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August 2016

James Comey and the Stinking Fish Factor Joan Swirsky

I always thought that James Comey was a company man. As it happens, the company he heads is among the most influential, powerful and scary companies in the world––the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But still, a company guy. Whether working for a president on the moderate-to-conservative spectrum like G.W. Bush or for the far-left current occupant of the Oval Office, Barack Obama, makes absolutely no difference to this type of obedient––and now we know, subservient––accommodator.

The red flag of skepticism should have gone up years ago to the American public when lavish praise was heaped on Comey by people who revile each other. While the spin insists that Comey is a lot of virtuous things––“straight-shooter,” ”unbiased,” “fair-minded,” “non-partisan” “man of his word”–– don’t be fooled. That’s Orwellian newspeak for someone who will do and say anything to keep his job, including, as Comey did in the latest Clinton fiasco case, (1) create out of whole cloth an “intent” criterion in federal law to let a clearly corrupt politician off the hook, and (2) appropriate the job of the Attorney General in announcing what the outcome of the FBI’s investigation should be.

While citing Hillary’s “extreme negligence” in handling classified information, a virtual litany of illegal acts committed by the then-Secretary of State, and the fact that hostile foreign operatives may have accessed her e-mail account, Comey said he would not refer criminal charges to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the Justice Department. Hillary, he said, was “extremely careless” and “unsophisticated,” among other spitballs he hurled in her direction before completely letting her off the hook!

Comey’s friend and colleague, Andrew C. McCarthy, says that the FBI director’s decision is tantamount to sleight-of-hand trickery. “There is no way of getting around this,” McCarthy writes. “Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation…in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require.”

Thomas Lifson, editor and publisher of AmericanThinker.com, wrapped the entire debacle up neatly, saying that “the director of the FBI offered 15 of the most puzzling minutes in the history of American law enforcement. James Comey spent the first 12 minutes or so laying out a devastating case dismantling Hillary Clinton’s email defense. Then, “in a whiplash-inducing change of narrative, he announced that `no reasonable prosecutor’ would bring the case he had just outlined, an assertion that was contradicted within hours by luminaries including former U.S. attorney (and NY City mayor) Rudy Giuliani and James Kallstrom, former head of the FBI’s New York office.”

Which begs the question: Why would Comey act contrary to the wisdom of virtually every legal scholar who has written or spoken about this case?

HILLARY CLINTON’S IMMIGRATION GOALS WOULD IRREVOCABLY UNDERMINE NATIONAL SECURITY : MICHAEL CUTLER

Our nation’s immigration laws are completely blind as to race, religion and ethnicity, and were enacted to protect national security and the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

My previous post for CAPS, “Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Make Her Economic Promises Impossible to Achieve,” focused on how providing potentially tens of millions of illegal aliens with an equal standing in the overflowing labor pool of unemployed or underemployed American and lawful immigrant workers would exacerbate the plight of these desperate workers and their families.

Today my focus will be on how Hillary Clinton’s proposal to provide millions of illegal aliens with lawful status would do irreparable harm to national security and public safety.

Hillary has made much of having been Secretary of State. During her acceptance speech at the DNC she said, in part, “We will not build a wall,” thereby echoing the remarks of her successor at the State Department, John Kerry who, in his commencement address at Northeastern University several months ago, said, in part, that America could not remain great by hiding behind walls.

I recently wrote a commentary about Kerry’s dangerous globalist agenda that apparently is paralleled by Clinton, “John Kerry: Enthusiastic Proponent of a ‘Borderless World.’”

Metaphorically, America’s borders are her walls.

One of the critical roles of the State Department is to issue visas to aliens who seek entry into the United States. The visa process came under scrutiny by the 9/11 Commission. It identified failures in border security and failures of the visa process that enabled the 19 terrorists in the 9/11 hijackings and terrorists who preceded them. Visa fraud was a means to enter the U.S., allowing them to embed themselves in the country as they went about their deadly preparations.

Given this, any journalist who interviews Hillary Clinton should ask if she has read “The 9/11 Commission Report.”

That report should be required reading for the president of the U.S., all high-ranking members of the administration and every member of Congress.

The official government report, “9/11 and Terrorist Travel – Staff Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,”focused specifically on the ability of the terrorists to travel around the world, enter the U.S. and ultimately embed themselves here as they went about their deadly preparations to carry out an attack. The preface of this report begins with the following paragraph:

“It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy. We believe, for reasons we discuss in the following pages, that it must be made one.”

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Debacle: Arming Jihadists in Libya . . . and Syria Looking ahead to the next installment of e-mails from WikiLeaks By Andrew C. McCarthy

As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya — indeed, that ISIS is ISIS — thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama’s secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton’s lying to Congress and the American people — this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian “rebels” — including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS — just as, at Mrs. Clinton’s urging, our government had armed Libyan “rebels” (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton’s favor. Now the organization’s founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton’s key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist “rebels,” the Syrian “rebels” who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS.

The Daily Wire and other outlets are reporting on Assange’s comments, published by Democracy Now. Clearly, we should not take Assange’s word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails “about Libya alone.” Let’s see if he has what he says he has. But it is worth setting the stage, because what is known is outrageous and has not been given nearly enough attention — largely because Beltway Republicans were complicit in the Obama-Clinton policy of allying with Islamists, and thus have shown no interest in probing the inevitably disastrous fallout.

As I have been pointing out for years, for example, we have never gotten to the bottom of why the State Department, under Mrs. Clinton’s direction, had an installation in Benghazi, one of the world’s most dangerous places for Americans.

Academic Article: Ski Slopes Are Sexist Of course they are! By Katherine Timp

According to a recent, too-idiotic-to-even-understand article published in The International Review for the Sociology of Sport, ski slopes are sexist “masculinized spaces.”

“This article examines how skiing landscapes are constructed as masculinized spaces,” states the abstract for Memorial University of Newfoundland assistant professor Mark C. J. Stoddart’s piece titled “Constructing masculinized sportscapes: Skiing, gender and nature in British Columbia, Canada.”

Um . . . hills with snow on them are “masculinized spaces”? What in the fresh hell is this guy talking about?

Well, according to Stoddart, ski slopes are places “for performing athletic, risk-seeking masculinity,” and “less risky areas of the skiing landscape may be interpreted as ‘gender-neutral’ or feminized space.”

Honestly, to me, Stoddart’s insinuation that risk-taking is a man’s thing is what really seems sexist here — but he insists that it’s the ski slopes that are the problem, and that “the social construction of sport landscapes shapes gendered power relations.”

“Through skiing, participants construct the meaning of gender and place, privileging masculinized versions of the sport,” the abstract continues.

Now, maybe I’m missing something, but I tend to think that people who are out skiing are probably thinking about, like, you know, skiing. I highly, highly doubt that anyone (anyone!) is out on the slopes thinking “Ugh, the steepness of that slope just keeps making me think about how oppressed I am by the patriarchy; I guess I’ll just go home and knit” or “Wow, that slope is so steep that it makes me think of how much better men are than women” or “That slope looks easy; it must be a girl!”

Regulators’ Infectious Zika Incompetence Interdepartmental buck-passing, big-government sloth, and anti-science ideology are allowing a needless spread of the disease. By Henry I. Miller & John J. Cohrssen

The bad news about Zika continues. The epidemic that has spread from Brazil to the rest of Latin America is now raging in Puerto Rico, with thousands of residents infected every day, and the first locally transmitted cases have been reported in the United States — more than a dozen during the past week or so in south Florida. Although the number of known locally transmitted cases is still small in this country, the fact that there are any at all is ominous (if not unexpected): It reflects that there are sufficiently large numbers of people with circulating Zika virus that mosquitoes are finding and biting them and then passing the virus along to another person or persons. We’re certain to see increasing — possibly exponentially increasing — numbers of cases.

Zika causes babies to be born with small heads and malformed brains, and probably other, more subtle defects. It also causes some adults to suffer the progressive paralysis of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Several companies are working on a vaccine, but because of technical issues and regulatory requirements, none is likely to become commercially available before the end of the decade.

Congress and the Obama administration have been at odds about how much additional funding is necessary to respond to the Zika outbreak, but far more significant is the bumbling of Obama’s Food and Drug Administration, which is blocking progress on a vital tool to control Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which carry and transmit not only Zika but also the viruses that cause dengue fever, chikungunya, and yellow fever.

Using molecular genetic-engineering techniques, the British company Oxitec (a subsidiary of America-based Intrexon) has created male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes with a mutation that makes them need a certain chemical (the antibiotic tetracycline) to survive. Without it, they die — as do their offspring — before reaching maturity. If these males are fed a diet containing tetracycline (to keep them alive long enough to reproduce) and then released into the wild over several months, the result is a marked reduction in the mosquito population. Because male mosquitoes don’t bite, they present no health risk, and, because their progeny die before they can reproduce, no genetically engineered mosquitoes persist in the environment.

This approach has already been widely and successfully tested abroad. Efficacy trials of Oxitec’s genetically engineered mosquitoes across Brazil, Panama, and the Cayman Islands all resulted in greater than 90 percent suppression of the wild population of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, and the World Health Organization has endorsed Oxitec’s product. (Aedes aegypti mosquitoes are an invasive species in the Americas, so there’s no possibility that reducing their numbers will disrupt natural ecosystems.)

But U.S. regulators have been paralyzed, unwilling to permit even small-scale field testing. The story behind this monumental snafu has several elements, all of which were avoidable.

The first problem is that the FDA and the Agriculture Department are completely out of sync. The Oxitec mosquito should be regulated by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, which has the authority and expertise to oversee field trials and commercialization of genetically engineered insects. (The technique of using sterile insects to control pest populations was developed in the 1940s by the USDA’s E. F. Knipling, who used irradiated males to eradicate the New World screwworm, an evil-looking parasite that attacks livestock and humans, from the U.S. and much of North America.) But for a combination of reasons, including budgetary concerns and antagonism to genetic engineering among some senior USDA officials, the department demurred. It ceded jurisdiction to the FDA, which is completely unqualified to review the mosquito and unwilling to move its approval along.

The FDA regulates the genetic material introduced into the mosquito as a “new animal drug” — similar to the way it regulates flea medicines and analgesics for dogs and cats. The rationale is that introducing DNA into the genome of the mosquitoes is analogous to dosing them with a drug. (This was an unwise and unnecessary policy decision, but that is a story for another day.) According to statute, in order to be marketed, the genetic material, like other “drugs,” must be shown to be safe and effective for the animal.

That presents a problem, because to approve the Oxitec insect, the FDA would need to employ logic that only a regulator could love: Regulators would somehow have to conclude that the genetic material that causes a male mosquito to self-destruct after producing defective offspring is safe and effective for the mosquito. The FDA could find itself tied up in legal knots if its ultimate approval of the insect were to be challenged in court by environmentalists or anti-genetic-engineering activists.

Nevertheless, in 2011 the FDA, apparently whistling past the graveyard, accepted Oxitec’s application to perform a field trial in the Florida Keys. But because of timidity, incompetence, or under-the-radar political considerations, not a single test mosquito has yet been released. In May of last year, the FDA announced that a proposed environmental assessment of the trial would be issued, and a draft, which concluded there would be “no significant impact,” was finally released this March. It went out for public comment, after which the FDA will analyze the comments and decide whether to issue a final assessment or prepare a complete environmental-impact statement — which could take years.

Given the impending threat of widespread Zika infections, and their sequelae, in the United States, the FDA’s performance — or lack of it — is outrageous.

A Convention of the Absurd The Democratic Convention was an exercise in absurdist theater. By Victor Davis Hanson

Donald Trump, to the degree he is coherent, wants Americans to think the following of the Obama administration, the Clinton candidacy, and the entire progressive enterprise. His three-part writ could be summed up as follows:

1) Obama has doubled the national debt in just eight years. He has abdicated U.S. leadership abroad, was taken for a patsy by duplicitous trade partners, has deliberately divided races and tribes at home for transient political advantage, has nationalized health care into a mess, has overregulated and overtaxed the economy into near-zero-growth stasis, and has whitewashed all of the above with upbeat banalities about hope and change.

2) During Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the Obama administration oversaw the destruction of the modern Middle East, ignored the rise of ISIS, engineered a failed reset that empowered Putin’s Russia, let China systematize unfair and injurious trade practices that fuel an aggressive foreign policy, and alienated traditional friends while courting longstanding enemies. Clinton’s record of government service is one of decades of prevarication, malfeasance, and corruption.

3) Progressivism is a euphemism for a grievance-based agenda with mandated equality of result. An incompetent, uncaring, and always larger government is its agency — a project that demands constant tax increases and ever-greater social spending. It seeks to divide the country up by identity groups, politicize the bureaucracies, and ignore the old working classes, especially the white lower middle class.

The Democrats held a convention to prove all of Trump’s above depictions laughable by attacking Trump himself, often an easy target. Instead, they often seemed to confirm them. Consider:

A) Presidential candidates of the incumbent party usually have no choice but to promise more of the same good times. When they either will not or cannot offer rosy promises of continuity, they do not do well. Harry Truman and George H. W. Bush promised respectively more of Roosevelt and Reagan, and won; Adlai Stevenson and John McCain seemed to run away from their predecessors’ record, and lost.

MY SAY: THE DEMOCRAT’S KHAN JOB

Mainstream media figures from the New York Times to the Huffington Post to CNN are apoplectic Monday as their latest attack on Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has crumbled yet again under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Specifically, the newest line of attack to fall apart is the criticism of Trump over Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father who spoke at the Democratic National Convention last week.

Over the weekend and for the past few days since Khan spoke alongside his wife Ghazala Khan about their son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in Iraq in 2004, media-wide reporters, editors, producers, and anchors have tried to lay criticism on Trump over the matter. They thought they had a good one, a specific line of attack that pitted Trump against the military—and supposedly showed him as a big meanie racist in the process.

But, as Breitbart News showed on Monday midday, that clearly was not the case. Khizr Khan has all sorts of financial, legal, and political connections to the Clintons through his old law firm, the mega-D.C. firm Hogan Lovells LLP. That firm did Hillary Clinton’s taxes for years, starting when Khan still worked there involved in, according to his own website, matters “firm wide”—back in 2004. It also has represented, for years, the government of Saudi Arabia in the United States. Saudi Arabia, of course, is a Clinton Foundation donor which—along with the mega-bundlers of thousands upon thousands in political donations to both of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2016—plays right into the “Clinton Cash” narrative.

All of this information was publicly available, and accessible to anyone—including any of these reporters, and Breitbart News—with a basic Google search. Anyone interested in doing research about the subjects they are reporting on—otherwise known as responsible journalism—would have checked into these matters. But clearly, none in the mainstream media did—probably because, as Fox News’ Chad Pergram noted, Democrats “sense blood in the water over” the whole Khan controversy.

Earlier on Monday, as CNN host Kate Bolduan stacked a panel with three anti-Trump analysts against Scottie Nell Hughes—the only Trump supporter present—Bolduan admitted she has not done basic research about Khan.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, what law firm he’s connected to,” Bolduan, a CNN anchor, plainly admitted on live television on Monday during a discussion with Hughes.

Pope Francis: A Fool or Liar for Islam? The pontiff’s shocking statements on “Christians” who kill. August 2, 2016 Raymond Ibrahim

At a time when Muslims all around the world are terrorizing and slaughtering non-Muslims in the name of Islam, Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, continues trying to distance Islam from violence.

Last Sunday a journalist asked him about the recent and “barbarous assassination of Fr. Jacques Hamel” in France, and how the priest was clearly “killed in the name of Islam.” To this Francis

replied that he doesn’t like speaking about Islamic violence because there is plenty of Christian violence as well… [He] said that every day when he browses the newspapers, he sees violence in Italy perpetrated by Christians: “this one who has murdered his girlfriend, another who has murdered the mother-in-law… and these are baptized Catholics! There are violent Catholics! If I speak of Islamic violence, I must speak of Catholic violence. And no, not all Muslims are violent, not all Catholics are violent. It is like a fruit salad; there’s everything.”

Is the Pope really that dense? Is he incapable of distinguishing between violence committed in the name of a religion, and violence committed in contradiction of a religion?

Yes, Catholics—and people of all religions, sects, creeds—commit violence. That is because humans are prone to violence (or, to use Christian language that some—maybe not Francis—might understand, humans are fallen creatures). And yes, the Catholics that Francis’ cites do not commit crimes—murdering girlfriends and mother-in-law—because of any teaching contained in Christianity or Catholicism; on the contrary, Christian teachings of mercy and forgiveness are meant to counter such impulses.

On the other hand, the violence that Muslims are committing around the world—the beheadings, the sex slavery, the church burnings—are indeed contained in and a product of Islam, and they have been from day one.

Francis continued offering half-truths in the interview. After he acknowledged that there are “violent persons of this religion [Islam],” he immediately added that “in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists. Fundamentalists. We have them.”

This is another sloppy generalization. Sure, “in pretty much every religion there is always a small group of fundamentalists,” but that which is “fundamental” to them widely differs. One may say that Muslim and Christian fundamentalists adhere to a literalist/strict reading of their scriptures. While that statement may be true, left unsaid by those who think the issue is settled right there is: what do the Bible and Koran actually teach?

Khizr Khan’s Saudi Ties Is Saudi Arabia trying to manipulate the U.S. presidential election? Robert Spencer

Are the Saudis trying to make sure that the candidate of their choice is elected President of the United States this November?

Khizr Khan is more than just the father of slain Muslim U.S. serviceman Humayun Khan and the mainstream media’s flavor of the moment in its ongoing efforts to demonize and destroy Donald Trump. As far as the Obama administration and Hillary campaign are concerned, he is a living validation of the success of their strategy against “extremism”: by refusing to identify the enemy as having anything to do with Islam, they draw moderate Muslims to their side and move them to fight against terrorism. By contrast, Trump, in their view, alienates these moderates and drives them into the arms of the terrorists.

That all sounds great. There’s just one catch: Khizr Khan, and the Clinton campaign, have extensive ties to the Saudis – far more extensive than any possible connection that Donald Trump’s campaign may have had to Russia’s alleged involvement in the leak of emails that revealed that the entire Democratic Party presidential nominating process was rigged from the start. Not that the mainstream media will pause from speculating about Trump and the Russians long enough to tell you any facts about Khizr Khan, Hillary and the Saudis.

Intelius records that Khizr Khan has worked at Hogan Lovells Llp. According to the Washington Free Beacon, “Hogan Lovells LLP, another U.S. firm hired by the Saudis, is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia through 2016, disclosures show. Robert Kyle, a lobbyist from the firm, has bundled $50,850 for Clinton’s campaign.”

The Free Beacon added that the Saudi government has “supplied the Clinton Foundation with millions. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has given between $10 and $25 million to the foundation while Friends of Saudi Arabia has contributed between $1 and $5 million.”

And so we were treated to the spectacle of an employee of a firm that is registered to work for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia lambasting Donald Trump at the Democratic National Convention, and then (lo and behold!) becoming a media darling as he excoriates Trump for his “black soul.”

Might the government of Saudi Arabia, which has spent countless bullions of dollars spreading the virulent and violent Wahhabi strain of Islam around the world, have any interest in making sure that a presidential candidate who speaks more forthrightly about the Islamic terror threat than any presidential candidate has since John Quincy Adams, and who has vowed to take concrete steps to counter that threat, is defeated? Is that why Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous indignation and misleading disinformation about the relationship of Islamic jihad terrorism to Islam, was not only featured at the Democratic National Convention but has dominated the news cycle ever since?

This has gone on long enough. The 28-page section of the 9/11 report detailing Saudi involvement in the September 11, 2001 jihad attacks were just finally released (albeit with substantial portions still redacted), after being kept classified for fifteen years by one President who held hands with the Saudi King and another who bowed to him. And for fifteen years, the U.S. has done little or nothing to free itself from dependence upon Saudi oil and develop alternative energy sources. Why not? We know the Saudis have kept the Clintons’ palms abundantly greased. Who else’s?

Hillary: ‘Director Comey Said My Answers Were Truthful’ By Debra Heine (Huh????!!!!)

Hillary Clinton has spent a lifetime in politics lying about matters both big and small. This is not exactly a revelation. Over twenty years ago, longtime New York Times political columnist William Safire wrote about his painful realization that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was a “congenital liar” in his famous essay “Blizzard of Lies.” While most of time her tendency toward dishonesty manifests itself to cover up her own corruption and malfeasance, sometimes her fibs are intended to evoke sympathy. Other times — one suspects — she lies just for the fun of it.

It should be well established at this point that Clinton is not one to shy away from telling whoppers when the situation requires it. Her modus operandi these days in fact seems to be “lie big or go home.”

Which is exactly what she did on Fox News this weekend, earning herself four Pinocchios from the Washington Post.

“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace played a video of Clinton saying: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified materials. I am confident that I never sent nor received any information that was classified at the time. I had not sent classified material nor received anything marked classified.” Following the clip, Wallace said, “After a long investigation, FBI Director James Comey said none of those things that you told the American public were true.”

Clinton said in reply: “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people, that there were decisions discussed and made to classify retroactively certain of the emails.”

Unfortunately for Hillary, that wasn’t the end of it. Wallace then played a video of the exchange between Comey and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails either sent or received. Was that true?

COMEY: That’s not true.

GOWDY: Secretary Clinton said, “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Was that true?

COMEY: There was classified material emailed.

Clinton stumbled a bit after that.