Displaying posts published in

November 2016

Turkey’s Increasingly Unfree Press by Robert Jones

The international media was shaken by the October 31 police raids in Turkey, on both the Cumhuriyet daily newspaper and on the homes of its editors and writers.

“The law on abandoned properties was an excuse to seize other people’s property, and Armenian assets in particular became the main basis of the republican regime. The property of the murdered Armenians was Turkified, along with Greek and Jewish properties.” — Alin Ozinian, journalist.

It seems that throughout Turkish history, the Turks have not been able to take a single step without committing crimes against the non-Muslim citizens of their country.

The international media was shaken by the October 31 police raids in Turkey, on both the Cumhuriyet daily newspaper and on the homes of its editors and writers.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) declared that it is “appalled by the accelerating extinction of media pluralism in Turkey,” and referred to Cumhuriyet (“The Republic”) as “the latest victim of ‘never-ending purge’ of Turkish media.”

Misplaced Charity By Marilyn Penn

If you are a convicted killer in the state of New York, you are entitled to take college courses both while in prison and when you are released. The John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of the City University, offers full scholarships to those criminals who have served their time and wish to enroll. The student who is profiled in this Sunday’s Times is a 41 year old former drug dealer whose explanation for murdering another drug dealer when he was 23 is that his girlfriend had broken up with him, he had served some time at Rikers Island and he was feeling “hopeless and angry.” (Life Beyond Bars: One Man’s Journey From Prison to College, NYT 11/6/16) By contrast with this magnanimous govt largesse, if you are the law-abiding child of a living fireman or policeman, NY state has no educational stipend for you at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice – odd, considering that law enforcement is as heavily involved in that field as law – breakers. If you are the victim of a crime, NY State does have an Office of Victim Services (OVS) but they don’t provide any assistance for your higher education. Instead, you can get lots of information related to victims’ rights in judicial proceedings, victim impact statements and restitution for your injuries. The website doesn’t mention helping to educate you while you are feeling “hopeless and angry” after your traumatic attack.

Presumably, the experts have figured out that the way to lower the enormous cost of incarceration, is to lower the rate of recidivism so that investing in educating prisoners is a way to save the state money. Mr Echeverria, the profiled ex-con in the Times has taken five years to achieve the status of sophomore, not exactly a productive financial investment by the state, to say the least. One wonders why the opportunities for prisoners do not focus on shorter term goals that might be more realistic than an eventual degree from John Jay, assuming that were possible. Culinary arts, appliance repair, construction related trades, medical and geriatric assistants – these are some of the fields that come to mind. Considering the enormously inflated costs of college education, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to help the families of public servants whose credentials might insure greater success and whose parents’ ongoing service to the state is immeasurably more deserving of scholarship aid? Why take that portion of the population whose dispositions, drug use and probable ADD along with other learning disabilities, render them least likely to excel in college, even under optimum circumstances.

If our next president is the candidate inclined to follow in Obama’s footsteps, we can expect a continuation of his Second Chance Pell Pilot Program which will award grants to 12,000 inmates to take courses at 67 selected colleges. Judging from the abysmal statistics attendant to public school achievement in large cities, this will be yet another government program with seemingly good intentions killed by blind assumptions about its students – in other words, a program that will afford as little bang for the buck as the swollen budgets of Depts of Education throughout urban America. In New York City public schools, a scant 36% of the students are proficient in Math and 38% in English – the cost of achieving this failure is almost $20,000 per pupil. We can only hope that a new administration shows greater ability to do some simple math.

WikiLeaks: CNN Asked DNC for Interview Questions for Trump, Cruz By Debra Heine

WikiLeaks released a second batch of DNC emails Sunday night that shows a disgusting amount of collusion between the Democratic National Committee and CNN, aka “the most trusted name in news” — otherwise known as the “Clinton News Network.” The emails suggest that CNN is in the habit of soliciting the DNC for questions to ask Republican candidates appearing on the network.

And DNC staffers are more than happy to help out by brainstorming lists of questions for CNN to ask the candidates. It’s a very convenient arrangement for both parties.

On April 25, 2016, DNC research director Lauren Dillon emailed her colleagues asking for “Trump questions for CNN” ahead of his appearance on the network. She said Wolf Blitzer would be interviewing the candidate before his foreign policy address on April 27.

cnn-questions-for-trump

Again on April 28, 2016, Dillon emailed DNC staffers to let them know that CNN was “looking for questions” for Senator Ted Cruz’s upcoming appearance. She asked them to send some “topical/interesting ones.” She also suggested that they include questions for Carly Fiorina.

cnn-questions-for-cruz

Peter Smith Those Huddled Masses and Their Votes

“And it gets worse when ethnic voting blocs become fixated on their own perceived ethnic interests. Alexis de Tocqueville worried about the tyranny of the majority. More worrying is the tyranny of minority ethnic groups pushing their own agendas and, by virtue of their strategic voting power, pushing the whole political process askew. No-one knows how this will end either. But it is not hard to see it taking Western societies away from their core cultural values. These are the values — free speech being one under notable pressure — which have separated Western societies from the banana republics that Latinos in America (or their forefathers) used to call home.”

There is a danger in these post-modern days, when Western culture is under attack from within by the left, that the impact of importing people whose culture is inferior (by any measure) will be underrated, that ethnic politics and enclaves shape the broader democracy.
According to CNN back in 2012, the Latino population in the US as a proportion of the whole will increase to 29% in 2050. It is now 17%. As to voters, according to Pew Research, published in January, 2016, 11.3% of eligible voters in the US election are Latino. This matters in some states more than others because of the uneven spread of the Latino population. In California, for example, it is 28%, in New Mexico 40%, in Texas 28%, in Florida 18% and in Nevada 17%. Usually around two-thirds vote Democrat in presidential elections. Obama got 71% in 2012.

What matters when it comes to having an open and prosperous society? It is clear that having material resources is not particularly relevant. When all is said and done it is only culture that matters. Or, (sotto voce) does race/ethnicity matter too in affecting cultural norms? My prior is that race only seems to be important because of the association of non-Caucasian populations with the absence of deeply-seated Christian norms of behaviour and civility. Though this does not seem to work too well when it comes to Central and South America. I don’t know the answer.

The US Census Bureau classifies Latinos (or interchangeably Hispanics) as having a lineage traced to Spain (25), Argentina (13), Cuba (n.a.), Colombia (6), Puerto Rico (n.a.), Mexico (9), Dominican Republic (6), Costa Rica (11), Guatemala (4), Honduras (2), Nicaragua (2), Panama (13), El Salvador (4), Bolivia (3), Chile (13), Ecuador (6), Paraguay (4), Peru (6), Uruguay (16), and Venezuela (n.a.). In brackets is the per-capita income of each country in 2015 to the nearest thousand $US, as published by The World Bank. Some do much better than others but, leaving Spain aside for obvious reasons; none are within distance of income in North America (55) or Australia (56) or prosperous Western European nations (Germany (41) France (36)).

John O’Sullivan America’s Choice

Mrs Clinton is plainly a globalist like President Obama, Donald Trump an opponent—if not the best one. But this election will not decide the issue which of its nature pits most voters against the progressive elites. It’s your politics for the next century.
Five weeks ago I summed up the state of the US presidential race in the Weekend Australian. After a long stretch in the primaries that had produced one surprise after another, I wrote, the Trump-Clinton battled had settled down to a surprising if unedifying stability:

Maybe the best metaphor for the current state of the race is one Trump himself has used: the “fixed” fight. On this occasion, however, the Mob has blundered and “persuaded” both candidates to take a fall . . . Each is fighting to lose, moreover, in his and her distinctive ways: Clinton is being undermined by the continuing drip-drip-drip of her own emails that show her to have lied and broken federal laws during and since her time as Secretary of State; Trump is being derailed at intervals by his own gaffes and insults . . . Both presidential candidates as a result are now two of the most distrusted people in America. Each overtakes the other at intervals depending on whether her lies or his gaffes dominate the headlines.

That pattern has continued to the time of writing which is just three weeks short of the election—and two weeks before Quadrant appears on the news-stands. Surprises still occur, of course, indeed more extravagantly than before, but they do so within this pattern of gaffe versus insult, or as the race deteriorates, scandal versus scandal. Just at present the accusations of sexual impropriety (and worse) by numerous women against Donald Trump dominate the headlines. But the steady flow of leaked emails from the Clinton campaign courtesy of Wikileaks, including dismissive remarks about Catholics and Latinos (supposedly constituencies within the Clinton camp) ensures that the candidates remain within hailing distance of each other.

Mrs Clinton is clearly ahead. Most pundits predict her clear victory, made sweeter by Democratic gains in the Senate. Her scandals have thus far been less scandalous than his scandals in the public mind—and less high-lighted by a largely partisan media. On the other hand it seems likely that Wikileaks’ supply of material will be at least as extensive as Trump’s legion of insulted women. And one less-noticed aspect of the campaign is the depth of consumer resistance to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s repeated comebacks from seeming catastrophe—the latest poll shows him trailing only four points behind his opponent despite the “bimbo eruptions”—are testimony to her dogged unpopularity as much as to his energy and media skills. Behind the sleaze factor, something deeper in American society apparently lies behind the resistance to Clinton and the refusal of the Trump rebellion to go away even as its champion implodes.

David Blankenhorn, the president of a small conservative think-tank devoted largely to reversing the decline of the American family, discovered that he didn’t know a single person who intended to vote for Donald Trump. He felt that was wrong in someone whose title was president of the Institute for American values. So he set off on a drive around America’s South-East—an electoral stronghold of Trumpism—to meet Trump voters and to find out what makes them tick. The results are collected in his article in the current American Interest magazine.

Among other things he found that the Trump voters were realistic, even cynical, about Trump. Those who supported him most strongly did so because they liked the fact that he was not bound by political correctness in speaking about immigration and similar issues. Paradoxically, some of the same people disliked his insults to others, his use of profane language, and his inability to control his own mouth–but liked what one might call his political profanities all the same. That lack of illusion about Trump helps explain why he has not been destroyed by the scandals plaguing him. They’ve been “factored in”.

An Early Result of Election 2016: Angry Voters After stormy campaign, many are doubtful that Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will unify the country By Janet Hook

Throughout the tumultuous and unpredictable 2016 presidential campaign, one thing has been constant: Voters have been seething with frustration over the state of American politics.

As Election Day approaches, they are even more disgusted than ever, after a protracted campaign that descended to new depths of vulgarity and vitriol.

Consider the scene in Eau Claire, Wis., on a recent fall day. Taunts flew across police barricades lining a street, with thousands of Donald Trump supporters on one side waiting to get into a rally for the Republican nominee and hundreds of anti-Trump protesters on the other.

“It worries me. There is too much ugliness on both sides,” said Soren Staff, a 25-year-old Hillary Clinton supporter who stood behind one barricade. “Eau Claire has never been a really divided place. We’re usually Wisconsin nice.”

A Trump supporter on the other side of the street expressed a similar sentiment.

“I’m ready for the campaign to be over,” said Drew Suttles, 22, who was in line for the Trump rally. “It has brought out a lot of bad things. You’re sitting in a bar and people start arguing. People don’t respect your opinion.”

The 2016 election was supposed to be about change. But regardless of who wins the White House, Congress is likely to remain narrowly divided between the parties and prone to gridlock. Even if Democrats win control of the Senate, winning a House majority as well is a long shot.

If Mr. Trump wins, he will have done so without the full support of Republicans in Congress, many of whom ran away from him. If Mrs. Clinton wins, she will face a Senate where many members will have saved their seats by promising to serve as a “check” on her presidency, meaning their mandate will be to oppose rather than work with her. CONTINUE AT SITE

Clinton’s For-Profit Chancellorship Laureate, Bill and a case study in modern crony capitalism.

No matter who wins on Tuesday, political reformers should focus on the lucrative ties between big business and big government. Consider the $17.6 million that Laureate International Universities paid Bill Clinton to be its “honorary chancellor” from 2010-2015.

We wrote about this in “The Clinton For-Profit Standard” (Sept. 7), and Laureate CEO Doug Becker criticized us in a letter for suggesting that Mr. Clinton may have been hired to provide political protection. Recently released emails via WikiLeaks provide a little more, er, color on the Clinton-Laureate relationship.

Clinton factotum Doug Band wrote a memo in 2011 to lawyers at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett showcasing Laureate as one of the relationships that his company Teneo cultivated for the Clinton Foundation. “Laureate is a Foundation relationship that evolved into a personal advisory services business relationship for President Clinton,” the memo says. “I have managed this relations and, since 2011, Teneo partners have helped this relationship, which is very time-consuming.”

We can only imagine. The memo says Laureate donated $1.35 million in 2009 and 2010 to the Clinton Global Initiative, plus another $50,000 for CGI University in 2011.

As the Washington Post reported, Laureate was invited to a State Department dinner related to higher education with academic leaders world-wide in August 2009. Another email that was released in a public records request last year shows that then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Laureate should be invited to that dinner because it is “the fastest growing college network in the world.” Oh, and Mr. Becker is someone “who Bill likes a lot.”

The Political Mr. Comey The FBI director gives Democrats the conclusion they demanded.

It looks like our contributor, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, was right last week. FBI Director James Comey’s review of newly discovered Hillary Clinton-related emails was never going to change his legal judgment because the FBI and Justice Department handling of the case was never serious in the first place.

The Justice Department never went to a grand jury in the case, which was needed to gather all appropriate evidence and vet the legal charges. Judge Mukasey’s judgment was vindicated on Sunday when Mr. Comey sent a letter to Congress saying that the FBI had reviewed the new emails and “we have not changed our conclusion that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

To rehearse Mr. Comey’s actions: In July he publicly exonerates Mrs. Clinton in an extraordinary press event, two weeks before she is to be nominated for President, though that is not his responsibility. He thus liberates Attorney General Loretta Lynch from her decision-making obligations as the nation’s chief prosecuting official. Later we learn Justice cut needless and generous immunity deals with Mrs. Clinton’s advisers.

Then 11 days before Election Day Mr. Comey sends a letter to Congress saying the FBI has found new email evidence. He comes under ferocious Democratic assault for meddling in the final days of the campaign. His boss, President Obama, joins the criticism and says Mrs. Clinton has already been exonerated. Then two days before the election Mr. Comey sends another letter exonerating Mrs. Clinton again. And Washington’s political class wonders why Americans don’t trust government?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the main point of Mr. Comey’s many political interventions has always been to protect Mr. Comey’s job and political standing. Certainly Mrs. Clinton will have cause to be grateful to Mr. Comey if she wins on Tuesday. The price to the country is the damage he has done to the reputation of the FBI as an apolitical law-enforcement agency.

The Clinton Email Scandal: It’s the Cover-Up That Is Getting Her By Frank Salvato

A recent exposé by FOX News Channel’s Bret Baier and his Special Report team, exposed and chronicled a damning timeline and some internal practices that prove the Clintons – both Bill and Hillary – did, in fact, have a “pay-to-play” scheme in place entangling the Clinton State Department and the Clinton Foundation. It also proves that senior staff within the Clinton campaign knew there was damaging information held within the emails trafficked over Hillary Clinton’s private unauthorized server, including correspondence between Clinton and President Obama.

These revelations alone, regardless of what FBI Director James Comey believes is actionable within either of the FBI investigations, had the potential to end Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations. Alas, the mainstream media is so intent on providing cover and refuge for all of Hillary Clinton’s unethical and criminal acts – by Comey’s own description in his first announcement, that she is getting the pass of the millennium.

Since the re-institution of the original criminal investigation by the FBI and the revelation of a second investigation by multiple FBI offices targeting the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton has dropped like a rock in the polls. This decline is especially felt in several of the critical swing states, including Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Comey’s statement today that he is standing by his earlier decision not to recommend prosecution of Hillary Clinton for additional instances of mishandling classified information will most likely have no effect on the polls at all, although it will give the Clinton team a closing argument centered on deflection and ambiguity. The fact remains – and it is undeniable – Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information and is being treated in the aftermath as being above the law.

One of the key issues in the email and unauthorized (read: illegal) server scandal is Clinton’s initial and consistent claims to transparency where her communications were concerned. In her first statement on the matter she insisted – in no uncertain terms – that she wanted to combine her personal and government devices for “convenience.” Since then we have learned that she had over a dozen communications devices, some of which her team destroyed…with hammers.

My Lecture on “Politically Correct” That the Red-Green Axis (Marxist-Islamic) Tried to Shut Down : Diana West

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3427/My-Lecture-on-Politically-Correct-That-the-Red-Green-Axis-Marxist-Islamic-Tried-to-Shut-Down.aspx

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3422/Abroad-in-America-October-2016.aspx

Behold, my own personal protesters (above) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, snapped en route to the parking lot of a lecture hall where I was to give a speech on October 18. My topic? The origins and impact of the Marxist-Bolshevik-Fabian-Socialist-Democrat-Progessive-Alinskyite-micro-aggression-trigger-warning censorship movement against truth and tradition that is opaquely known as “politically correct.”

Ironic, no?

Actually, we’re way past ironic, and deep into the danger zone where the ideological and the doctrinaire dominate discourse — but also make people cower. As I explained nearly ten years ago in my first book, The Death of the Grown-Up, this same “politically correct” movement to silence speech and political discourse generally has made common cause with the Islamic blasphemy law movement to supress all criticism, including factual discussion, of Islam as “hate speech.” Under Islamic law, such “hate speech,” a.k.a. “blasphemy,” is punishable, and, even in our own time, often punished, by death. In Western society, this Red-Green axis increasingly draws strength to become more and more dictatorial, even as sharia expands its control and influence on law and custom in Europe and beyond.

Last week in Chapel Hill, I saw how the mechanism works up-close, when I, too, became a target for suppression.

There were three distinct phases to this campaign by local groups and individuals of the Marxist and/or Islamic variety to shut down my appearance — as well as appearances by all future speakers hosted by Issues Confronting Our Nation (ICON), the lecture series that sponsored my talk.

The strategy was to demonize and thus delegitimize me as a point of pressure to bear on the management of the venue, Extraordinary Ventures, to convince them to cancel my appearance and sever its standing business relationship with the ICON lecture series forevermore. However outrageous, such thuggish tactics have been successful before, as cancellations of many other events attest (up to and including Milo Yianappolous’s appearance this week at the University of Maryland, canceled over a hastily imposed security fee). Hallelujah, the strategy failed in Chapel Hill last week. However, as I will explain, this was not necessarily a zero-sum-game.

Phase 1 began five days before my arrival in Chapel Hill with emails and Facebook messages to the venue management, smearing my work as “hatred,” “paranoia,” “xenophobia,” etc. Previous ICON speakers Roy Beck, Jim Simpson, Mark Krikorian, and John Guandolo were similarly tarred as “racist” and “bigoted” in this same poisonous effort to pressure EV to stop doing business with ICON.

In one email, the protesters said my work contributed to “the anti-Shariah movement throughout the country”; actually, they said I had contributed to the hysteria that led to the anti-Shariah movement throughout the country — but I’ll take the compliment as it was not meant.

Bonus: I was able to put the email to good use in a PowerPoint slide for my lecture on PC.