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September 2016

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The Next President Unbound There is reason to worry about both candidates abusing power as president, because Obama and the press normalized executive overreach. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 29th, 2016

Donald Trump’s supporters see a potential Hillary Clinton victory in November as the end of any conservative chance to restore small government, constitutional protections, fiscal sanity, and personal liberty.

Clinton’s progressives swear that a Trump victory would spell the implosion of America as they know it, alleging Trump parallels with every dictator from Josef Stalin to Adolf Hitler.

Part of the frenzy over 2016 as a make-or-break election is because a closely divided Senate’s future may hinge on the coattails of the presidential winner. An aging Supreme Court may also translate into perhaps three to four court picks for the next president.

Yet such considerations only partly explain the current election frenzy.

The model of the imperial Obama presidency is the greater fear. Over the last eight years, Obama has transformed the powers of presidency in a way not seen in decades.

Congress talks grandly of “comprehensive immigration reform,” but Obama, as he promised with his pen and phone, bypassed the House and Senate to virtually open the border with Mexico. He largely ceased deportations of undocumented immigrants. He issued executive-order amnesties. And he allowed entire cities to be exempt from federal immigration law.

The press said nothing about this extraordinary overreach of presidential power, mainly because these largely illegal means were used to achieve the progressive ends favored by many journalists.

The Senate used to ratify treaties. In the past, a president could not unilaterally approve the Treaty of Versailles, enroll the United States in the League of Nations, fight in Vietnam or Iraq without congressional authorization, change existing laws by non-enforcement, or rewrite bankruptcy laws.

Not now. Obama set a precedent that he did not need Senate ratification to make a landmark treaty with Iran on nuclear enrichment.

He picked and chose which elements of the Affordable Care Act would be enforced — predicated on his 2012 reelection efforts.

Rebuffed by Congress, Obama is now slowly shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center by insidiously having inmates sent to other countries.

Respective opponents of both Trump and Clinton should be worried.

Either winner could follow the precedent of allowing any sanctuary city or state in the United States to be immune from any federal law found displeasing — from the liberal Endangered Species Act and federal gun-registration laws to conservative abortion restrictions.

Could anyone complain if Trump’s secretary of state were investigated by Trump’s attorney general for lying about a private e-mail server — in the manner of Clinton being investigated by Loretta Lynch?

Would anyone object should a President Trump agree to a treaty with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the same way Obama overrode Congress with the Iran deal?

If a President Clinton decides to strike North Korea, would she really need congressional authorization, considering Obama’s unauthorized Libyan bombing mission?

What would Americans say if President Trump’s IRS — mirror-imaging Lois Lerner — hounded the progressive nonprofit organizations of George Soros?

Partisans are shocked that the press does not go after Trump’s various inconsistencies and fibs about his supposed initial opposition to the Iraq War, or press him on the details of Trump University.

Conservatives counter that Clinton has never had to come clean about the likely illegal pay-for-play influence peddling of the Clinton Foundation or her serial lies about her private e-mail server.

But why, if elected, should either worry much about media scrutiny?

Obama established the precedent that a president should be given a pass on lying to the American people. Did Americans, as Obama repeatedly promised, really get to keep their doctors and health plans while enjoying lower premiums and deductibles, as the country saved billions through his Affordable Care Act?

More recently, did Obama mean to tell a lie when he swore that he sent cash to the Iranians only because he could not wire them the money — when in truth the administration had wired money to Iran in the past? Was cash to Iran really not a ransom for American hostages, as the president asserted? Did Obama really, as he insisted, never e-mail Clinton at her private unsecured server?

Can the next president, like Obama, double the national debt and claim to be a deficit hawk?

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A SEAL Goes to Congress By Elise Cooper Ryan Zinke (R-MONTANA)

By on September 29th, 2016

“Since he is Jewish, he agrees that people should not be comparing the refugees of today with the Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis. “For me it’s like two completely different subsets, apples and oranges. Some of the refugees today seem to have no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and do not assimilate well. There should be experts trained to determine a high threat, medium threat, and low threat. Just look how this administration processed illegal immigrants who were supposed to be deported, but were granted illegal status here.”
Retired Navy SEAL Ryan Zinke is running for re-election as Montana’s sole congressman. He is in a tight race against a Democrat liberal enough to make Hillary Clinton appear like a conservative. Recently, those who served in the U.S. armed forces, like Zinke, have decided to extend their service by becoming the new leaders in Washington DC. He interviewed with American Thinker, sounding off about issues important to him and this country.

Once elected, Zinke knew he must wade through the waters once again, but this time as the first Navy SEAL to go to Congress. Having to maneuver through the Washington bureaucracy has been a lot harder than performing his duties as a SEAL. “I went to Congress to give veterans a voice and because we understand what it takes to get the job done. We are less Red or Blue, but more Red, White, and Blue. Having been overseas we understand the importance of how national security/defense are critical in keeping this country free.”

A twenty-three-year veteran, he ended his military career as a commander and trainer. This propelled him to understand what it takes to become a U.S. representative, bringing character and leadership to Washington. He told American Thinker, “When you go out on the field, when you’re in battle, then you have to operate as a team and understand you’re doing it for a higher purpose. I think we should re-establish what the higher purpose is. We were all sent here, Republican or Democrat, to represent our district and also look at what’s in the best interest of this country.”

One of the most important issues to him is the vetting of Middle Eastern refugees. He helped to sponsor the American Safe Act, which passed the House of Representatives with a bipartisan vote in November 2015. The bill’s purpose is to bolster the refugee screening process. After hearing the FBI director’s testimony he knew that it is very difficult to vet these refugees because there is no database. Having fought in Iraq he understands “In Iraq and Syria you’re looking at a country that doesn’t have indoor plumbing. And yet we think that we have a database where we can determine who is a terrorist, who is a terrorist sympathizer? And who is not and who is an innocent victim? Quite frankly, we don’t have the database because a database doesn’t exist. So I think the right path is to make sure we have a vetting process where we can identify the threat. And we need to stop and pause. Provide more transparency. And when we do have refugees, we need to ensure those refugees are not terrorists. I see it as extremely dangerous since we are still at war.”

Since he is Jewish, he agrees that people should not be comparing the refugees of today with the Jewish refugees escaping the Nazis. “For me it’s like two completely different subsets, apples and oranges. Some of the refugees today seem to have no allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and do not assimilate well. There should be experts trained to determine a high threat, medium threat, and low threat. Just look how this administration processed illegal immigrants who were supposed to be deported, but were granted illegal status here.”

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

America’s Versailles Set By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 29th, 2016

During the last days of the Ancien Régime, French Queen Marie Antoinette frolicked in a fake rural village not far from the Versailles Palace—the Hameau de la Reine (“the Queen’s hamlet”). “Peasant” farmers and herdsmen were imported to interact, albeit carefully, with the royal retinue in an idyllic amusement park. The Queen would sometimes dress up as a milkmaid and with her royal train do a few chores on the “farm” to emulate the romanticized masses, but in safe, apartheid seclusion from them.

The French Revolution was already on the horizon and true peasants were shortly to march on Versailles, but the Queen had no desire to visit the real French countryside to learn of the crushing poverty of those who actually milked cows and herded sheep for a living. It is hard to know what motivated the queen to visit the Hameau—was it simply to relax in her own convenient and sanitized Arcadia, or was it some sort of pathetic attempt to better understand the daily lives of the increasing restive French masses?

The American coastal royalty does not build fake farms outside of its estates. But these elites, too, can grow just as bored with their privileged lives as Marie Antoinette did. Instead of hanging out with milk maids in ornamental villages, our progressive elites, at the same safe distance from the peasantry, prefer to show their solidarity with the dispossessed through angry rhetoric.

Take the case of Colin Kaepernick, the back-up quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers who makes $19 million a year (or about $20,000 per minute of regular season play). He has been cited by National Football League officials in the past for his use of the N-word, yet he refuses to stand for the pregame singing of the national anthem because he believes that his country is racist and does not warrant his respect. His stunt gained a lot of publicity and he now sees himself as a man of the revolutionary barricades. A number of other NFL athletes, as well as those in other sports, have likewise refused to stand for the national anthem to express solidarity with what they see as modern versions of the oppressed peasantry. But Kaepernick and his peers make more in one month than many Americans make in an entire lifetime. Still, for these members of the twenty-first-century Versailles crowd, the easiest way of understanding the lives of the underclass is expressing empathy for them for no more than a minute or two.

Lately, the entire Clinton clan has created a sort of Hameau de la Reine of the mind. Chelsea Clinton, for example, is married to hedge-fund operator Marc Mezvinsky (whose suspect Greek fund just went broke), and she once made over $600,000 for her part-time job as an NBC correspondent. She serves in a prominent role and is on the board of the non-profit billion-dollar Clinton Foundation, which has been cited for donating an inordinately small amount of its annual budget (often less than 15 percent) to charity work, while providing free jet travel for the Clinton family and offering sinecures for Clinton political operatives in between various Clinton campaigns. Explaining why she works at the Clinton Foundation and for other non-profits, Chelsea confessed, in Marie Antoinette style, that “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” She cared enough, though, to purchase a $10.5 million Manhattan apartment not long ago rather than, say, rent a flat in the Bronx.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Muslim mall shooter voted three times but is not a US citizen : Martin Barillas

By on September 29th, 2016

Arcan Cetin, the suspect in the deadly Sept. 24 Cascade Mall shooting in Washington State, is facing prosecution for killing five people in just 60 seconds at a Macy’s store. Cetin used a Ruger rifle with a 25-round clip. He already had a criminal record going back two years and was charged in 2015 for assaulting his stepfather. After his arrest, he received a mental evaluation to determine his mental competence. Subsequently, he confessed to the crimes.

In addition, he may be facing additional investigation into his voting record and citizenship.

Cetin was born in Turkey and is not an American citizen, according to federal authorities cited by KING 5 News in Washington. This means that he cannot legally vote in the United States. However, records show that he registered to vote in 2014 and voted in three election cycles, including the May presidential primary.

The young Muslim man emigrated to the U.S. from his native Turkey as a minor and is permanent resident of the U.S. While permanent residents may apply for U.S. citizenship, KING’s sources say that Cetin’s status has not changed.

In the State of Washington, voters can merely attest their American citizenship when registering online or registering to vote at an office of the Department of Licensing. State law in Washington does not require any proof of citizenship. It is thus that state officials contend that the voter registration process operates under an honor system rather than rigorous proof.

Secretary of State Kim Wyman said that an investigation is going forward in an effort to preserve public confidence in the integrity of elections, and due process for Cetina. In an interview with KING, Wyman said “We don’t have a provision in state law that allows us either county elections officials or the Secretary of State’s office to verify someone’s citizenship.” In Washington State, the penalty for voting as a non- U.S. citizen can result in five years of prison time or a $10,000, according to state law.

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The FBI’s Hillary email probe is looking even more like a coverup Paul Sperry

By on September 29th, 2016

It’s bad enough that FBI Director James Comey agreed to pass out immunity deals like candy to material witnesses and potential targets of his investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illegal private e-mail server.

But now we learn that some of them were immunized despite lying to Comey’s investigators.

In the latest bombshell from Congress’ probe into what’s looking more and more like an FBI whitewash (or coverup) of criminal behavior by the Democratic nominee and her aides, the Denver-based tech who destroyed subpoenaed e-mails from Clinton’s server allegedly lied to FBI agents after he got an immunity deal.
That’s normally a felony. As a federal prosecutor, Comey tossed Martha Stewart in jail for it and helped convict Scooter Libby for it as well. Yet the key Clinton witness still maintained his protection from criminal prosecution.

With Comey’s blessing, Obama prosecutors cut the deal with the e-mail administrator, Paul Combetta, in 2015 in exchange for his full cooperation and honest testimony. But the House Judiciary Committee revealed Wednesday that he falsely told agents in a Feb. 18 interview that he had no knowledge that e-mails he bleached from the server were under congressional orders to be preserved as evidence.

In a second interview on May 3, Combetta admitted he, in fact, did know. But he still refused to reveal what he discussed with Clinton’s former aides and lawyer during a 2014 conference call about deleting the e-mails.

Instead of asking Attorney General Loretta Lynch to revoke his immunity deal and squeezing him, Comey let him go because he was a “low-level guy,” he testified at the House hearing. It’s yet another action by Comey that has left former prosecutors shaking their heads.

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Let’s Lock The Door To Islam by Geert Wilders

By on September 29th, 2016

Yesterday, I visited Maassluis. It is a town near Rotterdam, where the indigenous Dutch inhabitants have become the victims of immigrant youths of Moroccan descent.

Cars have been demolished, houses vandalized, people threatened. The Dutch no longer feel free and safe in their own city. When the local radio station interviewed some of the victims and referred to the perpetrators as Moroccans, it received an anonymous letter: “You are racists! Your time will come! I won’t take care of it because I am too old. But our boys are the new soldiers.”

Maassluis. It is just one of the many Dutch towns and neighborhoods terrorized by Moroccan or Turkish youth gangs. Others are Schilderswijk, Oosterwei, Kanaleneiland, Zaandam, Helmond. Not surprisingly, a poll shows that 43% of the Dutch people want fewer Moroccan immigrants in our country. These people are not racists; they are decent people, patriots who love their country and do not want to lose it.

The great Ronald Reagan once said that “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” These wise words are more true today than ever before. We are the free men and women of the West.

Freedom is our birthright. But if we fail to defend it, we are bound to lose it. And, sadly, that is exactly what is happening today.

2016’s Black Summer of Jihad, with terror attacks all over the free world, teaches us that the enemies of freedom are already among us. The ruling elites all over the Western world have accepted millions of people into our countries without demanding that they assimilate.

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Georgetown University’s Errant Priest-Professor : Andrew Harrod

By on September 29th, 2016

Who writes of the “stubborn, feckless resistance of Hamas,” an anti-Israeli jihadist terrorist group? Astonishingly, it is Georgetown University ethics professor and Catholic priest Drew Christiansen, a man like many Georgetown academics who pairs distinguished credentials with abiding antipathy towards Israel and apologetics for Islam.

Christiansen is the former Jesuit weekly America’s editor-in-chief and director of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) Office of International Justice and Peace. His resume can thus impart considerable authority to his causes. Accordingly, he recently addressed on September 12 yet another event against “Islamophobia” at Georgetown’s Saudi-funded Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).

Notwithstanding Christiansen’s erudite pedigree, his views concerning Islam and Israel are not at all nuanced. His priestly colleague, the late eminent conservative scholar and commentator FatherRichard John Neuhaus, already discerned in 2008 that America “under its editor, Fr. Drew Christiansen, has an apparently irrepressible urge to engage in bashing Israel.” The same outlook dominates a National Catholic Reporter blog column begun in 2014 by him and his coauthor Ra’fat Aldajani, described by Christiansen as a “Palestinian-American who represents the majority Palestinian view.”

The pair unequivocally describe Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as the “West’s last colonial war.” Apparently oblivious to longstanding Arab attempts to destroy an Israel condemned as illegitimate, these authors claim that “Israeli occupation of Palestinian land” after Israel’s 1967 Six Day War victory is the “root cause of the conflict.” This occupation is “illegal,” they proclaim, even though it resulted from Israel’s defensive war and is legitimated by United Nations Security CouncilResolution 242. As properly interpreted, this resolution calls upon Israel to make undefined territorial withdrawals while receiving in return “secure and recognized boundaries.”

Not heeding Israeli legal claims to the Jewish ancestral heartland of Judea and Samaria captured by Israel in 1967, Aldajani and Christiansen deem Israeli settlements here “more properly ‘colonies’ as the French call them.” This Israeli “predatory land grab” also includes Jerusalem and “Israel’s illegal and internationally rejected claim” to the entire city unified by Israel’s 1967 victory. “No amount of insisting that all of Jerusalem is Israel’s ‘undivided and eternal capital’ will change the reality that it never will be,” the pair writes, who call for renewed division of the city into the capitals of Israel and a future Palestinian state.

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Hillary failed as secretary of state – why would president be any different? By: Betsy McCaughey

By on September 29th, 2016

Hillary Clinton boasts that her experience traveling to 112 countries as secretary of state qualifies her to be president. Don’t believe it.http://nypost.com/

Evidence shows she left the State Department in shambles and our nation weaker. Her record at Foggy Bottom disqualifies her to be president.

Her failures go beyond leaving four Americans to die in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012, the ridiculous Russian “reset” and the carnage in Syria that she and President Obama idly watched unfold – and that gets more horrific daily.

A string of investigative reports from the Obama administration shows that she botched key management jobs as secretary of state, threatening American lives and our diplomatic secrets.

Clinton’s State Department repeatedly rebuffed requests for additional security for the vulnerable compound at Benghazi, Libya. The result? Heavily armed terrorists were able to storm the compound and kill Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

But Benghazi wasn’t an isolated case. Clinton failed to secure diplomatic posts in Pakistan, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and other global hot spots. Internal State Department reports show the posts lacked emergency plans in case of attack. Guards assigned to them had no training in chemical or biological threats and, amazingly, some hadn’t undergone background checks.

Clinton tried to weasel out of taking the blame for Benghazi, testifying to Congress that she wasn’t personally involved in embassy security. But e-mails later revealed that was false.

Investigators also point to Clinton’s total neglect of cybersecurity. The Bush administration – reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center – had made it a top priority to protect information flow among embassies, the CIA and the FBI.

But Clinton dropped the ball, creating what the department’s inspector general called “undue risk in the management of information.”

In November 2013, the IG issued an alert to the State Department’s top executives about the urgent “recurring weaknesses” in cybersecurity that had been red-flagged in six previous reports between 2011 and 2013, almost all on Clinton’s watch. The “recurring weaknesses” had still not been addressed, including vulnerabilities to hackers.

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Lejla Colak Video: What My Experience With Islam Tells Me About “Islamophobia”.

By on September 29th, 2016

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/09/29/lejla-colak-video-what-my-experience-with-islam-tells-me-about-islamophobia/

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Hillary’s Talk of ‘Implicit Bias’ Should Scare Every American This is a road we don’t want to travel. By David French

By on September 28th, 2016

You’re guilty and you don’t know it. Sure, you think you’re a decent person who treats people fairly, judging them on the content of their character and not the color of the skin. But let’s face it: You’re deluded. Especially if you happen to be white, you’re biased and you don’t even know it. You’re unaware of your own privilege, and of the extent to which your beliefs, speech, and even mannerisms oppress people of color. It’s time to confess. It’s time to be re-educated. It’s time to rid yourself of your false consciousness.

This is the message of the modern campus radical, of the diversity trainer, and, increasingly, of the Democratic nominee for president, Hillary Clinton.

Like many of the most dangerous progressive ideas, “implicit bias” or “unconscious racism” seems reasonable enough at first glance: Aren’t we all shaped by our environment and upbringing to make snap judgments about people? Aren’t those judgments often wrong? Couldn’t we all use exposure to different cultures and ideas to help us get past preconceived notions and casual bigotries? What could be wrong with that?

Indeed, in the debate Monday night, Clinton framed her discussion of “implicit bias” as a malady we all suffer from, telling Lester Holt: “I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.” Well, yes, too many people do jump to conclusions. So, what’s the solution, Hillary?

When it comes to policing, since it can have literally fatal consequences, I have said, in my first budget, we would put money into that budget to help us deal with implicit bias by retraining a lot of our police officers.

Wait. What? If we’re all biased, who’s training whom? Let’s be very clear: When it moves from abstract to concrete, all this talk about “implicit bias” gets very sinister, very quickly. It allows radicals to indict entire communities as bigoted, it relieves them of the obligation of actually proving their case, and it allows them to use virtually any negative event as a pretext for enforcing their ideological agenda.

Is this overblown? Well, let’s look at how Clinton has used “implicit bias” to deal with a specific incident: the shooting of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Okla.:

Hillary Clinton comments on #TerenceCruthcher on @SteveHarveyFM: “How many times do we have to see this in our country?” Full: pic.twitter.com/MdCbvHjHF5
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) September 20, 2016

This is extraordinarily irresponsible. How does Hillary possibly know that Crutcher’s shooting had anything at all to do with race? I don’t recall her being in Tulsa that night. There is no “we” about a police officer’s decision to pull the trigger. So why are we talking about collective guilt?

Ah, but that’s the magic of “implicit bias” and “unconscious racism.” Skepticism of its existence is proof of its existence, and you can just “know” that Crutcher or Philando Castile or Michael Brown or Keith Scott would be alive today if they had been white. In other words, the very existence of the incident proves the racism. The denials of racism prove the racism. And everyone who’s “keeping score” or “gets it” knows the real truth.

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