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2016

The Art of the Steal By Joan Swirsky

Hillary doesn’t want a fair fight. Or even an unfair fight. She wants to cripple the GOP so it can’t fight at all. It’s the ultimate rigged election….

We’re a little more than two months from the November 8th election and everyone knows that all Democrats, a good number of Republicans and conservatives, and almost the entire media have been agonizing over and militating against the fact that billionaire businessman Donald Trump is the last man standing in a contest that pits him against Crooked Hillary for the presidency of the United States.

But why are no professional political commentators—on TV, radio, or in print—explaining exactly why Mr. Trump is such a mortal threat? After all, he has proven himself to be an upright citizen, a wildly successful businessman, the bestselling author of over a dozen books, a philanthropist, the father of five respectful and loving children the eldest of whom are also impressively contributory members of society, the representative of every value Republicans and conservatives traditionally stand for—low taxes, fewer regulations, secure borders, a strong military, strict conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, et al—and significantly a person who has never been accused of being complicit in the deaths of U.S. servicemen, under the ominous investigation of the FBI, or operating an international money-laundering slush fund that compromises the national security of the United States.

Here is the answer: It’s all about the deal!

Underneath the veneer of “service” our elected politicians purport to be driven by, underneath the “ethical standards” our financial centers pretend to operate, and underneath the gauzy illusion of objectivity the media pretend they represent, the so-called culture of the D.C.-Wall St.-media complex is all about cozy arrangements that inevitably line the pockets of those engaged in the following kinds of local, regional, national and international deals, to name but a few:

under-the-table deals
pay-to-play deals
greasy-palm deals
foundation slush-fund deals (sound familiar?)
mutual back-scratching deals
hush-hush deals
access-to-power deals
good-stories-in-the-media deals (sound familiar?)
bad-stories-in-the-media-about-your-political-enemies deals (yep)
sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll deals
immense wealth-producing lobbyist deals
On and on…

UN NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS (NGOS): INCITING HATRED, ANTISEMITISM AND VIOLENCE FROM THE WORLD STAGE

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/site/documents/?d=15720
CLICK HERE FOR FULL REPORT

Our ground-breaking report exposes the shocking antisemitism and incitement to violence that is occurring at the United Nations by means of UN-accredited non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The UN is enabling groups to spread hatred, encourage terrorism, and promote the destruction of the Jewish state from the world stage.

Democratic states, led by the United States, control the purse strings of the United Nations either from within the UN bureaucracy or through domestic policy. Getting serious about combating gross intolerance and violent extremism means putting an immediate stop to the use and abuse of the United Nations to broadcast and support antisemitism and bigotry and the lethal consequences.

Latest email disclosure is just more proof that Clinton lied By Andrew C. McCarthy

On Tuesday, The Post’s Daniel Halper broke the news that Hillary Clinton continued recklessly mishandling classified information even after stepping down as secretary of state. The revelation is bracing — but hardly surprising.

We already knew Clinton’s email practices remained a national security vulnerability after she left the State Department at the end of President Obama’s first term.

For nearly two years, she maintained the servers through which her unauthorized, non-secure homebrew communication system had operated. As we now know, about 62,000 emails were stored on those servers, over 2,000 of which contained classified information, including some of the most sensitive national defense secrets — and the highly classified sources and methods for acquiring those secrets — maintained by our government.

The latest classified email disclosure is a joke. The document is so chockablock with classified information — meaning it is so thoroughly redacted — that the State Department might just as well have issued a blank page. This reminds us of how cynically the Democrats’ presidential nominee looked the American people in the eye and assured us, for over a year, that she never sent or received classified information.
When this preposterous claim was exploded, she tried Clintonian parsing: None of the emails, we were told, was “marked classified.” But the latest email discovery illustrates how farcical this talking point has always been.

Officials with security clearances know the categories of information that are classified pursuant to an executive order — whether they’re “marked” as such or not. Clinton not only knew the rules, she was in charge of enforcing them throughout her department.

And in any event, as FBI Director James Comey conceded, Clinton did send and receive some emails with classified markings.

We are also reminded that Clinton repeatedly vowed she’d surrendered every single government business-related email upon the State Department’s request.

This was an extraordinary lie: She hoarded and attempted to destroy thousands of emails which, like the one The Post describes, involved government business — some of it highly sensitive and significant (such as the 30 emails related to the Benghazi massacre that the FBI recovered but the State Department has yet to disclose). Converting government records to one’s own use and destroying them are serious crimes, even if no classified information is involved.

The Secession of French Muslims by Yves Mamou

In the French republic, state schools were built to fight the grip of the Catholic church on the whole of French society. The thinking was that Darwin is better at explaining the origin of the human race than the Bible. To build a country of free citizens: knowledge first; belief only if you insist, and even then, only by yourself.

“If the hijab or burkini had anything to do with modesty or piety, the Islamic fundamentalists would have sought private beaches, not insisted on forcing themselves on the public. … If the hijab becomes an accepted public phenomenon, a modern society cannot teach its future generations that a woman’s dress is not an excuse for rape”. — Hala Arafa, writing in The Hill.

A French Muslim society that often seems to feel as if it still belongs to its country of origin, appears to have decided that the game of secularism and “living together” should be over. With veils, burkinis and guns, various Islamists groups seem to be trying to embed the same message: We remain Muslims first and have decided to pay no attention to the culture of countries in which we are living.

For many today, French secularism is an anti-human rights ideology, a kind of moral deformity close to racism.

How can a free country, they ask, even think of doing such a thing as trying to ban a veil or a burkini — the full body covering for women to wear on the beach? How, they ask, can the French Republic call itself free and remain free when many of its citizens would like to rob Muslim women, peacefully obeying their own religion, of the freedom to choose their own clothes?

The current radicalization in France is not like that of the recent migration of Muslims to other European countries. Muslims have been coming to France in large numbers since the French left Algeria in 1962. The French never made any distinction between the French of “Gaul” and the French of North Africa. The current radicalization is not of those who came then, but of the younger generation — of French Muslims. They were born in France, speak French, were schooled in France — but they are not at ease with the values of France.

The $50 Billion Illinois Favor Factory Hums Along by Adam Andrzejewski

It’s been two years since Illinois state government had a full-year budget. Now, more than 70,000 vendors are owed $8.2 billion. Yet, despite the legislative deadlock and seemingly fiscal insolvency, more than $50 billion in state payments flowed to providers and other entities in FY2016.

So, who actually got paid and for how much while others waited in the long line of unpaid bills?

Recently, our organization at American Transparency (website: OpenTheBooks.com) filed our annual Freedom of Information Act request with Illinois Comptroller Leslie Munger (R) for the state’s checkbook payments. Here’s what we found: 56,738 recipients received fast-tracked payments of $50,125,427,171.

We plotted the recipients by ZIP code – review your neighborhood or look across the entire country. Just zoom-in, click a ZIP code pin, and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart below the map.

The top 25 accounts paid by the Comptroller received $21.8 billion. The vast majority of the payments were for social safety-net healthcare providers ($5.9 billion); the Teachers Retirement System pension payment ($3.224 billion); Cook County ($2.7 billion); Chicago Board of Education ($2.1 billion); Regional Transportation Authority ($1.7 billion); and transfer payments to the state treasurer or banks.
Here are some of the entities receiving the large state payments in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2016:

The Terrorist Threat from the Southern ‘Border’ Trump and his supporters should stress the life-and-death aspect of illegal immigration. By Deroy Murdock

Donald J. Trump met today with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and later flies to Arizona for a much- anticipated speech on immigration. On these and similar occasions, it would behoove the Republican presidential nominee to go beyond the usual concerns about Mexican and Central American migrants crossing America’s southern “border.” Trump should focus, privately and publicly, on what U.S. officials call “Other Than Mexicans.”

OTMs consist of all sorts of people who break into the United States from countries all around the world. These include such colorful locales as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

In fact, federal agents in 2014 apprehended 4,930 individuals who hailed from the four nations that Washington listed as “state sponsors of terrorism,” plus the ten countries that the Transportation Safety Administration had designated as “of interest.” Foreigners who arrive legally from those places are subject to enhanced passenger screening. A total of 69,599 people from those 14 countries were arrested while trying to enter America illegally, from fiscal years 2005 through 2014, according to the 2014 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, published this month by the Department of Homeland Security.

While these figures involve all of America’s frontiers, among the 486,651 illegal aliens caught entering the United States, 479,371 (or 98.5 percent) were nailed along the southern Boundary. It probably is safe to assume that a similar proportion of illegal aliens from these worrisome nations also were captured waltzing in from Mexico.

Brazil Has Had Enough But have we? By Kevin D. Williamson

The Brazilians may not know how to run an Olympics, but they are just aces at impeachments.

Americans should take note.

After a lengthy period of deliberation, the Brazilian parliament has formally removed from office President Dilma Rousseff, the corrupt left-wing populist who has been trying to do for Brazil what Hugo Chávez and his epigones did for Venezuela.

The entire Brazilian political class has been in bad odor of late, with a wide-ranging corruption scandal at the state-owned oil company reminding the world why sensible people do not think much of state-owned enterprises, petroleum-oriented or not. Brazil was riding high for about five minutes there while commodities prices were unusually strong, but President Rousseff’s anti-business, anti-trade, anti-investor, welfare-statist agenda — which differs from the current Obama-Clinton-Sanders-Trump economic vision mainly in aggressiveness rather than substance — did what it usually does. Unemployment and inflation took off, and public-sector spending increased radically, resulting in an unbalanced fiscal position that caused Brazil’s government debt to be downgraded to junk-bond status.

As with the food riots in Venezuela, the Left in Brazil and internationally has whispered darkly that this represents a “coup” against a populist progressive who angered the world’s corporate bosses and free-market fundamentalists. “Corruption is just the pretext for a wealthy elite who failed to defeat Brazil’s president at the ballot box,” the Guardian sniffed. The truth is that Brazilians are not eager to go back to being the country in the Western hemisphere that people cite to illustrate what India used to be like.

What is of note is that Brazilians have made the connection between corruption and poverty.

Rousseff’s corruption, at least that which has been persuasively documented, is pretty small stuff by Brazilian standards — indeed, by U.S. standards. It is “pedaladas fiscais,” what we might call “creative” public finance. Brazil has state-run but notionally independent banks and pension funds, whose coffers were raided through a series of loans to the Brazilian government in order to hide the fact that the government’s finances were such a complete and total shambles that payments otherwise could not be made to popular programs such as cash handouts to the poor and housing assistance — the stuff that politicians such as Rousseff and her party use to buy loyalty. In the United States, that sort of thing is just standard operating procedure for the federal government when it comes to things like Social Security, and for local government when it comes to public employees’ pensions: magical accounting.

The More Things Change, the More They Actually Don’t Technology hasn’t changed the core of who we are, and history proves it. By Victor Davis Hanson

In today’s technically sophisticated and globally connected world, we assume life has been completely reinvented. In truth, it has not changed all that much.

Facebook and Google may have recalibrated our lifestyles, but human nature, geography, and culture are nearly timeless. Even as ideologies and governments come and go, the same old, same old problems and challenges remain.

Compare what dominated the news in 1966, 50 years ago.

Abroad, Israel was constantly fighting on the West Bank against Palestinian guerrilla groups and in the air over Syria. It is likely that in another 50 years the story will remain about the same.

The Middle East in 1966 was going up in flames, just as it is today — and in many of the same places. The Syrian government was overthrown in a coup. The Saudis, Jordanians, and Egyptians were involved in a civil war in Yemen. The Egyptian government executed Islamists charged with planning a theocratic takeover.

Africa, as today, was wracked by wars or coups in places such as Chad, Ghana, Nigeria, and Sudan.

American relations with Russia were tense. Moscow clamped down on dissidents and opposed almost all U.S. initiatives abroad.

The Castro government in Cuba was railing against the United States, outlawing free expression and alleging American interference in Cuba’s affairs. The only difference from today was that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro then was a 40-year-old firebrand, not a 90-year-old near-invalid.

Nothing has much changed elsewhere in the world either. Just as Cyprus today remains a bone of contention between Turkey and Greece, 50 years ago Greeks and Turks were meeting to resolve tensions on the divided island. Ditto the ongoing dispute between India and Pakistan, whose leaders met frequently during 1966 following outright war in 1965.

There were also the sorts of rifts within NATO that have become so familiar. Today, the U.S. worries that the alliance is unraveling due to bickering and the unwillingness of European countries to increase their defense budgets. Fifty years ago, the problem was France. In 1966, the French actually quit the alliance, which suddenly had to transfer its headquarters from Paris to Brussels, Belgium.

Nor were things that different at home than they are today.

Hillary First Broached Saudi Visa Deal During Visit to Huma Abedin’s Mom’s Saudi Madrassa Paul Sperry

Earlier this month, CounterJihad.com broke the story that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was instrumental in cutting a special deal with the Saudi government to reverse post-9/11 restrictions on Saudi visas, triggering an unprecedented explosion in Saudi students entering the US. CJ has since learned that the seeds of this major change in immigration policy – one with serious national security implications – were planted during a 2010 visit by Clinton to a Saudi college founded by her top aide’s radical Muslim mother – a college that turns out to have direct ties to terrorists.

Clinton’s then-deputy chief of staff Huma Abedinarranged the trip to the radical Saudi school, overruling concerns by diplomatic security, in what was yet another example of Abedin, a self-described “devout Muslim” whose family has direct ties to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, playing an outsize role in influencing US policy when it comes to the Middle East and Muslim empowerment.

The policy reversal appears to have had its roots in a speech Clinton gave at the Dar al-Hekma girls college in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the behest of Abedin, whose mother, Saleha Abedin, helped found the school and currently serves as its dean. Abedin also runs the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which seeks to boost Muslim immigration rates in the the U.S. and other Western countries, while also propagating Sharia law in those nations.

“You know that after 9/11, the United States closed its borders to students from around the world, and the number of Saudi students studying in our country fell dramatically,” Clinton lamented in her talk before the elder Abedin and her students. “Well, I am very pleased that we are now back to the levels that we had before 9/11.”

Don’t bee-lieve the latest bee-pocalypse scare by Paul Driessen

As stubborn facts ruin their narrative that neonicotinoid pesticides are causing a honeybee-pocalypse, environmental pressure groups are shifting to new scares to justify their demands for “neonic” bans.

Honeybee populations and colony numbers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and elsewhere are growing. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the actual cause of bee die-offs and “colony collapse disorders” is not neonics, but a toxic mix of predatory mites, stomach fungi, other microscopic pests, and assorted chemicals employed by beekeepers trying to control the beehive infestations.

Naturally, anti-pesticide activists have seized on a recent study purporting to show that wild bee deaths in Britain have been correlated with neonic use in oil seed rape fields (canola is a type of OSR). In a saga that has become all too common in the environmental arena, their claims were amplified by news media outlets that share many activist beliefs and biases – and want to sell more subscriptions and advertising.

(Honeybees represent a small number of species that humans have domesticated and keep in hives, to produce honey and pollinate crops. Many are repeatedly trucked long distances, to pollinate almond and other crops as they flower. By contrast, thousands of species of native or wild bees also flourish across the continents, pollinating plants with no human assistance.)

The recent Center for Ecology and Hydrology study examined wild bee population trends over an 18-year period that ended in 2011. It concluded that there was a strong correlation between population and distribution numbers for multiple species of British wild bees and what study authors called their “measure of neonic dose” resulting from the pesticide, which is used as a seed coating for canola crops.

The study is deeply flawed, at every stage – making its analysis and conclusions meaningless. For example, bee data were collected by amateur volunteers, few of whom were likely able to distinguish among some 250 species of UK wild bees. But if even one bee of any species was identified in a 1-by-1 kilometer area during at least two of the study period’s 18 years, the area was included in the CEH study.

This patchy, inconsistent approach means the database that formed the very foundation for the entire study was neither systematic nor reliable, nor scientific. Some species may have dwindled or disappeared in certain areas due to natural causes, or volunteers may simply have missed them. We can never know.

There is no evidence that the CEH authors ever actually measured neonic levels on bees or in pollen collected from OSR fields that the British wild bees could theoretically have visited. Equally relevant, by the time neonics on seeds are absorbed into growing plant tissue, and finally expressed on flecks of pollen, the levels are extremely low: 1.3-3.0 parts per billion, the equivalent of 1-3 seconds in 33 years.