller Report
To read all articles go to http://pamelageller.com/2017/04/jihad-thailand-war.html/
Today's Top Stories
- United States launches missile strikes on Syria
- Jihadis Declare War on Thailand on Eve of New Constitution: Scores of Mass Attacks, ‘Biggest Attack in Years’
- Russia recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital
- Vehicular jihad Muslim Mows Down, Murders Jewish Soldier, a ‘Sweet Kid’ Who ‘Couldn’t Hurt a Fly’
- .@Jack Sedition: Twitter sues US to protect treasonous account by federal employees
- .@VogueMagazine cover model MURDERED by devout Muslims for not wearing Islamic clothing #AnnaWintour
- Don Rickles RIP: The end of era
- FINALLY SOME GONADS: Republicans Pull the Trigger on Nuke Option #SCOTUS
- Outcry in Sweden as Muslim school segregates boys and girls
- European Union Tells Hungary and Poland To Accept Mass Migration Or Leave
- France: Muslim who murdered Jewish woman shouted “Allahu Akbar!” ‘They tried to cover up the terror attack’
- “Moderate” Malaysia: Muslim MP and former Sharia court judge says 9-year-olds can marry
- Trump Doubles Down on Promise to Reform Veterans Affairs
- Illegal Immigration Plunges in Wake of Trump: John Kelly, DHS Chief
- Cancun Spring Breakers Chanting ‘Build the Wall’ Turns Out to Be Fake News
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Ivanka Trump Secretly Met With Planned Parenthood Boss
Ivanka Trump initiated a meeting with Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards after her father was inaugurated as U.S. president, a new report revealed.
The first daughter and Cecile Richards met to talk about the nation’s largest abortion chain at Ivanka Trump’s request, in what Politico called an “under-the-radar meeting.”
A representative from the abortion giant said Ivanka Trump wanted “to know more about the facts of Planned Parenthood,” according to the political news outlet.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens called it “an explainer meeting” . . .
“The purpose of the meeting, from Cecile’s point of view, was to make sure that Ivanka fully understood what Planned Parenthood does, how it is funded, and why it would be a terrible idea for Planned Parenthood to be removed from being able to see Medicaid patients,” said Laguens. “The main thing that Cecile Richards was doing was explaining that the money doesn’t actually go to abortions — we get reimbursed the same way a hospital does. We were clearing up misinformation about how this works.” (Read more from “Ivanka Trump Secretly Met With Planned Parenthood Boss” HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/04/ivanka-trump-secretly-met-planned-parenthood-boss/
Obama Gave $68 Million to Pro-Abortion UN Population Control Agency, Here’s How Much Trump Is Giving
The Trump Administration reinstated a policy Monday evening directing United States foreign assistance dollars away from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on the basis that its activities in China are complicit with that nation’s coercive population control program, the implementation of which includes forced abortion and involuntary sterilization. United States funding will be directed instead to other family planning and health programs not involved in China’s population control program.
“We congratulate President Trump and his administration for making it abundantly clear the United States will not support a United Nations agency that cooperates in China’s brutally repressive population control policies,” said National Right to Life President Carol Tobias. “I heartily applaud what we at National Right to Life are seeing from this pro-life administration.”
The State Department memorandum issued Monday determined that the UNFPA was in violation of the Kemp-Kasten anti-coercion law. The amendment prohibits giving U.S. “population assistance” funds to “any organization or program which, as determined by the President of the United States, supports or participates in the management of a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”
As the memo states:
The Chinese Government’s Population and Family Planning Law, even as amended in 2015, and related regulations and practices at the central and Provincial levels, clearly constitute a “program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization,” and are an integral part of the comprehensive population-control program the Chinese Government advances. While there is no evidence that UNFPA directly engages in coercive abortions or involuntary sterilizations in China, the agency continues to partner with the [National Health and Family Planning Commission] on family planning, and thus can be found to support, or participate in the management of China’s coercive policies for purposes of the Kemp-Kasten Amendment. (Read more from “Obama Gave $68 Million to Pro-Abortion UN Population Control Agency, Here’s How Much Trump Is Giving” HERE) http://joemiller.us/2017/04/obama-gave-68-million-pro-abortion-un-population-control-agency-h
The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
The Allegation That Congress Destroyed
Your Internet Privacy Is Fake News
by Tom Giovanetti
.
Top Headlines
White House to unveil new liar-nObamaCare repeal deal Tuesday. (Washington Examiner)
Democrats are applying litmus tests to Gorsuch their favorite justices wouldn't pass. (The Federalist)
Newspaper editorials pan Democrats' attempt to filibuster Gorsuch, encourage confirmation. (The Washington Free Beacon)
Trump ready to tackle North Korea alone. (RealClearDefense)
Reversing another liar-nObama policy, Trump pulls funding for UN Population Fund. (CNS News)
California Senate OKs statewide illegal immigrant sanctuary bill. (The Washington Times)
NCAA lifts ban on hosting events in North Carolina over "bathroom law." (Mediaite)
Number of people who owe over $100,000 in student debt has quadrupled in 10 years. (Market Watch)
New Yorkers shocked to find that people are fleeing their city in droves. (Hot Air)
Trump donates 1st quarter salary to National Park Service. (Hot Air)
Policy: The god that failed: Communism & socialism then and now. (The Center for Vision & Values)
Policy: If Nuclear Deterrence Fails, What's The Plan? (RealClearDefense) ~The Patriot Post
.
.
Whoever Released Susan Rice, Unmasked Flynn,
Trump Names Committed A Felony
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Judge Andrew Napolitano addresses the question of when is it right and when is it wrong to unmask the identity of an American. Susan Rice is not going to like what he’s got to say... Napolitano points out that the key points are what “Rice did with the name once unmasked and why she unmasked it.” He says, “The government surveils conversations and she believes that the conversations involve a foreign power so she asks for a transcript of the conversation. She gets it immediately, and she sees American person 1, foreign agent, American person 1, foreign agent. She feels knowing who the American person 1 is will help her understand the conversation, the NSA gives her the name. That is called unmasking. That’s legal – unmasking for the purpose of developing a further understanding of the national security reason for the conversation.” Napolitano continues, “Unmasking for another reason – politics, vengeance, curiosity, embarrassment; that is profoundly illegal. So if the conversation, instead of between foreign agent and American 1 is between American 1 and American 2, and number 1 is Donald Trump and number 2 is Paul Manafort, and she sees what they’re talking about, she whispers in the ‘president’s’ ear, ‘guess what Trump and Manafort talked about tonight, and we’re back in July, that’s called espionage.”... http://rickwells.us/napolitano-whoever-released-susan-rice-unmasked-flynn-trump-names-committed-felony/
liar-nObama’s Top 10 Betrayals
of the American People
by Truth Revolt
{truthrevolt.org} ~ On this new special edition of Anni Cyrus’s “Top 10”, Anni discusses liar-nObama’s Top 10 Betrayals of the American People, unveiling the treacherous record of a Radical-in-Chief. Don’t miss it! http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/glazov-gang-obamas-top-10-betrayals-american-people
.Rice Didn’t Randomly Choose To Do This –
Stinks To High Heaven
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Reflecting on how different the leftist propaganda media’s posture and conduct would be if it had been President Trump spying on liar-nObama coming in, she understates it as “Watergate times ten... There would be people staked out at the Brookings Institution, where Susan Rice has a cushy job, they’d be at her house, they’d find her. If the shoe was on the other foot there wouldn’t be this appalling lack of curiosity on the part of the mainstream media about what was going on here.” Ingraham asks, “Who directed her to do this? This was just a random thing she was thinking because, uh, Donald Trump’s name was mentioned in some intercept? I mean, Donald Trump’s name would have been mentioned in hundreds, if not thousands of foreign intercepts. So she just happened to choose these ones? The whole thing stinks to high heaven.” Hannity asks her, as a lawyer, if there’s any situation in which Susan Rice would need to unmask a Trump transition team member or either candidate Trump or President-elect Trump... http://rickwells.us/laura-ingraham-rice-didnt-randomly-choose-to-do-this-stinks-to-high-heaven/
.Defector: Only One “Real Solution”
to North Korean Threat
{fixthisnation.com} ~ In an interview with NBC News, North Korean defector Thae Yong Ho said the mad dictator Kim Jong Un is “desperate” to hold onto his failing regime, and he sees the development of nuclear weapons as crucial to his continued rule... Thae, the highest-ranking North Korean official to defect in more than twenty years, said the U.S. should be prepared for anything when it came to Kim Jong Un’s aggression. “Once he sees that there is any kind of sign of a tank or an imminent threat from America, then he would use his nuclear weapons with ICBM,” he said in the interview. Thae warned that the Kim regime had “reached a very significant level of nuclear development.”...
.
White House Officials Divided on
Islam, ISIS, Israel and Iran
by Soeren Kern
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ The people U.S. President Donald J. Trump has chosen to lead his foreign policy team may complicate efforts to fulfill his inaugural pledge to eradicate "radical Islamic terrorism" "from the face of the Earth"... a Herculean task even under the best of circumstances. An analysis of the political appointments to the different agencies within the U.S. national security apparatus shows that the key members of the president's foreign policy team hold widely divergent views on the threat posed by radical Islam — and on the nature of Islam itself. They also disagree on approaches to Iran, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the European Union, Russia, globalism and other national security issues. The policy disconnect is being exacerbated by the fact that dozens of key positions within the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies remain unfilled... https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10158/white-house-islam-isis-israel-iran
.
.
One clear message from the last election is that voters want a clean break from the heavy-handed regulatory overreach of the Obama administration. Congress intends to overturn as much Obama administration overreach as possible, and it’s in that context that Congress overturned the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) pending privacy regulation. But there’s been a lot of confusion, so let’s explain.
Originally, consumer internet privacy was handled by the federal agency specifically designed and empowered to protect consumers: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC has legislative authority and decades of agency expertise in consumer protection, including privacy protection.
That is, until the FCC under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler usurped the FTC’s authority as part of its ideological campaign to heavily regulate the internet.
One of Wheeler’s first moves was to hire Gigi Sohn, who has spent the better part of her career crusading for the de facto nationalization of broadband providers. Gigi seems to see ISPs as the root of all evil in the communications marketplace, and once Wheeler hired Sohn as his special policy advisor, the regulations came fast, furious and unhinged from empirical data or marketplace considerations.
As part of their crusade, Wheeler and Sohn went far beyond the net neutrality demands of most activist groups and completely reversed previous FCC policy by reclassifying broadband under the same regulations governing the old analog phone networks, which themselves barely exist anymore.
This ill-advised move had the effect of calling into question much of the FTC’s ability to enforce its privacy regime over broadband providers. So the FCC, not Congress, was responsible for disruptions in federal privacy protections.
Then the FCC doubled down on its mistakes by creating its own new, poorly designed privacy regulations that were inconsistent and uncoordinated with existing FTC rules and practices. And the FCC regulations focused on ISPs rather than on edge providers—i.e., companies that people interact with directly, such as Facebook—even though edge providers gather far more personal data than do ISPs. This, of course, was consistent with Wheeler’s and Sohn’s view that ISPs are somehow inherently culpable for every imagined or perceived problem in the communications industry.
The FCC’s privacy regulations also departed completely from long-established “opt-out” privacy expectations and instead adopted an onerous “opt-in” standard, which would completely preclude innovation and experimentation in making advertising more tailored and personalized for consumers.
This is why groups like IPI urged both Congress and the FCC itself to throw out the Wheeler privacy regulations, which Congress did.
Importantly, as the Competitive Enterprise Institute has pointed out, there remain numerous and overlapping federal and state privacy protections for consumers. And, of course, the FCC regulations were pending—they had not yet even come into effect themselves. How does it feel to have been lied to?
As a participant on the internet, your privacy is at no greater risk as a result of Congress’ actions. But freedom and innovation were at risk, because of out-of-control, power-grabbing agencies like the FCC under Wheeler. Thankfully now we’re on the path to restoring sanity in internet regulation.
The Allegation That Congress Destroyed
Your Internet Privacy Is Fake News
by Tom Giovanetti
{ipi.org} ~ You have been lied to about “your browsing history being sold to the highest bidder.” That was fake news pushed by special interest groups taking advantage of easily duped social media.One clear message from the last election is that voters want a clean break from the heavy-handed regulatory overreach of the Obama administration. Congress intends to overturn as much Obama administration overreach as possible, and it’s in that context that Congress overturned the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) pending privacy regulation. But there’s been a lot of confusion, so let’s explain.
Originally, consumer internet privacy was handled by the federal agency specifically designed and empowered to protect consumers: the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC has legislative authority and decades of agency expertise in consumer protection, including privacy protection.
That is, until the FCC under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler usurped the FTC’s authority as part of its ideological campaign to heavily regulate the internet.
One of Wheeler’s first moves was to hire Gigi Sohn, who has spent the better part of her career crusading for the de facto nationalization of broadband providers. Gigi seems to see ISPs as the root of all evil in the communications marketplace, and once Wheeler hired Sohn as his special policy advisor, the regulations came fast, furious and unhinged from empirical data or marketplace considerations.
As part of their crusade, Wheeler and Sohn went far beyond the net neutrality demands of most activist groups and completely reversed previous FCC policy by reclassifying broadband under the same regulations governing the old analog phone networks, which themselves barely exist anymore.
This ill-advised move had the effect of calling into question much of the FTC’s ability to enforce its privacy regime over broadband providers. So the FCC, not Congress, was responsible for disruptions in federal privacy protections.
Then the FCC doubled down on its mistakes by creating its own new, poorly designed privacy regulations that were inconsistent and uncoordinated with existing FTC rules and practices. And the FCC regulations focused on ISPs rather than on edge providers—i.e., companies that people interact with directly, such as Facebook—even though edge providers gather far more personal data than do ISPs. This, of course, was consistent with Wheeler’s and Sohn’s view that ISPs are somehow inherently culpable for every imagined or perceived problem in the communications industry.
The FCC’s privacy regulations also departed completely from long-established “opt-out” privacy expectations and instead adopted an onerous “opt-in” standard, which would completely preclude innovation and experimentation in making advertising more tailored and personalized for consumers.
This is why groups like IPI urged both Congress and the FCC itself to throw out the Wheeler privacy regulations, which Congress did.
Importantly, as the Competitive Enterprise Institute has pointed out, there remain numerous and overlapping federal and state privacy protections for consumers. And, of course, the FCC regulations were pending—they had not yet even come into effect themselves. How does it feel to have been lied to?
As a participant on the internet, your privacy is at no greater risk as a result of Congress’ actions. But freedom and innovation were at risk, because of out-of-control, power-grabbing agencies like the FCC under Wheeler. Thankfully now we’re on the path to restoring sanity in internet regulation.
By Craig Andresen – Right Side Patriots on American Political Radio
The current situation in Syria, has gone from bad to worse this week, as a chemical 
weapons attack left dozens dead, and dozens more critically injured in a northern Syrian community, the Idlib province described as a rebel enclave.
It has been described as the worst chemical attack in the war-torn country in years, but the real question is…who did it?
Therein, lies the problem.
Internationally, the UK, U.S., France and the U.N. are blaming Syria’s president, Bashar al Assad, while Russia and Putin are laying the blame on the Syrian Rebels. Al Assad says he and his military had nothing to do with it, and the rebels have even tried to blame the U.N. for the situation that led to it.
Some Guy Named al-Assad: Trump vs. Putin for the Sovereignty of the Middle East and Peter and His Admonition to Wives
A NEW DAY BLACK AND RED™ WITH THE UNDERGROUND PROFESSOR, DR MICHAEL JONES, AND THE EXCEPTIONAL ONE, KEN MCCLENTON
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