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November 2016

FIRST POST ELECTION JOKE: Kerry Offers to Help Start Trump Admin ‘Off on the Right Footing’ By Bridget Johnson

Secretary of State John Kerry said he instructed State Department personnel this morning to keep pressing forward with the administration’s foreign policy goals until Inauguration Day and to prepare for the “amazing peaceful transfer of power” enshrined in America’s “beautiful” democracy.

Meeting with Foreign Minister Murray McCully in Christchurch, New Zealand, today, Kerry deviated from remarks on the bilateral relationship to note the “momentous election” on Tuesday.

“I want to offer my congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump and wish him well for the American people, for him, for his family, on the enormous challenges that he will undertake to resolve, to meet, with the same spirit, I hope, that characterizes every presidency, Republican or Democrat, to protect the interests of our people and uphold the values of our country,” Kerry said.

He also expressed “appreciation and respect” for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “I know how hard she fought. I know what it takes out of a family, having been there and done that,” the 2004 Democratic Party nominee said.

“With a transition like this, the issues that we face don’t go away. The values with which we face them are the same values the day after the election that they were the day before. And so I sent a note to all of our personnel within the State Department this morning reiterating what I have said to them personally before I left the country to come here, and that is that we have a time-honored tradition of a very peaceful and constructive transfer of power within administrations when that occurs in the United States,” he said. “And I have instructed everybody in the State Department to make sure that while the issues still are in front of us, we will continue to work every day between now and January 20th in order to further the interests of our country, protect the safety and security of our people, and guarantee that we address those issues and concerns, which are the same today as they were the day before the election.”

“That means making people safer, working to continue to build relationships, which is why I’m here, and continuing to work not just for the United States but for the better prosperity and stability and security of people all around the world.”

Kerry said he also instructed his staff to work on the transition itself. “And we will do everything in our power, as I have instructed our team, to work with the incoming administration as fully and openly as possible, to be as helpful as possible, so that the transfer of power will be as smooth as it possibly can without missing a beat on the important issues before us,” he said.

Virginia University Offers ‘Healing Space’ for Distraught #NeverTrump Students By J. Christian Adams

George Mason University is offering a “healing space” gathering for students distraught over President-Elect Donald Trump’s victory. The snowflakes unable to cope with Trump’s win gathered after Student Body President Nathan Pittman sent an email with the subject header “2016 Post-Election Healing Space” to all Mason students. It said:

Mason Community – Healing Space – Post 2016 ElectionStudent Leaders in the Mason Community have come together to provide a space for students to gather in the wake of yesterday’s Presidential Election. Please feel free to stop by and have conversations with other members of the Mason Community. Time: 7:30pm, Wednesday, November 9 Place: The Hub Ballroom, Fairfax Campus Hope to see many members of the Mason Community.

Earlier, the vice president for university life, Rose Pascarell, offered support services for students unable to cope with Trump’s win.
Psychological and counseling services were made available to students affected by Trump’s win. The email from Rose Pascarell states, in full:

We have just completed a long and hard-fought presidential election, which has forced a national dialogue on a number of issues and sparked a range of emotions. Reactions to the results span a continuum from jubilation and optimism to despair and fear and everything in between. Regardless of your perspective, we want to acknowledge the range of emotions that many in our Mason community have experienced throughout this process.University Life staff are here to provide support. You can visit any University Life Office for assistance. A list of University Life Offices is available at ulife.gmu.edu. For those who live on campus, Housing and Residence Life staff are also available 24/7. And counselors from Counseling and Psychological Services are available to provide support to any students experiencing emotional distress (caps.gmu.edu; 703-993-2380).

For many, this is a time to discuss and make sense of the outcomes. University Life will be hosting a post-election conversation space in Patriots Lounge, Student Union Building I, from 3:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. today and 10:00 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. tomorrow. Snacks and refreshments will be provided. University Life staff members will also be present to provide support and refer students to campus resources, as needed. For those who prefer to take a break from politics, a list of other events and activities can be found at getconnected.gmu.edu. In addition to these gatherings, there will also be opportunities ahead for post-election analysis by some of our Mason faculty and content experts.

American Muslims aim their animosity at Trump, not radical Islam By Ed Straker

The striking thing about the series of American Muslim viewpoint articles published recently is that we see Muslims complaining vociferously about the election of Donald Trump while at the same time being completely silent about the dangers of radical Islam. It causes me to think that too many American Muslims have a bigger problem with Donald Trump than they do with radicalized Islam.

On Slate, one Muslim proudly announces that he is not shaving his beard and that his hijabi wife will continue to comply with sharia law, even though Donald Trump has never asked him to shave anything.

Tuesday was a slow-dawning personalization of the election for me. First came a wave of anxiety at the thought of Trump in the Oval Office. Then came the nausea, realizing what it means for our nation’s moral compass.

What about the moral compass of Islam? The writer talks about fictionally being forced to shave his beard and remove the hijab. Does he realize that in many Muslim countries, people are killed for not wearing a beard, for not wearing a hijab? Does he realize how he sounds?

… we have someone who has made it abundantly clear that he believes Islam is at war with the United States and that regarding your neighbor with suspicion (and perhaps even hostility) is not just a protected right but a moral imperative. Why wouldn’t his supporters lash out at us? Who is protecting us?

Radical Islamists are massacring Americans, and this arrogant, self-absorbed Muslim is worried about himself. Last I checked, no Muslims were being killed in America for being Muslim.

You can read the same thing in the New York Times, where another Muslim fears for his safety now that Trump has been elected president.

As Mr. Trump’s base rejoices, American Muslim parents are furiously WhatsApping and texting one another about how they’re terrified for their children’s safety. Does my 2-year-old son, Ibrahim, and 3-month-old baby girl, Nusayba, deserve to be bullied at school for simply having a Muslim name? Do their mosques deserves to be vandalized?

The crumbling Clinton criminal enterprise By Russ Vaughn

Sadness reigns in progressives’ America – a grief so profound as to provoke outbreaks of acute liberal insanity. But the grief, anxiety, and outright fear affecting progressive America for the moment must surely pale against those same emotions within Clinton, Incorporated, whose future fortunes have done a disastrous one-eighty since early Wednesday morning.

Think about it for a moment: with no more promise of future access to the presidential inner circle, what third-world government or major global enterprise truly wants to pay a cool half-mil to a now not so cool Bill for his special insights? Do you suppose that all those Wall Street swells are breathlessly waiting to hear the unique perspectives of a now not the first female president at a tidy 250 grand a pop? Sure they are.

But of course, the influence-peddling speeches were just chump change, mere walking around money for high rollers like Hill and Bill. The real cash, the huge multi-million-dollar payoffs that even bought pre-presidential secretary of state access, has until now come in the form of donations to the various non-profit entities the Clintons created to funnel their filthy lucre into – huge amounts of cash that could be washed, rinsed, dried, possibly even nationally dyed before being made available to maintain their one-percent lifestyle. It occurs to me that perhaps there is no longer a waiting list of sheiks and Middle Eastern potentates eager to pony up petro-dollars to ensure that a Clinton presidency maintains a firm grip on the now closed tap of federal petroleum resources, as the current occupant of the Oval Office long has.

In six months or so, when the new U.S. attorney general appoints a special prosecutor to investigate the Clinton Foundation and all its related entities, does any of us really believe that Fortune 500 companies are going to be as keen as they once were to have themselves listed as donors to anything that has the Clinton brand on it? Without the family-White House link, will billionaires feel so warmly inclined toward neophyte investor and Clinton son-in-law Mark Mezvinsky, whose now defunct Greek hedge fund apparently “lost” huge sums of its investments? Ever wonder just where “lost” investments end up?

The Trump Opportunity by Daniel Henninger

Now what?

Nothing will be more important to getting that answer right in the Trump victory period than separating fact from abundant fiction.

The 2016 presidential campaign was a magic mushroom tour through the American psyche—its voters, its politicians and not least the exotic varieties of people who populate what we call “the media.”

For all of them, the Trump candidacy seemed to be a national Rorschach inkblot. Everyone looked at the same Trump events, Trump speeches and Trump polls and interpreted them as individual political biases and desires.

There was one exception to this mania: the collective wisdom of the American voter.

In normal times—and these are not normal times—it would have been impossible for a candidate outputting Donald Trump’s chamber of spoken and personal horrors to win. (Sometime in the next year, John McCain deserves an apology.)

What we learned on Nov. 8, 2016, was that voters looked past or through all the atmospheric debris of this campaign and focused on what mattered—the direction of their country. Its economy, its politics and the state of the culture.

One stunning example. White evangelical Christians voted by 81% for the nation’s leading proponent of the Playboy philosophy. They blew past that because they knew that Mr. Trump’s personal life would not bring into the Oval Office the Democratic Party’s triumphant secularism. That is the philosophy that sued Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor into religious obeisance and elevated transgender bathrooms to a litmus test. Thus, their vote.

Another fable propagated everywhere during the campaign, and especially in the time since the Trump victory is that he had unearthed some unknown catacomb of lower-middle-class anger . . . at everything. Mr. Trump himself tagged “globalization” with the blame.

Let us be clear about the economic status of the American middle class, and indeed of the middle-class people in low-growth Europe responding to populist appeals there. Economic life isn’t bad weather. It is the result of politics. Wrong political decisions have economic consequences.

We didn’t have this sense of ennui or dissatisfaction during the growth years of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s or the Clinton presidency in the 1990s. CONTINUE AT SITE

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM FOR CHRIS CHRISTIE……FROM JANET LEVY

Beware of Abu Chris Christie – Supporter of Jihadists and Shariah

Chris Christie, whose state has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country, held an Iftar dinner at the Governor’s Mansion in 2012 and invited his “friend” Imam Mohammed Qatanani, a self-admitted member of Hamas and a defender of a charity that provided funds to children of suicide bombers. Imam Qatanani is the religious leader for the Islamic Center of Passaic County (ICPC) in Paterson, New Jersey, a city known to locals as “Little Ramallah.” In a June 2007 sermon at the ICPC, Imam Qatanani condemned Christians to “eternal hellfire.” He is an advocate of Islamic blasphemy laws that criminalize criticism of Islam.

Christie referred to Qatanani as “a man of great good will” and defended him when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempted to deport him for failing to disclose his arrest and conviction in Israel in 1993 for involvement with Hamas. (Qatanani publicly ranted against Jews and in support of Hamas on the eve of his deportation hearing).

The New Jersey governor has publicly defended Sohail Mohammed, the lawyer who represented Hamas-affiliate Qatanani as well as dozens of detainees swept up by law enforcement after 9/11. Sohail Mohammed is a board member of the Muslim American Union, an organization closely integrated with the ICPC (Qatanani’s mosque) and whose leadership is linked to Hamas. Christie aggressively pushed for Mohammed to become a Superior Court judge leading to speculation that the appointment was a payoff to Imam Qatanani for the ICPC support Christie received for his gubernatorial campaign. Sohail Mohammed publicly defended Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Sami Al-Arian.

Christie has derided anyone who perceives shariah law* as a threat in the U.S. despite the fact that 23 states have already used shariah as a factor in their deliberations. In 2009, a New Jersey judge referenced shariah when he refused a temporary restraining order for a divorced Muslim woman who had been raped and assaulted by her ex-husband, maintaining that Islamic doctrine requires wives to comply with all of their husband’s sexual demands. Under current New Jersey law, non-consensual sex between married persons is considered rape. (Fortunately, the decision was overturned 13 months later).

In 2012, Governor Christie called for an investigation into the NYPD’s counterterrorism procedures as he objected to their conducting surveillance of mosques and a Muslim student group known as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Student Association (MSA). In 2010, Christie publicly proclaimed support for the mosque at the graveyard of 9/11.

HAIL TO THE NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF BY JOAN SWIRSKY

What last night’s victory means is that for the next four and hopefully eight years, we’ll have someone in the White House who actually loves America, and that it is not the self-appointed political so-called experts who choose the American President but We the People!

George Soros––the billionaire puppet-master and sugar daddy behind Trojan Horse Barack Obama and money prostitute Hillary––is now irrelevant. The moneybags hedge-funder, who once boasted that his days as a young man in Hungary collaborating with the Nazis to identify his fellow Jews and send them to their grisly deaths were among the best of his life. But President-elect Trump trumped Soros into oblivion!

Ø The polls are always wrong, manipulated and skewed as they are by leftists.

Ø The media are comprised largely of leftwing shills, including the narcissistic scribes, broadcasters and legislators who spent eight years touting Obama’s incentive-killing, socialist-promoting, and utterly failed ideas, among them Obamacare and Common Core, just two examples of the disastrous programs that will be scrubbed in a Trump presidency, resulting in genuine help for people in matters of health and education for their children.

Ø The pop-up, Soros-financed leftist groups like Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, even the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement against Israel––all based on the left’s hatred and prejudice––will vanish as Americans under President Trump go back to work and come to realize that the psychotic jealousy that fuels these groups has hurt and not helped either themselves or our country.

Ø The IRS, FBI, Justice Department, even a Supreme Court justice, et al, can be had for a price or a threat.

EDWARD CLINE: THE UBIQUITY OF LIES

I can’t think of a better way to open a column on the ubiquity of lies in politics today than by quoting Melanie Phillips from her Jerusalem Post article of October 27th “As I See It: Palestinians step up the jihad of the lie” :

Of all the disturbing issues of our time, the most fundamental is the collapse of the distinction between truth and lies.

When post-modern society decided that the notion of objective truth was bunk and so everything was relative, it also destroyed the idea of a lie. If there’s no such thing as truth, there can be no such thing as a lie. Everything becomes merely a matter of opinion.

Melanie Phillips is a prolific British writer, author of many notable and controversial titles such as Londonistan, All Must have Prizes, and The World Turned Upside Down.

So, it wasn’t just the concept of truth that was attacked or suborned, it was also concept of falsehood that was also banished from objectivity. If a statement is a lie, how would one know it if one’s cognitive faculties were sabotaged, if reason and logic were committed to the dustbin? Reason, logic, and objectivity have already been carted away by the Marxist dustmen in academia, leaving hapless students and taxpayers and mortgaged-to-the-hilt parents with the multi-fortune tab. It explains the state of the culture and the pathetic state of students.

A noteworthy example of how to lie is the British government’s decision to conceal the true ages of Calais “Jungle” children from the public by erecting a screen to shield the true ages of the “children.” The Daily Star of October 23rd reported:

But the new arrivals were shielded from view with a 15ft fence around the entrance to Lunar House in Croydon, south London.

Yale Professor Makes Midterm Optional For Anyone Too Upset With The Election Results

A professor at Yale sent an email out during yesterday’s election coverage to students in the ECON 115 class excusing them from taking a midterm if they found themselves to be too distraught from the results of the election.

The email came after the professor received requests for extensions from some students that were in, “fear for their families.”

This happened at one of the most prestigious universities in the country.

These students will probably go on to be leaders in their chosen fields, and executives in major companies.

Basically run this country in twenty years.

So what does it tell you if they are unable to handle the outcome of an election?

Try not to laugh too hard reading this:

The battle over microaggressions going on at our universities is both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. By Daniel Shuchman

What’s Happened To The University?

By Frank Furedi
Routledge, 205 pages, $26.95
Rancorous trends such as microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings and intellectual intolerance have taken hold at universities with breathtaking speed. Last year’s controversy over Halloween costumes at Yale led to the departure of two respected faculty members, and this year made the fall festival a flashpoint of conflict at campuses across the country. The recent explosion in the number of university administrators, coupled with an environment of perpetual suspicion—the University of Florida urges students to report on one another to its “Bias Education and Response Team”—drives students who need to resolve normal tensions in human interaction to instead seek intervention by mediators, diversity officers, student life deans or lawyers.

As Frank Furedi compellingly argues in this deeply perceptive and important book, these phenomena are not just harmless fads acted out by a few petulant students and their indulgent professors in an academic cocoon. Rather, they are both a symptom and a cause of malaise and strife in society at large. At stake is whether freedom of thought will long survive and whether individuals will have the temperament to resolve everyday social and workplace conflicts without bureaucratic intervention or litigation.

Mr. Furedi, an emeritus professor at England’s University of Kent, argues that the ethos prevailing at many universities on both sides of the Atlantic is the culmination of an infantilizing paternalism that has defined education and child-rearing in recent decades. It is a pedagogy that from the earliest ages values, above all else, self-esteem, maximum risk avoidance and continuous emotional validation and affirmation. (Check your child’s trophy case.) Helicopter parents and teachers act as though “fragility and vulnerability are the defining characteristics of personhood.”

The devastating result: Young people are raised into an “eternal dependency.” Parenting experts and educators insist that the views of all pupils must be unconditionally respected, never judged, regardless of their merit. They wield the unassailable power of a medical warning: Children, even young adults, simply can’t handle rejection of their ideas, or hearing ones that cause the slightest “discomfort,” lest they undergo “trauma.”

It is not surprising to Mr. Furedi that today’s undergraduates, having grown up in such an environment, should find any serious criticism, debate or unfamiliar idea to be “an unacceptable challenge to their personas.” He cites a legion of examples from across the Western world, but one Brown University student perhaps epitomizes the psyche: During a campus debate, she fled to a sanctioned “safe space” because “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs.”