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February 2016

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A Serious Senator Sasse Challenges Trump’s One-Man View of Governing By John Fund

By on February 1st, 2016

Nebraska senator Ben Sasse crossed the border into neighboring Iowa last week to warn fellow Republicans of the dangers of voting for Donald Trump.

Although Ben Sasse has Ivy League degrees and was the president of Midland University from 2010 to 2014, he had broad tea-party support in his 2014 Senate run from groups such as the pro–free market Club for Growth and the libertarian-leaning Freedom Works.

“I ran because the country is in constitutional crisis,” Sasse told me in an interview. “America already has a president who has run roughshod over the Constitution; we don’t need another. I’m pro-Constitution, and if that makes me anti-Trump, that’s Mr. Trump’s problem,” he told reporters in Iowa.

So Sasse began his Trump critique with a series of Twitter questions for him on where he stands on issues such as support for government-run health care in Canada and Scotland. He also threw in this zinger: “You brag abt many affairs w/ married women. Have you repented? To harmed children & spouses? Do you think it matters?”

Other than calling that question “a cheap shot,” Trump ignored Sasse until the day after Thursday’s Trumpless GOP debate. He then let loose with two Twitter barrages. In the first one, he wrote: “The great State of Nebraska can do much better than @BenSasse as your Senator. Saw him on @greta — totally ineffective. Wants paid for pols.”

In the second tweet, he sneered that Sasse’s donning of Nebraska Huskers football gear while on TV made him look “more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator.”

The “gym rat” responded by saying that since he was the son of a football and wrestling coach, he viewed Trump’s taunt as “high praise.”

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E-mail ‘Did Not Originate with Me’ — Hillary Blames Her Underlings, Again By Shannen W. Coffin

By on February 1st, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s continually evolving defense of her apparent mishandling of classified information is starting to sound a lot like a running gag from Get Smart, the Sixties spy sitcom. Trapped in life-or-death situations at the hands of his archenemies, Agent Maxwell Smart would always seek to bluff his way out of trouble. When Mr. Big wouldn’t budge, Agent Smart moved on to the next prevarication until he found something that might stick:

Maxwell Smart: I happen to know that at this very minute seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it? Seven.

Mr. Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.

Maxwell Smart: Would you believe six?

Mr. Big: I don’t think so.

Maxwell Smart: How about two cops in a rowboat?

Hillary Clinton is trying the same gag, without the benefit of Don Adams’s comic timing. In a March 2015 press conference at the United Nations — her first public comments after news broke of her exclusive use of a private e-mail server to conduct official business — the former secretary of state drew a line in the sand, insisting categorically that “there is no classified material” on her home-brewed server. That story quickly took on water. The Department of Justice began withholding classified material from public releases of Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails — to date, more than 1,500 e-mails have been withheld as classified, with more to come. And inspectors general for both the intelligence community and the State Department revealed that even a small sample of the Clinton e-mails they reviewed contained information classified as top secret. The State Department confirmed late last week that nearly two dozen of her e-mails were so sensitive that they would be withheld in their entirety from public disclosure.

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Hillary Defends Email Judgment, Calls Scandal ‘Very Much Like Benghazi’ By Bridget Johnson

By on February 1st, 2016

Hillary Clinton told ABC this morning that her email scandal “is very much like Benghazi… the Republicans are going to continue to use it, beat up on me.”

“I understand that. That’s the way they are,” she said.

Clinton’s Sunday show appearance came after 22 emails the State Department originally planned to release with Friday’s batch were withheld because of top-secret classification.

The State Department’s Diplomatic Security and Intelligence and Research bureaus will investigate whether information in the censored emails was classified at the time they were sent. Clinton has maintained any classified information sent in emails using her private server received the classification later.

Very soon after the story broke — just a few days away from the first votes to be cast in the 2016 presidential primaries — Hillary for America press secretary Brian Fallon called the withholding “over-classification run amok.”

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Khamenei Awards Medals to Commanders Who Captured American Sailors By Rick Moran

By on February 1st, 2016

Iran’s capture of 10 American sailors earlier this month is proving to be the gift that keeps on giving — for Iran.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei awarded Iran’s highest military honor — the Fath (Victory) medal — to five Iranian commanders who captured the Americans off Farsi Island.

The ceremony shows that Iran continues to rub America’s nose in the humiliation.

Fox News:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei awarded the Order of Fat’h medal to the head of the navy of the Revolutionary Guards and four commanders who seized the two U.S. Navy vessels, according to Reuters. Iran’s state media reported the news on Sunday.

In a tweet sent from his account Sunday, Khamenei misidentified those who were “captured” as being members of the Marines.

On Jan. 12, Iran captured 10 sailors whose boats “misnavigated” into Iranian waters, according to Defense Secretary Ash Carter. Though the sailors were released the following day, Iran released video of the sailors being captured, detained and apologizing for the incursion.

In one of the more enduring images from the video of the capture, the sailors are shown kneeling on the decks of the boats, with their hands on their heads, all while being watched by armed Iranian troops. Though U.S. officials initially sought to downplay the encounter, Carter recently said the images made him “very, very angry.”

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California of the Dark Ages By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 1st, 2016

I recently took a few road trips longitudinally and latitudinally across California. The state bears little to no resemblance to what I was born into. In a word, it is now a medieval place of lords and peasants—and few in between. Or rather, as I gazed out on the California Aqueduct, the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Luis Reservoir, I realized we are like the hapless, squatter Greeks of the Dark Ages, who could not figure out who those mythical Mycenaean lords were that built huge projects still standing in their midst, long after Lord Ajax and King Odysseus disappeared into exaggeration and myth. Henry Huntington built the entire Big Creek Hydroelectric Project in the time it took our generation to go to three hearings on a proposed dam.

For all practical purposes, there are no more viable 40-acre to 150-acre family farms. You can sense their absence in a variety of subtle ways. Tractors are much bigger, because smaller plots are now combined into latifundia, and rows of trees and vines become longer. Rural houses are now homes to farm managers and renters, not farms families. One never sees families pruning or tying vines together as was common in the 1960s. I haven’t seen an owner of a farm on a tractor in over a decade.

Several developments have accelerated rapid change in the state. The long agricultural depression at the turn of the century—years of unprofitable prices for tree, vine and row crops—gave way about a decade ago to a sudden farm bonanza, especially in nut tree prices. The result was that once unprofitable land that had bankrupted the old agrarian class was absorbed by larger concerns and went through the costly process of transforming into pistachio, walnut, and almond acreages. Land prices in central California suddenly went from $5,000 an acre to $30,000 and up. Sometimes I’d like to remind the ghosts of those who went broke that the land they sold off for nothing is now quite something.

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Germany’s Migrant Deportation Plan: “Political Charade” by Soeren Kern

By on February 1st, 2016

N24 television has reported that up to 50% of “asylum seekers” have gone into hiding and their whereabouts are unknown. They presumably include economic migrants and others who are trying to avoid deportation if or when their asylum applications are rejected.

Tens of thousands of migrants destroyed their passports and other identity documents before arriving in Germany. It may take years for German authorities to determine the true identities of these people and their countries of origin.

Even if Germany sends these individuals back to the countries where they first entered the EU (usually Greece, Hungary or Italy), with a borderless Europe, migrants can easily make their way back to Germany.

German authorities are downplaying migrant lawlessness, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiment.

Migrants are still coming to Germany at the rate of about 2,000 per day.

“Eight to ten million migrants are still on the way.” – Development Minister Gerd Müller.

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Islamic ‘Instruction’ in our Public Schools By Richard Butrick

By on February 1st, 2016

The Thomas More Law Center, which is a national public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has filed (1/27/16) a federal lawsuit on behalf of former Marine, John Kevin Wood, and his wife, Melissa, who refused to allow their teenage daughter to be subjected to Islamic “indoctrination and propaganda” in her high school World History class. The lawsuit was filed against the Charles County Public Schools, the Board of Education, and the Principal and Vice-Principal of La Plata High School located in La Plata, Maryland.

The Woods’ daughter was forced to profess and to write out the Shahada in worksheets and quizzes. The Shahada is the Islamic Creed, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” For non-Muslims, reciting the statement is sufficient to convert one to Islam. Moreover, the second part of the statement, “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah,” signifies the person has accepted Muhammad as their spiritual leader. The teenager was also required to memorize and recite the Five Pillars of Islam.

Among the “facts” that the students had to learn are the following:

Islam, at heart, is a peaceful religion

To Muslims, Allah is the same God that is worshiped in Christianity and Judaism.

Radical Islamist fundamentalists are opposed to Western civilization’s way of life and imperialist pursuits

Jihad: a holy war waged on the behalf of Islam as a religious duty; a personal struggle in devotion to Islam, especially involving spiritual discipline

No where (sic) in the Koran does it say you will go to paradise if you martyr yourself with a suicide bomb.

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The Paradoxical Origin of Climate Alarmism By Ari Halperin

By on February 1st, 2016

Three feet of snow on the streets of New York and Washington is mocking global warming alarmists. The natural sciences tell us that the alarmists got everything wrong: anthropogenic carbon release is not dangerous or even harmful, but extremely beneficial. 15% of the world’s agricultural production is due to the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. What’s more, the global mean temperature has not been increasing for 19 years, and the slight warming expected from the emission of the infra-red absorbing gases is expected to be beneficial in itself. And contrary to the alarmists’ claims, ocean water is alkaline, not acidic. See this short summary of science for more. Listing all the scientific errors made by the alarmists would take many pages, not to mention their logical fallacies, economic delusions, civic blunders, etc. So how did it happen that such a worthless agenda became so powerful? In large degree, it’s because it was worthless!

The weakness (or absence) of scientific support behind climate alarmism became its political strength.

Normally, political issues are real, in the sense that they represent real problems or real conflicts in society. Real issues — drug addiction, poverty, illness, or abortion — allow people to express different views or to take different sides. But the issue that gave birth to climate alarmism is different: the alleged problem (possible harm or danger from carbon dioxide emissions) simply does not exist. Most people are not interested in imaginary problems, and quite a few scientists, statesmen, and journalists came to the correct conclusion that the carbon dioxide/global warming/climate change problem did not exist. Naturally, they did not participate in research or discussion on this topic, which allowed those who believed in the alleged problem to monopolize the topic. And the more strongly somebody believed, the stronger his or her voice was in the discussion. This happened even before they gain enough power and money to chase away sceptics or buy supporters.

Let me clarify a few points before I get into the history. Climate change is real. The climate change problem is not.

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Who Received Hillary’s Secret Emails? By James Lewis

By on February 1st, 2016

Congressman Darrell Issa has predicted that Hillary and Huma will never be indicted for leaking top-secret information through their illegal email scam.

“I think the FBI director would like to indict both Huma and Hillary as we speak,” the Republican heavyweight told the Washington Examiner Thursday[.] … “I think he’s in a position where he’s being forced to triple-time make a case of what would otherwise be, what they call, a slam dunk[.] … You can’t have 1,300 highly sensitive emails that contain highly sensitive material that’s taken all, or in part from classified documents, and have it be an accident[.] … There’s no question, she knew she had a responsibility and she circumvented it. And she circumvented it a second time when she knowingly let highly-classified material get onto emails in an unclassified format.”

Issa’s comments come just two days after former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, claimed he has friends in the FBI who “tell [him] they’re ready to indict and they’re ready to recommend an indictment. … They also say that if the attorney general does not indict, they’re going public,” DeLay said Tuesday during an interview on Newsmax TV.

If H&H are not indicted soon, FBI and DOJ career lawyers may retaliate by leaking additional evidence about Hillary’s criminal, irresponsible, and dangerous malfeasance in high office. Hillary is therefore deeply implicated in the worst hostile penetration of the U.S. government since Stalin.

Huma’s lifelong collaboration with the Nazi-era Muslim Brotherhood has been thoroughly documented. Four Americans died in Benghazi while Hillary and Obama dodged their constitutional responsibility to order U.S. rescue forces to knock down attackers belonging to al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) – apparently because Obama was convinced he could do a deal with al-Qaeda. We know how well that worked out.

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Medals for U.S. Humiliation Iran honors the commanders who captured U.S. sailors.

By on February 1st, 2016

In other news from the receding tide of war, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has given medals to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recently captured and humiliated American sailors.

Iran state media reported Sunday that the Supreme Leader had awarded the Fath, or Victory, medal to the head of the Revolutionary Guards navy and four commanders who were involved in seizing two U.S. Navy boats in January. The two patrol boats were seized after they somehow entered Iran’s territorial waters. The Pentagon hasn’t publicly explained what happened, but the Revolutionary Guards have said they believe the boats entered their waters by mistake.

The Guards released the boats and crew, but not before deliberately embarrassing the sailors, the Navy, and the U.S. by broadcasting photos of the Americans in captivity, including the one nearby of the U.S. sailors on their knees with their hands behind their heads under armed Iranian guard.

Secretary of State John Kerry initially hailed the return of the sailors as a sign of the great new era of U.S.-Iran cooperation in the wake of the nuclear accord. “I think we can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago, and the fact that today this kind of issue can be resolved peacefully and efficiently is a testament to the critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure, and strong,” Mr. Kerry said.

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