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February 2016

Clinton Rages against Sanders ‘Smear’ in Dem Debate, Faces New Wall Street Headaches By Brendan Bordelon

Durham, N.H. – Well, that escalated quickly.

Hillary Clinton emerged Monday as the victor of the Iowa caucuses. But after winning by the smallest margin in history and trailing by 20 points in recent New Hampshire polls, she was anything but complacent during Thursday’s one-on-one New Hampshire debate. The former secretary of state erupted in righteous indignation after her rival, Bernie Sanders, brought up the money she’s raised from Wall Street, accusing him and his campaign of perpetrating a “very artful smear” by implicitly calling her a corporate shill.

But Thursday night also opened up a new, unexpected front for Clinton on the paid speeches she gave to Wall Street after she left office. After struggling on Wednesday to answer why she took $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs, she was asked on Thursday to release transcripts of all her paid speeches to large corporations. It’s a question that clearly caught her off guard, and one her campaign will now be forced to address.

Clinton opened the debate with a bang, pushing back furiously against Sanders’s jab at the $15 million her super PAC raised from the financial industry in the last quarter. “I really don’t think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you,” she said, shooting daggers in Sanders’s direction. “And enough is enough. If you’ve got something to say, say it directly! But you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received!”

Conservatives Shouldn’t Throw around the ‘Republican Obama’ Label Lightly By Jonah Goldberg

‘The Republican Obama.”That’s the new hot attack on Senator Marco Rubio. Ted Cruz leveled the epithet at Rubio just days before the Iowa caucuses, which is a little ironic since Cruz has been called the same thing in the past.

But the leader of the opposition to Rubio, at least when it comes to this line, is actually someone not in the race: Joe Scarborough, the normally affable host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

Contrary to all evidence, Scarborough has denied he has an unhealthy obsession with his fellow Floridian. But given Scarborough’s near-relentless denigration of Rubio, objective viewers might wonder if Rubio had run over Scarborough’s dog or toilet-papered his house one Halloween night in junior high school.

On Thursday morning’s show, Scarborough launched into an extended tirade about the best ways for other Republicans to attack Rubio. Sounding a bit like an armchair general who can’t wait any longer to be asked his opinion, Scarborough declared, “He is the Republican Obama. And he really is.” Time magazine, Scarborough complained with more than a touch of resentment, “anointed him the Republican party’s savior before he threw his first pitch.”

“Seriously,” Scarborough added, “I have complained for years that Barack Obama was sold and marketed like a bag of potato chips, and when I have said it, every Republican has agreed with me, and I said it was a bad move for America when they had a chance to have a more experienced candidate. Even Hillary Clinton. So now Republicans are going . . . down that road to elect a guy that has been marketed like a bag of potato chips. Good luck.”

It’s almost as if Scarborough forgot that Obama was elected – twice.

Is Facebook Biased Against Israel and Jews? by Johanna Markind

Facebook has been slow to take down pages inciting violence against Israelis and Jews.

Although Facebook’s ground rules officially prohibit bullying, harassment, and threatening language, last year it received numerous complaints about online incitement. On January 18, Facebook launched an initiative to prevent anti-Muslim hate speech on its German platform. But, according to a lawsuit filed in New York state court and a highly-publicized “experiment,” Facebook has no problem with anti-Jewish incitement.

Last October 20, the German daily Bild printed a double-page newspaper spread documenting racist vitriol posted on Facebook against migrants. On November 10 – days before the Paris attacks – Hamburg prosecutors launched an investigation into Facebook for allegedly failing to remove racist postings. The investigation was reportedly motivated by concern over “how the country’s long-dormant far-right was using Facebook to mobilize” against the influx of refugees. In other words, it was motivated by concern over anti-Muslim and anti-Arab posts.

Perhaps stung by that criticism, mere days after two Muslims murdered fourteen people in San Bernardino, California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg vowed that Facebook would “create a peaceful and safe environment” for Muslim users.

Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech by Douglas Murray

Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist — along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is “racist.”

The sinister reality of a society in which the expression of majority opinion is being turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Just last week came reports of Dutch citizens being visited by the police and warned about posting anti-mass-immigration sentiments on social media.

In lieu of violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings and frustrations. Remove the right to speak about your frustrations and only violence is left.

The lid is being put on the pressure cooker at precisely the moment that the heat is being turned up. A true “initiative for civil courage” would explain to both Merkel and Zuckerberg that their policy can have only one possible result.

It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was forced to back down when caught permitting anti-Israel postings, but censoring equivalent anti-Palestinian postings.

Now one of the most sinister stories of the past year was hardly even reported. In September, German Chancellor Angela Merkel met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook at a UN development summit in New York. As they sat down, Chancellor Merkel’s microphone, still on, recorded Merkel asking Zuckerberg what could be done to stop anti-immigration postings being written on Facebook. She asked if it was something he was working on, and he assured her it was.

“BUT ISIS KILLS MUSLIMS TOO!” – ON THE GLAZOV GANG

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/02/05/but-isis-kills-muslims-too-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed “But ISIS Kills Muslims Too!”, analyzing Obama’s favorite and specious mantra that ignores how totalitarian entities eat their own. (See Raymond Ibrahim’s article on this issue here.)

Don’t miss it!

The globalist legal agenda by Andrew C. McCarthy

Having annexed Crimea as well as swaths of eastern Ukraine and Georgia, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin casts a menacing eye at the Baltics. His new favorite ally, Iran, violated President Obama’s ballyhooed nuclear arms deal before the ink was dry, testing a new class of intermediate-range ballistic missiles designed to be tipped with the very nuclear warheads the mullahs deny coveting. Meanwhile, China flouts international law by constructing artificial islands to bolster its aggressive South China Sea territorial claims. In Europe, a Middle Eastern diaspora wreaks havoc on the continent, exploiting its generous laws on immigration and travel between countries while overrunning communities with Muslim settlers notoriously resistant to Western assimilation.

Rarely in modern history has the inadequacy of law to manage the jungle that is international relations been more starkly illustrated. Yet, according to the United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, it is precisely law, as divined by judges, that can tame our tempestuous times. That the judiciary is the institution least competent and least politically accountable for the task is evidently no more an obstacle than the impotence of law itself.

Appointed to the High Court by President Bill Clinton twenty-one years ago, Justice Breyer has been a stalwart liberal—which is to say, a political “progressive” on a court that is increasingly political. He is refreshing nonetheless, even for those of us who recoil from his ideological bent, for his willingness to depart from the Court’s custom of avoiding public debate. Like his colleague and philosophical counterpart Justice Antonin Scalia, Breyer is a frequent public speaker and occasional author on jurisprudential approaches to contemporary challenges. His newest book is The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities.1

The work has much in common with Active Liberty, Breyer’s offering of a decade ago, which the Hoover Institute scholar Peter Berkowitz perceptively pegged as a rationalization of “judicial willfulness masquerading as judicial deference” to democratic self-determination. The Court and the World is similarly a call for judicial supremacy, this time under the guise of international “interdependence.” The courts are once again pitched as an enabling agent of democratic choice, but on a supra-national scale.

The world, though, is a very undemocratic place—though perhaps no more undemocratic than Supreme Court diktats that remove controversies like abortion and “same-sex marriage” from democratic resolution.

How to explain the difference between progressive pretensions to “activate” liberty—i.e., to vouchsafe “the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning,” as Justice Anthony Kennedy vaporously put it in imposing same-sex marriage on the nation—and progressive judging’s actual affect of curtailing our freedom to live as we choose? This inversion of democracy, it turns out, flows naturally from Breyer’s inversion of the judicial role—a philosophy of judging shared by a working majority of his Court, the bloc of five unelected jurists whose edicts control ever more of what was once democratic space.

“[O]ur American judicial system,” he contends, should “see itself as one part of a transnational or multinational judicial enterprise.” Inconveniently (but, alas, not insuperably), the only “judicial enterprise” licensed by the Constitution, from which federal judges derive their authority, is the protection of Americans from overreach by our government and the remediation of other harms inflicted by third parties in violation of laws enacted by our elected representatives.

Interpreting the law as written—an intellectual challenge that is vital to the rule of law even if not sufficiently stimulating for many a robed social engineer—is not so much an enterprise as a discipline. In our system, it is supposed to be the politically accountable branches that get to do the enterprising. Nor does the discipline of judging take on a “transnational or multinational” character merely because some small percentage of the parties implicated in legal disputes is of foreign extraction—even if, as Breyer rightly observes, modern technology has made the percentage larger by making the world smaller.

What does Breyer see as the objective of this global judicial enterprise? The advancement of “acceptance of the rule of law itself.” This “rule of law,” you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn, bears an astonishing resemblance to the rule of lawyers—in particular, the judges along with the army of equally unelected transnational progressive lawyers who urge them on.

Disqualifying: Clinton’s Demand that Her Classified Emails Be Disclosed By Andrew C. McCarthy

With this week’s caucus in Iowa, speculation finally has finally given way to actual voting results in the presidential campaign. That makes it as good a time as any to observe that the Clintons have done it again: They have so degraded our politics that criminality rather than unfitness for office appears to be the only potential disqualifier for Democrats.

Sadly, we must say “potential” because we cannot be confident that even an indictment would cause Hillary Clinton’s supporters to abandon her. They’d rather have the Oval Office run out of Leavenworth than have a Republican occupy it in Washington.

The evidence of Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information is mounting. In just the past few days, we’ve learned that several emails communicated through and stored on the private email system Clinton improperly used to conduct government business contained the most closely guarded categories of national-defense intelligence. They cannot be disclosed even in redacted form without endangering (I should say, further endangering) vital intelligence methods and sources.

Moreover, there is so much classified information strewn through Clinton’s thousands of emails that the State Department claims it cannot comply with a federal court’s disclosure schedule. Translation: State is carrying water for the Clinton presidential campaign, ensuring that, for the next several weeks, primary voters will go to the polls not knowing what other damaging information may compromise the Democrats’ frontrunner before the November election.

Issa: FBI Director ‘Has No Choice’ But to Refer Hillary for Indictment By Bridget Johnson

The former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee said with the “body of evidence” against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, FBI Director James Comey “really has no choice but to refer this for indictment.”

“It does appear as though the administration continues to push for, if you will, double and triple and quadruple measuring,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), now chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet, told Fox Business Network. “But as you know, we have communications back and forth, the president from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail. We have 1,300 sensitive documents, 22 classified at the highest level.”

“This is well past anyone claiming that they didn’t know.”

Clinton told ABC on Sunday 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.

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

Cornyn: Clinton ‘Likely Violated Multiple Criminal Statutes’ Senator calls for special prosecutor to investigate Hillary emails. By Nicholas Ballasy

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to oversee the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as the nation’s top diplomat.

Cornyn said the investigation should be as “far removed from White House politics” as possible.

“In light of the unprecedented nature of the case and the multiple conflicts presented to the Department of Justice, I can see no other appropriate course of action than for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to pursue this matter wherever the facts may lead,” he said on the Senate floor. “That need is underscored by the apparent inability by the White House to try to influence or at worst obstruct the current investigation.”

The State Department categorized at least 22 emails found on Clinton’s server as “Top Secret.” The agency recently announced it would not release them. In response, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said an indictment does not seem to be the direction in which the White House is heading.

“Either the White House has information that they should not have about the status of this ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI, or they’re sending a signal to the FBI and the Department of Justice that they want this to go away,” said Cornyn, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

“It’s hard for me to interpret these comments both by the president or his press secretary as anything other than trying to influence the FBI or the Department of Justice on the outcome the administration prefers.”

The Unbalanced US Arab-Israeli Balancing Act By Dan Calic

The US and others, while suggesting they are strong supporters of Israel and its need for security, in reality are not promoting peace. Their policies are actually sustaining and rewarding terror.

Let me explain…

President Obama for example has repeatedly stated throughout his administration America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable. No doubt these are reassuring words to Israel and its friends around the world. However, his actions contradict his words.

How so? It has been the policy of the US and others to condemn the “settlements” and the “occupation” as the main obstacles to achieving peace with the Palestinians. For those who subscribe to said view, where were the occupation or settlements in 1948 or 1967? They did not exist.

However, in order to see the folly of blaming the lack of peace on these issues, we must look at what the statements imply.

They suggest the US is attempting to be balanced. This is meant to appeal to the Arab world, which believes the US has been too supportive of Israel for many years.
They allow the US to avoid tackling the real issues which are preventing peace.