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November 2016

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

America’s Best Arab Ally Faces a Crumbling Region It is a paramount American interest for things in Jordan to remain as they are.By Sohrab Ahmari

By on November 3rd, 2016

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is losing his nerve. After a year of silence, the self-proclaimed caliph of Islamic State released an audio recording Wednesday in which he urged his fighters to stand firm in Mosul as the U.S.-backed coalition closed in. “The value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” he thundered.

Next door, Jordanians watch the Mosul operation with enthusiasm and unease. As Information Minister Mohammad al-Momani puts it in an interview in Amman this week, “To us the Mosul operation is a cornerstone in the whole fight against terrorism.” Mosul also raises discomfiting questions about what form jihadism will take after Islamic State is defeated, and how that might threaten Jordan, America’s most reliable Arab ally.

Roiling Amman now are reports that many Islamic State fighters are “shaving their beards” to blend in as coalition forces draw near. An estimated 2,500 Jordanians have joined Islamic State, and alarms rang last week after the jihadist army overran half of Rutba, a city about 70 miles from the Jordanian border in western Iraq. “These groups are rooted now in Syria and Iraq, and Jordan will be a target once the space in Syria and Iraq closes,” says counterterror analyst Amer al-Sabaileh.

This is why border security is foremost among Amman’s priorities. Some 1.5 million refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq have already flooded Jordan, straining resources and patience in a small nation that unlike many of its neighbors isn’t blessed with oil wealth. Jordanians recognize the magnitude of the risk if even a minuscule fraction of the newcomers is linked to Islamic State. They aren’t keen to accept more.

The upside is that officials here have a good sense of what goes on beyond their frontiers. The Obama administration has been a relatively decent steward of the Amman-Washington alliance, and thanks in part to U.S. assistance, the Jordanian security apparatus is battle-ready for any territorial attempts. “We’ve been at war with Daesh in our northern and eastern borders for four years,” says Mr. Momani, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “So we are in a strong position to defend our borders.”

Jordan also faces an internal threat underscored by two Islamic State assaults in June against military and intelligence targets that killed 11 soldiers and officers in total. In coming years Jordan will likely face an uptick in such attacks, the product of the “collapse of ISIS and the rise of ISIS 2.0,” says Mr. Sabaileh, the terrorism analyst. Both the remnants of the old Islamic State and its successor group, he says, will have an incentive to stage brutal, sophisticated attacks—the former to demonstrate it is still in the game, the latter to prove its jihadist chops. CONTINUE AT SITE

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POLITICS Comments turned off

The Clinton Campaign at Obama Justice Emails on WikiLeaks show a top federal lawyer giving Hillary a quiet heads up. By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on November 3rd, 2016

The most obnoxious spin of the 2016 campaign came this week, as Democrats, their media allies and even President Obama accused the FBI of stacking the election. It’s an extraordinary claim, coming as it does from the same crew that has—we now know—been stacking the election all along in the corridors of the Justice Department.

This is the true November surprise. For four months, FBI Director James Comey has been the public face of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. He played that role so well, putting the FBI so front and center, that the country forgot about Mr. Comey’s bosses. Revelations this week build the case that President Obama’s politicized Justice Department has been pulling strings and flacking for Mrs. Clinton all along.

One piece of evidence comes from WikiLeaks, in a hacked email between the chairman of the Clinton campaign, John Podesta, and Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik. It was sent in May of 2015 via a private Gmail account, which has become the favored way for Obama employees to hide communications from the public. “Heads up,” Mr. Kadzik warned, informing the campaign about a coming hearing and a recent legal filing about Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Don’t let Mr. Kadzik’s fancy title fool you: He is a Clinton partisan. Before joining the Justice Department in 2013, Mr. Kadzik spent 30 years at the (now-closed) law firm Dickstein Shapiro, engaging Democratic causes—and Clinton causes. Mr. Kadzik’s wife, Amy Weiss, was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House and a communications director for the Democratic National Committee. Mr. Kadzik also represented the DNC. Campaign-finance records show the two variously donated to Hillary’s Senate leadership PAC, to her 2008 presidential campaign and to her current campaign.

Mr. Kadzik is also an old buddy of Mr. Podesta’s. The two go back to Georgetown Law School. When Marc Rich was lobbying Bill Clinton for a pardon, according to a 2002 House Oversight Committee report, the fugitive financier recruited Mr. Kadzik “because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.” Mr. Kadzik even represented Mr. Podesta, during the Monica Lewinsky saga. CONTINUE AT SITE

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Costs of Clinton Her policies are further left than Obama’s, and you know her ethics.

By on November 3rd, 2016

Americans go to the polls next week facing what millions believe is the worst presidential choice of their lifetimes. As we wrote after Donald Trump won the Indiana primary in May, the New Yorker and Hillary Clinton are both deeply flawed. But one of them will be the next President, so in the next two days we’ll try to summarize the risks—and the fainter hopes—of each candidacy in turn.
***Start with Mrs. Clinton because the costs of her Presidency are easier to see in advance. To wit, she would continue President Obama’s progressive march to a French-style welfare and regulatory state. On nearly every domestic issue, she has embraced Mr. Obama’s agenda and moved left from there.

She wants higher taxes, more spending on entitlements that are already unaffordable, more subsidies and price controls in ObamaCare, more regulations on businesses of all kinds, more limits on political speech, more enforcement of liberal cultural values on schools and churches.

The greatest cost of this would be more lost years of slow economic growth. The U.S. economy hasn’t grown by 3% in any year since 2005, and the explanation from Mrs. Clinton’s economic advisers is that America can’t grow faster and inequality is a bigger problem in any case. More income redistribution is their patent medicine.

But as we’ve seen with the rise of nativism and protectionism, the costs of slow growth are corrosive. Flat incomes lead to more social tension and political enmity. The fight to divide a smaller pie would get uglier in a country that was once accustomed to rising possibilities. Imagine the 2020 election after four more years of 1% growth.

Some Republicans say Mrs. Clinton would be more willing to negotiate with them than Mr. Obama has been. That’s a low bar, and during the 2016 campaign she hasn’t thrown a single policy olive branch to Republicans. None. Her current agenda may reflect her real beliefs going back to her activist days before the failure of HillaryCare caused her to adopt some New Democratic coloration. In 2017 she would also have Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders pulling her to the left.

Mrs. Clinton would also be less restrained by the courts. Mr. Obama has remade most of the federal appellate bench, and the Supreme Court is on the cusp. A Hillary victory means progressive judicial domination for a generation or more. This would mean more green lights for the abusive rule by regulation that has characterized Mr. Obama’s second term—and little chance to block the likes of his immigration order or Clean Power Plan.

Mrs. Clinton’s clearest advantage over Mr. Trump is on foreign policy, where she has shown more respect for America’s role in maintaining global order. She has sometimes shown more hawkish instincts than Mr. Obama, but then she also embraced his worst mistakes: the reset with Russia that badly misjudged Vladimir Putin, the nuclear deal with Iran, the withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and the abandonment of Libya after Europe and the U.S. toppled Moammar Gadhafi.

Even if she wants to revive U.S. leadership abroad, however, there is the question of means. Her entitlement expansions and higher taxes would squeeze the economic growth and budget space needed to finance more defense spending. This is Western Europe on the installment plan.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

MY SAY: LOWER EDUCATION

By on November 3rd, 2016

In my building and among my acquaintances high school seniors are nervously awaiting responses to their college applications. A friend of mine- a brilliant intellectual writer and editor, whose child is among them, remarked at a recent dinner that college catalogues should read as follows:

Dear Applicants,

Your parents have inculcated you with faith and respect for free speech and open debate. You have been taught to admire Judeo/Christian values, Western Civilization and culture, the genius of the founding fathers, and American exceptionalism. You are generally patriotic and liberal in the John Stuart Mill definition of the word.

Come to our college and for a tuition of $70,000.00 per year we will free your mind from all the foregoing and outdated cant.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Is the Abedin/Weiner Laptop the Last of It? There is much evidence that the Clinton e-mails investigation was never properly pursued. By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on November 3rd, 2016

A nagging question has been lost amid the tempest over the FBI’s revival of the Clinton e-mails investigation. As everyone knows, the file has been reopened because of a trove of e-mails found on a laptop shared by top Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her estranged husband, Anthony Weiner. What we don’t know, however, is: Why has the FBI only recently learned about a computer used by Ms. Abedin?

Remember, Abedin is said to have cooperated in the Clinton e-mails investigation and sat for a lengthy interview with FBI agents. The agents asked her about her e-mail practices. Assuming they asked basic questions, as agents are trained to do, they would have methodically itemized the computers and e-mail accounts she used. Yet, the Abedin/Weiner computer, which is said to contain 650,000 e-mails (an unknown number of which are relevant to the Clinton investigation), was not acquired by the bureau in connection with the Clinton investigation. It was seized in an unrelated investigation of Weiner, reportedly involving his alleged “sexting” with a teenage minor.

Why did the FBI agents on the Clinton e-mails investigation fail to acquire and search this computer months earlier? The question becomes more pressing in light of the Washington Examiner’s report that the FBI failed to ask not only Abedin but other Clinton aides to surrender their computers, smartphones, or other communications devices.

Now, there could be a good explanation, at least in connection with some Clinton aides. If, after a reasonably thorough investigation, the FBI had found no indication that potentially classified information was transmitted or stored on a particular device, there’d be no need to seize it. Let’s say X is a Clinton staffer. Let’s also say the FBI finds that X appears only to have used her government e-mail account for official business; that X did not have an account on the clintonemail.com domain; that whenever Clinton or other government officials e-mailed X, they addressed the e-mail to X’s state.gov account; and that X was cooperative when interviewed and convincingly said she never used her private e-mail for government business. Under those circumstances, it would be reasonable not to ask for the surrender of X’s private cellphone or computers.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Has Clinton Topped Nixon? The former secretary of state has been exposed as a ruthless politician following a playbook similar to Tricky Dick’s. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on November 3rd, 2016

Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure.

This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton’s sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. Meanwhile, seemingly every day WikiLeaks produces more evidence of the Clinton Foundation leveraging the Clinton State Department for pay-for-play profiteering.

At this point, Clinton has trumped former president Richard Nixon’s skullduggery — but without the offset of Nixon’s foreign-policy accomplishments.

Even before the most recent scandals, Clinton’s campaign had an eerie resemblance to the Nixon playbook.

Compare the election of 2016 to the election of 1972. The favored Nixon re-election juggernaut (dubbed CREEP, or the “The Committee for the Re-election of the President”) squeezed corporations and wealthy individuals for millions in donations, in much the same way that Clinton’s multi-million-dollar cash machine has vastly outspent her opponent, Donald Trump.

The Watergate tapes later revealed an entirely cynical Nixon campaign team and a hard-nosed White House cadre led by H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman — plus a host of lesser toadies, such as the conniving John Dean. They all took for granted that Washington functioned on a quid pro quo and pay-for-play basis.

In that regard, the Clinton campaign under chairman John Podesta (the new Haldeman) has become Nixonian to the core, thanks to Podesta’s ruthlessness.

The WikiLeaks/Podesta e-mail trove reveals that Hillary’s consultants have no moral compass. They lampoon Latinos as “needy.” Catholics are written off as being stuck in medieval times. Aides bartered with plutocrats for Secretary of State Clinton’s face time on the basis of cash donations. A primary debate question was tipped off by CNN contributor and Democratic operative Donna Brazile.

The nickname “Tricky Dick” referred to Nixon’s perceived anything-goes campaign style and his “flexibility” on issues. CREEP’s “plumbers” staged break-ins to look for leaked information. Petty activists supposedly tried to disrupt rallies for Nixon’s 1972 opponent, George McGovern. Clinton is using similar tactics. In the ambush tapes of Project Veritas, Clinton’s for-hire thugs bragged on film of provoking violence at Trump rallies and bringing in voters by bus to cast illegal ballots.

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MEDIA, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Factless Fact-Checkers How do you fact check when you don’t know what a fact is? Daniel Greenfield

By on November 3rd, 2016

Once upon a time, fact-checking meant that newspapers, radio stations and television news broadcasts were obligated to check their facts before broadcasting or publishing them. Some newspapers and magazines boasted renowned departments filled with intellectuals whose restless minds roved over each line to ensure that the fewest possible errors would appear under that publication’s masthead.

But fact-checking of the media by itself has declined almost as badly as the Roman Empire. Errors routinely appear under storied mastheads followed by corrections that are published as a janitorial duty. There is very little concern for the facts even among the great names of publishing and broadcasting.

The media has stopped fact-checking itself and it now uses fact-checking largely to refer to a type of opinion journalism in which it “checks the facts” of public figures. The fall of fact-checking within the media has paralleled the rise of fact checking by the media of its political opponents. The media has become factless even as it deploys a term that once meant self-correction to instead correct others.

Fact checks once meant that reporters were expected to be accurate. These days they’re only expected to be politically correct. The media deploys fact checks to check political correctness, not facts. Its fact checks routinely venture into areas that are not only partisan, but subjective matters of opinion.

Consider Politico’s often mocked “fact check” of Donald Trump as to whether ISIS was indeed unbelievably evil. Under a banner headline, “Donald Trump’s Week of Misrepresentations, Exaggerations and Half-Truths”, it zoomed in on a quote from his Florida rally.

“We’re presiding over something that the world has not seen. The level of evil is unbelievable,” Trump had said.

Politico swooped in to correct the candidate with its fact check. “Judging one ‘level of evil’ against another is subjective, but other groups in recent history have without any question engaged in as widespread killing of civilians as ISIS.”

There were no facts being checked here because Politico doesn’t seem to know what a fact even is.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

From Higher Ed to Political Indoctrination Parents who plan on refinancing their homes to send their children to college should instead consider trade school. Jack Kerwick

By on November 3rd, 2016

Parents who plan on refinancing their homes in order to send their children off to college should instead consider encouraging them to specialize in a trade.

Speaking as a Ph.D. in philosophy who has spent the last 17 years teaching at the college level, I’m perhaps the last person from whom advice of this sort is expected. But it is precisely because of my familiarity with academia that I beseech the college bound and their enablers—I mean their supporters—to revisit their plans.

Whether one regards a post-secondary institution as a means to either a remunerative profession or a genuine education, the tragic fact of the matter is that the contemporary academic world is about as politicized a cultural institution as any. More specifically, it is a bastion of Political Correctness, a decidedly leftist ideology that tolerates no competition.

For the last 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta, who is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught literature at a range of colleges. At the outset of each semester, he would quiz his students on their knowledge of American and Western history. What he found is that the “overwhelming” number of them believed that slavery—an institution, mind you, that is as old as humanity itself, was practiced in virtually every society the planet over, and that lasted only some 87 years in the United States—was an exclusively American phenomenon.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. His students “are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War and they are very fuzzy about slavery prior to the Colonial era.”

“Their entire education about slavery,” he adds, “was confined to America.”

Yet it isn’t just students who display an astonishing ignorance of slavery. Over at Boston University, Saida Grundy, an Assistant Professor of sociology and African-American Studies, tweeted that slavery is “a white people…thing.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

College Forces Mandatory Microaggression Sessions on Faculty After Prof Accuses Student of Plagiarism Daniel Greenfield

By on November 3rd, 2016

College is now a politically correct joke.

Suffolk University’s interim president said Tuesday that the college will hold mandatory microaggression training for all faculty in response to an outcry last week after a Latina student wrote a viral blog post saying she was the victim of a professor’s racial bias.

What did this racial bias involve?

Tiffany Martinez.said an unidentified Suffolk sociology professor handed back a paper she had written and in front of the class and told Martinez, “This is not your language,” insinuating that Martinez had plagiarized.

Martinez posted a photo of the paper on her blog, showing where the professor appears to have written “please go back and indicate where you cut and paste.” The professor had circled the word “hence” in the paper and wrote, “this is not your word.”

“In this interaction, my undergraduate career was both challenged and critiqued,” the student wrote. “It is worth repeating how my professor assumed I could not use the word “hence,” a simple transitory word that connected two relating statements. The professor assumed I could not produce quality research.”

Most college students, regardless of whether their ancestors originated from southern Europe or not, do not tend to use hence in a sentence. Hence, it’s the sort of word that professors seize on and suspect that what they are seeing is cut and paste material. Tiffany’s interaction has happened thousands of times with students regardless of race.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama DOJ: Handmaiden of Clinton Corruption How the Clinton machine is perverting U.S. federal law enforcement to shield Hillary. Joseph Klein

By on November 3rd, 2016

The Obama Department of Justice has been corruptly aiding and abetting the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, to escape legal accountability for her actions. From Attorney General Loretta Lynch on down through the Justice Department’s political ranks, the Department has blocked the FBI from searching for the truth and following the evidence of potential criminality to its logical conclusion. Whether it is Hillary’s use of a private e-mail server while serving as Secretary of State or her involvement in the pay-for-play Clinton enterprise known as the Clinton Foundation, the Obama administration is applying a banana republic-style double standard to pervert justice and the rule of law in order to shield her.

Lynch and President Obama were reportedly furious with FBI Director James Comey for sending a letter to Congress on October 28th indicating that new evidence potentially pertinent to the e-mail case had come to light, which required further investigation. This evidence consisted of a batch of e-mails FBI investigators had found on one or more computers belonging to Anthony Weiner, Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s estranged husband, while they were searching for evidence in an unrelated case involving Weiner’s alleged sexting to an underage girl. Comey sent his letter after months of agonizing over his previous decision to let Hillary off the hook in the e-mail case last July. He was said by a source close to him to have been particularly disturbed by the mounting number of resignation letters from FBI agents who felt betrayed by that decision.

Department of Justice officials had leaned on Comey not to send the letter to Congress, claiming that it would violate Department protocols and procedures against taking any action that could be perceived as interfering with the upcoming presidential election. To his credit, Comey ignored the Department officials’ objections, claiming he had an obligation to keep the Congress and the public informed of any potentially significant new developments in the case.

Democrats, who had lavished praise on Comey for his July decision, lashed out at Comey for sending his letter updating Congress. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid went so far as to make the baseless charge that Comey may have violated the law by informing Congress, because, Reid argued, he appeared to be taking sides in an election. The disgraced former Attorney General Eric Holder, held in contempt of Congress for withholding information relating to the Fast and Furious scandal, said about Comey’s action, “I fear he has unintentionally and negatively affected public trust in both the Justice Department and the FBI. It is up to the director to correct his mistake — not for the sake of a political candidate or campaign but in order to protect our system of justice and best serve the American people.”

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